Tag

habits

How to make habits LAST

By All, Personal Behaviour

How do you stick to your New Year’s resolutions? That was the behavioural design challenge 65 SUE Fundamentals Course alumni tackled at the beginning of the year. 

For two months, we coached them to reach their goals and build new habits. Because we know that breaking a habit is hard. But with our new LAST framework, we made it work! 

New LAST Framework

Resolutions have everything to do with creating new habits or beating old ones. But changing habits can be a difficult task. That is why we have created a brand new framework.

“How to make habits LAST”.

Every letter stands for a principle you should apply in practice: Loss aversion – Accountability – Social – Tiny steps.

You will be amazed at how four easy questions can effectively change your habits. We’ve done the ultimate behavioural design challenge to prove that it works! You can download the cheatsheet here.

But first, let’s start with defining the desired behaviour.

The Behavioural Statement

Everybody first needed to formulate a New Year’s resolution to start the challenge. We saw all kinds of goals coming through:

  • Plan more dates
  • Read more books
  • Paint more
  • Sleep better. 

But what is more? And what does better sleep mean? When you want to change your habits, it is important to break down the desired behaviour into very concrete actions and goals. Thinking about your specific behavioural statement can help with that!

“How might we specific target group at a specific moment help to achieve their job-to-be-done by having them engage in this specific behaviour by taking away comforts or anxieties”.

The target group was evident because they wanted to change their own behaviour. But picking a specific moment or a specific behaviour was very important to think about. When focused on this statement, the resolutions already became more concrete.

  • Organize 5 dates this year with my wife.
  • Go outside for at least 45 min a day.
  • 3 times a week work 1.5 hours on my physical health in the gym.

It’s also essential to think about your job-to-be-done. Why do you want to read/paint/walk/date more? The overall theme we saw was that everybody wanted to become happier in 2023 and that those behaviours would help them achieve that goal

Not sure yet what your specific goals will be to become happier this year? You can also read our blog about our 5 behavioural design interventions to achieve happiness this year.

As you will see, the LAST framework will also focus on removing comforts from your current behaviour by adding loss aversion to the process. Moreover, it will help them engage in their specific behaviours by implementing tiny steps or help them make their goals social. Now let’s look at every step of the framework in more detail.

Download the LAST framework cheatsheet

Do you struggle with building new habits? We all know creating new routines can be difficult. That is where Behavioural Design can help you out. We’ve created a new tool with four easy questions to answer to help you build new habits. This cheat card will help make your habits LAST!

Download the cheatsheet

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

1. LAST: Making it Social

One of the steps the LAST framework provides is making it Social. It can be a good starting point when creating a new habit. When you have thought about your desired behaviour and made it very specific in your head, it is time to make it social. Write down your new desired behaviour on paper or announce it publicly. It is a mind trick that works wonders. That is because our mind loves consistency. If we say we will do something, we want to stick to this behaviour to appear consistent (even if we write it down for ourselves).

Another way to add a social aspect is by setting yourself up for positive feedback. Engage your social network for them to give you compliments and cheers. This will trigger positive emotions that help stick to the new behaviour. If something feels good, you are inclined to keep on doing it.

2. LAST: Tiny steps

When are you going to perform the behaviour?

It is a crucial step to think about when you want to change your behaviour. You have to ‘spark’ the behaviour at the right time. Therefore, the next section we dive into from the LAST framework is Tiny steps.

The key to creating new habits is by starting small. Little steps will build up exponentially. Creating a new habit is difficult, so don’t design for disappointment by making the change too big.

You can make it easier by connecting the new behaviour to the existing behaviour. Our brain will reprogram more quickly if we build upon our current routine. For example, say you’ll drink a glass of water every time you have washed your hands after a toilet visit.

Try it for yourself: Every time I … I will … 

This is what we call tiny steps in behavioural design. It is a powerful method to get you started with behaviour change without getting overwhelmed by the task that you are facing.

3. LAST: Loss aversion

When you look at the behavioural statement, finding a way to take comforts or anxieties away is vital. Why would you go to the gym if you feel comfortable on your couch and there are no direct consequences if you don’t go? You can make up an excuse for yourself not to go when no strings are attached. The LAST framework will help you set some consequences when you don’t perform the behaviour. We are going to implement loss aversion to help you achieve your goals.

Because if you put something at stake that you don’t want to lose, it will drive your willingness to change. We humans simply don’t like losing something; therefore, it will activate our loss aversion.

For example, commit to donating money to a charity you don’t like. Or promise your partner you will cook for a month if you don’t keep up with your new habit. As long as it is something you dislike to do or lose, you design a context in which you want to sustain the desired behaviour and lose your current bad habits.

One important thing to add: Make sure it is something you actually can do in case you fail to stick to your new habit. If you are unable to do your ‘punishment’, it won’t motivate you to stick to your goals.

Do you want to be part of the next behavioural design challenge?

We offer multiple FREE opportunities for all SUE alumni who followed the Fundamentals Course. Attend a hackathon, join a behavioural design challenge like this one or ask your personal questions about social psychology in our alumni group. Read our brochure and sign up now for the course.

Download the brochure

No worries, no strings attached!

4. LAST: Accountability 

To finish the entire framework, we are now looking at the final step of the LAST framework: Accountability. 

Changing a habit on your own can be difficult. Therefore, finding someone who can keep you accountable for your behaviour can be helpful. Tell them to check on you once a week. What counts is the thought of social pressure. It makes us want to stick to a behaviour.

Also, by adding accountability, you design a context in which you can lose face by not living up to your intentions.

Asking someone to help you achieve your goals is already taking some sort of action. That is why it is important to answer these questions for yourself:

  • Who are you going to ask?
  • When are you going to ask?
  • When should they check on you?

When you are determined to reach your goal, involving someone to keep you accountable can be a great tool to keep you motivated!

How to make habits LAST: example

Now that you understand the LAST framework, it is time to put it into practice. Nothing can convince us more than social proof. We have just that from our group that tackled this challenge themselves.

We highlighted one resolution of a member of this group that might be useful for many people:

” I want to put my desk up in a standing position during every online meeting”.

You might have heard of a convertible desk. You can easily lift up the desktop to sit less during the day. But the habit of actually converting it is challenging to create. It is the perfect example to apply the LAST framework on. 

  1. Tiny Steps: Connect the new behaviour to existing behaviour. Whenever you plan a virtual meeting (current behaviour), you will schedule an additional reminder before the start of the meeting to convert your desk into a standing position (desired behaviour). 
  2. Accountability: Let the person you are meeting with know in advance that you have the resolution to stand up. For example, when you send an invite, put it in the description of the meeting. The social pressure of them asking you about it will motivate you to stand up. 
  3. Loss aversion: What is something you absolutely don’t want to do if you fail to achieve your goal? For example, turn your desk away from the window, no more coffee allowed that day, or your entire salary of that day goes to an organisation you don’t like. Pick something you don’t want to do and promise to stick to it. 
  4. Social: Announce your resolution. For example, tell everybody in your office, your partner at home or write it down for yourself. Our mind loves consistency. If we say we will do something, we want to stick to this behaviour to appear consistent. 

What do you think? Would these steps help you to stand up more during the workday?

In conclusion

We are very happy to see so many enthusiastic people who put our new framework into action. Now it is your turn to tackle your goals or resolutions this year. Changing behaviour is complex. But with these four easy steps, you can start making a difference this year and reach your goals!

Astrid Groenewegen – Behavioural Design Academy

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
02/03/2023

Where to start? This is golden era for Behavioural Design

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

The Covid-19 crisis requires behavioural change
at an unprecedented scale

Amsterdam empty streets during Corona

Abandoned Zeedijk street in Amsterdam during the COVID-19 outbreak.

A tiny creature with massive powers

One tiny microscopic creature did something to humanity what no other animal was capable of doing:

It stopped us.

Everything we thought about the present and the future has been shattered to pieces in just a matter of three weeks.

The future turns out not to be as positive as we anticipated.
The present turned out much more fragile than we assumed.

It took a tiny little virus to evaporate the profits of the last ten years in a matter of days. It squeezed out a sizable chunk of your pension. It might kill your job, and it might turn the debts you took in optimistic times, into serious liabilities.

The Covid-19 crisis requires behavioural change at an unprecedented scale. In this blog we explore the wicked design challenges for behavioural change.

Make Behavioural Design work for you

Join our virtual Behavioural Design Academy from home and see how you can effectively change behaviour and habits to cope with this crisis.

This changes everything

This virus has  thrown us abruptly into a forced behavioural change experiment, and we are struggling to adapt:

  • We need to figure out how to stay in quarantaine without making each other’s life miserable.
  • We have to find a way to be productive and creative while isolated from our teams.
  • We need to stay in mental and physical shape.
  • We’ll have to use our mental strength to avoid anxiety and depression and to be grateful for what we have.
  • And we’re going to get back in financial shape after this crisis. Surviving this one will provide us with valuable lessons for the future.

A Classic Wicked Behavioural Design Problem

If this is not a wicked Behavioural Design problem, then what is?

(Ok except for the climate crisis, which, by the way, is getting temporary relief from our ferocious efforts to finance our progress by pumping the CO2-byproduct of that progress into the atmosphere and the oceans, whereby we turn it into a problem the future generation will need to fix).

This forced social distancing experiment challenges us to change our beliefs and attitudes, change our behaviours and build new habits.

This crisis has all the characteristics of the ultimate behavioural design challenge:

  • It involves new behaviour.
  • We will need to break existing habits,
  • The behaviour we want to design will probably pay off in the far future,
  • While at the same time, we need to to be disciplined in the present.

In other words: although most people will want behavioural change, their habits, their context and their relative inability to resist instant gratification, will make it extremely difficult to succeed.

But isn’t this the characteristic of every exciting behavioural design challenge?

All behaviours that matter are difficult to change.

Amsterdam empty street 2

Book a virtual Behavioural Design Sprint

Book a Behavioural Design sprint to prevent a standstill and have Behavioural Design help you turn this crisis into progress.

Wicked behavioural challenges to work on

Behavioural Designers always design interventions with these barriers for change in mind. We believe that behavioural change can only be achieved if we start with irrational humans. We’ll need to take into account the forces that prevent them from changing their behaviour. We need to find Jobs-to-be-Done that matter to them, and we need to try to make a connection with those jobs. We’ll need to discover the hot trigger moments, where motivation and ability are high and use those moments to let them commit to something small.

We then need to find ways to keep them engaged and to help them to build and sustain new habits.

We’ll need to leverage our psychological understanding of behaviour to help people to build the habits that:

  • keep them in a positive flow
  • get them to experience deep work
  • harvest the creative, social and intellectual capital of their team
  • be creative and productive
  • get them to experience gratitude, joy and wellbeing
  • contribute positively to the life of others
  • get them to learn new skills
  • trigger a curious and optimistic mindset
  • get them to grow as a person
  • get them to try new ideas and embrace uncertainty

 

Change behaviour and the rest will follow

This crisis forces us to practice virtue in the face of gigantic obstacles.

It provides us with a unique opportunity to practice calm, to inspire others with optimism and re-program our brain away from anxiety into fascination and desire for action.

All these positive outcomes can only follow from changing our behaviour first. We firmly believe that we will find calm, experience joy, get creative and feel the power of great collaboration, only if we act first. Our emotions and experience follow from our behaviour. Only if we can get ourselves to commit to new habits; only if we can prime ourselves into thinking differently; only if we infatuate others with our energy and excitement, we will be able to come stronger out of this crisis.

In the upcoming weeks, you’ll hear much more from us. But we also urge you to apply the behavioural design method to influence the minds and shape the behaviour of yourself, your beloved ones and your colleagues. Use the SUE | Influence framework to analyze behaviour, SWAC tool© to come up with interventions for behavioural change, prototype, test and adapt.

There’s so much good work to do.
Let’s get it on.

The team at SUE | Behavioural Design

More blogs on Designing Citizen Behaviour

In this series we apply behavioural design thinking on how societies shape the behaviour of citizen

sue behavioural design
24/03/2020

Training and sprints during Covid-19

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

Behavioural Design and Covid-19

Training and sprints will continue

It would be the worst Behavioural Design if we as SUE wouldn’t come up with interventions to help contain the Covid-19 outbreak. Starting with how we manage things at SUE for all our clients and participants. And not to mention for our team. At our offices we have already taken all the measures that are advised:

  • We wash our hands regularly
  • Most of us are working virtually right now
  • We have special hygiene soaps in the offices
  • We have stopped shaking and hugging (and we are big on hugs)

But we are taking things a step further.

Make Behavioural Design work for you

Join our virtual Behavioural Design Academy and see how you can effectively change behaviour and habits to cope with this crisis.

