“Big things have small beginnings.”
David, Prometheus
IF you want a hassle-free food-shopping experience sans queues while visiting Barcelona (outside of the hottest of tourist spots), go between 1.30pm and 3.30pm. The time traditionally reserved for siesta may not actually involve many naps these days but it’s certainly not the time when Catalans go to the supermarket.
Clearly defined daily habits such as these surprised us both when we first came to live in Spain, in contrast to the UK and US, where patterns of movement in society are less clear. After living in Barcelona a number of years, one may pick up on certain other habits that allow an effective strategy to be put in place, depending on your needs. Feel like an atmosphere-rich breakfast? Go to the local café for a café amb llet at 10am. Want to go to the beach when people from Barcelona actually outnumber tourists? Head down at 4pm and stick around for an aperitif as you watch the sun going down. Feel like exploring further afield and the gorgeous Costa Brava north of the city? Just stay off the roads between 4-6pm on Fridays and 6-8pm on Sundays and you’ll ensure an average speed above 5km/h.
Such knowledge of societal habits and cultural norms allows you to take the best bits of living in a city that can feel surprisingly intimate – even though it is populated by 1.6 million people and most of its square kilometres house more than 20,000 people.
Technology is increasingly being used to uncover such patterns and exploit the insights. In fact, 80% of data now has a location component – yet only 10% of it is used in decision-making. CARTO is a location-intelligence platform that allows the user to find tangible outcomes in their location data. For city planners, such information allows them to target advertising campaigns for exhibitions, provide additional public bus routes or even decide which languages to provide services in at certain tourism offices across the city. Florence Broderick, who works in solutions mar- keting at CARTO, shared her thoughts on the value of such data:
“Before the era of the smartphone and IoT, we relied on surveys to understand citizen and tourist behaviour, asking small samples of people to declare their habits and preferences. Now we can understand a city’s real-time pulse, observing behaviour in an anonymized and aggregated way to drive city decision-making – making the most of the fact 95% of people keep their smartphone with a one-metre reach 24 hours a day. Everything happens somewhere, and leading smart cities, such as Barcelona, are making location intelligence a cornerstone of their governance strategies for that reason.”
Habits form culture
Identifying such well-defined behavioural patterns in the workplace may not be as easy. At least those that have the biggest potential to improve wellbeing and performance. For this reason, we believe it’s important to look at the discrete, individual level of habits. By empowering people with a knowledge of how to either build new positive habits, or stop a more damaging one in its tracks, we may help build high-performing teams.
Habits in the workplace can have a significant impact on an organizational as well as individual level. Habits form routines and behaviour, which form culture when aggregated on a team level. PwC’s Kristy Hull, writing in Strategy+Business in May 2017 notes how a critical few behaviours can help shape organizational culture. She highlights the importance of keystone behaviours, patterns of acting that are tangible, repeatable, observable, and measurable, and which have the potential to achieve a company’s objectives. These are the critical few behaviours with good reason, as she believes people can really only remember and change three to five behaviours at one time. This is part of a wider effort being driven by Jon Katzenbach, one of the authors of the 1992 book, The Wisdom of Teams. He suggests that rather than tackling culture head-on, which can be a daunting task likely to end in failure, a company may have better success identifying and trying to change a select few behaviours that will positively influence culture once implemented across the organization.
Amazon provides a good example. At the company, no one speaks during the first ten to 30 minutes of a meeting, using that time instead to read in detail a printed memo from the meeting chair that they are seeing for the first time. The memo is not sent by email ahead of the meeting, which would result in a cursory glance by most, with the deep understanding and healthy critique of the content able to drive a participatory, value-added discussion. It is reflective of our notes on iteration as one of the design vowels in the previous chapter, allowing the company to move beyond the ‘straw man’ first solution towards a well-developed product that the company is increasingly known for.
Addressing habits may also help the alignment of an individual’s values with that of their employer. Writing in Inc in July 2017, Adam Fridman highlighted factors that may help forge a stronger connection between the personal and organizational level, including several of the themes we have developed in this book, including purpose, happiness, and learning.
