Finding Beauty in Everyday Life: 2015

Switch – how to change things when change is hard

By Chip Heath and Dan Heath

1. Three Surprises about Change

- Ex. Movie popcorn study on mindless eating

- What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. i.e. changing people’s popcorn size (situation, easy) instead of convincing people to think differently (people, difficult)

- People resist change. But people also welcome change, think marriages and babies.

- Also got to influence the heart and the mind to change an individual’s behaviour

- Problem is the heart and the mind disagree

- “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant, and our rational side is the Rider. The Rider holds the reins and seems to be directing the Elephant, but the Rider is small relative to the Elephant. When the Rider and Elephant disagree, the Rider will lose.

- Ex of Elephant overrides the Rider… overeaten, slept in, tried quit smoking and drinking, said something angry and regret it

- The weakness of Elephant is that it’s lazy and skittish and considers the short-term pay off (ice cream cone) vs the long term (being thin). When change efforts fails, usually because of the Elephant. The strength of the Elephant is its emotion – the sympathy, love, compassion. And it’s the Elephant the one who gets things done.

- The Rider’s strength is in its rational long term thinking, the Planner. Its weakness is that it can get tiring, overanalyze and overthink things. Ex. agonize for 20 min to think about dinner

- If you want change, you have to appeal to both. Rider provides planning and direction and the Elephant provide energy.

- Self-control and self-supervision exhaust energy. Not just smokes, cookies, alcohol, but also the careful wording of a negative feedback

- During change, people often try to change a behaviour that has been automatic, a change would require careful supervision by the Rider

- What looks like laziness, is actually exhaustion Ex. cookies vs radish study. Engage people’s emotional side

- What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity Ex. 1% milk campaign. Provide crystal-clear direction.

- Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, and Shape the Path

- These three are not mutually exclusive of each other, to help make change EASIER (not easy), you are best to tap on all three areas

- Ex. 100,000 lives campaign with 6 detail steps to improve hospital process with a specific deadline goals

Direct the Rider

2. Find the Bright Spots

- Bright spots – look internally the successful efforts and stories. Ask the question what makes this work?

- Ex. Jerry Sternin working for Save the Children in Vietnam to fight malnutrition

- Rider’s weakness to overanalyze and spin his wheels “Analysis Paralysis”. His analysis is often directed to the problem rather than at bright spots.

- For example, malnutrition is a complicated problem to change due to the inherent problem of ignorance, poverty, and sanitation. But a simple change in cooking manner, can help the Viet kids become more healthy (bright spots)

- Ex. John Murphy – solution-focused brief therapy

- Traditional psychologist is classical psychotherapy and helps you explore your problem. What are its roots? Does it trace back to something in your childhood?

- Solutions-focused therapists don’t care about the archaeology, but how to solve the problem at hand. They ask questions that prompt you to think when the last time something was working for you were. And then go deeper and more specific about how that something working makes you feel, how did you behave, what was happening? Ex. Bobby with teacher greeting him with a smile and giving him manageable work to do. Ex. marriage counselling focuses on when he did something that makes you feel good.

- They look for “exceptions” and “things that work”, learn and recognize them to understand them to make the necessary change

- Ask “What’s working and how can we do more of it?” Rider often asks “What’s broken and how do we fix it?”

- Small adjustments can have big impact on a big problem ex. malnutrition in Vietnam

- There is an asymmetry between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution

- Big problem are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are often solved by a sequence of small solution over time

- Problem seeking mindset of a Rider is a weakness. We also often have a predilection for the negative. “Bad is stronger than good”. People remember bad events and spent more time analyzing what’s wrong.

- Imagine your child with 4 A’s, 2 B’s, and 1 F’s. As a parent you focus on the F and start to plan to have a tutor.

