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1-Page PDF Summary of Switch

We often don’t know why changes succeed or fail—we just know that they do. As it turns out, successful change follows a pattern that can be applied again and again to help you reach your goals, spark organizational shifts, and get people aligned with your ideas.

In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath dive into the inner workings of change, offering actionable advice for creating changes that not only succeed but stick.

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  • Organizational changes: Positive emotions like surprise or empowerment are better suited to the ambiguous, evolving, and long-term goals of organizations. Instead of motivating employees with a layoff threat, inspire them with an ambitious, exciting goal.

2) Minimize the Effort

One of the most distracting factors along the path to change is the possibility of instant gratification. The gratification that far-off goals offer is too distant—your emotional side naturally starts looking for more immediate ways to feel satisfied. Keep your emotional side on track by building frequent opportunities for gratification into the journey. You can do this in two ways.

Method #1: Shorten the Distance to Your Goal

People are naturally more motivated to work toward a goal when they feel that they’re already partway there. When progress isn’t immediately apparent, your emotional side becomes demoralized and distracted. However, a “head start” on your goals feels like immediate progress—giving your emotional side a boost of satisfaction and confidence that carries you to the next benchmark of progress. Motivate change by demonstrating the progress that’s already been made.

  • For example, you want your team to start meeting with their direct reports at least once a month. You remind them, “Last year, you only did two meetings per year. You’re already on track for seven meetings this year—one per month is achievable.”
Method #2: Build In Opportunities for Celebration

Keep in mind that any achieved goal is just a collection of small, doable actions. Shifting your focus toward these small actions, instead of the result, can prevent discouragement.

You can do this in two ways:

1) Start small. Instead of considering the overwhelming work to be done, think: What is the smallest task I could complete that would be a step in the right direction? Completing this small first task gives you a quick fix of instant gratification, motivating you to complete the next task.

  • For example, if the idea of cleaning your whole house is too daunting, commit instead to doing the smallest task possible, such as washing the dishes piling up in the sink.

2) Create milestones. Building small, frequent milestones into the journey and celebrating them ensures a regular supply of instant gratification opportunities. For example, if you’re learning French, you might set the following milestones: 1) Read and understand one article from Le Monde, 2) Watch a season of your favorite show with French subtitles, 3) Listen to and understand one French podcast episode, 4) Write an entire essay without using a dictionary.

  • Building these types of small wins into a long journey not only reassures you of your abilities, but it also diminishes the pressure and difficulty of achieving the goal. Instead of thinking, “I’ll never be fluent,” you’ll think “I can already understand a whole podcast episode. Learning French isn’t as hard as I thought.”

3) Cultivate Identity

When trying to get people on board with ambiguous ideas or big changes, it’s most effective to appeal to identity—the essential part of your sense of self and the way you make decisions. Identities can be relatively flexible in that you naturally adopt different identities throughout your life, such as parent, world-traveler, or musician. However, identities can be rigid in that if you propose a change that contradicts someone’s identity, they’ll naturally resist. Therefore, you need to either align your proposed change with someone’s identity or align their identity with your proposed change. Start by asking yourself if the people you’re appealing to would say: “I want to be the kind of person who makes this change.”

  • Yes: You don’t have to convince them—they’ll make the change because it nudges them closer to the identity they want.
  • No: You’ll have to convince them to adopt the identity of someone who changes.

Start small—ask your audience to perform a minor change-supporting behavior. The behavior makes them think that they do align with the identity you suggested. Subsequently, they start performing more behaviors that align with the change—reinforcing the identity.

  • For example, if someone tells you they don’t care about your town’s environmental awareness board, have her sign a simple “Keep Our Community Clean” pledge. This prompts her to think about herself as a responsible citizen. She starts picking up trash in town and participating in clean-up initiatives. Six months later, she’s on the board.

Part 3: Shape Your Path Forward

Creating a successful path toward change means keeping your rational and emotional sides moving forward together by eliminating instant-gratification distractions and removing any obstacles that might spark overanalysis. Interestingly, your environment can either work independently of or in tandem with your rational and emotional elements.

  • It can be an independent “quick track” to change. However, this only works if the environment is entirely foolproof and distraction-free. Not only is this difficult to achieve, but your rational and emotional sides aren’t under control—meaning any small distraction can irreversibly derail your progress toward change.
  • Environment is better as an aid to in-sync rational and emotional sides. This allows for distractions or unexpected obstacles—when your rational and emotional sides are a balanced team, you can shake off problems and continue moving forward.

