How to Change Behavior

“If you want to change a mind, simply talking to it may not be enough.”

In a story about how what teachers do can influence what they believe and consequently improve student performance, reporter Alix Spiegel looks at the results of research being conducted at the University of Virginia.

While many commenters focused on the impact on student performance in the research, I was more intrigued by the connection demonstrated between action and beliefs in the teachers. 

Something we all understand is the notion that our beliefs influence our actions. What I think, what I know, or what I think I know, determines how I act. 

In an oversimplified way, the study seems to show us something else: trying to change what someone thinks by giving them loads of new and compelling information will not necessarily get them to change what they do.

No matter how good your data is and how skilled you are at telling the story in that data, the information itself is often not sufficient to change behavior.

This has interesting implications for any of us who work in the change business (and who doesn’t these days?).

If you want someone to change the beliefs that drive their behavior, start with the behavior and watch the beliefs adapt.

The actions I take influence how I think about the world. How I behave can shift what I believe.

This story shines some light on the two-way nature of the mind-body connection. Each enhances the other.

In our over-rationalized, Cartesian world, we often forget the power and impact of physical acts as a tool for influence and change.

Cheating at Harvard?

What can we learn from the brewing scandal?

A few days ago I was listening to accounts of the story about cheating at Harvard. This was an incident that allegedly occurred last spring when around half of a class of 250 students was found to have engaged in some form of impropriety (copying, collaborating, and plagiarizing) on a take home exam.

Leaving aside the juiciness of cheating at an elite institution of higher learning, I was struck by the several questions that leapt into my head, none of which were being asked in any of the stories I read. (Maybe I’m just reading the wrong news.)

To begin, let’s go back to first principles. What IS cheating? Do we all agree what it looks like? Did we spend any time beforehand making sure we are in sync? I’m not offering a definition, only the suggestion that it’s a good idea to start here and find out whether we all have the same notion.

Then, what assumptions are we holding that we ought to be testing? To wit, that everyone in the community knows that cheating, as we choose to define it, is bad? That when someone sees someone else cheating, she knows to turn that person in?

These are only assumptions, and as assumptions, they need to be constantly monitored for their ongoing meaning and relevance. We’ve all been in situations where what we thought was true turned out to be only our own faulty and incomplete interpretation of what was happening.

And my last question: Is there a different way we need to be thinking about academic integrity and performance expectations? This case highlights the prevailing philosophy that individual performance is what matters most. This is what we try to measure throughout academia. Problem is, the world beyond the academy doesn’t work that way.

I have clients who pay me lots of money because they want help figuring out how to break free of the rut of individual performance expectations and get their people working collaboratively, across boundaries. Sharing information and resources. Finding better answers together than they could have by themselves.

Why doesn’t our education system prepare us for these real world challenges?

For all the wonderful things our education system does, it seems that this is one place it is lagging behind. Perhaps these Harvard students are in the vanguard of something new. I wonder if the institution has the courage to ask itself some tough questions about what comes next.

The Science of Organization Development

Touchy-feely has nothing to do with it.

I was reading an article tonight that reminded me about the science of what I do. 

As a consultant who works with organizations on what ails them, potential clients often perceive my offer as soft and imprecise. 

I'm getting better at demonstrating the real-world payoff for working with me: engaged employees, aligned organizations, better business results, improved relationships, more sustainable success. 

At the heart of the work is an approach that is analogous to the scientific method: data gathering, hypothesis development, and experimentation to test the hypothesis. We call it “action research” to distinguish it from what you do in physics, for example. But the process is the same.

We see this same approach elsewhere in organizations too, like in product and service development.

One distinction in the social and behavioral sciences is that our results usually cannot be replicated because of the vagaries and complexities of human systems. No two are alike.

Still, with enough rigor, patterns emerge that credibly support hypotheses, and these patterns can then be turned into frameworks. These frameworks can be used in other experiments, and the body of knowledge grows.

What We Mean By "Agreement"

The purpose of having an agreement is to create violations.

The purpose of having an agreement is not to prevent violations but to create them.

There's a counterintuitive notion if ever there was one. 

Most simply, without an agreement, it is impossible to have a violation. You may find yourself upset or angry with me over something I have done, but if we never took the time to devise an agreement, then it's impossible for you to tell me about the line I crossed in a way that has meaning for me.

On the other hand, if I know what we've agreed, I know what I can and can't do, and hopefully most of the time I'm on the right side of the line. If I shift my perspective accept the opening proposition here, I find I have a very different approach to my interaction with you when I do step over the line.

Keeping agreements is about integrity. Synonyms for integrity include rectitude, probity, virtue, and honesty. 

Integrity can be found at the personal and at the organizational levels. In my experience, organizational integrity is a much trickier characteristic to nurture and sustain. This is in part because of the challenges inherent in crafting group level agreements. 

Organizations are very good at writing policies and establishing rules, but these policies and rules are not very good at fostering collective integrity. That's because they are generally intended to address the extremes of behavior: the egregious violations that require disciplinary action. 

Integrity, rather, is something that is part of an organization's day to day existence and operations. Or not. It is not very effectively imposed from the outside. It grows from within. In groups, culture is a far better incubator, and regulator, of organizational integrity. 

I have been working for years with a national non-profit that is a paragon of this kind of integrity. Even though they have been on an astronomical growth curve lately, they continue to be very rigorous and intentional about guarding their culture, protecting it as one of their most valuable assets. 

A fundamental part of the culture there is a commitment to open communication. Lots of organizations say they have this value, and I have never seen one that lives up to it the way this one does. What makes the commitment so unique in this case is the way the entire organization reaches explicit collective agreements, acknowledges that violations of these agreements are only a matter of time, and then engages over the violation to either reconfirm or adjust the original agreement. 

These organizational agreements are living, breathing elements of the group's life together. When they become stagnant, they lose their meaning and impact.

Seven Minutes of Terror

High stakes teaming at NASA

Have you looked at this video yet?  If not, I urge you to.  It was assembled by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and it tells the story of what went into planning the landing of Curiosity, the Mars explorer.

In addition to amazing computer animation, it is narrated by a few of the engineers responsible for Curiosity, so you get to meet these people in all their excitement and pride.

The statistics of this mission are staggering.  The spacecraft has covered a distance of 352 million miles over the last eight months.  Curiosity is the size and weight of a compact car, brimming with high tech gear including sensors and laser beams and computers.

One group of people, the Landing Team, has been at work on Curiosity for ten years.  Ten years.  All that time, all that effort, to figure out what needs to happen from the time the ship hits the outermost reaches of the Martian atmosphere until it touches down on Martian soil.

Did I mention that entire sequence lasts seven minutes?

Ten years for seven minutes.  There’s a singular focus if there ever was one.

I realize this is all in the past now.  We know of the magnificent success of the journey and of the landing early Monday morning.  Still, I can’t get over the size of the accomplishment.

And, I can’t stop thinking about the Landing Team.  What must it have required to meld that group of world class experts into a highly functioning team?

While I don’t know for sure, I can hazard a guess as to some of the characteristics that were probably present from the beginning:

• Clarity of purpose
• Close connection to the external environment (with regular recalibration)
• Leadership, rotating as required
• Commitment to outcomes
• Respect for one another’s capabilities
• Adaptability (includes learning)

As with many teams that operate in high stakes environments, much will be written about what happened to enable this one to be so successful.  I look forward to taking part in that conversation.