- We need to focus on solution , switch to looking for successful patterns, flashes of success

3. Script the Critical Moves

- Decision Paralysis – more options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default, steady, known plan, which is often the status quo and this stagnates change

- Decisions are the rider’s turf, and because they require careful supervision and self-control the Rider becomes exhausted

- Ex. 6 jams vs 24 jams ; medical decision of one drug and surgery vs two drugs and surgery

- Ex. business sources of decision paralysis – growing revenue quickly vs maximizing profitability, perfect products vs efficiency

- For most routines, we operate on auto-pilot where most of the decisions have already been made. But in times of change, autopilot doesn’t work anymore. And every detail requires decision and choice which creates uncertainty.

- Ambiguity also leads to decision paralysis. The rider is directing the elephant on a new path, but the elephant resist because of the unfamiliarity

- Many leaders pride themselves in setting high level direction and stay out of the details. But the hardest part of change – the paralyzing part – is precisely in the details

- What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. Ex. 1% milk campaign

- To make a switch, you need to script the critical moves

- Ex. of Brazilian railroad company turnaround with 4 specific rules with regards to saving money and utilizing resources. Unblock revenue, minimize upfront cash, faster is better than best, use what you’ve got.

- Change begins at the level of individual decisions and behaviours

- Of course you can’t predict and script out every move. Script critical moves

- A failing example – the food pyramid. The hierarchy is confusing. Oz and grams are difficult to understand.

- How to script the critical moves, to translate aspirations into actions

- Specific, concrete, critical behavioural goals

- Ex. train abusive parents to be patient and accepting

- Ex. Howard, South Dakota a dying town rally up to spend locally, to increase tax, to increase infrastructure changes

- All starts with a specific action. We have seen this asymmetry of a large problem eventually solved by a small solution

- Clarity dissolves resistance

4. Point to the Destination

- Ex. Teacher to finish grade 1 class with grade 3 level

- A specific goal of pushing grade 1 comprehension by 50% or class average by 1.5 etc. etc. are only useful to a teacher’s planning, but are not effective in lighting a fire in the hearts of first graders. Instead create a culture of learning, and the grade 3 goal was specifically picked that the first graders actually have a chance in succeeding

- Destination postcard – a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible. Answers the question: Where are we headed in the end? What’s the destination?

- Ex. UCSF breast cancer facility – started a revolutionary compilation of different departments in the same building to ensure speediness of breast cancer diagnostic results

- When you describe a compelling destination, you’re helping to correct one of the Rider’s great weaknesses – the tendency to get lost in analysis. Rider will obsess which way to move, whether it’s necessary to move at all. You can redirect the Rider’s energy to help you navigate toward the destination – by giving it a gut-smacking goal

- Setting SMART goals in organizations (Specific, Measureable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely), but SMART goals are only good for steady-states situations because they presume the emotion, they don’t generate it

- In times of change, we need to make emotional goals (not financial ones)

- Effect visions express values that allow employee to identify with organization, and not just increase 15% return on equity

- Destination postcards gives inspiration

- What if your team isn’t inspired? Or what if, the team is secretly resistant to the vision?

- Enemy – rationalization. Ex. dieting, I did eat that salad last Thursday and this ice cream is ok. A big-picture goal like “be healthier” is imprecise and ambiguous and makes wiggle room for the Elephant to rationalize failure. Even setting a goal that states we will increase revenue by 14.5%, but when you achieve 12.3% you can still rationalize that in this climate we did well

- Set prescriptive, black and white goals. No more wine, no more Cheetos – but these are very uninspiring

- Ex. oil explorers. No dry holes. None. No bullshit, no wiggle room. Improves “learning” to not drill any dry holes

- If you worry about inaction on your team or silent resistance, black and white goals may be the solution. But many goals don’t have to be so unyielding

- Marry your long-term goal with short term critical moves. Vision with behavioural level execution. Back your destination postcard with behavioural script.

- Don’t need to anticipate every turn and destination. Trust the process

- When you are the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there.

- Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.

- Ex. football coaches. Investing I.I. analysis in Wall street, ready when the Amgen situation shows up

- Rider is visionary, long-term goals, willing to make short-term sacrifices but has limited reserves in strength, paralysis in the face of ambiguity and choice, relentless focus on problems rather than solutions

- Follow the bright spots. Don’t obsess about failures, look to investigate and clone successes.

- Give direction to the Rider – both a start and a finish. Send him a destination postcard and script the critical moves.

Motivate the Elephant

5. Find the Feeling

- Ex. Target fashion discounter by Robyn Waters changed Target’s purchase from take clothes that are popular last year and take it to Asia to knock it off to purchasing clothes that is popular this year. She showed the execs trendy colourful clothing matching the latest apple iPod products, m&ms, and bought a sample to test the waters

- The core of the matter is always about changing the behaviour of people, and by speaking to people’s feelings

- When change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Riders

- Kotter and Cohen states that most people think change happens in Analyze-Think-Change. This sequence works best when the parameters are known, assumptions are minimal, and the future is not fuzzy.

- Big changes are when parameters aren’t well understood, the future is fuzzy, and uncertainty hinders the Elephant. Big changes take the sequence of See-Feel-Change.

- The challenge is then to distinguish who people don’t support your change. Is it because they don’t understand or is it because they are not enthused? The answer isn’t always obvious even to experts

- Ex. Hope Lab designed a video game for teenagers battling cancer. Even teenagers only played the video game one or two levels have similar results in taking their medications as teenagers who completed the video game. The idea is that, this appeals to IDENTITY

- Identity – if I do this action, I am this kind of person. Ex. If I support the environment, I am this kind of caring human being.

- There is a difference in understanding the problem and knowing how to act and being motivated to act. Appealing to the Rider vs Appealing to the Elephant

- We are lousy self-evaluators, because we are subject to positive illusions (believing we are better than the average joe)

- How do you correct or dispel people’s positive illusions without raining negativity?

- Ex. Accounting Manager of a non-profit very stern on rules and on time, until he first-hand saw how the social workers are trying to make ends meet

- Emotions motivate Elephant. In fighting for change, we’ve got to find the feeling.

- It has been suggested to create a sense of fear or anxiety or doom. People are reluctant to change habits when it has been successful in the past, make your team that they are facing to have no choice but to act. Ex. hitting rock bottom before things get better

- BUT negative emotions are designed to motivate specific actions, avoid risks and confront problems. “narrowing effect”

- Positive emotions are better at cultivating creativity, flexibility, higher level problems. “broaden and build” to explore, discover, invent

- Most big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving, they don’t look like burning platform situations, we need to encourage open mind, creativity, and hope

6. Shrink the Change

- Ex. hotel maids are good exercisers. Car wash loyalty cards started with 2 stamps out of 10 or to get 8 stamps. The goal was the same for both groups, but one feels like they have a head-start. People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be a starting gate of a shorter one.

- One way to motivate action is to make people feel as though they are already closer to the finish line than they might have thought

- If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the changer, lower the bar, divide into smaller, achievable steps

- Ex. start cleaning the house 5 minutes a day. It gets you moving. The task seems less daunting. Starting a task is always worse than continuing it.

- Ex. attacking debt by organizing debt from smallest amount to largest amount, and pay off the smallest amount first. Even though the rational way of losing interest advices us to pay down the largest amount first, but for people to actually conquer debt is to make them feel good one small step at a time

- One way to shrink change is to limit the investment, while the other way is to think of small wins

- Ex. 50 miles tilt the next coffee stop

- Ex. government increase in credit card limit

- When you engineer early successes, what you are really doing is engineering hope

- For weight loss, it’s easy to measure progress. But what about something more abstract like marriage advice. Therapists would ask you to rate your experience with a miracle scale from 1 to 10 to help keep track. The other advantage is to demystify the journey. Make you see the progress and path more easily

- Small visible goals that are meaningful and within immediate reach

- Ex. elephant resist when task feels too big. Alcoholics Anonymous ask an alcoholic to not drink “one day at a time”.

