Tweaking the environment is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. It’s that simple.

Tweak the Environment

Growing your people is all about building the necessary rapport to get things done.The strategy relies on the identity decision-making model that essentially asks three questions:<ul><li>Who am l?</li><li>What kind of situation is this?</li><li>What would someone like me do in this situation?</li></ul>By making people embrace a certain identity, you can rally them to support goals that they otherwise would not care about.

Grow Your People

“Knowledge does not change behavior,” he said. “We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors.”

<ul><li>Habits can be both good and bad and to change yourself, you have to replace the bad habits with the good.  </li><li>Changing habits requires a change of environment and a change in mentality.</li><li>You can change habits by employing action triggers.</li><li>Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness.</li><li>Checklists perfectly combine tweaking the environment and building habits. They can be added to the environment in order to make behavior more consistent and habitual. That tool is the humble checklist.</li></ul>

Build Habits

The basic three-part framework you need to change behavior:<ul><li>Direct the Rider. Provide crystal clear direction. “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.”</li><li>Motivate the Elephant. Engage the emotional side. “What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”</li><li>Shape the Path. Create the conditions for both the rider and the elephant to excel. “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.</li></ul>

The Change Framework

<ul><li>Bright spots are successful efforts worth emulating</li><li>To discover bright spots, ask yourself: “What’s working and how can we do more of it?”</li><li>The Miracle Question: “What’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think the problem was gone?”</li><li>You could also ask yourself if the success of the few could be replicated by the many? If yes, then you’ve found a bright spot.</li></ul>

Bright Spots

The brain has two independent systems at work at all times.<ul><li>First, there’s the emotional side. It’s the part of you that is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure. </li><li>Second, there’s the rational side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It’s the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future.</li></ul>Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Change is only possible when both Rider and the Elephant come together.

The Elephant and the Rider  

“Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.”

Create a destination postcard that shows what you want to achieve in the near future.Destination postcards—pictures of a future that hard work can make possible—show the Rider where you’re headed, and they show the Elephant why the journey is worthwhile.

Point to the Destination

Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.Too many choices can lead to decision paralysis. For effective change, limit the options as much as possible.

Script the Critical Moves

“People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one.“

To shrink the change:<ul><li>Make the change small enough that you can’t help but score a victory</li><li>Limit the investment you’re asking for</li><li>Think of small wins—milestones that are within reach.</li></ul>

Shrink the Change

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: • The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients • The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping • The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Personal Development

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Problem Solving

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Books

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Leadership & Management

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: • The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients • The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping  • The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service  In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Chip Heath is the professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.He received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford.He co-wrote a book titled Switch How to Change Things When Change Is Hard with his brother Dan Heath.

Chip Heath

Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center. Dan has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. from the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin.He co-wrote a book titled Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard with his brother Chip Heath.

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