Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Switch – How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, is all about understanding the mechanics of change. The book is structured on 3 main parts (Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, Shape the Path) which explain the brain’s two independent systems that work at all times: the emotional and rational parts.
The emotional side is that part that makes us be instinctive and feel pain and pleasure. On the other hand, the rational side represents the conscious system and it’s the part that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future. From this point, the authors take the analogy used by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (University of Viriginia) in his book – The Happiness Hypothesis. Our emotional side is represented by an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider.
Direct the Rider: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.
Motivate the Elephant: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can’t get his way by force for very long. So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side – get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.
Shape the Path: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the Path. When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and Elephant.
As Chris Brogan likes to say The book is an absolute perfect prescription on how to understand change! [...] It’s a must. I can’t imagine not having this book and not trying out this sort of formula that it’s in there, and really not burning that formula into how you work with change, how you work with marketing, and how you get a lot of stuff done…
Having these said, while reading the book I extracted a couple of sentences that I found interesting and useful even out of context:
- People eat more when you give them a bigger container.
- Self-control is an exhaustible resource. (refers to the “supervised” like behavior)
- Change is hard because people wear themselves out.
- Decision paralysis: More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan.
