Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
just became one of my Top 5 leadership books.
You. Need. To. Read. This.
Look who else is.
Here are some of the insights I underlined along the way:
- What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
- Psychology 101: Brain has 2 independent systems at work at all times:
Emotional (instinctively feels pain & pleasure)
and Rational (deliberates, analyzes, looks to future).
Emotional side is an Elephant and rational side is it's Rider.
- Changes often fail because the Rider can't keep the Elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination.
- The Elephant is the one who gets things done. Much of our daily behavior is more automatic then supervised, and that's a good thing because the supervised behavior is the hard stuff. It's draining and exhaustible.
- Change is hard because people wear themselves out. If things are to change, you have to engage the Elephant.
- If you reach someone's Rider but not their Elephant, they will have direction without motivation.
- What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
- All change requires three things:
Direct the Rider (provide crystal-clear direction),
Motivate the Elephant (what looks like laziness is often exhaustion),
and Shape the Path (it's not a people problem, it's a situation problem).
Direct the Rider by:
- Finding the Bright Spots -
Reject analysis paralysis by focusing less on problems and instead on any bright spots! Bright spots provide not only direction for the Rider but hope and motivation for the Elephant.
- Archaeology is true but useless.
Instead, ask, "What's working right now and how can we do more of it?"
- Script the Critical Moves -
Too many options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat. The more options the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets. Decision paralysis deters people.
- Change = new choices = creates uncertainty.
Ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider; uncertainty makes the Elephant anxious.
- Inertia and decision paralysis will conspire to keep people doing things the old way. To spark movement in a new direction, you need to provide crystal-clear guidance.
- Point to the Destination -
When you describe a compelling destination, you're helping to correct one of the Rider's greatest weaknesses - the tendency to get lost in analysis.
Motivate the Elephant by:
- Finding the Feeling - Influence emotions, not just thought.
- Change is NOT: Analyze - Think - Change.
Change is: See - Feel - Change!
- "We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don't do it with information. We do it with identity."
- When people fail to change, it's not usually because of an understanding problem. Smokers understand that cigarettes are unhealthy, but they don't quit...
- Shrinking the Change -
People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one. That's why the conventional wisdom is that you don't publicly announce a fund-raising campaign for a charity until you've already got 50% of the money in the bag. After all, who wants to give the first $100 to a $1 MILLION fund-raising campaign?!
- The Elephant within us is easily demoralized - - it needs reassurance.
You need to lower the bar.
- You need quick wins to get fired up.
- When you engineer early successes, what you're really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort.
It's Elephant fuel!
- Growing Your People -
Everything can look like a failure in the middle.
- Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.
Shape the Path by:
- Right behaviors do not evolve naturally!
- Tweak the Environment - this is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder.
- What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
You've got some control over the situation.
- If you change the path, you'll change the behavior.
- Building Habits -
Because we instinctively try to fit in with our peer groups,
behavior is contagious.
- Why are habits so important?
They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot.
- The value of action triggers reside in the fact that we are preloading a decision.
- The hard question for a leader is not how to form habits but which habits to encourage.
- The habit should serve the mission!!
- Checklists simply make big screwups less likely; they provide insurance against overconfidence.
- People fear checklists because they see them as dehumanizing...
Well, if that's true, grab a pilot's checklist and try your luck with a 747.
- Rally the Herd -
In ambiguous situations, we all look to others for cues about how to behave.
- Behavior is contagious!
- In situations where your herd has embraced the right behavior,
publicize it.
More resources from the Heath Brothers: