Category

Personal Behaviour

How to make New Years Resolutions that stick?

By All, Personal Behaviour

Every year we humans engage in this collective ritual called New Years Resolutions. We somehow seem to believe in the illusion that the symbolic crossing of December 31st to January 1st unlocks a new door to untapped willpower and ability to change our behaviours and habits.

The beauty of a ritual is that it gives hope. The problem with rituals is that they don’t work. Bad habits are just too strong to change. Willpower dips fairly quickly. Temptation to give in to instant gratification is everywhere. Our lives play out in a choice architecture in which the most convenient option is to keep doing what we’re doing.

And yet, this time of the year is the perfect time to make some changes. So why not do it properly? New Years’ Resolutions are all about changing behaviours and building new habits. So let’s apply some behavioural design thinking to the problem.

Step 1: Always start with the Job-to-be-done behind your desired behaviour

A core concept of Behavioural Design is outside-in thinking. When we think about changing behaviour, we pay much more attention to the deeper goals and dreams behind the behaviour. To use the famous meme by Clayton Christensen: “We hire certain behaviours to achieve our jobs-to-be-done”. We go to the gym, because we want to lose weight, which is a functional job-to-be-done. We might want to lose weight to boost our confidence, which is an emotional job-to-be-done. And both goals might be instrumental to even a deeper social Job-to-be-done: To be seen as attractive by others.

When you apply Job-to-be-done thinking to New Years’ Resolutions, it’s pretty evident that the real job-to-be-done behind those vows and pledges is to increase your overall happiness. So before you choose a behaviour you would like to change, you should first have a clear understanding of the behavioural drivers behind happiness. Astrid did a keynote on this topic on Behavioural Design Fest 2018 (in Dutch). In this talk she referred to the work of Prof. Todd Kashban on happiness. His argument is that the number one driver to live a happy life is the pursuit of curiosity. Curious people perform behaviours that lead to happy outcomes: They experience achievements, they learn and master new things, they get to meet new people, they experience flow, etc. Happiness is not something you can find, it’s something you stumble upon.

So the big question for your new year’s resolution should be: What can I do to pursue my curiosity?

To answer this question, you’ll have to ask yourself a couple of related questions:

  • Which obstacles should I take away?
  • What prevents me from pursuing my curiosity?
  • What are bad habits and beliefs that keep me getting stuck in the same patterns?

The easiest way to find answers to this question is to use a second key principle of behavioural design thinking: look at past behaviour for cues.

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Step 2: Past behaviour never lies: look at past behaviour for cues. 

A powerful behavioural design principle is that past behaviour never lies. If I’d ask you how many times you want to go to the gym, you’d probably say three times per week. If I would ask you how often you go to the gym, you might still answer: “at least once a week”. However, if I’d ask you if you could walk me through the last two times you went to the gym, you will give me all the reasons and excuses why you didn’t make it to the gym in the last couple of weeks. And those are interesting, because they can give us all kinds of clues of the bad habits and other behavioural patterns that stood in the way of performing your desired behaviour.

Past behaviour never lies. So instead of making New Years Resolutions, it’s way more interesting to look at what happened last year. What made you happy? What sucked the energy out of you? What gave you a proud feeling of achievement? What gave you a sense of purpose and meaning? Which friends made you feel great? Which habits prevented you from doing the things you love? Which activities got you entirely in the zone?

Tim Ferris suggests to take some time to look at your calendar and spot the bright spots and dark spots. But go deeper than that. Most meaningful interactions or bad habits can’t be traced down to specific events. They’re part of your daily patterns.

Every quarter, my co-founder (and wife) Astrid and I start our two-day Quarterly Meeting with taking a whole morning to answer four questions. The answers to these four questions form the basis for the interventions we plan for the next quarter at SUE. Our principle is: Happiness first, the rest will follow. The questions we ask ourselves are:

  • Did you experience flow in the previous months? Can you give examples?
  • Did you experience personal success? Can you give examples?
  • Did you learn something new? What did you learn that excited you?
  • Were you able to contribute to the success of others?

By asking these questions, we immediately get an insight into the most critical drivers of our happiness. Sometimes we suck on one of these dimensions, and sometimes we feel we suck at all of them. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we come up with behavioural interventions to tackle them. The principle is exactly the same for making New Years Resolutions.

