Book Review: Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

I’m just finishing “Switch: How to change things when change is hard” by Chip and Dan Heath.  As I’m sure everyone who knows me knows, Chip & Dan Heath wrote one of my all time favorite “business” books, “Made to Stick” which talks about how to express ideas so they’re memorable and make an impact.  When I found out they had a new book coming out, I immediately placed a pre-order with Amazon.  Shortly before the release, when I got an email from one of their assistants asking me if I’d like a copy sent to me, I said “Of course!”  I was flattered that they knew I was a fan of their work and reached out, and I was excited to be able to read the new book.

I’ve ended up with two copies of Switch now (my pre-order and the promotional copy) and I am thrilled to have two, since it’s a book my husband is now starting as well, and this will eliminate any book battles at bed time, akin to our competition to read the last Harry Potter, when the first one to bed got to read the book and the other had to wait until the next night for a crack at it.

I love books that seem to get to the fundamental nature of problems and conflict, boiling things down into their essence and parts, so you have a new lens or template through which to view the world.  Made to Stick did this very well, condensing disparate parts and pieces of what makes stories, ideas, and messages of any sort memorable into a template of sort that helps me every day when I look at how to present ideas to others in a compelling way.

Switch takes on the huge problem of why change seems so almost physically painful, whether that change is personal or professional.  When we look at a big problem, like education or healthcare, it can seem impossible to tackle.  The problem seems too big.  There seems to be no good place to dig in and start making a change, and there seems to be too many external restraints that need to be overcome to make the problem seem remotely doable.  It may be written off as a “cultural problem” or a “system”problem or even a “few bad apples” problem, but in the end, a few small changes can often lead to cascading change, much like Malcolm Gladwell talked about in The Tipping Point.

Switch starts out with an analogy that change can be like a rider on an elephant on a path.  The rider is analytical by nature, the elephant is big and emotional, and the path is the things that need to be done to move forward to get to the destination that we all aspire to by creating change.  While I was initially not in love with this analogy, but it works in the book as a tool to frame out the different parts of creating successful change or innovation in any group or situation.

For change to be successful, all three of these components need to work together- the facts and numbers analytical portion must be happy; the moody and resistant portion of the group must be reasonably happy and convinced that they’ll give change a try, and the pathway needs to be clear enough and short enough to motivate the riders and elephants to choose it as an option or alternative to the status quo.

Let’s take a personal situation and apply this formula. (It’s easier than solving healthcare in a blog post.)

I just walk/ran my second half marathon.  For someone who just really started a concerted fitness program seven months ago, this would have seemed like a silly and crazy thing to even consider a year ago.  My elephant knew I needed to get in shape and get healthier, but there always seemed to be a reasonable excuse to avoid the gym- the pathway to health and fitness seemed foggy and the goal was noble but not specific and defined.  My “rider” knew what I needed to do, but we needed to construct a path to get there.

One of the steps was finding a personal trainer.  This way, I get to work out privately, and I’m coached so I pushed myself more than I would on my own- I have someone to impress.  I have an appointment to keep, and I’m not discouraged by the extra-fit others that are already at my destination, but just show me how much farther I have to go, causing a distraction from the smaller steps I need to take every day.

Another huge step was to find big external goals to work for, like these half-marathon events.  The distance events are like the end of a semester exam, as much as measurements of strength or pounds or inches lost are.  They are a test of strength, endurance and preparation, and show me what I can accomplish, as well as providing a comparison point for past performance.

By creating a pathway with many little goals along the way and big tests, the goal of better health becomes more achievable and more doable.  Every day behavior like skipping workouts or eating too much crap has its own built in penalties- for any endurance event, you pay the price for everything you did right or wrong along the training path.  This then makes the daily changes a bit easier to do as well, knowing the big wall is coming up fast as the race approaches.

I need the numbers- the analysis of the progress to satisfy my rider.  I need to feel good about myself and the changes that are occurring to satisfy the elephant, who might rather be eating girl scout cookies and watching Project Runway.  And all of this is easier when the path is much more specific, clear, and the change looks doable in its chunked-out parts.  It makes even thinking about doing another half-marathon possible, because I know the change is possible and the next goal is attainable, because I’ve done it before.

