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Key Concepts

The Elephant and the Rider

“But, to us, the duo’s tension is captured best by an analogy used by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his wonderful book The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.” (p. 7)

Steps to Creating Change

(copied directly from the authors’ summary)

1. Direct the Rider 

• “FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it.”

• “SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors.”

• “POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it.”      

2. Motivate the Elephant 

• “FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something.”

• “SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant.”

• “GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset.”                      

3. Shape the Path 

• “TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation.”

• “BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s ‘free’—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits.”

• “RALLY THE HERD. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread.”

Quotables

“What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” (p. 3)

“...all change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.” (p. 4)

“Self-control is an exhaustible resource.” (p. 10)

“Early in the first session, after hearing the patient explain his or her problem, the therapist poses the Miracle Question: “Can I ask you a sort of strange question? Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, ‘Well, something must have happened—the problem is gone!’?” (p. 36)

“It’s the Exception Question: ‘When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?’” (p. 38)

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?” (p. 45)

Our Rider has a problem focus when he needs a solution focus. If you are a manager, ask yourself: “What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?” (p. 48)

“Ambiguity is the enemy. 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.” (p. 53)

“Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch.” (p. 63)

“Clarity dissolves resistance.” (p. 72)

“We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible.” (p. 76)

“The specificity of SMART goals is a great cure for the worst sins of goal setting—ambiguity and irrelevance.... But SMART goals are better for steady-state situations than for change situations, because the assumptions underlying them are that the goals are worthwhile.” (p. 82)

“You have to back up your destination postcard with a good behavioral script. That’s a recipe for success.” (p. 93)

“Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.” (p. 106)

“Trying to fight inertia and indifference with analytical arguments is like tossing a fire extinguisher to someone who’s drowning. The solution doesn’t match the problem.” (p. 107)

“One reason we’re able to believe that we’re better-than-average leaders and drivers and spouses and team players is that we’re defining those terms in ways that flatter us.” (p. 117)

“Fredrickson argues that, in contrast with the narrowing effects of the negative emotions, positive emotions are designed to “broaden and build” our repertoire of thoughts and actions. Joy, for example, makes us want to play. Play doesn’t have a script, it broadens the kinds of things we consider doing. We become willing to fool around, to explore or invent new activities. And because joy encourages us to play, we are building resources and skills.” (p. 122)

“Psychologist Karl Weick, in a paper called ‘Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,’ said, ‘A small win reduces importance (‘this is no big deal’), reduces demands (‘that’s all that needs to be done’), and raises perceived skill levels (‘I can do at least that’).’ All three of these factors will tend to make change easier and more self-sustaining.” (p. 144)

“In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions when we have a decision to make: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?” (p. 153)

“How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road? The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route.” (p. 162)

“In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Businesspeople think in terms of two stages: You plan, and then you execute. There’s no ‘learning stage’ or ‘practice stage’ in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how ya do it, just get it done!” (p. 168)

“But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper.” (p. 168)

“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.” (p. 183)

“Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot. They allow lots of good behaviors to happen without the Rider taking charge.” (p. 207)

“You’ve probably created lots of team habits unwittingly. If your staff meetings always start out with genial small talk, then you’ve created a habit. You’ve designed your meeting autopilot to yield a few minutes of warm-up small talk. The hard question for a leader is not how to form habits but which habits to encourage.” (p. 215)

“So far, as we’ve discussed how to shape the Path, we’ve encountered two strategies: (1) tweaking the environment and (2) building habits. There’s a tool that perfectly combines these two strategies. It’s something that can be added to the environment in order to make behavior more consistent and habitual. That tool is the humble checklist.” (p. 220)

“In this entire book, you might not find a single statement that is so rigorously supported by empirical research as this one: You are doing things because you see your peers do them.” (p. 227)

“The lessons are clear. If you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together. They need a free space. They need time to coordinate outside the gaze of the resisters.” (p. 247)

“Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on to the second, third, and hundredth steps. And that’s a problem, because most of us are terrible reinforcers. We are quicker to grouse than to praise.” (p. 252)