Trevor's Reviews > Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

I really quite enjoyed this book. It was one of those books that had me talking to people about it before I finish reading it. In fact, if any of my M Teach friends are reading this – you probably want to get your hands on a copy of it, as it has some really interesting things to say about how to motivate students.

I’ve read another of their books – Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – which was also particularly good and based on an idea in Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. I thought when I read that book that it also had many things to tell people who want to teach. Essentially, they get all of the more recent research in psychology and behavioural economics and give interesting case studies that illuminate the importance of these studies. They also fit them into fairly easy to understand structures and metaphors and I think this forms the most interesting part of their work.

They base much of this book around a metaphor from a book called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. That metaphor is of the elephant and the rider. The idea being much the same as Plato’s metaphor of the charioteer from The Republic (yes, some of this stuff has been vexing thinkers for quite some time). To be honest, I prefer the elephant metaphor to that of the two horses and a rider that Plato develops.

The elephant is our emotional selves and the rider our rational self. Ever wondered why you can know that it makes sense to give up smoking and yet still not give up? To Plato that just means that you don’t really know – you simply would never do anything bad if you truly knew you were doing a bad thing. This has always been the bit of Plato that has sounded like nonsense to me. As a lapsed smoker for years, while I smoked, I knew and was ashamed of the fact that I smoked. I hated the idea that I was doing something that was so clearly stupid and self-destructive and would have done everything in my power to hide the fact that I smoked. But that didn’t mean I could give up. Giving up smoking was utterly impossible. My rider was utterly convincedI needed to stop, it was just that my elephant had a hell of a lot more will-power than my rider. Think of a rider on an elephant – he needs to exert a lot of will power to keep the elephant doing what he wants it to do, and that drains the rider to the point where he needs to sleep. But the elephant just keeps plodding on, knowing that eventually you will need to sleep, you will need to think about something else and when you do he will go in the direction he was planning to go all along.

They discuss an interesting study where people were asked to sit in a room alone with a plate of freshly cooked biscuits. They were then asked to do some boring maths and the people who were not allowed to eat the biscuits did fewer maths problems and for less time then those who could eat the biscuits. The point being that we have a limited amount of 'will-power' and it is easily used up. This seems to me to be an incredibly important thing to know about ourselves.

For years I tried to give up smoking, but then I would have a drink or be at a party or something awful would happen during the day or I would just be sitting around with no particular excuse at all and suddenly I would think, ‘oh God, I would kill for a cigarette’ and then I would be smoking again and that would be that. I have only been able to stay off cigarettes by learning to despise them. Now I hate the smell of them, I hate the taste of them, I hate just about everything about them. Revulsion is an elephant, rather than rider, concern and so I’ve used that to negate the other elephant issues that had been dragging me back to cigarettes previously.

This book says that if you are going to make any kind of change you need to consider three fundamental conditions – the elephant, the rider and the path – all of these can be manipulated and all of them should be manipulated to make change as easy as possible.

Directing the rider is very important, as the rider tends to be overly analytical and negative. There was a lovely quote I saw in a New Scientist article once by a mathematician, ‘any problem can be made to look unsolvable’. They offer the best advice I can think of – if you are seeking to make change you should see what is working and then see what you need to do to replicate that. Often people think they need to be the guru with new and surprising insights no one else has ever had. But often the seeds of what needs to change are already spread around, and you just need to tend them.

The elephant needs careful consideration. However, without getting the elephant on board (so to speak) change is going to be impossible. There is some lovely discussion here about diets and why they often don’t work that explains the elephant problem beautifully. I think the main lesson from a lot of this section for me was to remember that we are social animals and that we want to be seen as that and not stand out. Normalising change was very important.

Although, really this change the culture theme is the main lesson from their ‘shape the path’ section of the book. There is a lot of nice stuff about how you achieve this. There was an interesting part on drug use in the US military during the Vietnam war, for example, and the fact that when people came home to the US they tended to stop their excessive drug use. That is, the culture of life in US cities simply did not tolerate or sustain heavy drug use in ways that life in Vietnam did. Therefore, if you are seeking to make changes you should look very closely at how you can address the cultural issues that are potentially undermining that change.

I had heard many of the examples used in this book before – the ten-thousand lives campaign, for example, although it was better explained here – but they did put interesting spins on even the things I had heard about before.

There is a lot of excellent advice in this book about how to bring about change in both your own life and in your workplace and so on. There are excellent examples of how people have applied the strategies discussed and how these simple changes have made differences in what they have been seeking to achieve. I think the best of this book is that many of the interventions suggested are minimal and yet still highly effective. We tend to want to fix everything at once – but as the authors repeatedly point out, the rider is more than happy to find a thousand reasons to do nothing and to fixate on the 'true but useless' facts that tend to undermine change. The point is to find ways to see what can work (which is normally what is already working somewhere) and to replicate that.

I really liked the metaphor of the rider, elephant and path developed in this book and think, for that alone, this book is worth reading. It is also worth reading for many of the insights it provides in motivating change. This was really well worth the read.