Step 3: Prototype your New Years Resolutions

A third fundamental Behavioral Design Principle is prototyping: Whatever you think the solution is: prototype it first. Find a minimal version to test your desired behaviour and figure out if it works and under which conditions it works. Two things bothered me last year: Bad weather was depressing me, and I get miserable if I don’t have time to think, read and write. So we prototyped the idea of study weeks abroad. Our first prototype was fun, but it didn’t work. We spend a week in January in Morocco with our two year old daughter. Let’s say she had different ideas about family fun. A second prototype was that Astrid and I would do a monthly reading and writing retreat of four days, in turns. That worked incredibly well. We both got in deep work mode every time, and while the other was away, it was great fun to spend a couple of days as a single parent taking care of the little one. Our next prototype next year will be to spend two months in Thailand working as digital nomads.

I also prototyped things like:

  • Wim Hoff Ice Men Method: Loved it. Doing the breathing exercise and cold showers 3x week
  • Fishing: I asked a couple of people to teach my son and me to fish for pike and zander. I posted a #deartoask on facebook, and more than ten people offered to help me to learn the techniques. T
  • Set an epic goal: Climbing the Mont Ventoux by racebike is a dream, but I couldn’t get myself to turn this goal into manageable actions. This year I’ll make a new attempt.

It doesn’t matter if things don’t work. The fun thing is that you’re following your curiosity to see if it could work for you. That’s already incredibly powerful in itself.

Note: In 2019 we developed a program to turn desires into experiments, and coined it Fuck It, Let’s Do It. Look at Astrid’s keynote at Behavioural Design Fest to learn more about it (in Dutch, working on subtitles, sorry). We did several workshops with entrepreneurs and it actually transformed some people’s life. If you’re interest in doing a half-day workshop for your team, contact Susan for more details.

Want to make your habits LAST in the New Year?

We have created a new cheatsheet that helps you in four easy steps to create new habits! One of the steps is making the behaviour tiny (as you can read below in step 4). But we added three extra steps that will make sure your New Year's resolutions will last.

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Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

Step 4: Tiny Habits 

A last Behavioural Design puzzle piece is “tiny habits”: If you want to change habits: make them tiny. I can’t recommend enough the new book “Tiny Habits” by our intellectual hero BJ Fogg at Stanford. I am currently doing a 21 day plank challenge. It only requires me to try to do a plank once a day. After two weeks I already improved from 1.15 minutes to 2.50 minutes. The idea behind tiny habits is that when you turn your goals into tiny achievable actions that don’t require much willpower to perform, you will gradually expand your effort.

I put up a sheet with 21 boxes and put it up to our front door (BJ Fogg would call it a trigger), so I would always get a reminder that I must not forget to do my daily plank.

trigger for the 21 day challenge

Summary 

What I tried to argue is that you can take your New Years Resolutions to the next level with Behavioural Design Thinking. If you’re committed to changing your behaviour and habits this year, ask yourself four questions:

  1. What are my deeper goals, desires and Jobs-to-be-done behind the behaviour I want to change?
  2. How does this contribute to improving my happiness levels?
  3. What behaviours and habits stood in the way of the pursuit of curiosity last year?
  4. Which experiments do I want to set up to figure out what works for me?
  5. How can I make the desired behaviour tiny?

Happy New Year!

sue behavioural design
sue behavioural design
01/01/2020
elderly Couple

The Behavioural Design of Love and Desire

By All, Personal Behaviour

A long-term relationship is a classic behavioural design challenge. How do you keep being in love? And how do you keep the desire burning? What are the specific behaviours that add up to the more abstract goals of love and desire or passion? Let’s approach the problem with a behavioural design lens.

The tension between love and desire

What is the secret of desire in a long term relationship? Esther Perel did a brilliant Ted talk on that subject back in 2013. She opens her talk with the following riddles:

“So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever? And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? That’s the million-dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples?”

In her talk, she argues that our desire for love and our desire for adventure are in deep conflict. On the one hand, we want to feel safe, secure, nurtured, and respected by the other, and the thought of being rejected is profoundly terrifying. On the other hand, our desire to be loved is killing for passion and lust. Because lust needs play. Passion thrives on transgression, which can be translated literally as the act of crossing a line. Lust thrives on fantasy and on being able to act out on that fantasy.