- Small targets lead to small victories, and small victories often trigger positive spiral of behaviour

- Ex. marriage counsellor, one morning kiss

7. Grow Your People

- Ex. Conservation of the St Lucia Parrot by helping the St Lucia people identify that this bird is the pride of our nation, they were the kind of people who protect their own. Helps eliminate hunting of the bird and conservation

- He inspired the people to take pride, to grow the people to be more ready and motivated to act

- 2 basic model of decision making – consequences model and identity model

- Consequence model is similar to students of economics, the cost and benefit of an idea. A rational, analytical approach

- Identity model is who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?

- Identity can be adopted. Like profession, a good parent

- Ex. quitting nurse, improve sense of pride and loyal and good service

- Ex. Brasilata – workers are “inventors”

- Ex. grade 1s are “scholars”

- A new identity can take root quickly, but living up to it is awfully hard

- Need to create the expectation of failure

- Fixed mindset vs growth mindset

- People who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are basically static. Your behaviour is a good representation of your natural ability. You tend to avoid challenges, because if you fail, you fear others will your failure as an indication of your true ability. They feel threatened by negative feedback

- People who have a growth mindset believe that abilities are like muscles, they can be built up with practice. You can make yourself better at tasks. You tend to accept more challengers despite the risk of failure. You seek out “stretch” assignments at work. More inclined to accept criticism because it ultimately makes you better.

- A growth mindset will make you more successful at almost anything

- Parents should say “I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project” “I could tell you listen to your coach’s suggestion” instead of “you’re so smart” “you are good at basketball”

- Can people with a fixed mindset learn to adopt a growth mindset?

- Ex. junior high kids. “Everything is hard before it is easy” and should never give up because they didn’t master it immediately

- Business world implicitly reject the growth mindset. You plan and you execute. There’s no learning stage or practice stage. But to create change you got to act more like a coach and less like a score keeper.

- “everything can look like a failure in the middle”

- “Real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back”

- Failure is a necessary part of change, necessary path of success

- U-shaped curve. One peak labeled “hope”, and the other peak labeled “confidence” with the negative emotional valley labeled “insight”

- This creates expectation of failure. Telling team members not to trust initial flush of good feeling at the beginning of the project, because next is hardship and toil and frustration.

- Encourages us to seek out failure, we will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down – but throughout, we’ll get better, and we will succeed in the end

- Growth mindset buffers against defeatism. Frames failure as a natural part of the change process.

- Ex. hospital open heart surgery to a minimal invasive cardiac surgery. Successful hospitals adopt a learning frame. Encouraged questions, repeat surgery consecutively to reduce lag times, and introduce members one at a time to minimize risk to procedure. Failed teams were motivated by perform, shine, execute perfectly on first few tries. Successful teams focused on learning

- Failing is often the best way to learn, early failure is a kind of necessary investment

- Ex. school changing failure grade to “Not Yet”. Changing the students and teachers fixed mindset, improve tutorial, and ongoing advisors, transformed their identity and mindset

- Our brains and our abilities are like muscles. They can be strengthened with practice. Strengthen our identities.

- Central challenge is keeping the Elephant moving forward

- Whereas the Rider needs direction, the Elephant needs motivation.

- Motivation comes from a feeling – knowledge isn’t enough to motivate change

- Motivation also comes from confidence

- The Elephant has to believe that it is capable of conquering the change – to build people confidence and shrink the challenge

Shape the Path

8. Tweak the Environment

- What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem

- Ex. judging a bad driver as a jerk rather than he maybe rushing to appointment or judge popcorn eater as gluttony

- “Fundamental Attribution Error” – the deep-rooted tendency to attribute people’s behaviour to the way they are rather than the situation they are in

- Ex. marriage counsel of a “stubborn” husband, he isn’t always stubborn, he is often stubborn when you bring an issue up when the kids are around instead of in private

- If you want people to change, you provide clear direction to the Rider, or boost motivation and determination to the Elephant, or you can simply make the journey easier

- Ex. milk at the back of grocery store. Amazon’s 1 click check out. Traffic lanes and lights.