The brilliance of Switch is that this formula is tied into Maslow’s heirarchy of needs and one that applies to almost any situation.  For example, most of the strategies suggested to help kids with ADHD succeed in school involve not trying to fundamentally change the child, but change the environment to help the child do what’s needed.  Checklists of chores takes the amorphous “Do your chores” and breaks it down into specific, doable tasks, itemized and specific.  Showing a child how to be a bit more organized, and giving them tools that help ensure that they can keep the system up, with frequent checks, develops new, more constructive habits.  Getting rid of the daily speedbumps that turn a child off course- whether that’s always having things ready the night before to avoid morning panics, or smoothing the homework path by putting all their tools in one box and having a set place and time for work, or even putting hooks by the door so everything is available and convenient are small changes that can lead to big results.  Change can occur even in kids known to struggle in school, but they need those small successes to satisfy the elephant who needs to feel good, and they need “stuff to do” to satisfy the rider, but the pathway and environment are just as critical to success.

IDEO, the legendary design firm, works so well because their template works to make change of systems or design of new products integrate almost seamlessly into the way things are done.  they start out with understanding the problems or issues at hand- really getting to know what’s going on and how the situation isn’t working.  They then observe people using current products, or working with a customer, to understand how things are done now, and to start to get ideas about where a system or process might eb breaking down. Then they start the brainstorming and visualizing possible solutions ot the problem.  They rapidly put together prototypes, and then evaluate and refine what worked or didn’t work with the inital attempts, to tweek and further diagnose what will work in the end.  Then, they take their final product and implement it- what Seth Godin calls “shipping”- because all the greatest ideas in the world are worth nothing if they aren’t actually put into use.  Success means shipping- you’ve got to get the ideas out the door and into the real world- where the rubber meets the road.

While I’m still thinking a lot about Switch, it’s a book that helps me tie together all the separate ideas discussed above:

- how personal change and cultural change aren’t really so different;

-how many people problems can be solved by tweeking external environments and expectations;

-how good design and understanding problems are both key to making change successful,

and how in the end, it’s all measured by the implementation, and satusfying both the numbers people and the emotional folks as well- it’s a good change if people can see the difference and that how they feel about the change may be as critical to the outcome as any other part.   Never short-change the power of dedication, passion and enthusiasm- they will carry you pretty far down even a murky path, provided the obstacles aren’t too big at first.

I would definitely recommend Switch, another excellent book by Chip & Dan Heath- and don’t worry if you don’t love the metaphor of the rider and the elephant.  Like all good mysteries, it makes more sense in the end than in the beginning.

Tags: books, change, chip & dan heath, culture, economics, education, elephant, path, rider, switch

Idealism

At Educon this past weekend, I had many amazing conversations with educators, people interested in education reform, wild-eyed evangelists and more.  But one of the most telling moments was when Gary Stager asked, “When did idealism become a negative adjective?  I tell my grad students- You’re 22- idealistic is exactly what you should be.”

Educon as an “education/technology” conference tends to attract people who are dedicated to making schools all they can be, and others who want to make schools different, but are constantly finding the “Yes, But” in every sentence.

I was left with the impression this weekend that may educators have become real pessimists, and have lost much of their idealism.  After hearing story upon story of teachers having success with students from poor homes, from rotten neighborhoods and the like, you could hear someone remark that that case was the exception to the rule.  It made me think- How many stories of success and learning in relatively impoverished environments do you need before you decide that these stories are not the outliers and the one offs, but actually evidence that children may have potential, even if the deck is stacked against them.

The problem with this viewpoint, of course, is it doesn’t allow you to give up.  It means you have to reach every child, and not just the easy ones, either.  It means you can’t write off the disruptive kid, because with the proper teacher or a more interesting project, that kid might really start to blossom.  If you can, instead, look at some kids as lost causes and assume that you can’t make a significant difference, you get permission to fail and permission to stop trying.

I learned this weekend the real meaning of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Every time someone doesn’t expect a kid to achieve, every time we make a test easier so the passing rate goes up, every time we tell ourselves our school’s test scores are simply the fault of the proportion of ESL kids, or those with IEP’s,  we are short selling our kids and their potential.  We’re using grade inflation to mask any difficulties and let it masquerade as real progress, because that’s politically expedient.  Even if you have kids who don’t seem engaged, does that give you an excuse to stop trying to teach them?  Isn’t this just a way to let teachers off the hook from doing the really hard work required?

