Why Change Is So Difficult
Posted on 02. Jun, 2010 by Dennis Crosby in Marketing
I recently started a book that I found absolutely fascinating. The topic of the book was about how what it takes to get people to change their habits. I do realize there are thousands of books out their about the same topics and I have read quite a few of them. The reason “Switch” stood out to me (outside of the fact that my company’s name is “Shift”, so I had to look) was because it simplified and laid out the concept of change in a way that was easy to implement. Although the book covers a multitude of topics, for the purpose of this article, I will stick to just one.
The conflict between the elephant and the rider:
This is the symbolism of the feelings that everyone gets when they make strides for self improvement. The rider (your rational side) decides that this decision is what is best for you. This falls into all aspects of life; diets, traveling, learning a new language, etc. You make a choice to improve an aspect of your life and the rider tells the elephant to go that direction.
This is where the problem comes in. The elephant (your emotional and impulsive side), is just as the names suggest, a huge animal. The rider can tell it to go and in some cases can force it to go temporarily, but if the elephant decides it wants to go another way, the rider will always lose. That is why to make a change, you have to appeal to both the rider and the elephant (without the rider, the elephant has no direction).
When it comes to business, many people are resistant to change. Whether it be a new product/service, reorganization, process optimization or whatever else you can think of. As a marketer, I see this repeatedly. A company requests a way to stand out and bring in new customers that is “new, fresh, amazing” and you deliver exactly what they ask. The only problem is that, when the see the amount of change necessary, they panic. It’s just too different from what they are used to! I now realize that although we have satisfied the elephant, we have neglected the rider.
Now that I have a fresh understanding of this problem, I have taken steps to minimize this from happening.
What can you do?
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