I had the opportunity recently to hear an interview with Dan Heath about his new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, written with his brother Chip. Dan is a senior fellow at Duke's CASE center for social entrepreneurship. Chip teaches organizational behavior at Stanford. Switch is about the difficulty of change--due to the fact that we have "warring" systems in our brains, a rational one and an emotional one--and how to set up conditions to tip the balance in favor of change.
As I listened to the interview, I struck by several statements that reinforced things I had learned in my practice and reading in social marketing:
- Effective communication does not guarantee change
- When our environment changes, it affects our behavior
- Change rarely comes from knowledge
- Emotions and experiences lead to big changes
The Heaths base these assertions on two things: their observations about the effectiveness of communication to effect change, made while traveling around the country promoting their last book, Made to Stick, about creating "sticky" ideas; work from psychology, showing that we have "dueling" emotional and rational systems in our brains, when it come to decisions about behavior. Their conclusion: "Emotion is the boss, and reason is the servant."
The book relates successful behavior change strategies from recent psychological literature, and contains vignettes and case studies from public health, political and business arenas. It sounds like an excellent addition to one's library of creating successful behavior change. I plan to buy it--as soon as my "to read" stack dwindles a bit more!
You can hear the interview with Dan Heath on WUNC radio's The State of Things.