- Ex. switching to online billing hours instead of paper, people were reluctant because the software was flawed and made people frustrated, people took the easier path

- Many business think in terms of bribe and punishments. They often forget if you change the path you can change behaviour

- Ex. How to drive down errors in medication administration? The nurses know what’s expected of them, not a Rider’s problem. The nurses have no emotional resistance to do worse, not an Elephant’s problem. Which means the path, the distractions which can cause mistakes, where the medication administration area are in the nosiest part of the floor? And doctors called nurses even when they are in the middle of the task. Bought bright orange vest to visually tell everyone this nurse is administrating medication right now. People hated it. But data showed it worked it dropped errors by 30%.

- Ex. “sterile cockpit” no conversation outside of flying below 10, 000 ft. IT group adopt this quiet mornings on specific days of the week. So managers are not constantly asking for updates or quick helps from colleague that disrupt their real work

- This can work on us too. Often environmental tweaks beat self-control every time.

- Ex. changing the size of the popcorn serving help people eat less. Using small plates and bowls, portion snacks help eating problems

- Ex. reshaping office furniture to allow better meeting instead of behind a desk.

- Try outsmarting ourselves. Riders outsmarting our Elephants. Setting up coffee to auto brew in the morning. Gym clothes out before bed.

- Ex. Working while distracted by emails. Turn off email notifications, and check emails only a specific time of day. Some even used an old machine to make it impossible to check emails.

- Ex. factory machines taking off fingers. Both Rider and Elephant know how to avoid it. But by shaping the machine operation design to press 2 buttons to operate the machine “Y” in essence eliminate the possibility of hurting yourself

- How to prevent injuries. Use the “Haddon Matrix” where you think pre-event, event, post-event possibilities and solutions. Pre-event like ads against drunk driving, and lights on highways. Event like seatbelts, airbags, big orange barrels to soften collision. Post-event like emergency response.

- Ex. prevent data loss. Build in computer check ups, nightly backups, cloud sharing

- Ex. take out voice recording and make employees who hate giving customer service do great

- Simple tweaks of the path can lead to dramatic changes

9. Build Habits

- Ex. drug addicts of soldiers after Vietnam War without previous history, and not related to traumatic and stress events. It was a cultural experience. And what’s more surprising is that after 12 months of the vets returning home, the rates of addict drop drastically. What happened?

- People are incredibly sensitive to the environment and the culture – the norms and expectations of the communities

- One of the ways environment acts on us is by reinforcing (or deterring) our habits

- Habits are behavioural autopilot, great to free up resources of the Rider

- Ex. some successful changes happen with a move to a new location

- But that is dramatic change in environment. What are some more practical ways to create a habit? What are the mental groundwork to build a new habit?

- Action Triggers – ex. I’ll head straight to the gym right after I drop off Anna at school tomorrow morning. These are quite motivating and creating a mental plan.

- Imagining a time and place where you will do something, empower and motivate people to do what they know they need to do (given the Rider and Elephant are on board)

- Action triggers pre-decide what you want to do, and pass the control of the behaviour to the environment, protecting the goals from distractions, bad habits, or competing goals

- Action triggers simply have to simple and specific enough to be useful

- The use of action triggers specifically help with more difficult goals than easy goals

- Action triggers creates instant habit. Of course it’s not perfect and it has it draws back. But it’s a very practical and easy set up to extend the plan in motion.

- Ex. creates a meeting habit – small chat before the meeting. Or a stand up meeting.

- The hard choice for leaders is not how to form habits, but which habits to encourage

- The habits need to serve its purpose i.e. advance the mission, and the habit needs to be easy to embrace

- Ex. encouraging morning routines and school assembly, principal managed to tame and calm kids to a ready to learn environment. Don’t think they are all bad kids. How can you set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?

- Checklist – a checklist can combines the tweak the environment and building habits, make behaviour more consistent and habitual

- Ex. hospital checklist to prevent IV line infections

- Checklist contain straightforward advice. Educate people what’s best practice, ironclad. Simple, easy to follow instructions. It can also help people avoid blind spots in a complex environment.

