Troubled times set the tone for change in business and in life. Yet, there remains some fairly depressing cultural wisdom about change that suggests it's hard to teach the proverbial old dog new tricks, said Chip Heath at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

Heath, Stanford University professor and the co-author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, contends that mastering change is a task that forces us to recognize the two warring sides of our brains: emotional and analytical.

The emotional side likes the existing routine and is like a big elephant; whereas the analytical side is akin to a small human rider who can only hope to steer the elephant in one direction rather than another, aware that the sheer strength of the elephant could really power it along any course it wishes.

The key to implementing a change agenda is providing direction to the human rider (analytical side) of the brain, or provide motivation for the elephant (emotional side), and shaping the path to make the change journey easier to experience.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing those who want to drive change is the mandate of motivating the elephant, which is something often ignored even by innovators. Heath cited the example of a procurement officer frustrated by the reality that his company was purchasing 424 different kinds of gloves for its workers to do their jobs.

"He tried to connect emotionally with all of his management team," Heath recalled. So, when he got his chance at a meeting, rather than take out his computer, he laid out many of the gloves his company was using — with their price tags still attached — and asked his managers to peruse them. It didn't take long, until they realized just how many kinds of gloves there were, similar gloves with varying prices.

The reaction? "This is crazy" and "We can fix this!" By using the gloves as an example, the procurement leader won management support to pick just three types of gloves at agreed prices from preferred vendors, and to scour the rest of the organization for similar examples of waste and inefficiency.

"If you want to change, find the feeling," Heath said.

Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.

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