Chip HeathFriday, October 23, 2009
Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is the co-author of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which has been a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller. Chip is also a columnist for Fast Company magazine, and he has spoken and consulted on the topic of "making ideas stick" with organizations such as Nike, the Nature Conservancy, Microsoft, Ideo, and the American Heart Association.
Chip's research examines why certain ideas—ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths—survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas.
Chip has taught courses on Organizational Behavior, Negotiation, Strategy, and International Strategy. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Heath taught at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He received his B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford.
How To Change Things When Change Is Hard
It has been said the only thing in life that is constant is change. This is especially true in an economic turndown. Whether you're managing costs or leading a church, change pushes us beyond what's comfortable.
All change, at root, requires people to behave differently: members of your church need to reach out more enthusiastically to visitors, a shy child needs to become more outgoing, an employee on a production line needs to start looking for ways to save costs. Yet changing behavior is hard, as evidenced by anyone who's ever tried to start an exercise program or train a teenager. This session will present a framework for changing how people act, even in the toughest circumstances.
We'll see case studies that include a man who helped solve the malnutrition problem in the poorest of poor Vietnamese villages (without a budget for food), an entrepreneur running a boring technical services business who turned his employees into customer service zealots, a short intervention that reversed the decline in math scores among junior high students at an academically underperforming middle school, and a simple method that dramatically increased food drive donations among a population that had been specially nominated as least likely to donate.
Session 1 (8:30 – 10:00am CST)
How Your Organization Can Change: The Pattern of Successful Changes
Many change initiatives fail because leaders do not recognize the basic pattern by which change happens. This session will introduce that simple three-part pattern. And we'll consider the answer to the first key question of change: How do you getpeople moving—quickly—to address a change that needs to be made? Sure, people may realize the problems you face, but how do they get ideas about how to solve the problems? We'll discuss how to prevent "analysis paralysis"-convening yet another task force that will commission yet another study to collect more information. We'll see how a troubled teen went from failing to succeeding in most of his class periods through a quick, low-impact intervention, and how a small non-profit saved over 100,000 lives by changing the practices of hospitals across the country—over which they had absolutely no authority.
Break
Session 2 (10:15 – 11:45am CST)
Motivating People to Change
You don't need a title or specific position to make change happen at every level in your organization. This session will identify specific ways to motivate organizations, teams or individuals to change. The current system is familiar and safe even if it isn't working, so inertia is strong and big changes can seem overwhelming. How do you overcome inertia or status quo bias? How do you insulate people against inevitable setbacks? We'll see how the most successful design firm in the world prepares its teams for the inevitable depressing moments in any design process and how one duo changed the work habits of their most curmudgeonly colleague who was known, not affectionately, to his coworkers as Attila the Accountant.
Lunch - Provided onsite (11:45am-12:45pm CST)
Session 3 (12:45 – 2:15pm CST)
Working the Situation
We often make the mistake of thinking we have a people problem when we actually have a situation problem. That's good news because situations are frequently easier to fix than people. Child-proof medicine caps make it near-impossible for kids to get into their parents' medicines by accident. What's the "child-proof medicine cap" equivalent for you? Is there a way of making the old behavior that you're trying to change impossible to continue? We'll see an entrepreneur improve customer service by making it impossible for his employees to ignore customers. We'll also discuss how to use social dynamics to support your change. People are social animals and the actions of others matter. How do you create a culture that gets momentum toward change on your side? We'll see how a hospital managed to change an engrained practice with a history of decades by creating "free spaces" for reform-minded interns.
Break
Session 4 (2:30pm – 4:00pm CST)
Change Workshop
In this session we'll tackle some of your own changes and use the discussed framework to suggest ways of solving them. Come prepared with an idea of something you'd like to change—in your workplace, in your church, or in your community—and we'll use the wisdom of the group, facilitated by Chip Heath, to apply the change framework and suggest some change advice for your own challenge.