There are three ways to build support into your path toward change.

1) Build a Change-Supporting Environment

The first way to smooth your path is to create a change-supporting environment—that is, an environment that makes good behaviors easier to perform, and bad behaviors harder to perform. Create a change-supporting environment by modifying your routines or your space.

Change-supporting routines: Change up your routine to surround yourself with tools that make good behaviors easy and roadblocks that make bad behaviors difficult. Imagine you’re trying to start running every morning and want to spend less on unhealthy food. Make good behaviors easier by setting your coffee to auto-brew at 7 a.m. so you’ll be more motivated to get up, and packing your lunch the night before so you don’t order takeout at work again.

Make bad behaviors more difficult by finding a running buddy you’ll have to contact if you want to skip your run, and only ordering takeout with one specific credit card that you keep in an inconvenient place like your garden shed.

Change-supporting spaces: Physically rearranging your space can guide you toward performing more change-supporting behaviors.

  • This might look like moving The Chair that sits by your back door and seems to gather clutter no matter what you do. If you remove this natural drop-zone, you’ll likely find that your clutter gets put away where it belongs.

2) Create Change-Supporting Habits

It’s not always possible to change your environment—in these cases, work on building habits that trigger good behaviors. When desired behaviors become habitual, autopilot behaviors, you’ll naturally and effortlessly fall back on them to conserve rational energy.

At the base of good habit-building are “action triggers.” These are the triggers we set up to prompt a certain action. For example, “When I leave work (trigger), I’ll go to the gym (action).”

Powerful habits come from combining action triggers with preloaded responses—practiced and memorized reactions. Your preloaded response happens reflexively in a situation that calls for it. Pairing action triggers with preloaded responses prevents you from getting lost in possible solutions or pulled off track by your emotional wants.

How to Create a Preloaded Response

While creating preloaded responses, reframe your thoughts from “What is the right thing to do?” to “What is my action trigger, and how can I get the right thing done?”

Your action triggers need to be specific and visible—otherwise, they won’t be strong enough to trigger your preloaded response. For example, you’re trying to cut down on drinking. You identify specific situations where you’ll be tempted to drink and create preloaded responses that make you do the right thing: not drink.

  • “When the waiter asks me what I would like to drink, I’ll say seltzer.”
  • “When I’m walking home after work, I’ll take the long way to avoid passing the bar.”

These triggers—“when the waiter asks me what I would like to drink” and “when I’m walking home”—are specific enough to prompt your response. On the other hand, a vague action trigger such as, “When I go out, I’ll drink seltzer instead of wine,” leaves room for deliberation: “We’re at dinner, which isn’t really going out. Just one glass of wine will be fine.”

3) Leverage the Influence of Others

You can also use the people around you to support change. Humans, as social creatures, figure out how to behave by watching others—when you’re not sure how to react to a situation, you’ll look for cues in the behavior of those around you. This means that behavior is contagious between people. There are three ways you can ensure that your environment sends contagious, change-supporting social signals.

Method #1: Broadcast Good (and Bad) Behavior

Get people on board with changes by broadcasting just how many people are performing change-supporting behaviors. People take this information as a social signal that indicates what they should be doing—and they feel ashamed when their actions fall short of this standard.

  • For example, an editor who wants a faster article turnaround creates a spreadsheet that’s shared with all writers, so everyone can see others’ progress. A lagging writer will see that her late work is the odd one out and will quickly speed up.
Method #2: Give Shape to Ideas People Already Agree With

At times, your proposed change will be an idea that everyone already agrees with—you just have to attach social signals to it in order to make it a widespread practice. When the idea has a concrete shape, it can be publicized and incorporated into common knowledge and opinion.

  • For example, in the 1980s the concept of “designated drivers” was virtually unheard of in the United States, though most people agreed there was a need for a safe way to get home after drinking. A public health professor asked TV writers to include designated drivers in their scripts—attaching social signals to the idea. Within three years, 90% of the American public knew, and used, designated drivers.
Method #3: Get Change-Supporters Together

Cultural changes can be difficult because they disrupt the “way things are,” which is often closely intertwined with people’s identities. Put your efforts toward helping change-supporters find one another and cultivate a new identity and culture. In doing so, they’ll feel more emboldened to speak up for change—thus sending out social signals to a larger audience.