While programs like “Race to the Top” sound wonderful, a race also implies winners and losers rather than helping all boats to rise to the top.  I think we have to stop making education a competition. There’s a  competition between teachers and students, where teachers have to exert command and control over kids, and every psych experiment ever done has shown that no one learns well in a coercive environment.  The students push back, and there’s a giant tug of war going on where no one actually ever wins or moves forward.

I want teachers and students and parents to be idealistic about education.  We have to have high dreams and aspirations.  We may fall short of the “perfect goal” but if we never shoot for the target, we have no hope of ever even coming close.

Gary also quoted Seymore Papert, the father of educational computing and founder of the MIT Media Lab, as saying “It’s okay to worry about the work on Monday, as long as it’s also working towards what you need to do someday.”  We need to have the wide angle lens as well as the microscope working at all times, and keep an eye on the bigger mission.

The process of changing and improving education is difficult.  It’s something I’d love to see IDEO try to tackle, because rather that getting potshots from outside, I think education will only improve when people fully understand the problems from the inside out first.  And as long as we keep putting ridiculous pressure on our schools to meet relatively arbitrary standards in an arbitrary period of time, where we measure each classes achievement like a new set of widgets, rather than measuring an individual student’s growth over time, we keep educators locked in Maslowe’s basement, where they are constantly distracted with worry about the “food clothing shelter” aspects of school, and never have the time or the security to have truly higher aspirations of themselves or their students.

I am an idealist about education.  We have all the potential in the world.  We just have to be willing to harness it, to let go of the substantial fear that exists, and feel free to dream and experiment, and be willing to be wrong and try again, all the while keeping the best interests of the kid’s at heart.  It is possible.  It can be done.  But we have to be willing to be idealists, we have to be willing to be disappointed from time to time, and we have to be willing to dust ourselves off and try again as need be.

But mostly, we have to stop seeing Idealism as a pejorative, and instead, embrace it as the thing we should all aspire to become.

Tags: education, education reform, educon, Gary Stager, idealism

First Impressions of Linchpin by Seth Godin

I was one of the lucky early few that signed up by making a donation to the Acumen Fund, to get an advanced copy of Linchpin by  Seth Godin.

Seth has asked people to read it, think about it and give a thoughtful review.  I couldn’t wait to tell you about it until I finished the book- I’ve found myself quoting concepts in the first few chapters to friends  already, so I thought it was time to share.

Seth starts out the book by talking about how the old American dream and template we’ve all been fed is history.  There are tons of people who still believe all you have to do is follow the rules and you’ll get a job where you then follow the rules and get rewarded.  But the bottom line that many folks are finding out is that following the rules has ended up being a sucker’s deal, a bait and switch bargain.  The safety and security of jobs and pensions and retirement at a reasonable age, in reasonable health, where you enjoy a permanent vacation until you die is history, and we just have to accept that.  It sounds harsh, but I think we all know that’s true.

As someone with young kids, I know I have to prepare them for a very different world than the one I grew up in, and  that is both scary and challenging.  They’re going to need flexibility, maintain those qualities of being curious, being creative and innovative problem solvers for the rest of their lives.  With schools still programmed, in many sectors, to produce widgets for giant “work”  machines, how can I counteract this effectively?  Certainly, my kids are growing up exposed to innovative thinkers making their own game every day, but I know I still have to find more opportunities for them to flex these muscles on their own now, so they are willing to do so as they get older as well.

Seth encourages all of us to be creative, to be artists, to become remarkable and indispensable.  I wanted to find an exception to this rule, but I found I can’t.  At first, I thought- well, you know the professions- Doctors, Lawyers- we need those folks to make everything else work- how much real creativity do you have as a physician?  Well, and then I took a closer look at what my husband does every day.  Sure, he’s an OB-GYN, but he’s involved with research, working on projects including looking at fetal growth curves, how they can eventually eliminate prematurity, and other projects that at the heart of them require this creative problem solver mentality.  He has to take everything he knows, figure out the problems that are still there, that cause problems big and small every day, and design research protocols to try to make them better, so each patient coming through his clinic gets the best care possible.  It means getting the doctors and nurses and patients in the practice to consider different schedules, to try new clinics like “birth control before breakfast” and step out of their own comfort zones and potential myopia.  He has to ask people to try to do things differently and make a difference- not just by bringing new people into the world (which is pretty amazing in and of itself) but to be able to do so in a constantly changing environment, with financial pressures, with each patient having their own unique set of problems, and being able to improvise on the fly.  The best doctors do this well, and do become linchpins, not only to their patients, but to their colleagues and institutions where they practice.

