Dan Heath is an insightful and engaging communicator, widely recognized business consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is co-founder of Thinkwell, a publisher of innovative textbooks.
Chip Heath is an author, consultant, speaker, and popular professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Management. His unique research on what makes ideas succeed has been featured in a wide range of popular media programs and publications.
- Switch is all about how to change when change is tough.
- Think about something about you or your organization that needs to change.
- People’s first knee-jerk reaction to change is the idea that people don’t like change.
- If your goal in life is to minimize the amount of change you experience, you’ve made a terrible mistake!
- There’s certain kind of changes that are big (marriage, children, etc) that come effortlessly; but there’s other changes that are excruciating.
- Sometimes the smallest things are the most difficult to change.
An Elephant and A Rider
- Change is filled with conflict.
- Part of wants to save for retirement; the other part wants to spend.
- There’s a battle in any circumstance of change.
- Part of us sees the need for change, the other part of us resists change.
- There’s two parts to our brain: the thinking side and the side that actually does the work.
- The rider can think of where we need to go, but the elephant doesn’t want to move.
- Part of change is aligning the goal of the rider with the will of the elephant.
- Emotional appeal triggers change.
- Reach past intellectual arguments and tap into something that motivates for the long-haul.
From a ministry-perspective… you have 9 major ministries… 2 are working well, 5 are marginal, and 2 are failing miserably… what would you do?
- Ignore the bottom 2; brush past the working 5 and focus on the main 2.
- In a time of change, there’s a lot that’s not working… you’ve got to find what’s working, find the bright spots.
- Bright spots prove success is possible.
- You’ve got to study and clone bright spots.
- There’s a new type of therapy that is focused on bright spots instead of negative memories or issues from the past.
- Bright spots prove we are capable of solving our problems.
- We tend to focus on areas that are weakest, but we need to focus on where God is really working, the bright spots.
- When dealing with problems, ignore the True But Useless info (TBUs) and focus on learning from what is working and replicating it.
Big problem, small solution.
- Big problems are rarely solved with big solutions.
- Big problems are typically solved by a sequence of small solutions.
- To accomplish meaningful change, you must be convinced that there is a goal worthy of the pain of changing.
Shrink the change.
- By breaking big problems into a series of small solutions, those small success provide motivation.
- If you find yourself demoralized, it’s a sign you haven’t shrunk the change enough.
- Small victory is impetus for great change.
- We often get frustrated and depressed because we ourselves can’t change and we can’t get people to move.
The Valley of Insight
- When IDEO starts a new project, the team leader goes to a whiteboard and draws a “U-shaped” curve… you’ll start on a “high” called hope and you’ll end on a “high” called confidence. In between there will be a “dip” of insight.
- Insight won’t come as quickly as we want it to come.
- We have to struggle through it, because struggle leads to confidence.
- We can equate the valley of insight to hell.
- How to people interpret hard times?
A Growth Mindset + Failure
- People with a “growth mindset” view life through the lens that they can get better, with work.
- A “growth mindset” has a tolerance for failure.
- Built-in to the “growth mindset” is a tolerance for failure.
- We often equate failing to missing God.
- Failure is a necessity in a time of change.
- If you are going to have a growth mindset, you have to pursue to the point of failure.
- Failure is an early warning sign of success.
- Some people need to be empowered to fail!
We might not have a person problem, but a situation problem
- When we make assumptions about people, we attribute things to them without questioning their situations.
- The Fundamental Attribution Error – we look at people but we don’t look at their situations.
- We need to think broadly about people’s situations.
- Good leaders have the gift of seeing people’s situations.
- Sculpting the path is part of creating change.
When change occurs, there’s usually a predictable pattern.
- What’s effective is a deep emotional appeal.
- The reason we get married and have children is because there’s something deep and emotional we experience.
- Think of all the things society does to shape the path.
- We need reverse engineer successful changes when facing new ones in front of us.
If there’s something you’re facing, God will help you overcome what you see as a challenge.
The “dip” is a place to gain insight.