We believe habits to be a source of untapped potential for an organization. As human beings we like habits. They represent the known, give us control, and help us save energy and deal with stress. The esteemed 19th-century American psychologist, William James said that: “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits – practical, emotional, and intellectual – systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”
In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey invented the self-help management genre. The book, first published in 1989, has sold over 25 million copies worldwide. Knowing which habits are conducive to professional success and personal happiness continues to receive significant attention today, yet knowing how to make those habits stick is another matter. There is a wealth of potential insight in considering the subconscious part of our brains. Part of the appeal of design-thinking in recent years has been a powerful set of design methods that aim to shine light on the subconscious or hidden part of the user. For leadership practice, the design vowels of the previous chapter may help explore and understand workplace habits.
We process a large amount of automatic, subconscious activity every day but implementing new, positive habits, or breaking negative ones, is a significant challenge. Types of thinking and decision-making are natural areas of analysis in the working context. Though some of the studies may be questionable, a quick ‘wisdom of Google’ search puts our daily decisions at more than 30,000, with only 70 of those being conscious. Certainly, of more reliability is the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who writes on two systems of thinking.[1] Fast or System 1 thinking, which is the subconscious part of our brains and much more frequent; and slow or System 2, our conscious self which is much less frequent. It is clear that we need both. Without habits we’d be unlikely to proceed very far in our daily lives – if for example every single decision were to be slow and conscious. Yet stepping back from our normal routines and being wary of our competence and experience that results in automatic patterns is also healthy. More mindful practice may result in a higher degree of System 2 thought.
Although we may perceive certain behaviour as good or bad in others, it is not always so clear-cut for ourselves. When we create a habit the brain stops participating fully in the decision-making process, and doesn’t distinguish between good and bad habits. So what are the tactics that help us take a step back, to first identify the good and bad behavioural patterns in our own lives and teams, and have a better chance of changing them?
We have developed the 7S model, comprised of seven behaviour ‘hacks’, a term of increasing usage the past few years which merits a brief presentation.
We see three elements to hacking. First, it is an iterative process. One long cycle of designing, implementing, and reflecting on the results of a new behaviour is unlikely to yield much insight. Instead, iterating fast and tweaking different behaviours has greater impact. Experimentation and learning from failure are just as useful for behaviour change as for other company processes where iteration may be traditionally employed, such as lean startup methodology.
Second, hacking deals with (even thrives on) constraints or limitations. On an organizational level, a typical constraint may be lack of budget or time, which nevertheless drives people to more creative solutions. On a personal level constraints are also present. For example, in a busy life it may be hard to retain focus or attention on habits, or there may be such variation in your day-to-day that it is hard to see where new habits could be placed. For health-centric habits such as going to the gym or cooking more, you may simply not have the time.
Finally, we believe hacking should produce unconventional solutions. Challenging conventional wisdom is important. This could be driven by the other two elements. For example, instead of trying to carve out time to go to the gym twice a week, try suggesting a walking or even running meeting with a client to discuss that next project. Over-long, inefficient meetings killing energy in your team? Get rid of the chairs and cut the normal meeting time in half.
In essence, hacking is about curiosity. Many articles on social media these days take the form of some personal experiment, say drinking water or exercising each day for a period of time and noting what happens. The content is often uninspiring, but the approach is not, and is reflective of what scientists have done for years: designing an experiment, measuring, and drawing conclusions. So hacking can be defined succinctly as acting like a scientist but without a budget!
Inspired by Covey, the following elements are the seven hacks of highly effective habits. They are the result of a decade of executive teaching and research.
The seven hacks of highly effective habits
1. Small
The typical approach to change, particularly by the driven professional class, is that of a significant effort towards achieving an ambitious or stretch goal. By definition, this significant effort is deployed now and again, which may or may not lead to success. Yet a much smaller (and therefore more sustainable) effort on a daily basis is likely to yield a greater benefit. Daily implementation is key. We highlighted the Maxwell quote of changing our lives through daily action in chapter eight, and to that train of thought we can also add Gretchen Rubin, another American author, who said that: “What you do everyday matters more than what you do every once in a while.”
A very successful habit may exist of course on a less frequent level, yet the daily implementation means that the cumulative benefit will quickly accrue for a relatively minor effort. The lauded strategy of ‘the cumulative effect of marginal gains’ from the British Olympic track-cycling team shows how even tiny changes allied to accumulation can have a big impact – in their case, from being a mediocre performer winning one Olympic gold in 100 years, to becoming the sport’s preeminent force, with 22 gold medals in the last three Olympic Games. Their marginal gains included rubbing the tyres of the bicycles with alcohol after each round of competition to remove particles of dust, examining the official bus timetable and contracting their own transport company to give the cyclists 15 minutes more rest in the Olympic village, and asking a leading surgeon to show the cyclists how to wash their hands, so as to minimize the chances of catching a cold or virus. In our business coaching work we’ve been inspired by marginal gains and have seen the impact of small changes, such as improving executives’ ability to sleep on a plane by making use of their own pillow.