  • Imagine you’re tasked with getting your corporate office on board with a four-day workweek. A change-supporting employee comes into conflict with an anti-change employee who makes snide comments about her work ethic. You say, “Maria, you should work with Sean (a change-supporter) on this project. I think you’ll be better aligned in your values.” Maria and Sean regularly discuss the perks of the shorter week, giving them the confidence to praise the system to colleagues, even those who are anti-change. Eventually, their ideas spread through the office, and everyone agrees to a four-day week.

Conclusion: Make Changes Stick

Getting your change in motion is half the battle—now, turn your sights to making that change stick for the long term. There are three ways to accomplish this.

1) Reinforce change: Change doesn’t happen in an instant—it’s a long process of repeated behaviors that slowly get closer to your goal. You can motivate continued attempts at change by celebrating behaviors, no matter how small, that represent progress toward the goal.

  • For personal goals, this might look like praising your daughter for letting her little sister watch her play—although your end goal is getting her to share toys willingly.
  • In an organization, this might look like publicly thanking an employee for handing in her report using all of your new guidelines—even though there are several mistakes.

2) Give the change time to settle in: The beginning stages of change are the hardest simply because you’re not used to them—but you’ll find that changes become acceptable and start to snowball as you give them time to settle in. This happens for two reasons:

  • The mere exposure effect—that is, the more you’re exposed to something, the more you like it. For example, you may initially hate vegetables, but over time you come to appreciate their interesting flavors and textures.
  • When you repeat behaviors enough, you eventually attach your identity to those behaviors. This makes them easier to continue because you’re acting in line with who you believe you are. For example, if you start running every day, you’ll start to think of yourself as a runner—which further motivates you to stick with running.

3) Remember that change is a pattern: When change works, it’s because you got your rational side, emotional side, and your path all on track—change follows this pattern in all contexts. This knowledge helps you with change in two ways:

  • You've likely already made successful changes in your life. This means you’ve used the change pattern before and already know you can do it. Keep this in mind to maintain your confidence when taking on new changes.
  • Going forward, your changes will have a higher success rate because you understand the three essential elements and know how to use their power to support change.

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Here's a preview of the rest of Shortform's Switch PDF summary:

PDF Summary Chapter 1: The Essential Elements of Change

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However, there’s a major hidden advantage of your emotional side that can drive successful change. Your emotional side is much stronger than your rational side—if you can harness the energy of your emotions and point it in the right direction, it will do most of the legwork in getting you to your goal.

  • For example, if your goal is to get more exercise, you might get yourself excited and emotionally invested in exercise by focusing on how you’ll feel when you finally complete your first marathon. It becomes easier to put on your running shoes once you elevate exercise from an obligation to an exciting process with an emotionally charged goal.

Rational You and Emotional You Must Sync Up

When change fails, it’s often due to a conflict for control between your rational side and your emotional side. Jonathan Haidt explains this conflict in The Happiness Hypothesis, where he compares the struggle between your rational side and emotional side to a rider atop an elephant, urging it forward. The elephant is far stronger than the rider—if they have different ideas about where to go, the rider will lose every time.

  • This is why, even though you...

PDF Summary Part 1: Rational You | Chapter 2: Find and Replicate Success Stories

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2) We naturally feel defensive or argumentative toward “outsider” solutions, for two reasons:

  • First, we believe that solutions from elsewhere couldn’t work in the context of here. For example, many Americans feel that the universal healthcare systems that many countries have couldn’t work within the context of the United States.
  • Second, we’re easily insulted by the idea that someone else knows how to solve our problems better than we do. “The Canadians think they can show us how to do healthcare better? Give me a break—ours is the best in the world.”

“Insider” success stories send the message, “That does work here,” and give us the satisfaction of having solved our own problem.

Now we’ll examine how seeking out success stories can be applied in the context of personal change, organizational change, and social change.

Personal Change: Solution-Focused Therapy

Solution-focused therapy shows how identifying exceptions to a problem can effectively drive change. This type of therapy doesn’t look into the past to analyze and unravel the sources of your problems. Instead, solution-focused therapists examine the immediate problem and its solutions...

