9 Great Things from the book Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

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9 Great Things from Switch
● Switch: How to change things
when change is hard
by Chip and Dan Heath
● Buy it, it’s great
These slides barely skim the surface.
(And I am not on a commission!)

1. The Elephant & The Rider
● The Rider is rational, analytical
● The Elephant is emotional, quick-to-
react
● (To me it’s a bit like System 1 and
System 2, described in Daniel
Kanneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking
Slow)
● But perhaps easier to visualise

2. Bright Spots
❖ Bright spots are the glimpses of light in the darkness
❖ Even a glimmer of light can lead to important, effective change
❖ Case Study: An aid worker addressed high infant mortality in a
community.
○ They noticed just 1 or 2 families did not fit the pattern.
○ It turned out those families fed their children in a subtly different
way to others...
○ ...a minor behaviour modification which saved childrens’ lives

3. Knowledge is overrated
● If knowing equated to change, no doctor would smoke or drink too
much.
● (Enough said)
● We have got to ‘find the feeling’.
● In a similar vein they talk about ‘TBU’:
“TBU—true but useless. It was paralyzing knowledge.”

4. The Miracle Question
A form of therapy described in the book asks the ‘miracle question’
“While you are sleeping, a miracle happens and your
troubles are resolved. When you wake up in the
morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that
would make you think the problem has gone?”
This isn’t asking you to describe the ‘miracle’ itself but rather a
tangible sign that it happened. What would you see?

5. Their Dad
“(Our dad, Fred Heath, who worked over thirty years
for IBM, would tell his teams that when “milestones”
seemed too distant, they should look for “inch pebbles.”
Nice one, Dad.)”

6. Destination Postcard
● There are interesting case studies about the need to make strategic
goals simple and singular in the Heath Bros book, Made to Stick. In
Switch the Heaths use a nice image for a smaller, near-to objective:
“We want what we might call a destination postcard—a
vivid picture from the near-term future that shows
what could be possible.”

7. Exposure Effect
“…which means that the more you’re
exposed to something, the more you like
it. For instance, when the Eiffel Tower
was first erected, Parisians hated it.
They thought it was a half-finished
skeletal blight on their fair city, and they
responded with a frenzy of protest.”

8. Designated drivers
● Brilliantly, it seems that the concept of a ‘designated driver’
was spread by infiltrating TV.
“Segments featuring designated drivers appeared on Hunter, The
Cosby Show, Mr. Belvedere, and Who’s the Boss? On an episode of
the smash-hit 1980s legal drama L.A. Law, the heart-throb lawyer
played by Harry Hamlin asked a bartender to call his designated
driver. A designated-driver poster appeared in the bar on Cheers.”

9. The Identity Model
● Appealing to a positive sense of identity, not
self-interest, can get people to take unusual decisions
“…In the identity model [we ask]: Who am I? What kind of situation
is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?”
● Case Study: researchers found that people who accepted a small
‘drive safely’ sign in the window of their house were then far more
likely to accede to having huge ‘drive safely’ billboards on their lawn1
1 - Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, may say this is triggering negative identity - commitment and consistency...

Many More Great Things
from Switch are in Switch
For more, here’s a link to buy it
on Amazon UK

9 Great Things from the book Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

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9 Great Things from the book Switch by Chip & Dan Heath