Chip Heath is an author, consultant, speaker, and popular professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Management. His unique research on what makes ideas succeed has been featured in a wide range of popular media programs and publications.
Dan Heath is an insightful and engaging communicator, widely recognized business consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is co-founder of Thinkwell, a publisher of innovative textbooks.
Notes from this session follow.
- Is there something in your organization you want to change?
- Dan recently got married.
- Everyone says people avoid change, but certain kinds of changes seem to be effortless while others are extremely difficult.
- Changed is filled with conflict. We want to save and spend. We want to diet and eat sweets. Part of us wants to change but part of us resists.
- Two systems in our brains, the planner, and the part that lives in the moment. The human rider sitting on top of the elephant. Part of change is aligning the goals of the rider and the elephant.
- Have to appeal to an emotion.
- Teacher went past the intellectual argument and told 1st graders they would be 3rd graders if they stuck with her.
- If you’ve got 2 ministries really working well, 5 ok and 2 failing. Focus on the 2 that are really working well.
- Modern psychology focuses on the problems, but solution psychology focuses on where things are really working. Bright spots are proof they’re capable of solving the problem.
- Example: Save the Children, sent to Vietnam to tackle malnutrition. Went to a village, gathered mothers, told them he wanted to help their nutritian. Gathered data, found children who were healthy with parents who weren’t wealthy. Observed the parents, they were serving 4 small meals instead of 2 large ones. “Bright spot” moms were sprinkling in shrimp, crabs, and other foods into the rice. Others started copying the “bright spot” moms. All because one person went into a village and looked for what was working.
- Big problems are most often solved with several small solutions.
- Shrinks the change.
- Example of Miner County. If each person spent just 10% more of their money in the county it could revolutionize the county. Saw a $15M increase in tax revenue. Continued to increase every year.
- If when talking about a solution you find yourself getting exited, you’re on to something, you’re reaching the elephant. If you find yourself feeling weighed down by the solution, you haven’t found the right solution yet.
- The elephant is skidish and lazy.
- Valley, insight period, can be frustrating because the insight doesn’t come fast enough.
- People like Tiger Woods have the growth mindset. View their talents and skills like muscles, they more they work on things they can become better at anything.
- But built into that mindset is a tolerance for failure. Failure is not not an option, it’s a necessity. When you go to the gym, you work up to the point at which they fail. Failure may be an early warning sign for success.
- “Let you go? I just spent $10m educating you!”
- We may not have a person problem but a situation problem. We tend to attribute things to a person rather than to their situation.
- Experiment… 63% who were told they had time stopped, 10% of those who felt stressed for time stopped.
- A lot more people would tithe if we did direct deposit. A lot more people would serve if the times were convenient.
- Sculpting the path so the elephants can’t see the bananas is important. ?
- Society has built in a lot of things that make the change of marriage work, tax incentives, marriage celebration. We need to create incentives to make changes easier.