Change

How to change things when change is hard?

Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

September 3, 2024

Motivation

All change
= behavior change

For something to change, somebody somewhere has to start behaving differently—in other words, all change is ultimately behavior change. Chip Heath, American author

Foundation

Switch: How to change things when change is hard

This unit is inspired by and based on the book Switch by Heath and Heath (2011)

Chip and Dan Heath have mined the latest psychological research to work out how to engage our emotional brain, and encourage us to focus on “bright spots”—techniques proven to help us change bad habits—rather than merely telling us what we’re doing wrong. Psychologies Magazine

Exercise

A bad habit is something where you have all the information you need to see its a bad behavior, yet your keep doing it anyway.

Are you engaged in some kind of “bad” habit?
Why?

Introduction

Knowing vs. doing

A fundamental tension of psychology: knowing what the right answer is vs. doing it.

Problem statement

Psychology assumes that the brain has two independent systems at work at all times (see e.g., Haidt 2006; Kahneman 2011).

Emotional system
& rational system

The elephant, the rider and the path

Leading change

Rider + elephant + path

If you want to change things, you’ve got to appeal both. The rider provides the planning and direction, and the elephant provides the energy. [..] A reluctant elephant and a wheel-spinning rider can both ensure that nothing changes. But when elephants and riders move together, change can come easily. Heath and Heath (2011)

Three hypotheses about change

  1. Direct the rider
  2. Motivate the elephant
  3. Shape the path

Direct the Rider

Exercise

Paralysis in the face of …

Tell us about a time when you experienced mental paralysis. How did it manifest? How could it have been avoided?

Take 10 minutes to discuss these questions in small groups and come up with one example you could present to the plenum.

Strategies

What can you do to resolve mental paralysis and/or resistance?

Follow the bright spots
Script the critical moves
Point to the destination

Follow the bright spots

Investigate what’s working and clone it. Heath and Heath (2011)

Example: Jerry Sternin and mothers in Vietnam

In 1990, Jerry Sternin was working for Save the Children, asked to open a new office in Vietnam “to make a difference” within 6 months (see e.g., Marsh et al. 2004).

  • Many children suffered malnutrition—a result of many intertwined problems: poor sanitation, universal poverty, no clean water, etc. (true but useless analysis).
  • Sternin synthesized the “conventional wisdom” about feeding kids (norms).
  • Sternin looked for very poor kids who are bigger and healthier than the typical child and analyzed what the mothers were doing differently (positive deviations).
  • Sternin organized cooking groups where the mothers got highly specific instructions (Rider) and the feeling that they can make their kids healthier (Elephant), which also changed the culture of the village (Path).
  • Six months later, 65 percent of the kids were better nourished and stayed that way; years later the program reached 2.2 million Vietnamese people.

Conclusion

Switch from a problem focus to a solution focus.

Script the critical moves

Don’t think big picture,
think in terms of specific behavior. Heath and Heath (2011)

Example: Brazilian southern line

In 1996, GP Investimentor Limited bought parts of the Brazilian railway network (a deteriorating mess) and set a young talent in charge—Alexandre Behring.

  • Behring only had 30 million Brazilian reals in cash on its balance sheet (i.e., nothing).
  • To change direction and guide decision-making, Behring developed four rules:
    • Money is only invested in projects that provide higher revenue in the short term.
    • The best solution to a problem is the one that costs the least money up front.
    • Quick fixes are preferred to slower options that provide superior long-term fixes.
    • Reusing or recycling existing materials is better than acquiring new materials.
  • In 2000, the company’s performance improved from a net loss of 80 million reals to a net profit of 24 million reals.

Conclusion

If you want to change things, be clear about how people should act.

Point to the destination

Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. Heath and Heath (2011)

Example: No dry holes at BP

After decades of success, in the 90s, BP had issues to find untapped oil resources.

  • In 1989, BP had an average accuracy rate of just 1 out of 5 (global standard).
  • The oil explorers behaved like salesmen and put pressure to drill every well (the logic behind: the payoff on hitting one big well will cover for the ones they did not hit).
  • To reduce cost per Barrel, the CEO posed a clear destination: “No Dry Holes”—meaning no random shots, but systematic tests (using the knowledge they had).
  • But No Dry Holes created an even bigger shift in BP’s culture—no one rationalized failure buy saying ‘Oh, we hit a dry well, but we learned’.
  • In 2020, BP’s hit rate was 2 out of 3.

