“Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” offers a groundbreaking approach to navigating life’s toughest transitions. The Heath brothers blend psychology and behavioral economics to unveil a practical framework for personal and organizational transformation. Their insights empower readers to overcome resistance and embrace positive change.
Ready to revolutionize your approach to change? Dive into this summary and discover the tools to make lasting improvements in your life and work.
Table of Contents
Genres
Marketing, Sales, Personal Development, Personal Growth, Business, Psychology, Self Help, Leadership, Management, Productivity, Education, Decision-Making and Problem Solving, Motivation, Personal Transformation, Change Management, Coping and Healing, Organizational Behavior, Self-Improvement, Self-Esteem
“Switch” presents a three-part framework for change: directing the Rider (our rational side), motivating the Elephant (our emotional side), and shaping the Path (our environment). The Heaths argue that successful change requires aligning these three elements.
To direct the Rider, they advise:
- Find bright spots: Identify what’s working and replicate it.
- Script the critical moves: Be specific about desired behaviors.
- Point to the destination: Paint a vivid picture of the end goal.
For motivating the Elephant, they suggest:
- Find the feeling: Tap into emotions to drive change.
- Shrink the change: Break big challenges into smaller, manageable steps.
- Grow your people: Foster a growth mindset and build identity-based habits.
To shape the Path, they recommend:
- Tweak the environment: Make the right behaviors easier and the wrong ones harder.
- Build habits: Create action triggers and checklists.
- Rally the herd: Harness the power of social influence.
The book is filled with engaging stories and case studies that illustrate these principles in action, from healthcare improvements to organizational transformations.
Review
“Switch” stands out in the crowded self-help genre with its evidence-based approach and practical strategies. The Heath brothers excel at making complex psychological concepts accessible and actionable.
Strengths:
- Clear, memorable framework
- Engaging storytelling
- Balance of theory and practical application
- Applicable to both personal and professional contexts
Weaknesses:
- Some concepts may feel oversimplified
- Limited focus on systemic or structural barriers to change
The book’s greatest asset is its versatility. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, implement a new business strategy, or change a community’s behavior, “Switch” provides a toolkit for success.
While not a magic bullet, “Switch” offers a thoughtful, structured approach to change that can significantly increase your odds of success. It’s a valuable resource for anyone facing a challenging transition or seeking to drive positive change in their life or organization.
How do you convince someone to change?
Whether you’re trying to get a team at work to change from Microsoft Office to Google Suite or trying to get your child to eliminate a bad habit, remember the people you want to change have two selves: a rational self and an emotional self.
The rational self is like a rider on top of a six‐ton elephant. The rational rider (the part that believes it “should” change) is at the mercy of the emotional elephant (the part that “doesn’t feel like” changing). If you’ve tried to start a new exercise habit but quit after three weeks because you don’t feel like going to the gym, you’ve felt the power of the elephant.
To convince someone to change their behavior, you need to do more than make a rational argument for change (i.e., convince the rider to change); you must motivate their inner emotional elephant to embrace change.
Switch examines why it is often difficult for people to switch their behavior, and how, by understanding the mind, it is possible to find shortcuts that make change easier. Through scientific studies and anecdotes, Switch provides simple yet effective tools for implementing changes.
Motivate the Elephant with a Sense of Progress
In 2004, a local car wash gave 300 loyalty cards to 300 random customers ‐ 150 loyalty cards required 8 stamps to earn a free car wash, and the other 150 loyalty cards required 10 stamps to earn a free car wash. The card with 10 required stamps, however, came with 2 free stamps. Both cards required the same effort to complete (8 car washes), but the loyalty card with 2 stamps motivated nearly twice as many people to return 8 times to earn their free car wash!
If you can make someone believe they’ve partially completed a change (like those 2 stamps did), you’ll increase the odds they’ll change. If you manage a team of designers who work on outdated design software, you’ll have a better chance at getting them to switch to a new software program if you show them how their skills on the existing software transfer to the new software, which moves them up the new software learning curve.
“That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.” – Chip and Dan Heath
Motivate the Elephant with Identity Misalignment
In 1977, a 21‐year‐old college student named Paul Butler tried to save the St. Lucia parrot – a species of parrot on the verge of extinction that only existed on the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia. Many St. Lucians were poaching the bird and destroying the parrots’ natural habitat.
Butler hosted St. Lucia parrot puppet shows, distributed parrot T‐shirts, and recruited volunteers to dress up in parrot costumes and visit local schools in the hopes of making the St. Lucians aware and proud of their parrot. At every public event, Butler would say, “This parrot is ours. Nobody has this but us. We need to cherish it and look after it.”
More than 30 years after these change efforts, Butler reported there are more than 1000 St. Lucia Parrots on the island and, “no St. Lucian has been caught shooting a parrot for fifteen years.”
If you can help people see that they are not acting in alignment with who they say they are (St. Lucian’s weren’t acting like St. Lucians by killing their own bird), they’ll be motivated to change.
“How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?” – Chip and Dan Heath
Direct the Rider Through Change
If you motivate someone’s inner elephant to change, your work isn’t done. Now, you must direct the rider.
The rational rider loves to think, but the more time the rider’s left wondering, “What should I do next?” and “Am I doing this right?”, the more it pulls on the reins and walks the elephant around in circles, which quickly de‐motivates the elephant. Therefore, you need to eliminate ambiguity and give the rider explicit behaviors to execute. Think of facilitating change like programming a computer. If you don’t give the computer specific commands, you’ll receive an error.
“Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.” – Chip and Dan Heath
Don’t simply tell your friend to “Go to the gym and exercise.” Instead, help him set up a detailed workout routine so that he knows exactly what exercises to do, at what weight, for a specific number of repetitions and sets. But only include critical decisions – decisions that might cause confusion and derail the change. Leave out trivial actions, like what to wear to the gym and what music to listen to at the gym.
When proposing a change, walk through the change in your mind to identify the key decision points and script explicit behaviors (i.e., “When you encounter _____, do this _____.” OR “If _____ happens, do _____.”). Eliminate points of confusion to increase the probability of change.
Review
“The Elephant and the Rider”
Chip Heath and Dan Heath offer memorable metaphors and solid tactics for enabling successful change.
The co-authors of Made To Stick and The Power of Moments, professors Chip Heath and Dan Heath consult and speak worldwide about the psychology of decision-making, change, innovation and collaboration.
This book stands the test of time. Current findings in neuroscience, behavioral economics and decision science support the authors’ advice about change management.
Engage Logic and Feelings
The Heath brothers offer a memorable metaphor – “the Elephant and the Rider” – to explain the need to appeal to both emotions and logic when you want to motivate change. The Elephant represents your feelings; the Rider your rational thinking. Change advocates usually mistakenly focus on rationality. The Heaths offer a process for getting your Elephant on board and clearing the path for Rider and Elephant to work together. Their business classic remains a perceptive and applicable change management guide.
Other worthy business guides await in the Heath-osphere. Among them are Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, Power of Moments and Decisive and Dan Heath’s Upstream. John Kotter’s Leading Change provides sound guidance while offering strategies that parallel and bring richness to the Heaths’ approach.
When you set small, visible goals, and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed. They break the habit of losing and begin to get into the habit of winning. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH
Here, the authors’ central theme is that to spark change and make it stick, you must appeal to people’s rational thinking and to their emotions, and you must reward small successes.
Path to Change
The Heaths remind you that people think rationally, but feel powerful emotions, which usually win out. Change requires syncing the interests of the thoughtful Rider and the emotional Elephant.
The Heaths emphasize that people do most things automatically, habitually and unconsciously. To get people to do things differently, you must shape their path.
Like most people, you battle to balance short-term pleasure against long-term gain. Your Rider, the Heaths explain, decides to get up before dawn to work out, but your Elephant doesn’t want to, so you hit the snooze button. The Rider can control the powerful Elephant only with great effort, and the Rider gets tired. The Heaths suggest never putting your Rider in situations that tempt your Elephant.
Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH
The authors recommend easing your Rider’s path by reducing the number of decisions it makes. Set clear goals and directions so your Rider saves energy. Tell a story and describe the reward at the end of the path. The Heaths urge you to focus on what people see and feel over what they analyze and think. The best way to engage the Elephant, they counsel, is to use narrative.
Mind-Sets
The authors caution that motivating people by helping them identify with a change won’t always suffice. People often adopt fixed mind-sets which lead them to fear failure or criticism if they try new things. To encourage growth mind-sets, the Heaths advise communicating candidly about the initial difficulties people may encounter and the probability they’ll make mistakes. Tell them they need to fail in order to learn. Describe the better future that awaits.
Nudge
The Heaths leverage evidence from psychology as a central element of their change process. Recent neuroscience proves you can nudge – guide – people toward better behaviors and decisions. The authors assert that most people follow the crowd. Leverage this: When a large part of your team does things you like, make sure everyone knows about it.
Burning Platform
In an emergency, the Heaths admit you might find yourself using fear to motivate change. Otherwise, they caution you to avoid the burning platform approach.
To change someone’s behavior, you’ve got to change that person’s situation. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH
The false notion that people won’t change until the ship is sinking led to a school of thought in which leaders scrambled for a threat on which to base their argument for change. The Heaths deplore that method and urge you to tap positive emotion to encourage creativity, lateral thinking and innovation. They recommend engaging the Elephant’s positive emotions.
Empire
Dan and Chip Heath have created an empire of business guides that have gained critical regard and endured because businesspeople, students and professors keep buying them – and for good reasons. The Heaths present their sometimes counterintuitive but always commonsense advice clearly and simply. They use no jargon. They ground their guidance in human nature as illuminated by psychology, sociology and applicable case studies, and they have a knack for useful, original metaphors that stick in the mind. Though this book was first published in 2010, nothing about their advice has dated. Some of it might ring familiar, but only because so many authors have synthesized and passed along what they learned from the Heaths.
CHIP HEATH is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. DAN HEATH is a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Heath brothers are the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch. They write a regular column in Fast Company magazine, and have appeared on Today, NPR’s Morning Edition, MSNBC, CNBC, and have been featured in Time, People and US News and World Report.
Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, and his brother Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University. They have co-authored two other bestsellers: Made to Stick and Decisive.
Table of Contents
1. Three Surprises About Change
DIRECT THE RIDER
2. Find the Bright Spots
3. Script the Critical Moves
4. Point to the Destination
MOTIVATE THE ELEPHANT
5. Find the Feeling
6. Shrink the Change
7. Grow Your People
SHAPE THE PATH
8. Tweak the Environment
9. Build Habits
10. Rally the Herd
11. Keep the Switch Going
How to Make a Switch
Overcoming Obstacles
Next Steps
Recommendations for Additional Reading
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index