FDE Times: Switch by Chip and Dan Heath — why users understand the new system and still go back
A Nov 4 FDE Times review of the Heath brothers’ 2010 change book maps Rider, Elephant and Path onto post-go-live abandonment. For FDEs the Path matters most: change defaults and environment so the new workflow is the path of least effort.
Three weeks after a smooth demo and training, logs often show users back on spreadsheets. FDE Times argues Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch (2010) explains that failure better than most architecture guides: reason (the Rider) and emotion (the Elephant) compete, and both travel a Path you can reshape.
Using an invoice-reconciliation agent as the running example, the review maps three failure modes—missing clarity (“approve high-confidence pairs every morning”), missing early wins (ten pairs in session one, not three thousand), and an environment that still makes export the easy path. FDEs control the Path through configuration: open the review screen by default, bury the spreadsheet export, sit with two or three influential hands-on users in week one.
Read the book by sorting each story into Rider, Elephant or Path, then note a matching config change. Measure before and after: what share of pairs are approved in-system versus exported. A deployment is finished only when users no longer want the old way.
Source: fdetimes.net