Conclusion

Paint a specific, rich, detailed picture of what the destination looks like to motivate people.

Motivate the Elephant

Exercise

Information vs. feeling

Can you think of any situations in life where you or others have tried to get people to change their minds with information, rather than with feelings?

How could those situations be approached differently to be more effective?

Strategies

What can you do to prevent exhaustion?

Find the feeling
Shrink the change
Grow your people

Find the feeling

Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. Heath and Heath (2011)

Example: Chemotherapy game

After enduring weeks of brutal chemotherapy in the hospital, the children struggled to faithfully take their medications at home.

If you skip 20 percent of your doses, you don’t have a 20 percent higher chance of getting cancer again. Your odds go up 200 percent. Steve Cole, research director for HopeLabs

Hope labs developed a game called Re-Mission (Kato et al. 2008).

  • They played Roxxi, a nanorobot in a silver suit that moved through the bloodstream and bombarded tumor cells with electro-green chemo beams; in between, Smitty, a mentor robot, provided additional information about chemotherapy and recovery.
  • Kids adherence to their medication plans increased significantly.

Conclusion

Things you see are more likely to evoke emotion than things you read.

Make the need for change clear (tangible).

Shrink the change

Downsize the change until it no longer frightens the elephant.

Example: Wash loyalty card

A local car wash ran a promotion featuring loyalty cards (Nunes and Dreze 2006).

  • Group A: For every car wash bought, customers got a stamp on their card.
    Eight stamps meant a free car wash.
  • Group B: Customers needed to collect ten stamp, but they were given a “head start”
    (2 stamps have already been added).
  • A few months later, only 19% of group A had earned a free wash vs. 34% of group B.

People find it motivating to be partly finished with a longer story then to be at the starting gate of a shorter one Heath and Heath (2011)

Conclusion

Small targets lead to small victories, small victories can trigger momentum. Heath and Heath (2011)

Grow your people

Identities are central to the way people make decision
(March 2009).

Example: Junior-high math students

Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck (2007) set up a study for seventh-grade math students in school in a low socioeconomic environment.

  • The experimental group was taught that the brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise (two hours over eight weeks).
  • The control group was taught generic study skills.
  • The teachers, unaware of which group their students were assigned to, identified students who they thought had experienced a positive change during the term, whereof 76% were in the experimental group.

One hardcore, turned-off, low effort kind in the group said, ‘You mean I don’t have to be dumb?’ From that day on, he worked. Heath and Heath (2011)

Conclusion

Create a sense of identity and convey a growth mindset.

Shape the path

Exercise

Environment shapes behavior.

Take five minutes to think back over your day.

When and where did your environment significantly shape your behavior?

Strategies

What can you do to make change more likely?

Tweak the environment
Build habits
Rally the herd

Tweak the environment

When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. Heath and Heath (2011)

Example: Medication at Kaiser South

At Kaiser South Sans Francisco Hospital, nurses administer about 800 medications a day.

  • Nurses are impressively accurate: on average, they commit approx. 1 error per 1,000 medications administered.
  • However, a single error can be harmful or even deadly.
  • In an effort to reduce medication errors, distraction was identified as a cause.
  • Distraction isn’t a Rider (understanding) nor an Elephant problem (motivation).
  • Instead of changing nurses behavior, medication vests have been installed, showing that nurses are administering drugs and should be left alone.
  • Errors dropped by 47 percent.

Conclusion

Situations trump personal attributes

Build habits

When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesnt’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. Heath and Heath (2011)

Rally the herd

Behavior is contagious. Help it spread. Heath and Heath (2011)

Challenges

You want to learn how to lead change more efficiently? Here are three challenges that might help you along the way.

  • Level 1: Analyze a personal change problem, identify bright spots, analyze them and find ways to reproduce the practices.
  • Level 2: Apply the framework to one personal change problem—find ways to direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path in order to support your change.
  • Level 3: Identify a change problem within a group (e.g., at work); try to get the mandate for the change; develop a picture of what the goal looks like, script the critical moves, create positive emotions, shrink the change or make people grow, and try to tweak the environment path wherever necessary.

