Sunday, September 12, 2010

Book Summary - Switch - Part 3

In the part 2 of this book we have seen that the rider should be directed by looking at the bright spots, reducing ambiguity by scripting the critical moves and pointing to the destination.
 But before even the rider can be directed, the elephant has to be motivated to move. So how to motivate the elephant?Elephant is a feeler, so you have to

Find the feeling : Let the people who have to change experience the consequences of not changing or the advantages of successfully doing the change. This brings in emotion to change. This may give a initial motivating boost which you get while reading a personal development book which quickly wanes, so what should be done is we should
Shrink the change: We have so make the big thing into small chunks so that the elephant will get a feeling of do-ability so that they don't get discouraged and altogether stop working. This can be done by identifying what exactly are your small victories so that you can celebrate it and get the high of getting it done, which in a virtuous cycle will bring in more celebrations.
Another helpful thing which can be done is to
Grow your people: The authors say that we make decisions in two ways - one is analytically, which appeals to the rider and other way is by identity which appeals to the elephant. When we cannot approach the problem analytically, we can do it by growing the identity for that in the people. What would a good citizen do in this situation - etc, by this identity questions, lot of change can be successfully enabled. 
There are two types of mentalities of people. One with fixed mindset and other called growth mindset - Fixed mindset people think that their talents and abilities are fixed and hence they cannot be cultivated. Whereas growth mindset people can think of everything as a learning and grow from it.
IDEO has a graph showing the project mood which has hope - > Insights -> Confidence in the order. When they fail they gather insights from that, so they are positively taking failure which is useful for growth.

In the next part, we will see what can be done to improve the environment, i.e shaping the path. Stay tuned.