Habits

What does it take to change? To adopt new behaviours, drop bad ones, eat better, exercise, start a new business, learn a new skill etc etc

There is a chasm. Between motivation and actual behaviour change, there is a chasm. Be it personal or organizational. Crossing that chasm takes more than motivation. It takes a series of actions done every day. A lot of books, on self-help or organizational change cover the why and the what, but rarely the how.

There were a few things in my life that needed changing. Namely, I wanted to get fitter, start meditating and this i.e write regularly. In 2021 (hello lockdown) I did a deep dive on habits. Well, as deep a dive as I could go. I read three books: Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, James Clear’s Atomic habits and B.J Fogg’s Tiny Habits.

This post is an attempt to examine what habits really are and pull out nuggets from these three books that I found useful. This post merely scratches the surface so if you are after a deep dive, I highly recommend all three.

Why Habits

Personally, because there were changes I needed to make. I wanted to start a regular writing habit, start meditating and my guitar was lying in its case for…15 yrs. Meanwhile what I was doing was spending too much time on my phone..and spending too much time in the evenings going down YouTube and Netflix rabbit holes. In 2020 it came to a head when work shifted virtually and all the zoom meetings and added screen time short-circuited a few wires and I had trouble sleeping and was constantly exhausted. And those freaking memes about Newton discovering calculus or Shakespeare writing King Lear during a plague weren’t helping? I had read Charles Duhigg’s book a couple of years ago and loved it, but reading Atomic habits and Tiny Habits were game-changers. Let’s dig in…

Firstly, what is a habit? According to James Clear: “A habit is a routine or behaviour that is performed regularly — and in many cases, automatically”

The Elements

What is the make-up of a habit? The process of building a habit can be divided into cue, craving, response, reward. Charles Duhigg in his book combined craving+response into routine but same same.

Fig 1: The Habit loop

Cue: A trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode. It’s the bit of information that predicts a reward

Craving: The motivation to act…without which we have no reason to act. Important note: What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers

Response: Your action; could be a thought or an action..it also depends on your ability to do the thing. If the action requires a more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won’t do it.

Reward: The end goal. The reason for all these shenanigans. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us

Over time, this loop: cue, routine and reward becomes more and more automatic. For better or worse (ahem..doom scrolling). The cue and reward systems become intertwined and release a powerful sense of anticipation and craving.

There are 3 sections themes I want to cover in this post:

1. Keystone
2. Behaviour
3. Identity

I got interested in habits because there were aspects of my behaviour that I wanted to tweak but what’s interesting is that it’s not just individuals whose behaviours can be tweaked, it’s organizations as well and that’s what we will look at first.

Keystone…Or the View from the Top*

In 1987, Paul O’Neil was brought in as the new CEO of the Aluminium Company of America — or Alcoa. Alcoa as a company wasn’t in the best of shape. They made a few managerial missteps that ate into their profits. As an ex-government bureaucrat, Paul O’Neil was seen as an odd choice to lead a massive corporation back into profitability.

The puzzlement turned to shock at the first investor meeting.

Paul O’Neil took the stage and rather than espouse the usual new-CEO BS of boosting profits, lowering costs, being proactive about synergy etc etc etc. Instead, he said that his intention was to make Alcoa the safest company in America. That is, the goal would be zero injuries.

Here’s what he said:

“If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. If we bring our injury rates down it won’t be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you hear from other CEOs. It will be because the individuals of this company have agreed to become part of something important. They’ve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. Safety will be an indicator that we’re making progress in changing our habits across the entire institution. That’s how we should be judged.”

Apparently, some investors stampeded out the door and sold their Alcoa stock thinking that this crazy hippie would run the company into the ground..but within a year of O’Neill’s speech, Alcoa’s profits hit a record high. Oh and Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world.

O’Neil was able to transform Alcoa into a profitable company and a bastion of safety by attacking one habit and then watching changes ripple through the organization.

This is a Keystone Habit, a habit that has the power to start a chain reaction..changing other habits as they move through the organization or your life. They start a process that over time transforms everything.

Safety: The Keystone:

Safety as a catalyst of change was that rare thing. It was something that worker unions and executives could both agree was important. Also key to having no injuries was to understand the why i.e why injuries happened in the first place, to understand that you had to understand the how i.e how manufacturing processes were going wrong; to understand how and where the processes were inefficient and quality control was askew. Once you recognize and fix all of that you get the best, most streamlined aluminium manufacturing company on Earth. A company that leads to less wastage, zero injuries, happy employees and increased processes.

