Personal Notes: Switch (How to change things when change is hard)

Book Review (more note-to-self, your take away might be different).

First, do read the book if you haven’t (click on the book to grab the book from Amazon).

Extremely quick summary (a.k.a. table of content) – tackle change with 3 concurrent steps:

• Direct the Rider
• Motivate the Elephant
• Shape the Path

Specifically, Direct the Rider (with logic) by:

• Finding the Bright Spots
• Scripting the Critical Moves
• Pointing to the Destination

Concurrently, Motivate the Elephant (full of emotion) by:

• Finding the Feeling
• Shrinking the Change
• Growing Your People

Not to forget, Shape the Path (or environment) by:

• Tweaking the Environment
• Building Habits
• Rallying the Herd
• Keeping the Switch Going

I always find that no matter what formula self-improvement books gives you, it’s the anecdotes that really have a profound impact, followed by relating the stories / concept to one’s own life. The writing of this blog post for example, is an eventual realization that I’ve held on to Ivy’s book for a year now (sorry Ivy! – critical move is to write this and then return it before year ends) and reducing a full fledged review for my organization into a more familiar blog post (shrinking the change + building on habits).

Notable stories & lessons

Glove
424 different kinds of work glove were found by a summer intern of one particular manufacturer, with varying prices. How to change? Gather a sample of each glove and pile it into the board room’s conference table to the appalling look of the board member’s face.

Milk
Obesity is on the rise in US. How to change? Crystal clear direction on purchasing behavior, specifically: switching from whole milk to 1% milk (which yours truly was convinced once but felt that the taste sucked, and switched back to whole milk.. heh)

Malnutrition
Malnutrition in Vietnam. Lots of TBU (True But Useless) reports indicating them. How to change? Look for the bright spots, such as finding kids who are bigger and healthier amongst the poorest families. Do a diff. That’s the your solution: feed less but more meals, mix in swet potato green and prawn/crab, eat even when sick. Also applicable to drug administration, kid counseling, or 3 sales rep out of 50 sells like crazy.

Jams, 401(k)
Decision Paralysis (you bet I’m pretty stuck in this now that my bond is ending) – doctors when presented with more new medication chose the medication less compared to surgery; sampling 6 jams ends up with more sales than sampling 24 jams; increasing investment options reduces 401(k) participation; speed dating less people “match” more often. We become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. The most familiar path is status quo: How to change? Script the critical move (eliminate ambiguity).

Railway
Corporate example: Behring’s 4 rules for fixing railway problems: (1) Unblock revenue, (2) Minimize up-front cash, (3) Faster is better than best, (4) Use what you’ve got. To me, still not prescriptive enough, but probably best script I’ve heard.

Howard
Critical move scripted by students to revitalize the waning Howard and surrounding Miner County: spend 10% more of their disposable income at home will boost local economy by $7 million.

Third Graders
Having “KPIs” is different when setting the destination – destination is NOT the KPI. Like, to motivate first-graders, set a goal of achieving “third-grader” status, which is bigger, smarter and cooler, call them “scholars”, etc. In other words they are BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), such as breast cancer treatment under one roof, or Ian Vann’s “No dry holes” vision for BP.

Analysis Paralysis
Important note to self: When you describe a compelling destination, you’re helping to correct one of the Rider’s great weakness – the tendency to get lost in analysis.

Target
Waters is a fashion snob who “slipped from Versace to Tweety Bird” i.e. worked in discounter Target took the Chairman Ulrish’s vision of “upscale discounter” to heart, got creative to motivate people against looking at sales numbers. For example, to push for more color in trendy clothing, she brought huge bags full of bright-colored M&Ms to her internal meetings, poured them into a glass bowl and ask people to look at their own reaction to color. Then colorful iMacs, then photographs of boutiques around the world, etc. All this when she had no head count (why do modern corporate world succumb themselves to this way of organizing work anyway), was borrowing people and budget, and most importantly, without authority telling her to do so.

SFC
When change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Rider. Not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Video Games
Roxxi, the nanobot, boldly defeating cancer, is a video game created to connect with the emotion of kids who undergone chemotherapy, to encourage them to take medications. Medicine means power, you fuel your ray gun by taking Chemotherapy and antibiotics. I can do this, I’m in charge. Chemo isn’t a reminder of the sickness; it’s how you get your life back.

Developers
Ah this is the main section why I’m writing this down – to keep rethinking the whole process of customer engagement when it comes to software development.

