A Mango-bloated Monkey and Our Review of “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath

"Hundreds of sessions later, you've got a mango-bloated monkey ready to skate a half-pipe."

How can you hate a book with that sentence in it?  

Based on my very positive experience with the last Heath brothers book "Made To Stick" I was pretty pumped to get my hands on "Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard."  

I wasn't disappointed.  

This book, if every one of my clients will read it – will make my job very, very easy.  

This book, if every one of you who manages people will read it – will make your job very, very easy.

I'll admit.  There isn't a lot of new information for me in this book.  Spending as much time as I do looking for ways to influence behavior requires I do a lot of reading and therefore, many of the stories, examples and studies referenced in the book are familiar to me.  And if you're a long-time reader of this site – might be a bit familiar to you as well.

The Heath brothers hit on the biggies of why we do things and how we can affect change.  Things like:

• Social Norms
• Positive Deviants
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Learning Mind-Set
• Commitment and Consistency
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Positive-Negative Asymmetry

They also hit on the need for incentives and how using incentives and rewards can modify behavior in monkeys – hence the title of this post.  But just as I was getting ready to get angry (see this post the other day) they add this… and I'm thankful:

"Let’s be clear, we’re not advising that you treat your colleagues or fellow citizens like monkeys or children—Roger, you cut back your expenses last month! What a big boy you are! Reinforcement doesn’t have to be condescending, and it doesn’t have to come with a power dynamic. Think of the way a friend urges you on at the gym (“Good work—now do one more rep!”). But reinforcement does require you to have a clear view of the destination, and it requires you to be savvy enough to reinforce the bright-spot behaviors when they happen."

I can get behind that thinking.

While the book isn't the acme of books on change – it is written in a way that will help you easily remember the way in which people make changes and hopefully use them in your business (and personal) lives.

Following the Story Line

The Heath Brothers – taking a cue from their first book – craft a very easy to remember story.  Extending an analogy from Jonathan Haidt's work "The Happiness Hypothesis," they weave a tale about a rider, an elephant and the path.  

From the book:

"Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider.  Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader.  But the Rider's control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant.  Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose."

In a nutshell that is the book.  

The brothers Heath take us through how and when to engage the Rider and/or the Elephant to elicit change.  They also spend a good bit of time on "the path" or the environment in which change occurs.  Personally, this is an area I think we overlook all too often.  

While the book falls victim to the same issue many business books do today – presenting evidence supporting their point of view as if there were no other contradicting evidence – I do think at a very high level it does a good job of framing the "change" discussion.  The authors include what they call "clinics," which are situations for change we would find familiar in our daily lives and address how they would engage the Rider, motivate the Elephant or change the path.  These clinics help bring the book from idea to execution and are helpful to see how ideas about change look in the real world.  (I'm a big fan of application.)

Net-Net – Get it, read it, call me to help implement it.

I've put together the "money quotes" from the book – ones I think will make you think and make you want to read the book.  I do recommend it. (Email subscribers may have to click through to see slides.)