Quotes About Adaptation

Don Berwick, with his 75-person team at IHI, had convinced thousands of hospitals to change

To change someone's behavior, you've got to change that person's situation.

Tweaking the environment is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder.

Our three-ring binders won't change a thing. But a little humor and humanity might. December

sometimes in times of change, nobody knows how to behave, and that can lead to problems.

In this chapter, we've seen that what looks like a "character problem" is often correctible when you change the environment.

A business cliché commands us to "raise the bar." But that's exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over. If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.

You can't script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It's the critical moves that count. Recall

If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.

The more instinctive a behavior becomes, the less self-control from the Rider it requires, and thus the more sustainable it becomes.

once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they're acting.

Identity is going to play a role in nearly every change situation.

Big changes can happen.

So when you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that's just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage," became the most e-mailed article on the Times website in 2006, and it led to a book on the same topic.

in situations where change is needed, too much analysis can doom the effort. The Rider will see too many problems and spend too much time sizing them up.

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Change isn't an event; it's a process.

So if one of your stars leaves, you can simply wish him the best of luck on his new bus. And then grow another star to take his place. May

Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don't like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they're acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they'll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment.

Even in failure there is success.

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You

It's clear that we imitate the behaviors of others, whether consciously or not. We are especially keen to see what they're doing when the situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous. And change situations are, by definition, unfamiliar! So if you want to change things, you have to pay close attention to social signals, because they can either guarantee a change effort or doom it.