Reading list

For digging deeper, I recommend reading the articles cited here, particularly:

  • The endowed progress effect: Nunes and Dreze (2006)
  • Lewin’s change theory: Lewin (1951)
  • Identities and identity work in organizations: Brown (2015)

As well as following books:

  • The Happiness Hypothesis: Haidt (2006)
  • The Growth Mindset (personal change): Dweck (2017)
  • The Heart of Change (organizational change): Kotter and Cohen (2012)
  • “Nudging” People to Make Better Decisions: Thaler and Sunstein (2008)

Homework

To get to know, what we mean with (recent) theoretical and empirical findings and to prepare for next class please read Dirks and Ferrin (2001) (download) and take some notes on the main constructs and findings.

Q&A

Literature

Berwick, Donald M, David R Calkins, C Joseph McCannon, and Andrew D Hackbarth. 2006. “The 100 000 Lives Campaign: Setting a Goal and a Deadline for Improving Health Care Quality.” Jama 295 (3): 324–27.
Blackwell, Lisa S, Kali H Trzesniewski, and Carol Sorich Dweck. 2007. “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention.” Child Development 78 (1): 246–63.
Booth-Butterfield, Steve, and Bill Reger. 2004. “The Message Changes Belief and the Rest Is Theory: The ‘1% or Less’ Milk Campaign and Reasoned Action.” Preventive Medicine 39 (3): 581–88.
Brown, Andrew D. 2015. “Identities and Identity Work in Organizations.” International Journal of Management Reviews 17 (1): 20–40.
Dirks, Kurt T, and Donald L Ferrin. 2001. “The Role of Trust in Organizational Settings.” Organization Science 12 (4): 450–67.
Dweck, C. 2017. Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfill Your Potential. Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic books.
Heath, D., and C. Heath. 2011. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Random House.
Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus; Giroux.
Kato, Pamela M, Steve W Cole, Andrew S Bradlyn, and Brad H Pollock. 2008. “A Video Game Improves Behavioral Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer: A Randomized Trial.” Pediatrics 122 (2): e305–17.
Kotter, J. P., and D. S. Cohen. 2012. The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations. NONE. Harvard Business Review Press.
Lewin, Kurt. 1951. “Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers.”
March, J. G. 2009. Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen. Free Press.
Marsh, David R, Dirk G Schroeder, Kirk A Dearden, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin. 2004. “The Power of Positive Deviance.” Bmj 329 (7475): 1177–79.
Nunes, Joseph C, and Xavier Dreze. 2006. “The Endowed Progress Effect: How Artificial Advancement Increases Effort.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (4): 504–12.
Polletta, Francesca. 1999. “’Free Spaces’ in Collective Action.” Theory and Society 28 (1): 1–38.
Schwartz, B. 2009. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Revised Edition. HarperCollins.
Schwartz, Barry, and Andrew Ward. 2004. “Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice.” Positive Psychology in Practice, 86–104.
Thaler, R. H., and C. R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. A Caravan Book. Yale University Press.
Wansink, B. 2006. Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Random House Publishing Group.

Footnotes

  1. Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, professors at West Virginia University, were contemplating ways to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. They concluded that you don’t need to change drinking behavior, but purchasing behavior. Thus, they launched a campaign that was punchy and specific in motivating people to buy skimmy milk (instead of the fuzzy message to act healthier) (Booth-Butterfield and Reger 2004).

  2. In 2004, Donald Berwick, a doctor and the CEO of the Institute of for Healthcare Improvement, wanted to save a massive number of lives by reducing the “defect” rate in healthcare (e.g., administration of medication at the wrong time). Besides providing a crystal clear direction, he also motivated people by making them feed the need for change—he confronted hospital administrators with the mother of a girl who’d been killed by a medical error (Berwick et al. 2006).

  3. A study of Brian Wansink of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University shows in his popcorn studies that “people eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period.” (Wansink 2006, 16–19)

  4. Bright spots don’t have to be shining success stories, just look for situations when things are working better than others.

  5. How it can be that more choice is actually bad for us? (Barry Schwartz and Ward 2004; B. Schwartz 2009)

  6. When the elephant really wants something, the rider can be trusted to find rationalizations for it.

  7. Please consider that black and white goals create a danger of demoralization if you don’t meet them consistently.