Making the elephant and rider work in synergy
If you ask people what their take on change is, you will get varying perspectives — it will be organizational change if you talk to corporate people, personal change if you seek opinion from self-help gurus, or change in the world if you ask activists or advocates who seek universal improvement. The book Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, authored by brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath, dwells on all kinds of change — individual, organizational and societal — in the same light. Whether you are helping your husband or wife lose excess pounds, or assisting your work team to cut down on unnecessary expenses or advocating a “no to plastic bag” usage, the fundamental blueprint remains the same. It always starts with the decision to act to make a difference.
The tome uses the metaphor of the human mind that is powered in a large way by Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which posits that your psyche is allegorically an elephant, representing your emotional responses, while the rider on top of the elephant represents the logical and rational side of your mind. The rider can sway where the elephant goes, but unless the elephant feels safe with the lead rider’s judgments on how their journey together should go, things will not happen. Following that metaphor, the Heaths provide 12 principles that shape how individuals and groups can respond to all sorts of changes given the constant battle between the emotional and rational sides of people.
1 You need a roadmap to steer the elephant. Since the rider is your rational side that grips the reins and chooses the way forward, he needs to be directed. The control of the rider can be unstable because he is so much smaller in proportion to the size of the elephant. Whenever a huge elephant and a tiny rider argue and disagree about where they should go, the elephant expectedly triumphs. In a lot of situations, what looks like an elephant’s struggle or a rider’s resistance is really just a lack of full understanding of what roles each has to play, and what tasks each needs to do. As such, you must give the rider a sound roadmap with which he can efficiently maneuver his partner elephant.
2 Big problems are rarely solved by big solutions. They are most often cracked by a sequence of small solutions over time. It is finding the bright spots or examples of what’s working, understanding why they are working and knowing what makes them different. Shy away from what’s not working and trying to fix it. And to grasp what makes them different, you must also appreciate the normal way things are done and compare it with what you find in the positive outliers.
3 People should be clear on how they should act in a change situation. The most basic frustration you hear from change agents has to do with people “not supporting the change initiatives.” But when you ask them about what they want people to do, you often get a list of abstractions. If you want change effected, you have to be clear about how people should move. As the book explains, “The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out.”
4 You can redirect the rider’s energy toward the destination. Have a tangible goal that you want accomplished and rally people around it. Avoid abstraction. There are targets that may be acceptable in the boardroom but in reality, you need something solid that people can chew on, understand and be familiar with. Your first instinct, in most change situations, is to offer data to riders, who will surely love them. They will pore over that data, analyze or even poke holes in it. With information and knowledge on hand, you can point to where the rider should go.
5 To make progress toward a goal, you require the energy and drive of the elephant. You ought to motivate the elephant, your innate emotional side that is indolent and easily agitated and will opt for quick payoffs over enduring rewards. The elephant symbolizes the first cause of any failure to change, because the change you want usually involves short-term sacrifice in pursuit of long-term benefit. You can’t get anywhere with any move to change unless you engage a person’s emotional side to get his reserved elephant to bring itself to the corridor of change.
6 Adopt the see-feel-change pattern. There will always be opportunities for change if only you avoid wasteful actions and concentrate on working to make things flow. The idea of focusing your efforts into bite sizes rather than big chunks that choke you fits in this mold. It gives you an idea, in concrete terms, of what is truly promising. In almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not “analyze-think-change,” but rather “see-feel-change.” When people fail to change, it’s not usually because of a problem in understanding what confronts them, but the resolve to act on it. Smokers understand that cigarettes are unhealthy, but they don’t quit. There’s a difference between knowing how to act and being motivated to act. Sometimes you speak to the rider when you should be speaking to the elephant.
7 Motivation is more important than math. When you swing early victories, what you’re really doing is swinging hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It’s food for the elephant. Big change could be devastating; it could jolt the elephant. You have to break it down to manageable sizes. And while it is important to have a convincing feel of where you are going, it is equally — if not more important — to have a sense of your “here and now” progress. It will give you a sense that you are getting somewhere. At every opportunity, configure your next steps to admire what has been achieved and work to build on it. “Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens — and when it happens, it lasts. The challenge is to get the elephant moving, even if the movement is slow at first,” the authors advise.
