Community Safety Leadership
The Rider, the Elephant and the Path: What Community Safety Taught Me About Change
Why people are not always resisting change. Sometimes we have simply made the journey unnecessarily difficult.
One of the models I still come back to, across very different parts of community safety work, is the Rider, the Elephant and the Path from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
I find it useful not because it is complicated, but because it is honest about something that community safety leaders often get wrong: the assumption that when people do not change, they are resisting.
The Model
The Heath brothers describe change as involving three elements. The Rider is the rational, analytical part of us that can understand direction and follow logic. The Elephant is the emotional, instinctive part that provides the energy and motivation to actually move. The Path is the environment, the route, the conditions that make the desired behaviour possible or impossible in practice.
When change fails, we tend to blame the Elephant. We say people are resistant, disengaged, unwilling. But the Rider may not have been given clear enough direction. The Elephant may not have been given a genuine reason to care. And the Path may have been so difficult that even motivated, capable people could not navigate it.
What This Looks Like in Community Safety
Think about a new referral pathway, a revised risk process, or a change to how information is recorded across a partnership. These are the kinds of changes that community safety leaders introduce regularly.
When they do not take hold, the conversation often turns quickly to training, reminders and performance management. Occasionally that is the right response. But often, if you look more carefully, the problem is somewhere else entirely.
The Rider may not have clear direction. Do people understand what is changing and why? Do they know what good looks like under the new approach? Have they been told clearly what they are expected to do differently, and what they should stop doing? Ambiguity is not the same as resistance.
The Elephant may not have a reason to move. Do people believe the change will make things better? Do they trust the reason it is being introduced? Do they feel safe enough to try something new, knowing they might make mistakes while they are learning? Change that is announced without explanation, or that arrives alongside other pressures, often fails not because people disagree with it but because they have no emotional reason to invest in it.
The Path may be making the change impossible. This is the one that community safety leaders most often overlook. Consider how many processes in multi-agency work involve too many steps, confusing forms, multiple incompatible systems, contradictory instructions from different organisations, unclear thresholds, no feedback on whether the action worked, and genuine uncertainty about who owns what when something goes wrong.
Sometimes people are not resisting the destination. We have simply made the journey unnecessarily difficult.
The Leadership Question
Before describing somebody as resistant to change, it is worth asking three questions.
Is the direction clear? Not just communicated, but genuinely understood. There is a difference between sending an email and creating understanding.
Is there enough reason to care? Not just a business case, but a genuine human reason to invest effort in doing something differently. People change when they believe the change matters, not just when they are told it is policy.
Have we made the change possible in practice? Have we looked at the actual steps involved and asked honestly whether a busy practitioner, working across multiple systems and multiple partners, can realistically do what we are asking?
What I Have Learnt
My thinking on this has changed over the years. Earlier in my career, I was more likely to interpret slow uptake as a people problem. Experience has taught me to look at the whole picture first.
The Rider, the Elephant and the Path is not a framework that removes accountability. People do sometimes resist change for reasons that need to be addressed directly. But it is a framework that asks leaders to be honest about their own contribution to the difficulty before placing the problem entirely with the people they are trying to lead.
In community safety, where change is constant and the stakes are high, that honesty matters.
Explore the 4P Community Safety Leadership Framework
This article sits within the Lead People domain of the 4P Community Safety Leadership Framework, which explores how leaders develop capability, manage performance and create the conditions for good practice.
Written by
Wendy