How to make behavioral change stick for ourselves and our teams

Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two entirely different challenges. Organisations usually fail in the latter one. Knowing what to do is tackled with strategy work, sales development programs, service design, customer service training and many other planning processes. However, it is the execution part - actually doing it - that is so often lacking.

Matching your new strategy or masterplan with new behaviours doesn’t have to be difficult. Fortunately, we can increase the likelihood of success by following habit anchoring strategies that are based on behavioural science. We’ll go through two of them in this article.

Create only 1-2 new habits at a time

While most of us have multiple new habits we’d like to develop, trying to create too many habits at once will most likely result in failing to form any. Each change we make in our daily lives takes much more energy and space than we realise. Remember that creating even one habit

does take some time. 66 days on average. We need to let go of the idea of doing everything at once. Instead, we need to focus on repeating just 1-2 new habits until they become ingrained in our behavioural DNA. Only then will we have the time and space to develop other habits.

In our Nanohabits Programs, we can introduce more habits at once, and decrease the time it takes to anchor them. This is due to the fact that the participants have state of the art tools, strong support and multiple science-based anchoring strategies in place. However, we are still quite conservative about the volume of habits that we recommend are anchored at once. It’s usually smarter to identify the highest-impact habits, and focus on anchoring them well before moving on to the next habit sets.

Repeat the behaviour in a consistent context

A new behaviour is much more likely to become habitual, if you practice the behaviour in a consistent context.

The idea of repeating a single action in a consistent context is different from common advice; that which emphasises a variation in behaviours and settings to maintain interest. Trying different sports at different times of the day may not be the best advice if you are aiming at developing a routine for exercising. A better one is likely to be jogging at the same time each morning. The same goes for the organisational behaviours. It might be smart to always initiate coaching at the same time and place, like via the phone when driving to work, if you are trying to develop a new coaching habit for yourself. Variations in the situation or context may stave off boredom, but they are both effortful and depend on a sustained level of motivation.

How to make people to repeat the behaviour

Research shows that people may subconsciously associate certain behaviours (e.g., checking social media) with given locations (e.g. the kitchen table) or in conjunction with other behaviours (e.g. eating). Over time, these contextual cues become powerful nudges that prompt people to repeat a behaviour. Utilise these strategies to your advantage.

If you want to anchor powerful, easy to adopt habits for yourself or your team, Nanohabits® can help. Get in touch with one of our team today.

Sources:

1. see for instance Danner, U. N., Aarts, H., and Vries, N. K. (2008). Habit vs. intention in the prediction of future behaviour: The role of frequency, context stability and mental accessibility of past behaviour. British Journal of Social Psychology, 47(2), pp. 245-265.

2. Lewicki, P., Hill, T., and Bizot, E. (1988). Acquisition of procedural knowledge about a pattern of stimuli that cannot be articulated. Cognitive Psychology, 20(1), pp. 24-37.

3. Graybiel, A. M. (1998). The basal ganglia and chunking of action repertoires. Neurobiology of Learningand Memory, 70(1), pp. 119-136.

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