How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
By Chip Heath + Dan Heath
- Direct the Rider – what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. Provide crystal-clear direction.
- Ask: what’s working and how can we do more of it?
- Script moves with rules so you can easily make decisions. Think specific behaviors.
- Point to the destination: definition of done.
- Motivate the elephant – what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The rider can’t get his way with force for long, engage their emotional Elephant.
- Find the feeling: knowing something and why it’s worth doing
- Shrink the change (focus on small things to get long term vision, they aren’t scary things)
- Appeal to identity: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?
- Elephants are the real hold back – it’s not an intellectual problem, it’s a feeling problem; a habit problem
- Elephants like immediate payoff: boosts of hope and success, tiny ones
- Set small, visible goals. Get it into their head that they can succeed.
- Shape the path – what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. The situation is the Path. When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and the Elephant.
- Build a habit
- People attribute things to the way they are vs the situation they’re in
- Rally the herd – create a bandwagon effect
- Catch people being good
- Behavior is contagious
- All successful change comes from this perspective: SEE – FEEL – CHANGE
People don’t see the need to change
- Find the feeling. Dramatic demonstrations.
- Create empathy. Show people the problems with not changing.
- Tweak the environment so they have to take action
We’ve never done it that way
- Highlight identity. What’s consistent with the history of your organization?
- Find a bright spot that was invented there and clone it
We should do something but we’re bogged down in analysis
- Find the feeling
- Create a destination
- Simplify the problem with scripted moves
The environment changed and we need to adapt
- Create a new habit
- Set an action trigger
- Create a new routine
- Old patterns are powerful, script the critical moves.
People aren’t motivated
- Is it an identity conflict?
- Make a destination postcard to motivate
- Lower the bar to keep people moving
- Use social pressure
- Smooth the path
I’ll do it tomorrow
- Shrink the change to start today
- Set an action trigger for tomorrow
- Make yourself accountable to someone
It’ll never work
- Bright spot that shows it can
- Small victories engineered
- Some people do think it, carve out a space for them