I wanted to find some exception to Seth’s rule, being a believer that education and formal college educations are not worthless, but have value beyond memorizing facts. I want to believe we do teach people things in school that matter and its not all about grinding creativity out of people.   But I think becoming a linchpin is not about whether you’ve had any formal training or education in anything- it’s ultimately about taking your cumulative knowledge and experience from every thing you have ever done, and be willing to use all of it, at any time, as tools to solve the next problem.

For example, I started reading Seth Godin and a bunch of books in the “business/management” section of the bookstore, not long after my husband introduced me to Marcus Buckingham and the Strength-based approach to, well, everything.  I rapidly found that all the books in the education and parenting section of the book store, where I frequently spent time, were missing the boat.  The really interesting stuff about managing people, developing them to reach their full potential, and the like were all sitting in the business section.  I realized that running a family is exactly like running a small business, and everything I knew had infinite applications outside of the box one might put them in.  “Pediatric logisitics”- managing kids/people, schedules, activities, performance (grades), camp, and keeping an eye on the larger issues at the same time are all the same skill sets I use in my business, in running Podcamps, in every other aspect of my life as well.

The main point here is this- you have to be a person who strives to make a difference in everything you do.  You have to care.  You need to look out for yourself, but you also can’t afford not to look out for others as well.  You need to be able to use all of your experience, no matter where it’s from, and weave it into a new solution to try and make a change for the better.  There are no more silos.  There are no more boxes.    It’s all about bringing all your resources to bear to try to solve problems big and small, and not being afraid of having a “crazy” idea.  Those crazy ideas in the hands fo the right people, shared with other people who care, mean all sorts of resources can be marshaled and then moving the needle becomes easier than ever.

Thanks, Seth, for the jolt of espresso to my creativity, and for reminding me how important it is to care .  Thanks for the reminder that we have  to be willing to try the “impossible” (which turns out only to be a bit difficult) and can be accomplished if we just try to see the possibilities rather than shut down because it seems risky or scary.

I look forward to the chapters to come.

Tags: creativity, education, linchpin, seth godin, taking risk

Updating Education

I sit on the Technology Committee for our local School District.  We are so very lucky to have a set of tech guys who understand that the world is changing rapidly, and their job is not only to keep the computers and tech infrastructure running, but their job is to see into the future and plan out what the kids in school today will need to know in five to six years when they graduate from school, as well as those poised to graduate this year.  They have a conveyor belt of students that need to be prepared for an ever changing workplace, and these folks need to bring kids, faculty and parents- thousands of people along, hopefully willingly, for the ride.

It’s a big task, and one that’s made more difficult when budgets are tighter than ever.  While there’s a comfort in doing what’s always been done- making the easy, default decision, these folks are actively looking at and starting to use ebooks in the classroom.  They’re realizing that even if the books need to be updated more frequently, it’s cheaper and easier and better than ordering new textbooks once a decade.  (Storage is way easier, too, and it avoids any of that “I lost my book” syndrome forever.)  It means that kids can have access to books as long as they have internet access, and it means making sure that can happen for all kids, not just some of the kids in the District.

This may mean things like moving aggressively on a 1 laptop per student policy(1:1 laptop) in an unfriendly budget cycle, but it also may mean that this is the time to make those tough choices.  It may be time to transition to a system that’s cost-effective long term, saving money on everything from paper to toner to money spent on updating textbooks that are out of date faster and faster than ever before; it may mean making sure local libraries and even the school computer labs function more like community centers or labs in colleges and maintain extended hours.  It’s going to take a whole community effort to make something like this happen, and I think it’s going to end up being more important to our children’s futures than lights at the stadium or other priorities.

I was excited and proud that so many of my freshman son’s classes were using multimedia resources this year.   The kids are creating podcasts, using wikis, making websites- light years beyond what was happening even two or three years ago.  But many parents are still trying to figure out their first ipod, and still think wiki is something you get at a Hawaiian restaurant, so it’s becoming clear this education effort will be truly an education of the entire village.

