Switch — A Top of the Page Review

October 2022

Change management doesn’t have to feel like your stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Let’s face it, change is hard! If you’ve ever led an organizational change initiative (or been the unwilling victim of one), you know that most organizations fail to effect sustainable change. I once worked with an organization that changed a key customer facing policy once or twice a quarter. Unsurprisingly, managers were confused, staff morale was low, and customer experience was inconsistent.

In all fairness, most change initiatives are not quite so awful. But many businesses fail more often than they succeed in launching and sustaining change. All too often change management is an afterthought in business. As in, after the project launches. After the software is implemented. After the initiative fails to take root. After we realize it’s all a hot mess.

Switch shows us it doesn’t have to be that way. Change is hard, but it doesn’t have to be impossible.

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. 2010. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. New York: Crown Publishing

Quick Summary

Switch outlines an approach to creating sustainable, meaningful change by appealing to both reason and emotion. The authors offer a wide variety of compelling change stories from around the world. The stories range from addressing child malnourishment in the developing world to battling obesity in other parts of the world. Their examples are pulled from an array of efforts running a gamut of public policy issues and social behavior to business endeavors. They successfully integrate insights from multiple disciplines to provide practical tips for those who are facing daunting change situations.

To change behavior, leaders must…

• Change the situation
• Understand the intellectual and emotional effort required for people to make the change
• Address both rational and emotional needs
• Be clear & specific about what behavior should change
• Point to the final destination and tell a compelling story about why it is good

Key Takeaways

Change Management

Creating a sense of progress is critical to change management. It fuels our emotional needs. Progress keeps our focus sustained and keeps us motivated.

People Management

What often looks like a people problem is actually a situation problem. It is easier to blame people for being lazy or incompetent than to examine the complexity of the processes surrounding them that lead to undesirable behaviors. Business leaders need to get clear on what is driving people’s behavior before they leap to the conclusion that they have the wrong people on board.

I deal with broken or poorly developed processes pretty regularly in my “day job.” I can attest to the power of the situation to guide people’s behavior in ways that often runs contrary to what leaders want. In the businesses I work with, I generally find people are well-intentioned. They want to perform well and desire organizational success.

One practical tip the authors of Switch make is to short circuit ambiguity by scripting the critical moves. When leaders build the environment to support the change they want, transformation is not only possible, but often self-sustaining.

Process Improvement

Develop work flows that induce and sustain change.

Start by examining what is working well. Working well means that people are engaged and motivated. Working well means that the behaviors we desire are consistently occurring. Negativity bias is real and we tend to fixate on what is wrong. To shift to a solution focus, leaders need to be intentional about identifying where processes are working.

Once we know what is working, we can turn our attention to what needs improvement. Some of key questions to ask as leaders examine the processes they have in place are:

1. What can be done to prevent a thing from happening in the first place?
2. What can be done to minimize the negative impact when the thing happens?
3. How can we respond after the thing has happened that will minimize the severity of its impact?

Processes should support the people using them to do the work. Processes should make it easy for people to comply with the desired outcomes or behaviors. Processes that fail their people fail.

My Favorite Quotes

1️⃣

“Change begins at the level of individual decisions and behaviors, but that’s a hard place to start because that’s where the friction is. Inertia and decision paralysis will conspire to keep people doing things the old way. To spark movement in a new direction, you need to provide crystal-clear guidance. That’s why scripting [the critical moves] is important — you’ve got to think about the specific behavior that you’d want to see in a tough moment.”

2️⃣

“When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.”

3️⃣

“In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Businesspeople think in terms of two stages: You plan, and then you execute. There is no ‘learning stage’ or ‘practice stage’ in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how ya do it, just get it done!”

Final Thoughts

Change management is a substantial part of my profession, so I am always on the hunt for a fresh take on the topic. There are lots of case studies on how particular organizations managed and sustained change initiatives. I always enjoy those case studies, but there are surprisingly few publications that provide a framework applicable across a variety of scenarios written for busy leaders. Switch offers such a framework. Moreover, it is an engaging and accessible read.

When considering change management, keeping people at the center of our thinking super charges our efficacy. Humans are funny creatures in that we can simultaneously desire and loathe change. In life and in business, change is inevitable. The superpower we need most in business leaders today is smart, sustainable change management.

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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?