Reflecting on Nonprofit Culture While Reading Switch

After serving three times as an interim executive director, I’ve become obsessed with organizational culture.  
 
Earlier in the year, I read a lot of articles about culture change, and from these I gleaned a few interesting ideas.  Overall, though, I found these readings pretty underwhelming.   
 
Then I stumbled on a fascinating book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath, who are brothers.  I loved this book.  To be sure, it’s based on a corny metaphor – but it also distills a great deal of research in an accessible manner and provides the reader with a do-able change system to experiment with.
 
Crediting psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Heaths use the metaphor of an elephant (our emotional side) and its rider (our rational side).  They lay out an approach to change that has three parts: 
 
Direct the Rider.
Motivate the Elephant.
Shape the Path.
 
Unsurprisingly, each of these parts also has three parts.  Here’s a quick “cheat sheet” I created for myself, using the Heaths' chapter titles and a few snippets from the book:
 
In order to Direct the Rider:

• Follow the bright spots - Focus on scaling “successful efforts worth emulating,” however small they may be.
• Script the critical moves – Provide “crystal clear direction” because “what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity” and “clarity dissolves resistance.”
• Point to the destination – Create “a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible.”

 
In order to Motivate the Elephant:

• Find the feeling – Remember that visuals can help.  “In almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.”             
• Shrink the change – Focus on small milestones that are meaningful, visible, and immediately attainable.
• Grow your people – Make the desired change an identity issue rather than an analytical issue.  Create an expectation that there will be failures along the way.  Foster a growth mindset.

 
In order to Shape the Path:

• Tweak the environment – Focus on “making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder.”
• Build habits – “Preload decisions” by using “action triggers” that automatically tie a desired action to a precursor situation.
• Rally the herd – Take advantage of our natural attentiveness to what our peers are doing.  Make sure that reformers have a safe place to gather to plan for change.

 
That’s a lot to think about.  And not every change situation will be amenable to all nine of these approaches. 
 
I’m particularly interested in exploring bright spots – because I know it’s all too easy to focus on correcting what’s wrong rather than expanding what’s right. 
 
I also appreciate the reminder to focus first on seeing and feeling – a lifelong challenge for me, since I can too easily default to logical, analytical reasons for doing something.  The Heaths present several great examples of using compelling visuals to jump-start change, and I’m interested in experimenting in this vein.
 
Finally, I want to think more about rallying the herd.  The Heaths assert that “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.”  That’s a wake-up call. 
 
Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, is quoted in the book as saying, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game---it is the game.” 
 
That’s something that I, too, have learned through experience.  It’s a sinking feeling to realize that you have a culture problem but don’t have the right tools for culture change.  After reading Switch, I’m feeling hopeful that next time I encounter a tough culture problem, I will be better equipped.