Looking to the future
Amy Wix
MCTM Region 1 Director, Teacher at Kasson-Mantorville Middle School
Nobody likes change, but a group of people, a business or an organization that doesn’t embrace change is bound to stagnate. This summer, I along with Region 7 Director Becky Rud, attended the NCTM Affiliates Leaders Conference in Phoenix. The first thing I noticed while talking with others in the room was that the issues we have been dealing with during my time on the MCTM Board are similar to the issues the folks from Georgia, Nevada, Texas, Michigan and just about everywhere else attendees called home were dealing with; mainly, membership. A fair amount of our time was spent discussing the ideas in the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2010). The message from this book can apply to us as an organization, to school districts, individual schools, teams or classrooms.
The authors start off with an analogy used by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis (2006). You have a rider on an elephant heading down a path. The rider is the planning part of our brain that sets goals and has long term plans. The elephant is the emotional side of the brain, seeking the easiest path and looking for the quick payoff. If the rider and the elephant have the same path in mind, all is well with the world. When the rider wants to change the direction the elephant tends to resist. The rider becomes exhausted quickly because of the effort needed to direct the elephant in a direction it doesn’t want to go. The elephant, on the other hand, has the strength to go all day down the familiar path. To get things to change, someone has to act differently. Or, in other words, for change to happen it is important to create a path the elephant wants to follow.
Switch is divided into 3 parts: direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path.
Directing the rider involves finding bright spots. Finding bright spots allows us to look to solutions. Human nature tends to focus on the problems (a student’s report card with mostly all B’s, one A, and one C – the parent focuses on the C rather than looking at what worked for the A). Focusing on a bright spot gives us a solutions-based action plan for change. Another way to direct the rider is by scripting critical moves. When we are given too many choices, we are more likely to choose what is familiar. When we walk into a social event, we gravitate towards the people we already know. This occurs because making decisions takes mental energy (overwhelming the rider) and there is usually anxiety caused by ambiguity. If we script clear and simple guidelines for change we get a much better response from people. A third way to direct the rider is to point to a destination.
Remember, the rider is the one who over analyzes things. Change is needed often-times because we have big problems. The authors refer to a BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) as a place an organization would like to be a decade or two into the future. (Think Henry Ford and Wal-Mart- companies built with BHAGs.) To have change occur, though, we need goals closer to home that can be accomplished in shorter amounts of time. In Switch, these are our destination postcards – pictures of what could be and answers to the question “Where are we headed?” Our destination postcards direct the rider to a solution, rather than allowing the rider to get caught up in over analyzing a problem.
The second part of the book involves motivating the elephant. The elephant is the emotional part that craves instant gratification. It is also the side that we rely on to get most tasks accomplished. For change to be successful, we need to influence emotion, not just thought. We can do this by finding the feeling, shrinking the change and growing our people. When finding the feeling, keep in mind that all emotions, both positive and negative can lead to change. Negative emotion like fear and anger lead to faster responses and are helpful when trying to avoid risk, but are not a long term solution for change. Positive emotions like curiosity and joy are helpful when trying to change behavior and confronting new situations. The Heath brothers suggest we shrink the change by making small steps that are meaningful toward a goal and are within immediate reach.
When people fail to change, it is not usually because they fail to understand the problem. An effective way for growing our people is to appeal to their identity. Ask them, “What would someone like you do in this situation?” Focusing on an identity is more emotional and will more likely lead to change. This ties nicely to Carol Dweck’s work with growth mindset. Struggles are perceived as part of the learning and guard against defeatism. By helping people embrace a growth mindset, we acknowledge failure occurs where we want change to occur; we are not limited by where we are now.
Once we have directed the rider and motivated the elephant, we should shape the path, or make it as easy to follow as possible. The authors say “What looks like a person problem is often a situation problem.” (p.179) We often attribute situational problems to a person’s character. Shaping the path ignores individual people’s character.
We can make small changes, or what the authors call tweak the environment, to make a change easier. We can build habits by pre-loading decisions. A great example of this is making a checklist.
Another way to shape the path is to rally the herd. In ambiguous situations, people tend to look to others to see how to act. Building positive peer pressure is an example of how to rally the herd in a middle school setting. A final way the authors suggest for shaping the path is to keep the switch going. Change is a continuous process. The best way to keep it moving forward is to reinforce the positive actions and celebrate the small accomplishments.
Change isn’t easy. Following the pattern set out in the book: direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path can help us to take small steps toward our BHAG for our classrooms, our teams, our schools and our organization. As John F. Kennedy said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
Link to book: http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752