Making it small also increases the chances of creating a new habit, since it gains ‘automaticity’ in less time. Researchers at University College London found the amount of time for behaviours of varying complexity to become automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days.[2] For example, as shown in the figure below, creating the habit of drinking a glass of water took much less time than doing 50 sit-ups, with the authors finding a plateau to be reached, on average, after 66 days.
Figure 10.1. Time to achieve automaticity for different tasks
2. Specific
As ambition derails many attempts at successful behaviour change, so too does vagueness. Setting SMART (specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, time-based) objectives helps to achieve professional targets and the same detail-oriented approach can help on a personal level.
Set a finish line. Rather than making an open commitment to always take the staircase, start with a commitment to always take the staircase for the remainder of the month. Achieving your objective will give you the motivation to keep going.
Given the daily approach mentioned above, another key detail is when in the day you will commit to change. Consider your own life as well as your daily biological rhythm and biochemistry, as we covered in chapter eight. Knowing that willpower tends to decrease throughout the day should be considered. Committing to something early in the day works for many, yet another slot may be required if family or other matters take precedence. In any case, try and fix the same time each day – which leads to the next S.
3. Supported
Support your new action by placing it next to an existing one. What do you do each day? Perhaps you have a consistent routine related to your morning: personal hygiene or preparing kids for school. Do some squats after brushing your teeth (or during!) Triggers can be immensely powerful. Stanford educator and behaviour-change expert B. J. Fogg talks of his “flushing the toilet” trigger, after which he would complete a couple of push-ups. Though perhaps not for every one (and he did stress only at home!), it is a much easier way of doing 20 to 30 push-ups on a daily basis than all at once.
Figure 10.2. The habit cycle
Triggers give us a broader view of the behaviour and make it easier to implement, or displace, through considering the habit loop. A cue or signal exists before the habit, which then produces a reward. Rather than focusing on the behaviour itself, can you change the cue or reward? One of our coaching clients had a long-term bad habit of checking their email and social media in bed before going to sleep. After our coaching conversations, we identified the cue as them having their smartphone plugged to a charging cable on the bedside table. We eliminated the cue by placing the charging cable in the kitchen. The executive later told us they still wanted to check their phone in bed many evenings, but the cue was no longer there.
Considering the habit loop in its entirety also shifts the focus from the ‘hard’ routine to the much easier cue. Once we enter into the process we’re committed to follow-through. The dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp shows an example of this from her 2003 book, The Creative Habit:
“I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5.30am, put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.”
Considering the task to be completed as calling a taxi (especially the night before), rather than two hours of physical training also lightens the mental load considerably.
4. Shared
Share your change with your family, with your friends, or with your boss. If you plan to go offline after a certain time each day, you’ll need to manage expectations on a professional level. If you have a habit of collapsing on the sofa when you arrive home from work, tell your family so they are waiting for you to go for a walk when you arrive home. Sharing your change makes you accountable. And we all need to be held accountable.
The power of the coaching process also exists in creating this accountability, between coach and coachee. In the workplace, adding ‘bottom-up’ to the usual ‘top-down’ accountability has much potential. Leaders are often gauged on their credibility by matching their actions to their words. By sharing your own critical behaviours with your team you are creating a healthy pressure to follow through.
Telefónica CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete is a habitual Twitter user. The habit itself isn’t so much the use of Twitter, rather the practice of daily reading that he finds so valuable, and which he subsequently communicates via the social media platform. Daily Twitter use for a CEO of a publicly traded company which employs over 130,000 people would of course have its drawbacks, yet the value of the daily reading habit outweighs any disadvantages. He spends around 25-30 minutes reading different articles as soon as he arrives at the office, before programming an average of ten tweets per day.[3] We could say he is held accountable for his daily reading habit by the almost 64,000 followers he has on Twitter, with whom he shares his activity each day.
