The key ideas

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Chip Heath, Dan Heath, 2010

Why do we know what we should do and still do things the old way? The Heath brothers explain it through three forces: reason, emotion and surroundings. You'll learn how Vietnamese mothers, a pile of gloves and an orange vest changed behaviour where lectures failed, and you'll learn to find where your own change is stuck.

Who it is for

For anyone whose latest "fresh start on Monday" was over by Wednesday again. And for anyone who needs to change something in a team, a family or themselves when persuasion no longer works.

What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

Stale popcorn and a big bucket

At a cinema in Chicago, moviegoers were handed free popcorn at the door. There was a catch: it had been made five days earlier and had gone stale. Some got a medium bucket, others a large one. After the film, researchers from Brian Wansink's team weighed what was left. People with the bigger bucket ate noticeably more, even though the popcorn tasted bad.

With this story the brothers Chip and Dan Heath open their book on change, published in 2010. Chip teaches at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Dan works at Duke University. They are interested in one question: why is change so hard, even when everyone agrees that change is needed? The popcorn hints at the first part of the answer. You can lecture people about the dangers of overeating, or you can simply give them a smaller bucket.

The Heaths build their whole answer on an image borrowed from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In each of us there is a Rider, the reasoning mind that plans and weighs things up. And there is an Elephant: feelings and habits, huge and strong. And there is also the Path, the surroundings the two of them walk through. Change succeeds when the Rider knows where to go, the Elephant wants to go there, and the Path doesn't trip them up.

Ten stories lie ahead: villages in Vietnam, milk in West Virginia, gloves on a boardroom table, a parrot from a small island. Each one shows one part of this scheme. By the end you'll have a simple way to see why a change isn't happening, whether it's your own, your family's or your team's, and what you can do about it.

The Rider holds the reins, but the Elephant is stronger

Haidt's image is very simple. The Rider sits on top holding the reins, and seems to be in charge. But beneath him is a six-ton Elephant. If the Elephant wants to go another way, the Rider can do nothing about it. This happens every time someone oversleeps and skips a morning run or takes a second slice of cake, knowing perfectly well they shouldn't.

Yet the Heaths don't make the Elephant a villain. The Rider has a weakness of his own: he loves to think and analyse. He can turn a problem over in his head endlessly and never move an inch. And the Elephant has a strength of its own: energy, persistence, love. When change succeeds, the two are usually heading the same way.

Hence the book's main idea. For anything to change, someone has to start behaving differently. And behaviour depends on three things at once: clarity for the Rider, motivation for the Elephant, and how easy the Path is.

One more trait of the Elephant: it wants a reward now, not in a year. That's why big changes, where the payoff comes late, fall apart so easily. The Rider sees the benefit six months away, while the Elephant feels only today's discomfort.

The mistake almost everyone makes is to appeal to only one part. A manager sends a spreadsheet full of numbers and wonders why nothing changes. A parent shames a teenager but never explains what exactly to do differently. The Heaths suggest asking three questions in turn every time: what's unclear here, what's unappealing here, and what's in the way here?

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About the author

Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dan Heath, his brother, is a researcher at Duke University. Together they also wrote Made to Stick and Decisive.

All books by this author: Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Terms from the book

  • Rider
  • Elephant
  • Richards
  • Jones
  • Baumeister
  • Identity
  • Wansink: Brian Wansink, an American researcher of eating behaviour and a former professor at Cornell University. In 2018 several of his papers were retracted over errors in the data, and he left the university; the book came out earlier.
  • Haidt: Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist. He proposed the image of the elephant and the rider in The Happiness Hypothesis (2006).
  • Path: An image from the book: the surroundings and circumstances in which a person acts.
  • Sternin: Jerry Sternin (1938–2008), an American humanitarian worker. He worked in Vietnam for Save the Children.
  • Save the Children: An international charity founded in Britain in 1919. It helps children in poor countries and in disaster zones.
  • Bright spots: A concept from the book: cases where the desired behaviour already works despite the same difficulties.
  • Sweet potato: A sweet tuber widely grown in tropical countries.
  • Saturated fat: The kind of fat found in large amounts in whole milk, butter and fatty meat. Doctors advise limiting it for heart health.
  • Decision paralysis: A phrase from the book: when there are too many options, it becomes harder to choose, and people often choose nothing.
  • Destination postcard: An image from the book: a vivid picture of an achievable future that shows where to go and why.
  • Stegner: Jon Stegner, a purchasing manager whose story about gloves the Heaths tell.
  • Kotter: John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of well-known books on leading change in organisations.
  • St. Lucia: An island nation in the Caribbean, a former British colony, independent since 1979.
  • Butler: Paul Butler, a British conservationist who from the late 1970s led the campaign to save the St. Lucia parrot.
  • Jacquot: The local name of the St. Lucia amazon, a parrot that lives only on this island.
  • Kaiser: Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest American systems of hospitals and health insurance.
  • Berwick: Donald Berwick, an American doctor, founder and at the time head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
  • Institute for Healthcare Improvement: An American non-profit that helps hospitals reduce errors and improve care.
  • Rapid response teams: Groups of doctors and nurses in a hospital who come to a patient at once at the first signs of deterioration.
  • Catheter: A thin tube inserted into a vein or body cavity to deliver medicine or drain fluid.

All terms

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