The big drama with developing a loving relationship is that it’s killing for desire. And desire fuels lust. There’s no line to cross, no curiosity to explore, no space for excitement and fantasy. Romeo and Julia would end up as an average bored couple if it weren’t for the barrier in between them that worked like an aphrodisiac for their desire.

The feminist philosopher Camille Paglia wrote in her first bestseller “Sexual Personae” a brilliant line on this tension between love and desire.

Love is the endless cycle of pursuit, triumph and ennui (boredom).

What I love about this quote is that Paglia proposes a simple solution to the paradox of love and desire: turn it into an endless cycle.

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A long term relationship, is a behavioural design.

When you’re in a longterm relationship, your identity is the compound effect of all the tiny interactions you had with each other. Over an extended period, the daily little rejections, insults, not being nice to each other, eventually shapes your identity. You have learned to stop expecting more, and to avoid conflict. You try to tell yourself stories that this is how it’s supposed to be, and that you should be happy with what you have. There really is no limit to the capability of people to convince themselves that they should be happy and grateful, even if they don’t feel anything anymore.

It’s not that difficult to think of a long term relationship as a behavioural design. Behaviour that gets rewarded or suppressed over a long period eventually becomes a habit. And your habits define who you are.

You are what you repeatedly do. But what you repeatedly do is triggered by the context you are locked in.

When you think about it, you can think of every deviant behaviour as a perfectly understandable reaction to the environment: Is a depressed partner a sick person, or does he suffer from the feeling that he’s useless and that he’s not wanted or relevant to others anymore? Is a cynic partner born as a cynic, or has she learned that there’s no point in protesting?

How to maintain love AND desire? Let’s explore the behavioural design rules that can keep you in love for the rest of your life and the rules that will prevent your desire from fading out or switching object.

The behavioural design of love

There’s a big philosophical discussion about the difference between feeling in love and love. I love my kids, but I don’t experience the emotion of being in love. However, I do experience that emotion with my partner. So when I’m talking about the behavioural design of love, I am talking about that emotion of still feeling in love with someone.

The simple answer, IMHO is that there’s no such thing as Romantic Love with a capital L. That love only exists in movies, or when there’s a barrier that stands in between the lovers. It’s precisely that barrier that is essential for the emerging of passion. Everyone who was once in a relationship with a married person knows what I’m talking about. To paraphrase Camille Paglia: Romantic love fades into ennui once the pursuit leads to triumph.

Long term love is the compound interest you reap from daily behaviours. My wife Astrid and I agreed at the start of our relationship that we will never be unkind to each other, that we’re always going to do our best for each other and that we’re never going to take each other for granted. This might sound big and abstract, but we bring these commitments to life in small daily behaviours, from complimenting for dinner, touching each other when we cross, bringing a cup of tea without having to ask for it, bringing little treats from the shop, putting on some candles when the other is about to come home,…

These things sound trivial, but what they do is they provide little daily signals that remind the both of us of how special the other still is. And the compound effect of those daily affirmations pile up, even after 10 years.

Would you like to power up your team or project with behavioural intelligence?

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The behavioural design of passion, desire and lust

Esther Perel talks about the simple behavioural design rules that fuel desire: Allow the creation of some distance. Find ways to maintain a bit of mystery around each other. Keep surprising each other. Find ways to be able to look up to each other. Try to be a fanboy and fangirl as long as you live. And try to maintain a level of independence. Nothing is more killing for desire than neediness. To quote Perel:

“I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shot down and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge”.

The best couples have found ways to cultivate desire. But when desire is gone, lust will fade away,… or look for new objects of desire.

Love and desire are wicked design problems.

The design of a fulfilling long term relationship is as much a wicked design problem as the challenge to get people to recycle, eat healthily, get fitter, take climate action, etc. Just like with every wicked design problem, the real challenge is to design specific behaviours that eventually turn into habits. Habits change attitudes and attitudes transform identities. Love and desire are nothing more than the compound interest a series of tiny practices.