Below is O’Neill’s safety plan modelled on the habit loop:

1. Cue: An employee injury
2. Craving (or motivational force): Quick response is the new policy and if it's not adhered to there would be serious consequences
3. Response: Anytime someone was injured, the unit president had to report to O’Neil himself within 24 hours and present a plan making sure the same type of injury would never happen again
4. Reward: You got promoted if you embraced the system

The power of the Keystone:

Once a keystone is in place it starts to trickle down and affect all sorts of areas. When Zero Safety was set in motion at Alcoa, executives had to hear about acceding from the floor as soon as they happened, so new communication systems had to be put in place. Productivity of individual workers had to be tracked to figure out when part of the manufacturing process was getting out of whack posing a safety risk. Workers were given autonomy to shut down a production line if the pace became overwhelming. Aspects of the company’s rigid hierarchy began to shift, culture improved, costs came down, quality went up and productivity soared.

The power of the Keystone is that an initial top down shift starts a chain reaction that helps other good habits and behaviours take hold. The keystone guides small wins, they help other habits to flourish by creating new structures and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious.

How about in the lives of individuals rather than corporations? Take Exercise. Studies have shown that exercise seems to have all sorts of spillover benefits. People who start exercising habits change in unrelated areas of their lives. They start eating better, becoming more productive at work, feel less stress and show more patience with patience and family. If you focus on cultivating Keystone habits, you could cause widespread shifts for yourself and your organization.

From the bottom UP**

…but where to start? The answer: Start Small

The problem with a keystone habit is knowing what. Even then the prospect could seem overwhelming (eg running a marathon). And as stated earlier there is a chasm between knowing and doing. There is a saying “if information was the answer we would all be billionaires with six-pack abs)”

According to BJ Fogg there are 3 ways to create lasting change: Have an epiphany, change your environment, change in tiny ways. Number 1 is magical thinking, 2 and 3 are possible. Let’s look at 3

The crux is this: if you want long term change, or start the thing you have been putting off, take whatever that is, make it tiny, find where its fits naturally in your life and nurture its growth. The important thing is taking action, one small step. This might seem silly at first but it gives you something that is more important than willpower or motivation: Momentum. Once you have that you can ramp up. But let’s assume you don’t. Let’s assume you stay tiny. You spend one minute on whatever you want to cultivate. After 1 year you would’ve spent 365 minutes..and that’s progress

The Fogg Behavior Model:

What the hell is behaviour anyway? It’s an action that follows a prompt (most of the time subconsciously), collect a bunch of these and you have a habit. So to hack your habits you need (talking to myself here) to get to the root cause.

Enter the Fogg Behavioral Model:

B = M A P

A behaviour is happy when the three elements of M A P — Motivation, Ability and Prompt come together at the same moment. Ability is your capacity to do the behaviour and prompt is your cue to do the behaviour. The key here is that M A P has to come together.

Let’s go through a quick example

In 2010, the earthquake in Haiti hit and it was devastating. You are motivated to help. You get a text from the Red Cross, inviting you to help. You respond to the text with your donation. To break that down:

Behaviour: Donating via text in response to the earthquake in Haiti

Motivation: High i.e you really want to help

Ability (A): It’s super easy to respond to a text

Prompt (P): The text message was the prompt

Again M A P needs to be in sync. If you really wanted to help but you were at the gym and didn’t have your credit card with you..the moment would’ve passed i.e motivation + prompt but ability was lacking. Or you got something in the mail but threw it away thinking it was junk: motivation+ability but no prompt.

Stay above the Line:

Below is the visual representation of B = MAP for the above example.

If the motivation is sufficiently high, and the behaviour is easy enough it gets done?

However if one of those is out of whack the behaviour falls in a heap. For example, my motivation to wake up tomorrow and run a marathon might be sky high but my ability to do so.. let’s just say is negligible. Similarly, my ability to wash the dishes after dinner is top-notch. But my motivation…

See that curved ‘Action Line’ — that line is your friend. The job of Behaviour Change is to stay above it.

Let’s get into a real-world example. I wanted to start meditating. My goal was 20 minutes a day when I wake up. Let’s plot this out:

This was below the line because jumping into 20 minutes was tough. The problem was ability. So I pushed it way to the right of the scale, I made it super easy. My new goal, meditate for 1 minute when I wake up

So I did that for a week. Then increased it to two minutes..and within a few weeks, I got to 20.