5. Streak
Tracking the completion, or absence, of a certain behaviour over time creates a chain. And the longer that chain is, the harder it can be to break. This may be true of certain bad habits we have had for a long time, such as smoking. Alcoholics Anonymous, with its original Big Book – first published in 1939, is rich source of insight on behaviour for the public at large, and uses total sobriety time as a part of open group sharing.
Figure 10.3. Maintaining a streak
Yet the same logic can be used in a positive sense, for example, winning streaks in sport. It is also used in many apps today. For example, one may achieve special badges for maintaining a streak of daily practice such as meditation. If you have a bad day after 150 days of completing the same practice and the last thing on your mind is meditation, the simple fact of having completed 150 days will probably get you over the line to complete 151. An extreme example comes from the former British Olympic marathon runner Ron Hill. In January of 2017, at age 78, he brought to an end 19,032 consecutive days of running at least one mile. Again, we may imagine that on many occasions during those 52-plus years he may not have wanted to run, with the power of the streak the only thing of relevance. While running sick and with chest pains on the final day of the streak he felt it unfair on his family to continue, so decided to bring the streak to an end.
Think of the power of such streaks in sectors like health and safety in construction. If you are a worker on such a site, with a visible counter that says: “1,068 days since last accident”, that’s a powerful incentive not to be the one who brings the counter back to zero.
6. Surroundings
In an increasingly digital world, the physical environment matters more than ever. It is a powerful determinant of our behaviour, and one which we look at in greater detail in the next chapter.
Consider for example your home environment and perhaps a commitment to a morning yoga routine. One of the keys to building this into the daily routine would be to have the yoga mat in plain view. That way, rather than blearily fetching coffee as part of your daily stumble out of bed, unfurling that mat is a more natural part of the daily flow. It’s a similar, even simpler principle to that of laying out your workout clothes the night before an early-morning training session.
At work, simple changes could include a standing desk, new vending machine content, or simple changes to the staircase in order to make it more inviting. You may not have the reported $5 billion that Apple spent on its new spaceship campus but we can all think about redesigning our surroundings to support behaviour change and nudge both ourselves and our teams to implement the critical few behaviours that support an improved culture.
Figure 10.4. Staircase nudge from The Leadership Academy of Barcelona
Google has considered a behavioural economics approach in redesigning its own workplace environment. In a look at how employees snacked throughout the day, it was found that the location matters in a coffee area, with workers 50% more likely to take a snack with a cup of coffee when the snacks are three metres closer.[4] We are also drawn to variety as human beings, with people tending to eat fewer M&Ms from a bowl of the same colour, even though all M&Ms taste the same. Such an approach integrates some of our content of chapter nine, particularly observation, with the experimentation advocated here.
7. Social
Jim Rohn said “we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with”. What we often perceive to be our own behaviours are due to the influence of our family, friends, and colleagues. Thinking of our social environment will allow us greater insight to the habit-hacking process. Think of who you spend time with, both personally and professionally. Who are the people that will help you most in the formative stages of a new behaviour?
We may also think of our leadership activity and the design of teams. Research has shown the positive impact of placing a poor performer next to a high performer, with positive ‘spillovers’ created in terms of productivity, effectiveness, and client satisfaction with the work.[5] The authors suggest pairing employees with opposite strengths, as well as separating toxic workers.
Are all 7Ss to be employed in each case? Probably not. That is part of the habit-hacking process: finding out which ones are most important for you to gain traction in behaviour change, either to create and sustain a new healthy habit, or stop a more negative one in its tracks. We discuss below which of the seven hacks have proven most successful with participants on our executive education programmes.
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We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. |
The key is to keep it simple. We are inundated with a barrage of daily clickbait – often list-heavy articles that proclaim for example: “14 things that successful people do before breakfast.” The Economist took a swipe at such pieces a few years ago and made a call to take a step back from such frenetic hyperactivity and the growing cult of the ‘superboss’.[6] We believe a more relaxed yet curious approach to understanding one’s own behaviour, along the lines of hacking as described above, will result in greater insight to our subconscious selves and the identification of those keystone habits that make the rest of our lives function better, as well as our places of work.
Our research on habits at Telefónica
We have looked to gain greater insight into habits in the workplace through our research with attendees at Universitas Telefónica.[7] We were interested first of all in where and when habits were implemented, and what effects this placement had on the success of the habit. All attendees at the university during 2016 were surveyed, a total of 1,900 senior managers, with 574 responses received.