Learn more about the mental model of Compound Interest on the Farnam Street Blog: Why Small Habits make a Big Difference.

sue behavioural design

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

05/11/2019
We Want You - Uncle Sam

The Behavioural Design of Applying for a Job

By All, Personal Behaviour

How do you apply for a job? From a Behavioural Design point of view, this is a fascinating question. When you are applying for a job, there are several challenges you need to overcome. It’s a multi-level game in which you need to figure out how to reach level 3 or 4 with one single run. This blog post will tell you which levels are important and how to reach them.

 

A context of fierce competition for attention

First of all you have to be aware that most companies like ours get about 2-5 applications per day. In addition, those applications have to compete with about 50 other e-mails we have to try to process per day. That means you only get about 10-20 seconds to trigger my curiosity to invest more time in learning more about you. Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with being an asshole. It has everything to do with having to figure out how to process the flood of information  – in my inbox alone – that is competing for my attention every single day. Add to this the daily requests by vendors who approach us by phone or e-mail to “have a coffee” and you must realize that time is incredibly scarce and valuable.

Applying for a job is a classic choice problem: With a very limited amount of information and a limited amount of time, we need to make a judgement of whether we want to invest more time in getting to know you.

How to trigger curiosity?

The best way to help us to make a decision is to offer us system 1 shortcuts. One of the core principles of the Behavioural Design Method, that we train at the Behavioural Design Academy is “Help people to make a decision without having to think”. What this means is that the more we have to use our rational brain to figure something out, the more we end up with not making a decision at all. Here are a couple of tips to create shortcuts when you’re applying for a job:

  1. Get introduced by someone we know and trust. If you can get someone to vouch for you, you make it a lot easier for us to get curious
  2. Never pull a stunt to grab our attention. Applying for a job is a delicate seduction process. You wouldn’t set up a surprise act on your first Tinder date, won’t you?
  3. Be intriguing: what are surprising things you’ve done in the past, both in your personal, as well as your private life, that proofs to us that you’re an interesting person? Past behaviour never lies.
  4. Signaling: There’s a lot of value that you communicate in the effort you put into reaching us. We once got a hand written love letter in which the candidate wrote why and when she fell in love with SUE. We hired her on the spot. She still works at SUE.
  5. Study the people to whom you are writing your application. It’s not that hard to find the founders on Twitter, Linkedin and Google. Try to find out what they write about and try to contribute something to the things they are passionate about.

Summary: Think Outside-In

An application is like professional flirting. It might take a little more effort to go from Awareness to Interest to Desire and Action. Sometimes it even takes a couple of years. But just like with every every challenge to influence someones behaviour, you have to think outside-in: Try to figure out what the Job-to-be-Done is of the person you try to persuade, then take away their anxieties, then present yourself als the best solution to their pains and make them understand how hiring you would offer them gains that are incredibly valuable.

 

One more thing: At SUE we prefer to recruit within our network of Behavioural Design Academy alumni,or people who participated in one of our Behavioural Design Sprints.  The simple reason is that are already familiar with the Behavioral Design Method©.

 

I hope this blog post inspired you to rethink the way you design your application process approach. Good luck!
Tom

Want to learn how to design behaviour?

Join our two-day Fundamentals Course and master a hands-on method to use behavioural science to come up with communication or plans that will influence behaviour and will trigger a 'yes'.

Check out the course

Join the 1.500 forward-thinking professionals who already graduated!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
10/07/2019
A cliche image of coaching

Personal coaching is pointless: four reasons

By All, Employee behaviour, Personal Behaviour

The lie at the heart of the coaching and Leadership-Industry

I’m fully aware that I will probably get hate-mail for this. But I honestly think personal coaching is a gigantic waste of time and money. Personal coaching is based on the assumption that changing the individual will lead to a change in the behaviour of the group and will benefit the company. A multi-billion dollar leadership-industry even emerged around this assumption. “If only I would become a better leader, my company would grow and my team would flourish”.

I think this assumption is complete nonsense, because of these four reasons

1. There’s a very weak relationship between knowledge and habits.

Most smokers know smoking is bad for them. Most smokers know they should quit. But with every crave for relaxation or fighting boredom, they can’t help themselves and light up a cigarette.

The same goes for coaching. Learning a lot about yourself is one thing. Being able to break your automatic interaction patterns with your environment is a whole different subject. You and your environment can’t help but repeating the same patterns over and over again. And the moment you try to change, your environment will push back hard to get you in line with what they expect you to be.