• Situation: Developers code what they think are beautiful, not what customer wants, or is too complicated for customer to use.
• Why: An elephant problem on the developers – they understand what’s being ask of them through the customer feedback but resent being forced to change their beautiful code for the dummies in their audience. [This is observed more often than one thinks!]
• Making the switch: 1. Rider
  (1) Paint a group glory picture when product launch with customer acceptance, (2) Give specifics (not just poor UI/usability).
• Making the switch: 2. Elephant
  (1) One-way mirror to see customers, (2) Stress that good programmer works around roadblocks, not the quality of first draft.
• Making the switch: 3. Path
  (1) Build habits by snapping user-testing onto an existing routine, (2) Require programmers to program on the same machines customers use.

Positive Illusions
You can predict the IQ of fake weatherman better than himself. 66% of the time. 2% of high school seniors believe their leadership skills is below average. 25% of people believe they’re in top 1% of being able to get along with others. 94% college professors report doing above-average (i.e. 50%) work. We all need a bearing for change, first cut positive illusions by touching the ground, such as bringing Attila the Accountant to see the NGOs who relied on her paycheck.

Maids
Hotel maids who were told that they actually do exercise regularly as part of their job actually loss weight. Lower the bar.

Loyalty Cards
Loyalty cards with 8 stamp slots fair poorly compared to cards with 10 stamp slots but 2 of them already given. Shrink the change.

5 minutes room rescue
5 minute room rescue gets your house clean (incidentally this is what I practice for toilet cleaning – one wall, one corner etc. I never have to clean the toilet haha).

Debt Consolidation
This one was really eye opening: Sort your debt from small to large, make the minimum payments on each debt, then all the remaining dollar goes to the first (smallest) debt on the list. “Debt Snowballing” by Ramsey ignores interest rates, and focuses on the emotion of being able to strike a debt off a list first, then snowball the money to attack the second debt and so on.

Save the Parrot
By making St. Lucians embrace their native parrot (including puppet shows, T-shirts, local band song, hotel made bumper stickers, parrot costumes visit schools, telcos to print parrot calling cards), Butler created public support to pass the necessary laws that completely reverse its extinction path and stopped all poaching activities.

Nurses
Nurses who stayed despite a high turnover are fiercely loyal to the professional of nursing. Their satisfaction was an identity thing: the nobility of the nursing profession gave meaning to their work.

Brasilata
The steel can manufacturer Brasilata grows people by calling their employees “inventors”, ask them to sign an “innovation contract” when they join the firm and establishing processes for idea submission and implementation. In return, they got ideas on designing cans like car bumpers for dangerous liquids, reduce energy by 35%, and “Eliminate our jobs” requests.

Foot in the door
If the person already opted in to put a “Be A Safe Driver” sign at their car/home window, they are much more likely to allow for an eyesore billboard to be erected at their front lawn. Makes you a concerned citizen! (Plenty of such facebook pages to like if you want to get started)

Growth Mindset
“You mean I don’t have to be dumb?” Growth mindset can be taught by (i) reminding them that the brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise (nobody laugh at babies who can’t talk), (ii) relate to their first experience on a skateboard / Guitar Hero etc. recall how everything is hard before it is easy.

Not Yet
Molly Howard abhors the defeatist attitude of teachers in her school (There’s this belief that some children can some children can’t) and set to change it by: removing streaming (all kids are now college bound), match students with on-campus advisers, and change the grading system to A, B, C, NY for Not Yet, which reminds the kid that “My teacher thinks I can do better”.

Fundamental Attribution Error
The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in. Such as scolding the person who cut you in traffic.

I say ????????

Day to day, path after path
Lane markers on the road. Milk is placed all the way back for you to see more of the store. ATM forces you to remove the card before taking the cash. Amazon 1-click ordering. (Actually Singapore is full of this: lines on the floor for MRT, rubbish cans everywhere, grounded tables and chairs in markets, even predetermined chess boards on tables on void decks).

Used Couch
Changing 2 kids who always arriving late for class, sitting behind and talking to each other, laughing and disrupting the class? Buy a used couch and put it in front of the class: immediately obvious that the couch was cool place to sit in, i.e. they were now volunteering to sit in front of the classroom. Genius.

Cone of Silence
Nurses need to concentrate when administering medication. Richards bought a medication vest (cheap plastic / bright orange) and told everyone to leave the nurse alone when she’s wearing one of these. In planes there’s sterile cockpit (during takeoff and landing). Same goes for office work. Quiet Tuesdays?

