How To Make Change Less Complicated?
Step by step for managing the change
Why do you think change is hard? In my opinion, it is because most of us love staying in a comfort zone — something that is already familiar to us. It is scary to walk into something you don’t know yet, isn’t it?
I had experience with change. At that time, I was assigned to a role that I had no expertise for—also during a challenging situation, due to the reorganization. I had no choice but to accept it and to adapt to it. Fortunately, through the support and guidance from my manager and colleagues, I passed the storm and gained much knowledge from it.
There are times when external circumstances push us to do some changes — or adapt to changes — in our lives, and we need to accept the idea of it. Indeed, it is not an easy job to shift the old way of thinking to a new one.
Then how to make the change work?
This book will provide you the cheat sheet. Backed by research, Chip and Dan Heath elaborate on what are important things to do, to drive the transformation in your organization.
Adopting the analogy from The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, the authors describe three main ideas to make the transformation successful — direct the rider, lead the elephant and shape the path. And to make a successful transformation, you need to balance all of them.
Direct the rider
The rider is influenced a lot by logical thinking. Therefore, providing structured ways will drive the rider to move — set a goal and list the actions to direct it. One of the ways to know what kind of action needed is by looking for successful cases — or as explained in this book, try looking for the bright spots. Take the lessons from the experience of an NGO executive, Jerry Sternin, who successfully solved the malnutrition problem in one of the villages in Vietnam by doing simple improvement in less than a year —learning from a group of local mothers on how they feed their healthy children, then applied the practice to the rest of households in the village.
“What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.” (Chip and Dan Heath)
Sometimes, besides getting stuck in what to do to solve a problem, some people happened to experience decision paralysis — the inability to choose something because of too many options available at one time. Thus, leaders need to script the critical moves that will act as a threshold to help the decision-making process easier to do.
Lead the elephant
According to the study conducted by John Kotter and Dan Cohen, the big change can happen when we are presented with something that speaks to our emotional side. Something that moves us, something that motivates us.
“In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.” (John Kotter and Dan Cohen)
Instead of putting people in a crisis to make the change as an urgent thing to do, a better way to do it will be through building motivation. As explained by a psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, such a positive emotion tends to broaden our view. We become more open to new ideas and make us eager to do better at things.
However, motivation can come and go. The key to managing this is to make sure that we split the big goal into smaller chunks and making the progress visible. For example, instead of aiming to write 30 articles by a month, try to make a more achievable goal like, “writing a paragraph a day”. By setting a more achievable goal and quantifying it, people can get a feeling of how far they are from the main goal. It is also good for the psychological state since it will create a sense of achievement after finishing the small tasks — it will gradually build up your confidence along the way.
Shape the path
Borrowing the authors’ words, the idea of shaping the path is to facilitate people for a change by making the right behavior easier to do and the wrong behavior harder to do. Through his popcorn study, Brian Wansink gained an understanding that the size of your dinnerware can affect your eating habit. Although some of the participants stated that they are a mindful-eater — in other words, they thought they won’t overeat — they still ended up eating a bigger portion when the food served in a bigger container.
“What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. And no matter what your role is, you’ve got some control over the situation.” (Chip and Dan Heath)
In addition to making a conducive environment, creating action triggers will also help to maintain the longer effects of change because it will build our habits.
I will give the example from my experience. It was quite hard for me to write regularly, then I tried setting a pop-up reminder on my phone for 4 days a week to write at least 30 minutes. After a month, I didn’t even need the reminder anymore because it was already a part of my routine. I have formed a habit of writing!
Another thing, it is even better if you also have support from your community. As in my example, I have a writing partner who is willing to help me improve my work and encourage me to write more (I wrote the story here). And as a result, I am now more productive in writing, more than before.
Personally, I like this book because it provides me insightful information backed by research. Even though it sounds like it is a really serious and scientific book, it is not boring, at all! Through the stories, the authors successfully communicate the message to the readers on how to make the change works. If you are a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s books— I believe, that you will also like this piece!
I rated this book 4.3/5.0 for compelling research stories and comprehensive explanations. In general, this book is not only a good choice for readers who are interested in self-improvement but also business and leadership.
As a closing, I will share a nice quote as a reminder for us, that change is part of growing ourselves.
“Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything” (George Bernard Shaw)
Don’t fear the change, make the best out of it!
