Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

To change behavior, you’ve got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path. If you can do all three at once, dramatic change can happen even if you don’t have lots of power or resources behind you.

Bottom line: You are spending 80 percent of your time exploring Debbie’s success and finding ways to replicate it. You aren’t obsessing about the manager who was skeptical. You aren’t planning another training program with the same managers to review the material. You are simply asking yourself, “What’s working and how can we do more of it?” That’s

Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction. (Think 1% milk.) Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can’t get his way by force for very long. So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperativ

Over the past few chapters, we’ve seen that the central challenge of change is keeping the Elephant moving forward. Whereas the Rider needs direction, the Elephant needs motivation. And we’ve seen that motivation comes from feeling—knowledge isn’t enough to motivate change. But motivation also comes from confidence. The Elephant has to believe that