Popcorn buckets / self-manipulation
Smaller popcorn buckets makes people eat less popcorn (without feeling that they had less). Same goes to, smaller dinnerware, lay out jogging cloths before sleep, setting coffee auto brew to wake up (I want!), freezing credit card in a block of ice. Bosses can rearrange furniture to make direct reports feel like they can communicate better with you.

Outlook
TURN OFF OUTLOOK EMAIL NOTIFICATION. For urgent matters, please call or SMS.

Save your fingers
Design machines that switches on only when 2 buttons far apart are pressed at the same time, so that fingers are not cut.

Haddon Matrix.

Rackspace
To provide fanatical support, Rackspace went towards (i) standardization (no more bleeding edge) of technology, (ii) threw out the call queue (when a customer call, it means they have a problem), (iii) Straitjackets Awards to reward the zealots.

Drugs in Vietnam
50% of soldiers had been casual users, 20% had become seriously addicted, but when the soldier return home, only 1% of the veterans were still addicted to drugs. People are incredibly sensitive to the environment and the culture – the norms and expectations of the communities they are in. The anti-drug theme park is usually where the addicts can be surrounded by people who love them, give them meaningful work, give them girl-friends and social taboos and other rich environment cues of live prior to the addiction.

Quit Smoking
Go on vacation. Too many associations at home.

Action Triggers
Pre-decide. Before the environment takes over. Protect goals from tempting distractions, bad habits, or competing goals.

Hip / Knee surgery
Asking one group to “write down when and where you plan to walk” halves the time to recovery (bathing themselves, standing, getting in and out cars) for hip and knee surgery patients.

I say: ?!

In fact, on hindsight, every successful mobile game needs to create that instant habit in people to catch on (for the core game play), so the app must immediately guide that habit to happen + giving specific instructions to return to game play.

Stand up meetings
Also, start the meeting early, and keep it short (e.g. 8am to 8:30am). Standing up forces people to stop whining and go straight to the issue. Also found in Agile.

Assembly
(Another school example – I love school stories) Elder restored discipline in the school by (i) eliminate the egregious behaviors (forbidding parents from entering school compound without permission, suspend the no-hope-kid etc.), (ii) greet every student before he or she entered the school building (to counter the yelling the parents did on the kid earlier) like a valet service, (iii) group assembly at the cafeteria: call-and-response “We’re a school of what?” “Excellence!”, brief lesson in character (e.g. perseverance), Pledge of Allegiance, sang a patriotic song, quick spelling / math quiz, and finally (iv) kids stood silently and walked to class with “traveling arms”, folded behind them. By the time they sat at their desk, they were ready to learn.

Checklist
Implementing this in Michigan ICUs over 18 months saved est. $175 million and 1500 lives as there are no longer associated complications of infected intravenous lines that delivers medication. But you can’t grab a pilot’s checklist and try your luck at the 747. Checklists simply make big screw-ups less likely.

Peer Perception
Survey takers staying on when the room is full of smoke. Minority call the police when finding a suspicious vehicle. Obesity is “contagious” – you change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you. Drinking is contagious. That’s why baristas seed their tip jar, opera companies plant stooges in the audience to laugh and applaud (so do sitcoms), etc.

Publicize only when embraced
When hotels ask you to use your tower more than once, do you? If they say “8% of our guest decide to reuse our towels”, then you probably won’t. Publicizing, e.g. 80% of your team submit time sheets on time.

Designated Driver
Worked into favorite TV sitcoms, where one person will not drink and will drive the rest back. This is creating a social norm out of thin air.

Sugar Daddy
In Tanzania, unsafe sex as a result of older more powerful men with under aged girls led a group from USAID to create a campaign to fight cross-generational sex, with the hope to reduce cases of AIDS infection and death. They created and promoted a humorous program using radio as a medium where a pathetic villain character Fataki (means fireworks, i.e. unstable), despite his status and wealth advantages, and despite his smooth talk, never succeeds in getting his prey. Conversations ensued, language changed (“that guy is such a Fataki”), as Tanzanian public took ownership of the name and character who symbolized the bad behavior they’d resented quietly all along. Wonder why Chikopek is waning here.

Exotic Animal Training
There’s no punishment involved. Instead, animal trainers set a behavioral destination and use “approximations” – rewarding each tiny step toward the destination.

End.