PDF Summary Chapter 3: Minimize Ambiguity and Options

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For example, if you’re trying to eat healthier breakfasts, you can’t predict what foods will be available to you every morning. Instead, you might put together four critical guidelines:

  1. Never eat anything that’s covered in whipped cream.
  2. Don’t drink Diet Coke before noon.
  3. Every breakfast must contain at least one vegetable or fruit.
  4. Indulge in a carb-heavy breakfast such as pancakes only once per week.

Over time, these guidelines become more instinctive than unfamiliar—the status quo that your autopilot defaults to. This creates sustainable change because the desired behaviors will no longer require your rational side’s concentrated effort or self-supervision.

Erasing Ambiguity for Others

Erasing ambiguity is important when trying to get others to change their behaviors, because what you consider the “right” choices aren’t always the most obvious choices to others. They, like you, have a rational side that will overanalyze their options, seek solutions on the same scale as the problem, and get caught up in useless details. When presenting others with a proposed change, make the new way of doing things crystal clear—don’t assume that they’ll...

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PDF Summary Chapter 4: Paint a Picture of Your Destination

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  • For example, the vague goal of losing weight might make you wonder if you’ve really gained enough to do something about it. On the other hand, your clear “favorite jeans” destination makes the problem obvious: You’ve gained enough to not fit in your pants.

2) It interrupts your tendency to get caught up in the thinking and planning phase and pushes you into the doing phase. Instead of mulling over the details of your current situation and the many ways you could move forward, your thinking shifts to specific ways you can work toward the destination.

  • A vague weight loss goal would lead you to research your BMI and how much weight loss is enough for someone like you. On the other hand, your “favorite jeans” goal doesn’t need analysis—when you fit in your jeans, you’ve lost enough weight.
  • Instead of researching hundreds of possible diets and workout routines, you think about your lifestyle when you last fit into your jeans (a success story, of sorts). You think, “I fit in those jeans while I was working at my old job that required a lot of walking. Walking more will be a good first step toward my goal.”

Beware of Rationalization

**Even with a clear...

PDF Summary Part 2: Emotional You | Chapter 5: Appeal to the Right Feelings

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Why People Think They Don’t Need Change

Most people unconsciously have a “positive illusion bias”—that is, most of us think much more highly of ourselves than we think of others. There are three ways this bias makes it hard for people to understand the necessity of change:

1) When you think highly of yourself, you don’t believe that there’s anything about you that needs to be changed.

  • Imagine an alcoholic who believes he’s performing exceptionally well at work. He doesn’t see his drinking as a problem, because his work performance is evidence to him that he’s fine. Meanwhile, everyone around him can see that he’s drunk at work every day.

2) When you assume that your behaviors are better than others’, you can more easily rationalize those behaviors.

  • For example, if someone urged you to be more eco-conscious by lessening your bottled water purchases, you might think, “I’m not the problem. I don’t drink nearly as much bottled water as some people, and I almost always recycle.”

3) When your actions have known negative effects, you believe that you’re “above” these effects in ways that others aren’t.

  • You might think, “Smoking is known to have...

PDF Summary Chapter 6: Minimize the Effort

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  • Group B received punch cards with 12 spots, of which two were punched. Once they’d received their 12th punch, they would receive a free wash.

Although both groups of customers needed 10 visits to claim their free wash, only 19% of the 10-punch card customers returned ten times to claim their free wash. On the other hand, 34% of the 12-punch card customers returned 10 more times.

This result revealed a quirk of human nature—people are naturally more motivated to work toward a goal when they feel that they’re already partly finished with it. This is largely because your emotional side feeds on instant gratification, quickly becoming demoralized when progress isn’t immediately apparent. When you create a sort of “head start,” the perceived progress gives your emotional side the boost it needs to make it to the next benchmark of progress.

When you’re pushing for change, look for ways to remind people—or yourself—of the progress that’s already been made.

  • Personal change: After a few years of dabbling in French, you want to ramp up your efforts and become fluent. Look back on exercises you struggled with at the very beginning to remind yourself that you’re...

PDF Summary Chapter 7: Cultivate Identity

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  • For example, while asking college students to buy less bottled water, you encounter several students who state that they’re not interested in being more environmentally conscious. You ask these students to sign a “Keep North College Clean” pledge—this prompts these students to think about themselves as responsible citizens. They start picking up trash on campus and participating in clean-up initiatives. Six months later, you get them to commit to not buying bottled water.