8 Real change is often three steps forward and two steps back. Humans are social beings. You want to belong, and be part of a team. You want a group identity that you can share, cultivate and nurture. Give advance advice to people on what to anticipate, and make them embrace the challenge of solving issues and facing trials one by one, since these challenges can tell you what is working and what isn’t. Adopt “the growth mindset,” and by constant practice, build competency. Keep in mind that any new quest is going to involve failure. As such, you need to create the expectation of failure — not the failure of the mission itself, but the failure you will encounter as you go through the mission. You will persevere only if you perceive falling down as learning rather than failing.
9 The road to change often fails because the rider can’t make the elephant reach its final destination. You have to shape the path to keep the elephant going until the end of the line. Its predisposition for immediate satisfaction goes against the rider’s power to look at the forest and plan beyond the tree. If you can make the path ahead straight and clear, the more you can reduce the mix-up between the elephant and its rider and bring easier and faster growth to the two, notwithstanding what is going on between them.
10 Markers that show people which way to go or rejoicing about their advancements can provide the push. It adds even more weight behind your kaizen, the Japanese word for continuous improvement. As you stabilize and improve the process of change, you are likewise able to pave the path toward the behavior you want. Observe people go through their work process, and make mental notes where bottlenecks occur and where they get jammed. Then attempt to reorganize the process to take away the hurdles and provide signposts on where to go or to joyfully announce achievements. As the authors state, “The fundamental attribution error is in your inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.”
11 Building habits is essentially stitched into your environment. And behavior is anchored on how people react to things, other people and situations in the environment that stimulates those reactions. Consistent responses or actions become habits. So if there’s a need to alter those responses, connect the new response to a specific stimulus. Based on a study of people making changes in their lives, 36 percent of the successful changes were associated with a move to a new location, and only 13 percent of unsuccessful changes involved a move.
12 People are naturally biased toward wanting to be part of a common social structure. Rally the herd. Know the prevailing social pressure in your organization and see if it is counter to what you are trying to do. You may call attention to the team that is doing what you want and herald them as a team that is “doing it right,” and by doing this you draw attention to the bright spots, and discover precise, albeit diminutive things that make a difference in what they do.
Switch carries a number of case stories on change from across territories covering experiences of individuals, corporations, non-profit organizations and countries. There is Jerry Sternin of Save the Children, who rescued the lives of thousands of malnourished children in Vietnam by finding community bright spots of well-nourished children in poor families. You can be inspired by how Donald Bedwick, MD, the chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spearheaded the 100,000 Lives Campaign, which helped prevent an estimated 122,000 avoidable deaths. Appreciate how two health researchers, Steve Butterfield and Bill Reger, spread the gospel of health far and wide with a campaign promoting low-fat milk.
Corporate examples include the story of Target manager Robyn Waters and how she demonstrated what the balance between the elephant and the rider can bring. The story goes that during the department store chain’s transition to a fashion discounter, she encouraged Target merchants to offer stylish products. She invoked the elephant by demonstrating stylish products, while speaking to the riders in the organization through proven results. Since Target had an analytic, number-driven culture, publicizing the early results were critical. Waters pointed to “heroes” in her organization who took the risk and succeeded.
Humor was the tool the Los Angeles MTA used to sway commuters to use their cars. The company’s advertising increased citywide ridership to 29 percent, which was more than double the national “Feed the Pig,” The Ad Council’s public service announcement portraying the idea of “saving” as a series of small, simple choices. With the materials, 17 percent of the viewers said that they would be more likely to set cash aside. Ninety-two percent of Ikea shoppers, including celebrity customers, switched to reusable totes after Ikea imposed a five-cent fee on plastic bags. Google generated greater employee loyalty and heightened motivation to spend time at work by larding the Googleplex with everything from free meals to dry-cleaning services. Comcast commissioned Frank Eliason to talk to customers on Twitter after its service reputation sank. Eliason set the standard for fast, human interaction.
You have an emotional “elephant” side and a rational “rider” side. Heath and Heath’s final push is for you to reach both, make them work in synergy to clear their way to successful change.
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