Behavioural Design as part of a solution

Behavioural Design might be needed more than ever right now. In these times of uncertainty, we believe our clients and participants need all the help they can get not to come to a standstill. How can you make sure your clients are still coming to you? How can you make sure you and your team can still be a high-performance team when forced to work virtually? How can you install team habits? How can you better understand the psychology from clients, citizens and employees so you can help them make better decisions? How can we design behaviour to help slow the spreading of the virus down?

You might have been forced to stop travelling, but that doesn’t mean you want progress to stop or even worse to come to a standstill.

More know-how on Behavioural Design can help prevent a standstill or even help you acquire know-how to outsmart the competition (and virus). That’s why we will continue sprinting and training. SUE is going virtual as long as the outbreak isn’t contained. And SUE will start making free content and training to help organisations and people to install the new behaviours needed in these times. Just keep an eye on our newsletter that you can join on our homepage and this blog.

The reason for going virtual

After reading up on trustworthy sources on the Covid-19 outbreak, one of the most important conclusions is that we can help slow-down and contain the outbreak if we make sure a little people as possible come into contact with each other. We found this interesting graph that shows it in one clear picture:

That’s why we have decided to go fully digital at SUE. We feel it is our responsibility to our clients, participants and employees to protect them as much as we possibly can. By not bringing them together in one room. We have set-up a virtual training and sprint room, and we have all technology in place to visually collaborate from a distance.

Book a virtual Behavioural Design Sprint

Book a Behavioural Design sprint to prevent a standstill and have Behavioural Design help you turn this crisis into progress.

An interesting pilot

Maybe we can make the saying ‘never waste a good crisis’ true for every one of us. We will develop, prototype and improve new working habits.

Let’s turn this forced virtual working into a blessing. If we can make this work, we can also keep it up when this Corona crisis is over.

It could open possibilities for employees to have more flexibility as working from home reduces their travel time. It can open up new ways of wokring that helps parents spend more time with their kids. It can make teams surge as this time can help them experiment with high-performance team habits. It can maybe help this planet as breaking the habits to jump on planes, to commute to work by car or shop ’till we drop is replaced by more positive habits. It will be an interesting journey, and yes, we will experience setbacks. But this crisis will force us to learn super quickly to build better behaviours. Necessity is the mother of all progress. In the meantime,

We will take you along on our journey to help create better habits.

Both in staying on top of our game in work performance, but also in finding out how to make sure you still feel genuinely connected when not being in the same space. We will share this in our newsletter and on this blog. Interesting times and we hope you will join us on this ride. That is both necessary, but also extremely intriguing.

Our clients and participants

If you have booked a sprint with us, we will contact you personally to give you all instructions how to participate in the virtual sprint to help you come up with solutions to make Behavioural Design work for you. Do you want to book a new virtual sprint, as you also might feel Behavioural Design is the missing layer to dealing with this crisis? Please contact us; we can help you out with everything.

If you have enrolled in our Academy, we have sent you an email with the latest update on how you can access the virtual training will take place. Please also check your spam folder to find it. Do you want to join the Academy? Just enrol on the Academy page, and you’ll get all the information on how to join the virtual training room. The dates mentioned on the website are still the dates of the training.

Contact

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions: hello@suebehaviouraldesign.com
By phone: +31 20 2234626

Watch the complete overview of our blogs on behavioural design.

sue behavioural design
14/03/2020

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.

BONUS: free ebook 'Designing Happiness'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'Six Rules For Designing Happiness'. Because that is the main goal everybody will have for the new year: being happy. It is a little gift from us to you.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

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.

Download the cheatsheet

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
Jeff Bezos' famous rules for high output Team Behaviour

How Jeff Bezos designs Team Behaviour

By All, Employee behaviour

The number one question for every organization in the knowledge economy is to figure out how to get the highest level of creative, intellectual and productive power from their teams. This is a classic wicked Behavioural Design challenge: How do you design the ultimate high-output team? And how can you trigger team behaviour that leads to high output? Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has got some fascinating answers to this problem.

Jeff Bezos' famous rules for high output Team Behaviour

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is famous for his unorthodox management ideas to get the most out of a group of talented people. At Amazon they cultivate certain behavioural design principles that are designed to challenge group-think and promote excellence. The Atlantic published a fascinating long read about Bezos in which a couple of these ideas are covered.

The two-pizza team

The most famous rule is the “two-pizza teams”-rule: Every team should be able to be fed with no more than two pizza’s. The idea is that the small teams instil a sense of ownership over projects. The downside of this design is that “employees placed on such small teams can also experience a greater fear of failure because there’s no larger group in which to hide or to more widely distribute blame” (Quote from The Atlantic).