The results of the placement of habits are shown below and reflect our expectations – that respondents would be more comfortable attempting behaviour change at home. There is approximately an 80/20 split between home and work habits, with a more even distribution between morning (53% of sample) and evening (47% of sample).
Figure 10.5. Habit placement for 2016 data (sample = 574)
The success of habit formation, shown below, produced one or two surprises. Although we see success (as expected in line with our understanding of circadian rhythms) in the morning, what we didn’t expect was the most successful slot to be at work after lunch. This is the smallest part of the sample, but still worthy of further reflection.
Figure 10.6. Subjective evaluation of habit formation success
It could be that lunch has provided an additional energy boost for habit effort, consistent with some of the work in the decision-fatigue field. Perhaps also, with work priorities having been taken care of in the morning, the afternoon allows more space for thinking about self-improvement. In any case, we see an opportunity for greater attention to habits in the work environment, where only 20% of our sample chose to place them. With increasing attention to workplace design, an accompanying belief from the employee that their work environment offers a supportive space for positive behaviour change may impact greatly on workplace wellbeing.
As part of our ongoing analysis we are interested to find out if any of the variables positively predict successful behaviour change. These variables include gender, nationality, whether the change is targeted in the morning, and when the response data was entered in our collection form. This last variable is the most interesting as we have used it as a proxy for inferring the person’s chronotype (that is their lark or owl profile, as discussed in chapter eight). What we have found is that morning people have a higher level of success in forming the new behaviour compared to non-morning people (4.3 versus 3.5) and that the difference is statistically significant (p < 0.01). This seems to be consistent with the published research into morningness-eveningness, and we are excited to advance this avenue in our ongoing work.
Our research with attendees to Universitas during 2017, again with a total potential sample of around 2,000, looks at which of the seven hacks are most effective. All attendees attended a short Habit Hacking module comprised of two sessions, which covered the seven hacks and discussed how they could implement them in their lives. At the time of going to press we have received and processed the first 100 responses, with preliminary analysis as follows.
As with the 2016 sample, self-reported evaluations of habit success tend towards the upper end of the scale, with an overall average of 3.7/5, with 5 being the most successful. We would like to think our interventions are so effective that they result in a high degree of success, but have to acknowledge that the more likely explanation is that some people give themselves a higher score than the reality – perhaps not willing to fully accept their own ‘failure’ in a task. A further factor could be the time of survey, around the 100-day mark after the initial intervention, which may still represent the successful startup phase. Surveying the same people, for example, one year later would provide an interesting picture as to how sustainable their change really was. In any case, there is an even balance between those selecting 1, 2, and 3 out of 5, the ‘poor performers’ (49%) and 4 and 5, the ‘high performers’ (51%), which will allow further analysis.
The level of usage and success of each of the seven hacks allows further insight. Small is by far the most commonly used tactic, with 74% of the sample using that particular hack. We note that it does have the privileged position of being the first on the list, in both the training interventions and 100-day survey. It had a slightly above-average score, with people who used it, having an average success rating of 3.8/5. The most effective hacks are Streak and Surroundings, which each had an average score of 4.0 for those who used them.
Figure 10.7. Level of use of each of the seven hacks
Figure 10.8. Average score (effectiveness) of each of the seven hacks
A final reflection regards the overall tactics used by the best and worst performers. Those who rated the top five for habit formation used an average of 3.3 different hacks. 4/5 used an average of 3.0. Those who had the lowest scores, 1 and 2, used a total of 2.6 and 2.0 hacks respectively. This would seem to suggest that success is predicted by a larger number of hacks in use. One possible explanation could be that more hacks present different options for a changing personal and professional context, in order to stay the course with behaviour change. We are continuing to collect data and analyse both the 2016 and 2017 samples in order to test this and the other insights noted above.
Data analytics are helping us to understand patterns of behaviour on a deeper level, and can throw up some surprises. Barcelona is home to the fourth-biggest passenger port in the world, after the three in Florida. A total of four million people visit the city’s port each year, and it was also home for the inaugural season of the largest passenger ship in the world, Harmony of the Seas, with a capacity of up to 9,000 people. A boon for the city, as those upwardly-mobile tourists spend their disposable income here, right? Until you consider that upwards of 30% of the people never actually get off the boat.[8] Identifying behavioural patterns is a major benefit of our big-data era, but changing that behaviour remains a significant challenge. Addressing discrete habits on a very human level may help.