2. Individuals are overrated when it comes to making a difference

Only collaborations create breakthrough innovations. The central storyline of Michael Lewis biography of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky is how these two Isreali psychologists, basically re-wrote the rules of psychology through their collaboration. which had all the characteristics of a creative-intellectual love affair. They could never tell who initiated a breakthrough insight or idea. It was the creative-intellectual tango between both of them, that generated idea after idea. Interestingly, their intellectual productivity dried up, when they got separated in the eighties.

By the same standards: There would be no Steve Jobs, without Steve Wozniak or Johny Ive. No Warren Buffet without Charlie Munger. Even the archetype of the lone genius, Albert Einstein, turned out to rely heavily on the genie of his wife Mileva Maric. I think it was Aristotle who said: “knowledge is dialogue”. So instead of looking inside for “unlocking hidden truths about yourself”, find yourself a creative partner and start playing.

In his new book “Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell”, Google’s former chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt brings a homage to Bill Campbell, who both coached the Apple and Google Board at the same moment. Bill was famous for coaching the team, not the individuals of the team. As Schmidt puts it:

“You hear all the day that “I need a mentor.” Well, by the way, you need a mentor and I need a mentor; mentors are great. That’s not what Bill was. Bill was a coach and more importantly, he was the best coach of teams ever. And why do you need a team? Because a company is not an individual, it’s a team of individuals who need coaching to achieve their objective”.

 

3. You are the average of the five people you hang around with.

This is what Tim Ferris would write, if he would be given the chance to write copy on a public billboard.

The answer to becoming a better person is by surrounding yourself in your daily life with people better than yourself in different ways. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a mentor. But I do think that most of your uncertainties, flaws, ego-problems, bad habits and lack of energy can be attributed to the simple fact that you’re not surrounded by enough people, who push you to become the best possible version of yourself.

4. Change is about behaviour

Most of our limitations are the effect of the ecosystem we’re part of. As entrepreneurs, there was a time we worked day and night and frustrated our team because we couldn’t let go. The only way to solve this problem was to step out of this ecosystem for a while. This forced everyone in our team to step up and it provided an amazing opportunity for personal growth, and this includes Astrid and I. What changed us was an intervention that liberated everyone from a pattern we got locked into. No personal coaching could have solved this problem.

 

The Behavioural Design of Personal Growth

How does this relate to Behavioural Design? At SUE we think of Behavioral Design as a set of methods and principles to change behaviour, through the design of interventions that nudge people’s choices in a desired way. The more we work on big themes like happiness, excitement, creativity, productivity, etc… the more we discover that you can’t search for those values within yourself. They are the effect of the behaviour you are nudged into.

By the same standard we think of professional growth as just another Behavioural Design Briefing. If you want to grow as a person, simply create a context in which you are triggered into behaviors that lead to growth. The best way to achieve this is to come up with interventions that force a group to give more feedback. to engage in continuous learning and to experiment aggressively. Our Behavioural Design Sprintis an example of how the design of the process forces the group into these positive behaviours.

Want to learn more?

If you want to master the science of influence yourself, you could consider enrolling in our two-day course Behavioural Design at our SUE | Behavioural Design Academy. You can download the Academy brochure.

Or maybe you currently have a challenge in which you want to influence choice or change behaviour. Please, take a look at our Behavioural Design Sprint. It might be the answer you’re looking for.

Or could be you just would like to get to know us a little better. We happily introduce ourselves here.

04/05/2019
A clusterfuck

How to live a meaningful life in a world that is spinning out of control?

By All, Personal Behaviour

A slightly modified version of this blog was posted on our Behavioural Design Digest Newsletter (subscribe now). 

In this blog I want to share a couple of thoughts on how we can use a better understanding of human decision making to cope with the complicated challenges of our time. I want to make the case for living an anti-fragile life. It’s a bit of a provocative story, but it has a happy ending with some very practical guidelines on how live a great life. So please bear with me.

I’m not going to make silly predictions of what will be big next year. These forecasts are utterly pointless. On the one hand, because these forecasts are not meant to predict the future, but to show off the depth of expertise for the one who’s making them. On the other hand, because the future is becoming increasingly complex and complicated at an accelerating speed. Please allow me to zoom in on these two concepts.

