Tl;dr — ★★★★★ (🏆 FAV of 2022)
When we play the role of business manager for our clients or work with Chiefs of Staff, we’re often hyper focused on efficiencies of systems and how information gets organized & operationalized in the org. There’s a scary, nebulous concept lurking behind that work though — change.
And it’s not just business managers & COS — in fact, change management is one of the most essential leadership skills to hone. 🔨
These days, organizational change is fast-paced & relentless. It’s a given.
I mentioned change as nebulous. And oftentimes, when you’re at the center of it, it feels impossible to wrap your arms around. In Switch, Chip & Dan Heath make change management real. ✨
This isn’t a feel good book about why change management is important — this is an operator’s manual to enacting change in real life, by confronting both the emotional & rational influences that contribute to change resistance.
- What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
- What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
- What looks like a people problem is usually a situation problem.
This is one of those books that I would highly recommend if you have the time to read it in full. If not, take a peek at my Tl;dr recap below!👇
1 — Three Surprising Things About Change
For individuals’ behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds. The problem is this: often the heart and mind disagree.
The three surprises
- What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
- What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
- What looks like a people problem is usually a situation problem.
Change does not require authority or power. Be explicit — “some is not a number; soon is not a time.” Help, guide, and train people to get to your explicit numbers. Use peer pressure and metrics/examples to change minds.
The system proposed in this book is based on an analogy of Rider + Elephant + Path. All three have to work together to successfully enact change:
- Direct the Rider
- Motivate the Elephant
- Shape the Path
In the above analogy, the elephant is our emotional side & the rider is our rational side. The rider sits on the elephant and holds the reigns, seemingly in control. But the control is precarious — in a disagreement, the elephant will always win. If you want to change things, you have to appeal to both the rider and the elephant.
Direct the Rider
“What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.”
2 — Find the Bright Spots
- Find where the team has succeeded and try to emulate those “bright spots” — these also can help with adoption, since bright spots already exist in the org (”some people have a knee-jerk skeptical response to “imported” solutions)
- Bright spots also create a view that you’re already on your way to the goal and give you an action plan — too much analysis can cripple a project, but also make the problem seem too big to tackle
- Avoid the automatic want to match big problems with big solutions and allow asymmetry between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution — big problems can be solved by small solutions
3 — Script the Critical Moves
- Script your moves to make it easier for people to change by eliminating the ambiguity of goals while also eliminating choice paralysis
- “Clarity dissolves resistance”
4 — Point to the Destination
- “When you describe a compelling destination, you’re helping to direct one of the Rider’s great weaknesses — the tendency to get lost in analysis” — knowing why we need to change and showing the data to prove that will not spur change
- You have to remove the ambiguity associated with goals of large org projects by showing the Rider where you’re headed and the Elephant why that journey is worthwhile — appeal to both the rational & emotional
- Setting a black and white goal can prevent backsliding and silent resistance to your change initiative
Motivate the Elephant
“What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”
5 — Find the Feeling
- The sequence for change isn’t ANALYZE > THINK > CHANGE — it’s SEE > FEEL > CHANGE (a strong biz case won’t actually solve for the change management portion of your initiative)
6 — Shrink 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”, so you can motivate people by showing that they’re closer to the finish line than they think — start looking for existing wins to get the team fired up
- You have to show progress & plan for milestones; “hope is precious to a change effort” and visibility is important to ensure your initiatives gains speed and doesn’t slow down — show people how and when they’re making progress/hitting milestones
- “It’s ok if the first changes seem trivial”, we just have to break the pattern of losing and prove that the team can win
7 — Grow your People
- “Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure” — so how do you make your change resonate as a matter of identity?
- Team identities can be helpful, even if they’re fabricated; if a team sees themselves as “storytellers” or “inventors” then they have an allegiance to proving that identity through action, “a desire to live up to their identities”
- Use the Growth Mindset to encourage effort over natural talent, which inherently allows space for the expectation of failure (”not failure of the mission itself, but failure en route”, to learn) — we can teach teams “not to trust the initial flush of good feeling at the beginning of the project, because what comes next is hardship and toil and frustration”; by perceiving failure as learning instead of failing, we understand that we will get better & that we can reach the finish line
Shape the Path
“What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.”
8 — Tweak the Environment
- Be careful not to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are, instead of the situation they are in
- The concept of tweaking people’s environments is essentially making it easier to action right behaviors, and harder to action the wrong behaviors — do we know why people are/aren’t doing something specific?
9 — Build Habits
- “Action triggers” (or specific mental plan to action something) can motivate people to do the things they know they need to do — they “simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness”; by preloading a decision, you create a habit
- “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in people?” (Instead of why are these people acting so badly?)
- Don’t underestimate the power of checklists as habit builders — checklists can provide insurance against overconfidence
10 — Rally the Herd
- When your team has embraced the right behavior, publicize it
- Make sure those on your team who have embraced the change (your believers) know that it is OK to get vocal about their support, and enable them to do so
- Culture is the linchpin of successful organizational change — similar to your believers, if you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together; make sure your reformers know how to talk about the change, as well as what they will say when they encounter resistance (e.g. from the “old guard”)
11 — Keep the Switch Going
- Even initially jarring changes will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it — “they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things”
- Change follows a pattern — but remember that what is not part of the pattern is the type of person who’s doing the changing