How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

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Interview excerpts: Chip and Dan Heath, author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

The Quarterly: Could you please quickly summarize the core ideas in Switch for the benefit of those who have not yet read it?

Chip Heath: The core idea is that there are two sides to the way human beings think about any issue. There’s the rational, analytical, problem-solving side of our brains, which may think, “I need to eat less.” But there’s an emotional side that’s addicted to impulse or comfortable routines, and that side wants a cookie. At work, the rational side may say that the company needs to go in a different direction. But the emotional side is comfortable with the old ways of thinking and selling, and it has great anxiety about whether the company can change successfully.

My favorite metaphor for this dynamic comes from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who talks about a human riding atop an elephant.1 The Rider represents our analytical, planning side. The Rider decides, “I need to go somewhere, here’s the direction I want to go,” and sets off. But it’s the Elephant, the emotional side, that’s providing the power. The Rider can try to lead the Elephant, but in any direct contest of wills the Elephant is going to win—it has a six-ton advantage. So part of achieving change, in either our lives or in organizations, is aligning both sides of the brain by pointing out the direction for the Rider but also motivating the Elephant to undertake the journey. Of course, the Path the Elephant walks down matters too. High-ranking executives can shape that Path, that environment, and make the journey easier even when the Elephant is less motivated.

The Quarterly: In helping companies to work through these conflicts and smooth the road to change, how useful is a senior executive’s formal power?

Chip Heath: The Rider–Elephant conflict may be a reason not to press too hard on formal levers. It’s not enough for people to intellectually understand that an organization must start moving in a different strategic direction. People need to be motivated.

Our typical way of communicating speaks primarily—and in a lot of cases almost exclusively—to the Rider. It builds an intellectual case for change and relies on formal authority. In government, legislators have formal authority to change the rules of the system. The US Congress once changed the national speed limit to 55 miles an hour, for example. Did that automatically change behavior? As a parent, does formal power change the behavior of your teenagers?

It’s not enough to show intellectually that we need to change and then to decree what those changes will be. If it were, a lot more organizations would succeed in making strategic shifts. Formal power is tremendously useful, but if we start by wielding it we probably haven’t aligned the Rider and the Elephant. And if we rely only on the formal levers of power to lead, we may get too far ahead of people—they understand that they must change, but the motivation hasn’t kicked in.

The Quarterly: What’s an example of the kind of formal power you think executives mistakenly exercise and an alternative that might be more effective?

Chip Heath: Consider how change initiatives are typically rolled out. In many organizations, a change initiative consists of 35 slides in a PowerPoint deck analyzing the reasons for change. There’s nothing in the deck that helps employees believe that “We’re the kind of people who can successfully make this change.”

GE overcame this problem when they started talking about “ecomagination.” CEO Jeff Immelt said, “There’s a broad social trend toward finding more sustainable ways of doing business, and if we can take advantage of that, we will be well-positioned for the future.” GE did a green audit, looking for places where they already had industry-leading green products, and started highlighting those existing products for employees. One was an LED lighting system that produces great light with 10 percent of the electricity used by other systems. GE then said, “We’re the kind of people who can succeed in this new business environment that’s more and more focused on sustainability.” That motivates the Elephant.

The Quarterly: In Switch, you use the term “bright spots” to describe internal success stories like GE’s LED system. Could you say a bit more about the power of bright spots?

Chip Heath: Many companies try change themselves by benchmarking other organizations and borrowing their procedures or practices. The irony of benchmarking is that we’re essentially telling organizations to be more like GE or Apple or Nike. As Dev Patnaik, the author of Wired to Care,4 said to me one time, we know this doesn’t work on a personal level: we resist when members of our families say, “Be more like your brother.” The principle of bright spots is that you shouldn’t try to be more like Apple; you should try to be more like yourself at your best moments. Think about what you’ve done in the past, or what you’re doing now, that has worked tremendously well.

People have a tendency, especially in a change situation, to focus on the negative. Lots of research supports this negative focus—for example, if you ask sports fans what happened over the weekend, they dwell on the games their favorite teams lost. Companies too focus on the problems and not the bright spots.

I won’t say there’s no value in benchmarking. But if you believe that organizations differ in their cultures, capabilities, and structures, there’s something fundamentally odd about saying that you want to be more like another company that has a very different culture, structure, and set of capabilities. At the very least, the idea of looking to your own bright spots is a useful addition to your tool kit.

The Quarterly: What messages do you want to leave with senior executives who are seeking to catalyze change?

Chip Heath: Pay attention to creating an emotional case for change, not just an analytical one. Scale up bright-spot successes. And use your power as a top leader to smooth the path to change. Your people are ready to step up to the plate, but if systems or procedures are getting in the way of change, you are the one with the power to eliminate them.