The 6-page memo

Another rule I learned about is the 6-page memo. Quoting the Atlantic again:

Amazon has a raft of procedures to guide its disparate teams. Bezos insists that plans be pitched in six-page memos, written in full sentences, a form he describes as “narrative.” This practice emerged from a sense that PowerPoint had become a tool for disguising fuzzy thinking. Writing, Bezos surmised, demands a more linear type of reasoning. As John Rossman, an alumnus of the company who wrote a book called Think Like Amazon, described it, “If you can’t write it out, then you’re not ready to defend it.

The six-pagers are consumed at the beginning of meetings in what Bezos has called a “study hall” atmosphere. This ensures that the audience isn’t faking its way through the meeting either. Only after the silent digestion of the memo—which can be an anxiety-inducing stretch for its authors—can the group ask questions about the document”.

What a fascinating intervention to design high performance team behaviour! By simply asking people to pitch their plans in a 6-page narrative, they are forced to think very clearly about the problem and the solution. And by setting up this “study hall”-ritual at the beginning of the meeting, you know that your text will be read thoroughly and that you will be shredded if you didn’t think things through.

Would you like to know more how to leverage behavioural science to achieve operational excellence?

Has reading the Behavioural Research inspired you to see how you can make Behavioural Design power up your organisation? Please check out what we can do to shape employee behaviour.

Take me there

Discover how Behavioural Design can make talent flourish!

Culture is not about values, but about behaviour

How often have you been in a session in which you are asked to think about core values that define the culture of the organisation? I think this exercise is total crap. The whole idea that a team can cough up core values based on a brainstorm is insane. Values, beliefs and cultures are shaped by how the team interacts.

How a team interacts is by large determined by how the little rules, rituals of habits they installed to shape their interactions.

If a team is committed to a daily check-in, a proper check-out of every meeting and a weekly retrospective in which they share a round of constructive feedback, they will think of themselves as totally committed to growing and learning. They will think of honesty and feedback as something they simply do as a team.

Organisational design is about designing decision-making

There was another passage in the longread about Jeff Bezos that I thought was fascinating:

“What is Amazon, aside from a listing on Nasdaq? This is a flummoxing question. The company is named for the world’s most voluminous river, but it also has tributaries shooting out in all directions. Retailer hardly captures the company now that it’s also a movie studio, an artificial-intelligence developer, a device manufacturer, and a web-services provider. But to describe it as a conglomerate isn’t quite right either, given that so many of its businesses are tightly integrated or eventually will be. When I posed the question to Amazonians, I got the sense that they considered the company to be a paradigm—a distinctive approach to making decisions, a set of values, the Jeff Bezos view of the world extended through some 600,000 employees. This description, of course, means that the company’s expansion has no natural boundary; no sector of the economy inherently lies beyond its core competencies”.

Amazon is a paradigm, a distinctive approach to making decisions. That’s what makes the company so dangerous. The reason why they win in nearly every market is that they figured ways to analyse customer preferences and needs, build technology to cater to those needs and most of all: they know how to quickly turn this into success because they have a set of rules that allows them to make winning decisions much faster than their competitors.

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04/11/2019

How to design an innovation habit?

By All, Employee behaviour

This blog post touches upon the organisational habits that boost innovation and growth. Why are some companies more innovative than others? I want to argue that they have habits in place that produce more ideas and habits to get those ideas shipped. As Steve Jobs once famously said (paraphrasing William Gibson) : “Real artists ship”. In this blogpost I want to explore this innovation habit, based on our 8 year experience with collaborating with teams.

 

The habits that kill innovation.

Dozens of books have been written about this subject, but from our own experiences on running behavioural design sprints, these were the most common habits that kill innovation:

 

No research culture / a crisis of curiosity.
The bigger a company gets, the more out of touch it becomes with how real users think, feel and behave. Managers rely on abstract data, like market shares, sales volumes, etc. The more detached they become from the real customer, the less probable they will spot exciting opportunities.

