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Three Surprises About Change
How can three surprises about change improve people, teams, or organisational effectiveness?
Contents
A diagnostic lens that reframes resistance, laziness, and people problems as clarity, exhaustion, and situation problems.
Three Surprises About Change is a diagnostic for moments when desired behaviour is not appearing. It challenges the easy conclusion that people are resistant, lazy or simply the problem and replaces those labels with three testable explanations: unclear direction, depleted motivation and an environment that favours the old behaviour.
When to use it
- Diagnose a stalled change before assigning blame.
- Distinguish a direction problem from a motivation problem.
- Test whether the environment is shaping behaviour more strongly than personal intention.
- Design a balanced intervention for the Rider, Elephant and Path.
Origins
The three surprises are part of Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch framework, which combines ideas from behavioural science and social psychology into a practical approach to change. The diagnostic connects the rational Rider, emotional Elephant and surrounding Path: behaviour can stall because the Rider lacks clarity, the Elephant is exhausted or the Path makes the desired action unnecessarily difficult.
What it is
Each “surprise” converts a character judgement into a design question. What appears to be
- resistance
- may actually be a lack of clarity, so the Rider needs an unambiguous destination and next move. What appears to be
- laziness
- may be exhaustion, so the Elephant needs emotion, confidence and a manageable beginning. What appears to be a
- people problem
- may be a situation problem, so the Path needs different cues, defaults, friction or social signals.
These explanations are hypotheses, not excuses. Their value is practical: each diagnosis leads to a different intervention and can be tested against observable behaviour.
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