Accelerating Complexity

The future is complex because of exponential technologies. Technological progress is now accelerating so fast that a lot of things that seemed impossible two years ago are already achieved. Just to give you a couple of recent examples that were featured in Peter Diamandis’ amazing newsletter on exponential technologies.

The speed with which radical technological changes are being introduced is so beyond the scope of what we can imagine, that I think it’s just pointless to think about which technology will grow incrementally in 2019.

Accelerating Complications

The second problem with forecasting is that the future is that we have to deal with accelerating complications. Stability is rapidly crumbling on a global scale. The failure of the radicalised free-market to create prosperity and wealth for the many, instead of the few, has set into motion accelerating public anger towards the leading elites. This resulted in a global rise in the demand for radical leaders. This accelerating demand for radical nationalistic leaders has created a critical threshold of leaders that make any coordinated attempt to fight the wicked problems of this time impossible. The Trumps, Putin’s, Orban’s, etc. of this world continuously need to signal their virility to their base. In the world of the alpha male leader, compromises are for pussies.

The big problem of this critical decade is that the demand for strong leadership is only understood by radical demagogues who seize the moment to offer the public what they need –  which is simple explanations and simple answers -, thereby making the complexity of both the problems and the solutions even further out of reach.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, An ecosystem collapse is taking place. The bottom of the food pyramid is crumbling. Populations of Insects, birds, bees are rapidly declining. Global warming is spinning out of control, creating rising sea levels and more draught, leading to more refugees, leading to more instability. It’s basically a clusterfuck running out of control.

Human irrationality is making things worse

So we have to deal with accelerating complexity and accelerating complications. To make matters worse: humans have all kinds of mental flaws that make it impossible for us to make rational decisions and judgements to solve these challenges. In an accelerating complex world, we just have to revert to simple shortcuts for decisionmaking to make sense of things. Elites feel more and more entitled to their wealth because they think they earned it. It’s not: It’s the system that decides who gets the opportunities and who’s not. The middle-class is more and more sold for the story that it’s the immigrants and the politicians are responsible for their declining wealth. It’s not: it’s global financial markets and the monopolistic multi-nationals. It’s not too far fetched to think of global capitalism as a virus that turned into cancer, whereby rogue cells are rapidly killing all the healthy cells that keep an organism alive. Local politicians are powerless.

Another bias is the presence bias: we are not able to see changes, because they are not changing our surroundings fast enough. We like to look at the future as a simple continuous line evolving from what we know from the presence and the past. The optimism bias is also related to this: We tend to think the future will be positive and problems will be solved in time.

I hate to say it, but let’s face it: It looks pretty grim, doesn’t it?

A happy ending

Am I a pessimist? No! Those of you who know me, know I’m a very lighthearted person. But I’m not stupid. And I’m not blind. I know we much rather prefer to turn our head away, but this is the – fascinating – time we’re living in. So we have to put our big boy and girls pants on and face things as they are.

In the context of little positive outlooks, how can you remain optimistic and positive? It definitely helps to be an atheist. The only point in life is to experience love, find passions and explore curiosity. If you are able to design your life around these three principles, then you’re going to live a happy life as long as you live. Because – in case you missed the meeting – we’re all going to die.

A second thing you can do is to practice anti-fragility.  I love the concept of anti-fragility as proposed by Nicolas Nassim Taleb. Anti-fragile systems increase in strength, because of stress, shocks, attacks or failures. The better we get in dealing with randomness, change, bad luck and errors, the stronger we will become. Being an entrepreneur creates a natural context for becoming anti-fragile: you’re always experimenting, tinkering and failing your way forward. Taleb also suggests staying out of debt as fast as you can.  And take a lot of small risks instead of significant risks. You can find more tips on how to live an anti-fragile life here.

I can’t predict what 2019 will look like. The only thing I can wish for is to be prepared for unexpected shocks in the system that follows from accelerating complexity and accelerating complications. And if these shocks won’t come in 2019, then my practicing in anti-fragility will have helped me to have a year as great as 2018. I wish you a lot of anti-fragility in 2019.

Enjoy the holidays!
Tom

Image courtesy: A great metaphor for a clusterfuck.