 

No ideation culture / a crisis of imagination.
Once an organisation outgrew its startup phase and entered its scale-up phase, the whole mindset of the organisation is focused on growing the business. Most businesses organise their process around building the existing product offering. Moreover, to achieve this growth mindset, a specialisation of roles is required. Everyone is expected to perform in their specific domain, from the product manager to marketing manager, digital manager, UX-er, and communication manager. This results in a decreased capability of the organisation to think out-of-the-box and to think outside-in. Nearly always, the exciting opportunity for innovation transcends the boundaries of the specific discipline.

 

No prototyping culture / a crisis of experimentation.
The more an organisation specialises, the more we expect those specialists to know what they are doing. This expert fallacy is a well-known organisational problem: Because we are expected to be experts, we are more inclined to act like experts. The more we think we know, the less alienated we become from discovering the truth. Not knowing is perceived as a weakness in these companies, while every successful startup knows that aggressive experimentation is one secret ingredient to growth.

 

Conflicting incentives / a crisis of management.
In most organisations, the problem with innovation is that everyone, including management, is hired to execute the strategy. Not only are they hired, but they’re also reviewed based on the execution of the strategy. When your promotion depends on hitting the targets, everything related to new ideas will be perceived as a distraction.

 

The net effect of these habits is total inertia.
Even in the context of declining market share, missing targets and aggressive competition, all the forces in the organisation seem to pull people towards repeating the same strategies repeatedly. The habit of keeping doing what we always do is just too strong.

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The habits that boost innovation.

Innovation is not a goal as such. Innovation is always a function of growth. Some organisations are far better than others to spot opportunities, come up with ideas, test them and succeed in actually shipping them. Whether they improve the product, marketing, process or campaign, the value of new ideas is that they succeed in contributing to growth.That’s why we need to study the innovative power of an organisation as a habit problem.

Innovative companies have habits in place that trigger more curiosity, ideation, and experimentation. Continuous improvement is their default mode.

We have facilitated sprints with many teams. Most of them don’t call themselves “innovation teams”. They’re product teams, or growth teams, or customer experience teams. The biggest challenge they all face is to improve their output to generate growth for the business. There are four team habits we came across that strongly correlated with the creative and innovative power of a team:

 

A deep love-relationship with customer problems.
Innovative teams are in love with the problem of the customer. They relentlessly talk to customers or observe them in the real world and try to spot opportunities for helping customer to overcome pains, break bad habits, take away barriers and achieve goals. They are always asking themselves the question: How might we help our customers to be more successful

 

A fast process for generating ideas.
Innovative teams have proper ideation sessions. They follow the core principles for group creativity (like brainwriting and dotmocracy) and treat every idea as an interesting hypothesis. In a well designed creative process, the individuals come up with as many ideas as possible and the group decides upon which ideas are worth experimenting.

 

A process and tools in place to prototype and ship.
Great teams have a maker-mentality. They always try to figure out ways to prototype their ideas and test them in the real world. This allows them to increase their learning curve and their success rate rapidly. An essential condition for allowing this to happen is to have an infrastructure that allows experimentation.

 

A cultural shift that promotes, rewards and celebrates braveness.
This is by far the most important habit. Very often, the problem is cultural. If the organisation is number-driven, then you’ll always end up with all kinds of triggers that incline people to believe that following the rules and reaching targets is what the organisation expects of them. However, if you want to create a culture of experimentation, then you’ll have to embrace failure, promote and rewards braveness. People need to experience that experimentation is being expected of them.

Incremental versus radical innovation

In the literature on innovation, quite often the distinction is made between radical and incremental innovation. Incremental innovation is the optimisation of the existing products and services, whereas disruptive innovation is the more radical ideas to transform the business.

To be honest: I think this distinction is a bit artificial. If you think about the innovation habits we described above, then they are about being radically customer-centred, about having a maker-mentality, and a culture of experimentation. Out of this habit, both incremental, as well as radical ideas can emerge. The only thing an organisation needs to have in place is a fund to invest in the rapid prototyping and testing of some of the more radical ideas.

What this means for innovation leadership.

When approaching the problem of innovation in organisations from this perspective, I think

The role of an innovation leader in a company should be to help to build the innovation habit.

I don’t believe an innovation department – as the place where innovation is happening -is the solution. An innovation leader / or innovation tribe should be a group of people that facilitate and train teams to install the innovation habit. If new radical ideas come out of this process, they should be able to invest money in them to be able to hire a team to design, build, prototype and test the idea in the real world. If this experiment turned out to be successful, then it’s their job to convince the board to invest in the concept with ambition.

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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
25/08/2019