While I’m starting to come up with my plan on how we can accomplish this, I’d love your suggestions as well.  How would you take your local school district- not just the elementary school, but the middle school and high school, and the parents as well- and bring them up to internet and tech speed in the shortest period of time?  How do you change hearts and minds and make people less afraid?  How do you make people vote with their feet and their wallets and make a six year gradual transition/evolutionary process instead a two to three year revolution, preparing our kids now for what their future holds?

I know we can do it- and at the heart of it, I think it’s more of a marketing problem than anything else- we need to convince people this is not only important, but vital to our future.  What would you do?

Tags: 1:1 laptop program, change, computers, education, KCSD

Understanding Attention

As someone with two kids with ADHD, attention is a big deal to us.  I’ve made it my job to understand how attention works, how to get it, how to focus it, and how sustain it, because this information is vital to helping my kids learn how to learn most effectively.

Turns out, this has a shiny, interesting byproduct- the shift in the advertising and the PR markets is becoming all about how to get and sustain attention.    Whether you are talking about parenting, education, presentations, marketing- aspects of all of these endeavors involves, at its heart, attention.

Every human is equipped with a brain that has been customized by biology and experience over time.  We now know that brains are always changing, forming new connections, pruning out old ones, even after you are an adult.  People’s faces can be encoded on one neuron in your brain.* For everything you read, everything you see, everything you learn, your brain is changed by this process and customized for your needs.

Attention is the system that gets you to focus and possibly encode new information.  Our brains are constantly looking for new information and running complex algorithms to determine whether that thing moving in your peripheral vision is harmless, or a danger.  That’s part of our simplest flight or fight mechanism, and we can’t turn that off.

However, for people with ADHD, that system runs on high alert most times.  Every new and novel stimulus, from the kid dropping a pencil next to you to the teacher writing on the board, to thinking about what’s for lunch are competing for brain space and attention concurrently.  With ADHD, people have more trouble than most in directing their attention to a particular stimuls and tuning out all the others.  I often describe it as trying to watch TV with someone who loves to channel surf.  Just when you are getting into a show, someone comes along and changes the channel, and you don’t have the remote. Very annoying.

You get lots of little pieces of information this way, but integrating it into a coherent whole can be difficult.  When you attention keeps switching to pay attention up to each novel piece of information, you can lose a grip on the story line, and having to refocus can take time.  Medication for ADHD essentially gives people back the remote control, and their brains become a bit better at prioritizing what needs immediate attention and what can wait in line.

Attention essentially lets us decide what piece of information we can work on in our “working memory”- basically your mind’s lab bench.  You can work on problems, write, solve  math problems- but sooner or later, that project is going to need to be put away or stored, so you can move on to the next thing.  Some things get trashed, others get put away for short term or long term storage- and the more interesting things are, the more other pieces of information or relevant connections you can make to the new information, the more “copies” are put away in different folders in your brain.  Each time you think about your mom’s cookies for example, you not only can get to this memory from thinking about your mom, seeing a picture, but even seeing a silimar cookie or smelling cookies in the oven can bring this full memory back in all of its sensory glory.    This memory has many connections, so you can retrive it from many different storage places, so to speak.

Attention is something we all want.  Emotionally, it validates us as people.  It allows us to make deeper and more meaningful connections.  But if you overload the attention service, things become chaotic- the lab bench has too much stuff going on, and your brain can go so far as to boil over – many temper tantrums in adults and kids are caused by attention buffers beging overloaded and going into meltdown, or in entreme cases, people simply go to sleep to knock out the background noise, explaining why babies often simply go to sleep even in noisy shopping malls- their attention system gets overloaded, they get cranky, and respond by shutting off and sleeping.

If you really want to get ahead in the world of marketing, in the world of PR, presentation, education- whatever, really- it wouldn’t hurt to start by understanding how you can get and then focus the inborn attention mechanism we all have.  Then you can start to figure out how to sustain it, encode information into memory, and make it useful and relevant for your audience.

John Medina has a great book out about the Brain that I really think everyone should read- it’s called Brain Rules, and I have links to it below.  You could do worse than to learn how to use and manipulate the one tool every human has with them every day.

*See Brain Rules, by John Medina, for more in depth discussion about the brain and science- I’m really enjoying the Audible version.  His website is incredibly helpful as well.

Tags: ADHD, analogies, attention, brain rules, education, focus, John medina, marketing, PR