22/12/2018

Lose weight using behavioural design

By All, Personal Behaviour

Lose weight using behavioural design

Nir Eyal – once said: “Never trust a behavioural designer who’s out of shape.” The reason is that being (or getting) in shape or losing weight is all about showing (or stopping) a particular behaviour. And the secret weapon to successfully losing some extra weight is applying some behavioural design principles on yourself. So, if you want to light up your life and shed some extra you, you simply need to unlock the power of behavioural psychology.

Did I say simply? Yes, I did! The uplifting news is: You can quickly learn how to lose weight by using some simple behavioural design tricks, which you can use to effectively influence your behaviour (and I’m going to share The Golden Tip with you in a moment). Doesn’t that lift some weight off your shoulders already? Or, your bum. Or your belly. Or your second chin. Wherever you’d like. I’m all for it.

The Golden Tip

Okay, I understand you are hungry for The Golden Tip now. I can appreciate this appetite for knowledge. I need to make one more pun about eating before I move on, or are am I overfeeding you with puns already? I get it, so here you go. The Golden Rule is:

Ability eats Motivation for Breakfast

Let me explain what this means and what kind of substantial impact it can have on you realizing your goal to shed some weight. According to BJ Fogg – a Stanford professor who has studied human behaviour for years – there are two dimensions of behaviour: Motivation and Ability. For years we all only used motivation in trying to nudge our behaviour. But, most of the times it is much more effective to work on the ability axis. In plain English, making the desired behaviour easier or the undesired behaviour harder to do.

Let me give you an example. You can be very motivated to lose some weight. Most of us truly do. But most of us also don’t. It often takes the perseverance of a top athlete to stay focused and determined on that goal. Now, I ain’t no Olympic qualifier just yet, and my guess is most of you aren’t either. So, my motivation often goes down the drain, and I often switch to unwanted behaviour, like eating that bag of crisps that happens to be lying there. Or, drink that one (okay four) glasses of wine if you’re with friends. Or heating up that microwave meal after working late. No judgment here, we’ve all been there.

You can’t help your motivation from dropping now and then. But if it happens, ability is your secret weapon to success.

The secret weapon to success

But the key to successfully sticking to your weight loss plan lies exactly here. You can’t help your motivation from dropping now and then. But if it happens, ability is your secret weapon to success. By making your unwanted behaviour hard to do or your wanted behaviour easier to do, you’ll succeed. That’s behavioural design.

It may seem like an open door now, but the best ability intervention is not buying the unhealthy stuff: Don’t have any (not any) in your house, so if your motivation breaks you simply can’t eat something bad for you (making the undesired behaviour harder). Another intervention: Do food prepping. Make a healthy snack staple that will last a week, let’s say a healthy banana cake. If you get the 4 o’clock craving, you have that banana cake ready (making the desired behaviour easier). Bye, bye crisps. Something else: Put a toothbrush and toothpaste on your desk. If you get a snack attack, brush your teeth. See if you like to destroy your sweet minty breezy breath with some sugar or fat now. You won’t (making the undesired behaviour less enjoying aka harder).

These are just some examples of behavioural design by making behaviour harder or examples of making it easier. But I hope you get my point. Motivation is excellent, but the number one secret weapon for losing weight is ability.

Maybe you can come up with some more smart ability ideas yourself. I’d honestly love to hear them. Please post them on our Facebook page so that everyone can take advantage of them. I’ll put a healthy banana cake recipe on there too. To get you started.

How you can start right away

To wrap it up, the things you could do right away:

– Remove all unhealthy food from your house
– Make that banana cake or have someone make it for you
– Get yourself a toothbrush and toothpaste to put on your desk
– Analyse your behaviour: When does your motivation crack and where. And try to come up with some ability interventions for those moments (and please share them with us, ’cause we’re fellow crackers, you’re not alone in this)

Good luck!

Astrid

PS If you know someone who’s struggling to lose some weight, please share this article with him or her.

Astrid is the founder of SUE Amsterdam and The Behavioural Design Academy. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to nudge people into making positive choices in work, life, and play.

In two days of high-end master classes, we train people in unlocking the powerful principles of behavioural psychology and teach them our Behavioural Design Method™ that translates this knowledge into actionable skills to influence personal behaviour or the behaviour of customers, employees, family members or the general public.

Cover photo by Steve Rotman under creative commons license.

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19/07/2017