Book: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

I really enjoyed Switch (Amazon), it’s a book about behaviour change. The metaphor of the rider and the elephant is used throughout to illustrate that whatever you think you want to do, you (the rider) have less influence than the environment (the elephant).

It covers how to motivate the rider, but then make it really easy for the elephant. How do you do this for yourself? How do you do this in your workplace? Or use these strategies to enact social change – my two favourite examples were: getting a country to embrace the national bird, and reducing the prevalence of older men preying on young women by mocking them and giving strategies for helping the young women escape.

The message I took from the book is that behaviour change is hard, that changing environments is easier than changing people, but that often the most powerful thing you can do is change the story.