- Checklist also provide a good check against overconfidence.

- Checklist allows standardization.

- The environment can help you shape your habits and feel afresh. What else can help? The influence of other people

10. Rally the Herd

- When the environment is unfamiliar, we observe what other people are doing. Ex. going to church for the first time. Or going to a fancy dinner.

- But sometimes in times of change, nobody knows how to behave, and that can lead to problems. Ex. in emergency situation u want one person to help not 50

- Group fail to respond as well as individuals. When ambiguous situations happen, people look to others for cues about how to interpret the event.

- Ex. seeing a man suddenly collapsed in a mall. You would wonder a bunch of different scenarios, but whereas a crowd, you have two stimuli, the collapse itself and the crowd’s reaction to the collapse.

- Behaviour is contagious. We imitate the behaviours of others. The fashion, your partner, investing, even eating habits

- When you are leading an Elephant on an unfamiliar path, chances are it’s going to follow the herd. How do you create a herd?

- Publicize the correct behaviour. Ex. Leaving tips for the barista. Most hotel guests reuse their towels. 80% of employees turn in their time sheet on time. People will learn to follow their peers.

- What if the norms are against you?

- Ex. MSOM journal article takes months for reviews. First he spoke to the Rider by giving clear suggestions everyone review within 65 days. Then he appealed to identity. We are operations people, we lead in turnaround time. Third he defines a clear behaviour; every reviewer had to submit feedback within 5 weeks. And rally the herd by showing an excel spreadsheet that show the status of every paper submitted.

- Behaviour is contagious at the individual level, group level, as well as the societal levels.

- Ex. the concept of designated driver was set in 1980s, a norm in Scandinavian countries. He used even fictional, TV programs to stage the behaviour. He asks just put in 5 seconds into the plot. Winsten use the power of the Path to change the public’s behaviour, but he used the power of the Rider and Elephant to change the network executives behaviour

- Ex. Tanzanians with cross-generational unsafe sex leading to AIDS. How to change their environment to allow the public voice their disapproval openly. They chose radio media portraying a failed sugar daddy. Someone interrupting the behaviour. 2 objectives here, one to create a mocking label for the sugar daddy behaviour, and two to make it ok to mock them, to socially disapprove of them, to encourage intervention

- Ex. hospital change interns from 120 hr work week to 80 hr work week. One work and one didn’t. The interns refuse to hand off the work and to sign off, it’s a culture and attitude that seems you won’t be respected even the new law enforces it and seniors are supportive. Alpha had long, private in person rounds near the patient bedside in the afternoon. Beta had shorter, casual rounds at the computer lounge, which hinders talking openly about opinions.

- “Free spaces” – small scale meetings where reformers can gather and ready themselves for collective action without being observed by members of the dominant group. Allows effective discussions, ideas, identity and language to surface

- If you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together in a free space

11. Keep the Change Moving

- A long journey starts with a single step

- Yet many starts to form a habit, but breaks out of habit quickly. How do you keep the steps coming?

- First – recognize and celebrate that first step. Reinforce your change. Use reward

- Ex. animal trainers

- Set a behavioral destination and use approximation to reward each tiny step that leads towards the goal.

- Ex. improving relationship with husband or coworkers

- Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first steps of your long journey and the second and third and fourth steps. People are however terrible at it. We like to grouse not praise.

- I.e. people at work like to communal complain. We should however find bright spots, however tiny

- Our riders are naturally negative thinkers. Problems are easy to spot, progress much harder.

- Change isn’t an event, it is a process. To lead a process requires persistence

- Snowballing effect – Small changes can snowball to big changes.

- Mere exposure effect – the more you are exposed to something the more you like it

- Cognitive dissonance - people don’t like to act in one way and think in another. Once they act in a new way, it gives a new identity and want to continue

- Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball.

- Change isn't always easy though, but it isn't always hard

- When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. Give clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment. It’s because the Rider, Elephant, and the Path are all aligned in support of the switch.

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Switch - how to change things when change is hard