Switch: How to change things when change is hard

Author: Chip Heath and Dan Heath

As the title suggests the book is about techniques to bring about change. While the book mostly cites examples in a professional world, I feel that they are equally relevant in the personal space too. For that matter, most of the people skills applicable to professional world are also applicable to personal world and vice versa. In fact if people would spend even half the amount of energy on people skills in their personal world than they do on the professional world then they would be so much happier. Anyway I digress.

In this book, the authors suggest that to bring about a change – to bring people onboard a change you want to bring about – you need to appeal to their rational mind, the emotional mind and shape their path. Every situation is different and sometimes you may need to work on only one of these. While others you may need to work on all of these. Rational mind looks for reason and logic; emotional mind needs feeling and lastly you need to make it easy for people to adopt the change.

When I read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto I was amazed to see how an author can go on and on trying to prove the same point. Page after page, chapter after chapter. Same with most of Malcolm Gladwell’s books. He has tons of data to prove a singular point. While sometimes it might feel repetitive, it has the benefit that you will never forget it. And it proves their point because it’s not just one example, they have tens of examples. I felt that this book was trying to convey too many things and it’s hard to give as many examples when you’re trying to prove so many points. So while logically what they suggest completely makes sense to me, I didn’t feel that I’d sufficient proof that these techniques work in majority of the cases. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a good book to learn about how you can bring about change. I think trying to change something is not a definitive process, it’s an evolution. You will have to analyze at each point and make sure that you’re steering in the right direction.