July 23, 2023

Change, whether we desire it or not, is something we all experience.

In the book, “Switch: how to change things when change is hard”, brothers Chip and Dan Heath describe 3 components to creating successful change:

  1. Directing the Rider (the Rider being the planning, future-thinking, analyzing part of the brain)
  2. Motivating the Elephant (the Elephant being the emotional, instinctive, lazy, skittish part of the brain)
  3. Shaping the Path

Once the Rider has a clear direction, and the emotional Elephant has been triggered and feels motivated to change, the key to making change easier to adopt is to make the “right” (desirable) behaviors easier to make, and the “wrong” (undesirable) behaviors more difficult.

Often when we approach change, we assume people are the problem when actually the situation or environment is the challenge. Shaping the path is about shaping the situation or environment to support your desired change or behavior.

Here’s an example of shaping the path that’s shared in the book:

Studies show that at movie theatres, the bigger the bucket of popcorn someone has, the more popcorn they will eat. If we want to change that behavior (not eating as much popcorn) our instinct might be to teach people to make healthier choices so they eat less popcorn. However, what might be more successful is just giving people smaller buckets of popcorn so there is less to eat!

We shape the path, changing the situation, to help people be more successful in their effort to change.

What about in our digital lives?

Thousands of people across the world are using Notion for:

And much more. However, if you’ve dabbled in Notion at all, you’ve probably realized that simply inputting information into an app does not mean you’re suddenly a pro task manager, star student, or consistent with your goals. It’s easy for Notion to become an online filing cabinet full of pages and pages of information that isn’t easily accessible or greatly leveraged.