Something to readGetting ahead
Switch
A practical guide to making change stick, at work and in your own habits
Why it’s worth your time
When a change at work keeps stalling, Chip and Dan Heath's Switch suggests the trouble may lie less in stubborn people than in how the change was set up. They picture the thinking mind as a Rider on an emotional Elephant, both moving along a Path, and argue that a change needs all three. It gives you something to try besides explaining the change again.
Find what's already working
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- Read Three Surprises About Change, then Find the Bright Spots.
The opening chapter sets out the book's three-part picture of change, and the second shows the first move. After that, read the chapters that match where your change is stuck.
- Find one bright spot and share it.
Pick a change your team keeps struggling with, such as handoffs or a new process. Find one time it went well, and write down what was different. Bring it to the team in three parts: what you noticed, what it might mean, and what you'd try next. For example: the last two releases with a written checklist went smoothly, the checklist may be doing more than we think, so try it on the next one.
Good moments for this: when a team change keeps stallingbefore proposing a new way of workingafter a project that went oddly well
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
If people don't know what to do differently on Monday, more persuasion tends to change little. One specific first move, what the Heaths call scripting the critical moves, often gets further than a better argument.
What might make this harder
Look at a smaller unit: one meeting, one handoff, one person's week. A bright spot in the Heaths' sense can be modest, as long as it's real and someone could copy it.
Questions people ask
What is Switch by Chip and Dan Heath about?
A 2010 book by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath on why lasting change is hard and what tends to make it work. Built from stories of hospitals, companies and charities, it argues that change needs a clear direction for the rational mind, motivation for the emotional one and a setting that makes the new behavior easier.
What are the Rider, the Elephant and the Path?
The Heaths' picture of change: the Rider is the rational, planning mind, the Elephant the emotional, instinctive one, and the Path the situation around them. They borrow the Rider and Elephant from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
What are bright spots in Switch?
Cases where something is already working despite the odds. The Heaths' advice is to study why those cases work and copy them, which can be quicker than diagnosing every failure.
How do I get my team to change how they work?
Start small and concrete: find a time the new way already worked, name one specific first step, and change something in the setting, like a template or a meeting slot, so the new way takes less effort than the old one.
What it says, and how it holds up
People take on huge changes gladly, getting married, having children, yet resist small ones like filing an expense report on time; the Heaths set out that puzzle on Stanford's page for the book. Their answer draws on psychologists' picture of two systems in the mind, a rational planner and an emotional, impulsive partner, which they call the Rider and the Elephant after Jonathan Haidt's image. When the Rider and the Elephant agree, the Heaths argue, change can come quickly. Add the Path, the situation around both, and you have the book's structure: direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, shape the Path.
Speaking to a nonprofit technology conference in 2011, as the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported, Dan Heath argued that organizations pore over failures and rarely study why their successes worked. His example was Jerry Sternin of Save the Children, sent to fight child malnutrition in Vietnam, who set aside causes he couldn't fix, such as poverty, and looked for poor families whose children were thriving. They turned out to serve the same rice in more, smaller meals and to add tiny shrimp, crabs and sweet-potato greens; Sternin helped the mothers start cooking classes, and in time, the Chronicle reported, the approach helped more than 2 million children across Vietnam. Heath's suggestion for his audience was to study the software rollouts that went oddly smoothly.
There's a catch in Sternin's choice to set aside what he couldn't fix. If a team keeps missing deadlines because it's two people short, a bright spot may only show how the best performers cope with the shortage. Then the more honest move may be to put the shortage itself in front of whoever owns the headcount, with the numbers, before asking anyone to copy a coping strategy.
Sternin's example is older than the book. Jerry and Monique Sternin called the approach positive deviance, and it has a research literature of its own, so this part of the book rests on a method others had already tested in the field. The two-systems picture is looser, and can be read as a memorable metaphor for findings psychologists still argue over in detail. The Heaths built their pattern from people who succeeded, which can make change look tidier than it tends to be.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.