The other important factor is that the reverse is also true. If there is a behaviour you would like to stop..push it below the line. Make it harder to perform, increase the number of steps that the behaviour requires to take, keep it out of sight etc

Some thoughts on Motivation and Emotion

Motivation unfortunately is not the true engine of behaviour change. Out of the 3 elements of behaviour change (M, A, P), motivation is the most fickle and cannot be relied upon. Finding the right carrot to dangle in front of yourself for the most part isn’t going to work.

Motivation cannot be relied upon mainly for 3 reasons:

1. It’s complex: What really gets you motivated? Is it intrinsic? Is it fear of punishment? Is it context?
2. Motivation comes in waves: High levels of motivation are scattershot and unsustainable and we constantly overestimate our future motivation (..ahem new year’s resolutions). Also, willpower decreases from morning to evening, so complex decisions get harder later in the day
3. The Abstraction: Heath, Wealth, Fulfillment at work. These are wonderful things to achieve..but they are also abstractions..and motivating yourself towards an abstraction is not the ticket to long term change.

All of this to say that you cannot rely on high levels of motivation for behaviour change, and by focusing on motivation you will be ignoring the two key components of what really drives behaviour. Ability + Prompt. And by doing that you focus on behaviours that can be done in the moment (e.g. turn off your phone and meditate for a minute) as opposed to aspirations. This is not to say we shouldn’t aspire. As a species we are dreamers..and we should reach for those moonshots. But you can only achieve those moonshots if you execute the right behaviours repeatedly i.e bring that aspiration down to earth, focus on the ‘how to’, design your environment for a prompt and to make the ability easy..and start small?!

On Emotion

Behaviour change or creating new habits is tough. It takes a lot of trial and error…and through this process it's important to be kind to yourself. Feelings of guilt and shame are not helpful to the process. If you have fallen off the horse get back on again. If you have fallen off again..get back on again. And celebrate your wins..literally high five yourself or fist-bump the air. The feeling of accomplishment no matter how small is the magic ingredient.

As B.J Fogg says in his book ‘When you celebrate effectively you tap into the reward circuitry of your brain. By feeling good at the right moment you cause your brain to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviours you just performed. The definition of a reward in behaviour science is an experience directly tied to a behaviour that makes that behaviour more likely to happen again’

So be kind to yourself, get back on the horse and celebrate your wins

Identity ***

A question I have asked myself is why am I writing about habits here? This website and blog aren’t so much about personal development as it is about giving light to unexplored ideas that affect our working life. However, a big part of this is around meaningful work and an exploration of what that is and how to achieve that. Thinking of my own personal journey it wasn’t so much knowing what I had to do or how to go about doing what I needed to do or even why I needed to do it. It was who I needed to be. It was a question of identity and mindset.

As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits “Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe”

When deciding on what habits to change or adopt, it’s not so much what you want to achieve but who you want to become. Behind every system of actions is a system of beliefs. So you need to:

1. Decide the type of person you want to be
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins

So that:

• Each time you write a page, you are a writer
• Each time you practice an instrument, you are a musician
• Each time you make a courageous decision or encourage a colleague you are a leader
• Each time you solve a problem and bring value to someone else you are an entrepreneur

Unfortunately, this works in the other direction as well. Every action that leads to a bad habit is a vote for that identity. The good news is that nothing is 100%. Like any election, you just need a majority of votes to ‘win’. So like I’ve stated before be kind to yourself, if a few votes go in the bad behaviour bucket, it’s OK

Conclusion

“Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine”

Why habits? I’ve always been interested in change..in stories of how great corporations became great or of how individuals achieved the impossible. And that’s where they remained..in the realm of stories. When it came to my own life and business things seemed stuck. As I mentioned in the introduction there was a chasm that needed to be crossed. What I learned through this exploration of habits is that building a bridge across that chasm doesn’t take motivation or intellectualization of any kind but starting..doing and then keep doing in whatever capacity (i.e tiny). But decide who you want to be or what your organization stand for. And then decide what is the smallest step towards that identity.

Thank you for reading. Please check out my ONE IDEA newsletter, where I do a weekly deep-dive on one idea that challenges the status quo. Subscribe here: https://www.disruptivebusinessnetwork.com/

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*This section is adapted from Chapter 4 in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

** Adapted from various sections of Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

*** Adapted from various sections of Atomic habits by James Clear