Example: Saving the St. Lucia Parrot

In 1977, the St. Lucia Parrot was well on its way to extinction due to hunting, the illegal pet trade, and habitat destruction. Paul Butler, a freshly-graduated conservation student, was tasked with saving the St. Lucia Parrot on a shoestring budget.

He’d studied the parrots and came up with several crucial steps for preserving the species. However, each step required law changes that depended on the support and votes of the public, who didn’t care about the fate of the parrot. To save the species, he needed to get St. Lucians on board with his plans.

He didn’t have enough fuel to approach the issue from an analytical angle—there wasn’t any financial...

PDF Summary Part 3: Shaping the Path | Chapter 8: Build a Change-Supporting Environment

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Make good behaviors easier by:

  • Setting your coffee to auto-brew at 7 a.m. so you’ll be more motivated to get up instead of sleeping in
  • Packing your lunch the night before so you don’t order takeout at work again

Make bad behaviors more difficult by:

  • Finding a running buddy—if you want to skip your run, you’ll have to contact them first
  • Only using one specific credit card for takeout, and keeping it in an inconvenient place, like your garden shed

Change-Supporting Spaces

Other times, physically rearranging your space can help guide you toward performing more change-supporting behaviors.

  • For example, one executive received poor results on a feedback questionnaire from her employees—they reported that she wasn’t good at communication, though she prided herself on an open-door policy. She realized that she had a bad habit of looking at her computer screen while talking to the people who stopped by her office. She redid her office to include a small meeting area far away from her computer screen. She stopped her bad habit of distracted listening, and her communication scores went up.

For you, this might look like moving The Chair that...

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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Create Change-Supporting Habits

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Pairing action triggers with preloaded responses is effective because it prevents you from getting lost in possible solutions or pulled off track by your emotional side. You don’t need to decide how to act in response to an action trigger—you’ve practiced so many times, you already know what to do. You don’t needlessly tire out your rational side with deliberation and can focus your energy on getting the right thing done. In fact, research shows that using preloaded responses can increase your chances of achieving goals from 22% to 62%.

How to Create a Preloaded Response

While creating preloaded responses, it’s helpful to reframe your thoughts from “What is the right thing to do?” to “How can I get the right thing done when my action trigger happens?”

Your action triggers need to be specific and visible—otherwise, they won’t give a strong enough cue to trigger your preloaded response. For example, imagine that you’re trying to cut down on drinking. First, remind yourself what the right thing to do is—avoiding situations that will tempt you to drink. You identify the situations that usually trigger you to drink, and create preloaded responses to them....

PDF Summary Chapter 10: Use the Influence of Others

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Likewise, you can broadcast bad behaviors. This sparks change in people by creating discomfort—first, because they’re reminded that they’re behaving contrary to what's expected of them, and second because everyone now knows they’re not doing what they should.

  • For example, an editor who wants a faster turnaround on articles can create a spreadsheet that’s shared with all writers, so everyone can see others’ progress. A lagging writer will see that everyone else is getting their work in on time and that their late work is the odd one out—they’ll quickly speed up.

Method 2: Give Shape to Ideas People Already Agree With

At times, your proposed change will be an idea that everyone already agrees with—you just have to attach social signals to it in order to make it a widespread practice. In these cases, it’s necessary to give the idea a concrete shape that can be publicized and incorporated into common knowledge and opinion.

Example: Designated Drivers

In the 1980s, the concept of choosing a designated driver to safely get everyone home after drinking was popular in Scandinavian countries, but virtually unknown in the U.S. Jay Winsten, a public health...

PDF Summary Chapter 11: Keep Change Moving Forward

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  • This might look like going out of your way to thank a colleague for getting their report in on time, even if the formatting wasn’t quite right.

Reinforcement is especially hard in work settings because you naturally notice shortcomings more than progress, and it’s more fun to get together with colleagues to complain about, rather than praise, others. Stay focused on your goal and make a conscious effort to praise as much as possible.

(Shortform note: Read our summary of Radical Candor to learn how to give and receive sincere and helpful praise.)

Practice Reinforcement as a Parent

Work up to the behavior you want from your children by looking for vague approximations of the behavior—moments where your children are being polite, doing the right thing, or being helpful. Keep your goal in mind, and regularly ask yourself: Is this behavior in any way aligned with the goal? If it is, recognize and celebrate it.

Goal: Put a stop to the endless burp and gas jokes.

  • Reinforcement might look like: I appreciate that you said “excuse me” after burping. That was very polite....