Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
How, exactly, do you motivate people to change their behaviors? According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Switch, it boils down to a three-part process: reaching people’s rational minds, appealing to their emotions, and then shaping the environment to make it more conducive to change.
The authors lay out their own insights about the change process and how successful change comes about. They demonstrate their findings by presenting case-by-case examples from real life. Among the many anecdotes that they share:
• Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, two West Virginia University health researchers, persuaded the residents of two West Virginia towns to drink more low-fat milk and less whole milk via promotional ads that contrasted unsightly images of blobs of saturated fat (which an individual ingests when he or she drinks whole milk) with appealing images of glasses of low-fat milk. After six months, sales of low-fat milk nearly doubled.
• Donald Berwick, a doctor and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spearheaded life-saving procedural changes within Institute-affiliated hospitals. The hospital administrators were reluctant to adopt many of them, but he won them over by setting forth specific goals and the interventions that could help achieve them. He then launched a campaign of procedural change that hospitals would join if they wanted to participate. For added effect, he brought the mother of a girl who had been killed by medical error on stage to deliver a keynote speech. Joining the campaign was easy, and every hospital that did would receive a team of researchers that would help guide it through the changes. Within the first two months, more than a thousand hospitals joined.
• Jerry Sternin, a Save the Children administrator, received an invitation from the Vietnamese government to come to the country and reduce rural malnutrition. He traveled to a rural village and sought out “bright spot” households in which children were healthier and better-nourished than their peers. Then he interviewed the bright-spot parents to find out what they were doing differently. He brought them together with other parents in cooking groups that would meet regularly to prepare well-balanced meals. Six months later, 65% of the children in the village were eating better.
Switch offers many insights about human behavior and psychology that marketing professionals, communications experts, and public-policy makers might all appreciate.
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