Behaviour change happens most effectively when you {......}
a) Have Better Knowledge
b) Change Beliefs
c) Develop Skills
According to May 2024 research from the University of Pennsylvania, if you chose any of these, you’d be wrong.
Let me back up before we dive into the findings on what is the single most effective factor to drive behavior change.
What I hear: The single biggest challenge from organisations, large and small is we need to change and do things differently.
I hear these words daily…
“We need to be more agile”,
“We need to be more resilient”
“We need to drive transformation”
The global backdrop is common knowledge. The last five years have presented organisations with extraordinary challenges from Covid to adapting to using AI, to political polarisation, global conflicts, and climate change.
No one contests the fact THAT we need behaviour change.
What is and should be open to debate is HOW we drive behaviour change.
This is where the latest May 2024 research, summarising the insights from 145 research papers comes in.
It’s a detailed review of the literature on what determines behaviour and what is most effective at creating behaviour change.
The punch line is that focusing on changing habits where people make a change to their automated routines is the single most important shift
The research studied the relative impact of the most common factors thought to drive behaviour change. They include:
Knowledge: a collection of facts about an object of behavior, typically held with certainty, even though they may be factually incorrect;
Beliefs: probability judgments about an object, such as a virus, in connection with an attribute;
Attitudes: evaluations, that pertain to objects (i.e., general attitudes), such as fruits and vegetables, or behaviors (i.e., behavioral attitudes), such as eating fruits and vegetables
Emotions: visceral feelings, such as happiness or anger with an object or behavior
Skills: routines with general skills involving cognitive skills involved in self-control and specific skills involving domain-specific cognitive or motor skills.
Habits: involving repeated, automated behaviors that continue even in the absence of rewards.
Diving deeper, the hierarchy of what is most effective is shown in this picture:
Habits were the clear winner when it came to making interventions to create change.
It makes sense that past behavior is an important precursor of future behavior.
Interventions to train habits are clearly promising and, among all individual targets, demonstrate the strongest impact on behavioral change.
It’s time for a Rethink
It’s time to rethink how we lead.
It’s time to rethink how we think about change.
It’s time to focus on the micro to drive the macro.
What worked before is out of date.
These are the ideas I explore in depth in The Big Bold Mindset®.
The core idea of that book is that you can’t navigate a new world using an old set of charts.
Whilst of course, I’d recommend diving into the 21 principles in that book, let me get very practical and real with some things to experiment with right now.
So what can you do to change your habits, and those for you as a team?
Here’s three ideas for you to experiment with:
Personal. Think about a personal habit you want to develop. It could be something you already do and want to do more of. It could be something you want to do less of.
Grab a sheet of paper. Write it on the left hand side. Across the top of the sheet write the days of the week…Monday, Tuesday etc.
Now put it somewhere where you will see it everyday. Tick it off each time you do it.
Whether it’s drinking more water, exercising more, making time for family, reading or anything else, creating a simple visual accountability tool will make it more likely to happen.
Team. Have a discussion as a team around something you could do better. Explore some ideas and pick one simple ritual you all agree to commit to.
Nominate one person to initiate a discussion each week/ fortnight / month.
Some simple work ones could be Values Prizes - for us a quick 5 minute discussion each week to notice who has lived the values in a notable or interesting way.
Another one could be an Experiments Discussion - canvasing ideas to find fresh ways to tackle your challenges.
Try to aim to keep the process simple. Nothing kills a habit faster than complexity!
3. Identity. One central idea to making behaviour change stick is around the story we have of ourselves - Psychologists refer to this idea as having a flexible identity.
In the film, Darkest Hour about Winston Churchill and an important turning point in the war, there is a very revealing line from Churchill.
As he prepares to take the mantle for his greatest challenge yet, he stands in front of his hat rack and asks himself the question:
What self shall I be today?
He then selects the appropriate hat and walks out of the door.
It’s a moment in which he shows the power of having different identities. Identities and stories that we can use to empower us in different scenarios.
These things don’t happen by accident. They are as a result of thinking through the different parts of your life and who you need to be in each different situation.
Your Experiment: write out a script for an evolved identity, an evolved story of you - the person who embraces your new habits. Who is that person and how they (you) show up in the world. Imagine acting and living that way. Is it be the type of person who exercises regularly, or the type of person who is more thoughtful at work, or the person who is helping others to achieve their potential.
The Punchline
If you want to create lasting change, focus on habits. The small rituals and shifts that we can all make every day. This is the key to achieving the things that matter most to you. Focus on Habits.