Switch

Switch is about how you can lead and encourage changes of human behavior, both in yourself and in your organization, by focusing on the three forces that influence it: the rider, the elephant and the path.

The rider of the elephant is your neocortex, the newest, most rational part of your brain. It loves to think, to ponder and to look at all angles of a situation. This is very helpful when analyzing complex problems, but changing your behavior often isn’t one of them.

If you want to eat better, it’d probably easiest to start by having your coffee without sugar. But if your rider hears the vague goal “eat healthier,” it instantly goes into analyzing overdrive, thinking of hundreds of possible options – and ending up paralyzed.

This is just human nature. What we think is a resistance to change is actually just a lack of clarity on what to do next.

In order to avoid this, look at which small moves are the most critical and come up with a set of clear instructions for those. For example, when researches tried to get people from West Virginia to eat better, they told them one simple thing: “Buy 1% milk, instead of whole milk.” This was easy enough to do, and ended up doubling the consumption of 1% milk.

Some more ideas for eating healthy would be:

Eat salad for lunch every weekday. Only eat out on weekends. Never drink soda.

With the rider taken care of, now we have to get the elephant moving. However, unlike the rider, the elephant cares little about logical arguments and rational reasoning. It’s a stubborn, emotional creature, and those are best swayed by powerful feelings. For example, manager Jon Stegner was frustrated with his company’s purchasing process, he found it to be highly inefficient. But to get the board to act fast, he knew he couldn’t throw slides and charts at them, in hopes of a quick decision. Instead, he counted how many different gloves the company ordered and collected one pair of each. He then set up a meeting and piled up a mountain of 424 different pairs of gloves on the conference table, making it clear to every board member within seconds that their purchasing behavior was crazy – and being charged with re-designing it. When you want to quit smoking, telling yourself you’ll save money and be healthier is a weak argument. But taking a picture of your ugly, yellow teeth and looking at that every day, that’s an entirely different playing field. Both positive and negative emotions can get the elephant to move. Negative emotions work better with obvious problems, as shock and outrage give us a sense…