Why Reading

This book is a brilliant recipe for change management. The approach is that you need to address change from three angles. These being derived from a beautiful metaphor; the elephant, the driver and the path. You need to direct the driver (peoples rational mind), motivate the elephant (peoples emotional mind) and shape the path. Doing it using all your creativity and patience. The book is full of supporting research stories, that makes it a really interesting read. The Switch framework as it is called can be used on team and organisational level as well as for individuals and whole societies.

Reading tips

• Part 1, Direct the driver, is how you can enable a change journey to start, not letting the driver spin the wheels getting nowhere. “Follow the bright spots”, “Script the critical moves” and “Point to the destination” are three techniques to get the driver going. The driver part of us tend to be overly analytical and needs clarity and simplicity to get started.
• Part 2, Motivate the elephant, is nicely describing a part often underestimated. It´s how to get our emotional mind fired up. Because without that it doesn´t matter how good the driver is. The change journey will still not start or go very slow. “Find the feeling”, “Shrink the change” and “Grow your people” are three techniques that can be used to get the elephant moving. The elephant part of us tend to be very short-sighted, so it takes continuous effort too keep the elephant on the desired path.
• Part 3, Shape the path, is about how to smoothen the way for the elephant to move towards the destination. “Tweak the environment”, “Build habits” and “Rally the heard” are three techniques to ease the way for the elephant.
• At the end there is a useful “overcoming obstacles” appendix, that can be of help using the Switch framework described in the book.