E023: Behavior Change, an Introduction

now onto this episode.

Hi. This is James and Jane, and we are back again with another episode of The World of Work podcast. Yes, we are, which is just like, we won't go away. I know it's funny, isn't it? It just keeps on going. So how's your week been? What have you been up to? Jen? So I thought I knew what I was gonna say, and I've just remembered something else. I passed my first MSC module, of course. Yes, I'm super excited.

So that's a personal thing that I've had that I would love to pretend I wasn't excited. But after 22 years out of education, I was really excited. It's such a big step that's fantastic. So I'm super chat, and I got a really good mark. So well, Chapter back, right? What else has been going on? Two really exciting things. One, we started to get some really good engagement with other professionals in this space who are interested in what we're talking about, yeah? So we've got a couple of guest speakers. I'm having some conversations about, which is really exciting. It's great when people reach out, isn't it? It's the most lovely thing. Feels really good. And also really interesting topics that I hadn't really I kind of, I know we talked about really early doors, but it's stuff that we maybe are interested in, but aren't experts at, yeah. So when someone comes and says, Oh, I'm really interested in this, and this is my main focus. Do you want, do you want to maybe have a conversation about it? Then I get really excited, because I'm like, Yeah, far rather talk to someone who knows loads. Yeah. So super excited about that. And then I am also super, super excited about the fact that you and I had a really cool conversation last week, and we are beginning to look at what else we might do together. Yeah, that's exciting, isn't it? I mean, this has been a great sort of practice for us, and working together and seeing what we're doing, yeah, saying it out loud makes me realize how weirdly meta that is. It is a little bit slightly confusing it is. But effectively, we are quite enjoying recording this, I think, yeah, I am. I'm super enjoying it. I've developed the thing for Super today, super, but I'm really enjoying it. So I think

we're exploring where else we might be able to collaborate, which is super cool. Yeah, very exciting. So I've had a really good week. Great. That's really good. My week's been pretty good, but a bit mixed. So from a sort of work perspective, it's been really good. I've had some great conversations with people about future work, and also a couple of really good coaching conversations,

you know, with some clients, you're beginning to really enjoy that role as coach. Well, yeah, and obviously some sessions are better than others, but I've had a couple where it's just felt both really helpful for clients, but also enjoyable for me. I like to do things that I feel confident and, you know, I'm very much present and in the moment, and it's supportive of a person I'm working with, and that feels good. It feels like things are coming together, and I'm focusing and kind of in flow and helping people. And, um, yeah, we've got it another episode. Yeah, exactly. So that's great, but at a personal level, we've had,

you know, somebody I know, has been scheduled to have an operation, and that's been going on for a little while, and was rescheduled a few times. So I've done a lot of driving around and visiting people and just trying to keep everything on the road with that. So that's a bit harder, but at the same time, it's really good to be able to help people, right? I mean, you don't always have the chance to reach out and help people, so, so that's been pretty rewarding. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting one.

I've, I've mentioned to you before, I've got parents who are of an age, yeah, where they're more likely to not be so well some of the time. And I've really, part of my goal setting this year was, was deliberately leaving enough space and time to travel down to London to see them, because they are infinitely, infinitely more happy about seeing me now than they were 20 years. Yes, they're so pleased to see me. And you know, why wouldn't I do that? Then, great, great. So, yeah, it's nice. It's nice. You know, make time when you I think it's because I don't bring my washing anymore. You probably

actually like your net asset now, as opposed I am a net asset. I will say that's my mother next

time I see her, just make sure she thinks it's a positive thing as opposed to the negative one. Yeah. Well, that's good. So it's been a good time. I'm excited about some other stuff we're looking at as well. So I think that's good in terms of what we're doing. So we tell people we're, um, we're into series three now, right? So, so this is episode one of series three, and our first two series were,

you know, were, were less related in terms of content. Then are you suggesting they might have been a bit static gun in there? Well, I was trying to be more for those.

For those who don't know, the reason that we did the topics we did in the first two series predominantly was because they were really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And also we thought they kind of laid some foundations fairly early, yeah, yeah. And to be honest, when we started, we didn't know we'd be doing a series three, but now I'm quite impressed we've got past episode three. Mind series three, if people are still listening. By the time this goes out, I will be delighted exactly you let me know, in fact, if you have actually stayed with us on this journey, can you please tweet us out of our podcast? Yeah, that would be good.

So what we decided, we spent some time last week, we went for a long walk and did a bit of a sort of feedback and review, and we thought it would be good if we tried to have series three be a bit more structured and thematic. So what we've decided is that our future series, but some optimism there, at least series three is going to include six episodes. So we're going to shrink the series size, but we're going to bring in a theme for it, and series three is going to be about, effectively, behavior and motivation, right? We think that's a really interesting topic, and we think there are some some good underlying subjects we can have in there. So we're kind of excited to do it as a thematic piece. We're going to be looking at some sort of academic thinking in there, some practical advice, and trying to bring it all together into a sort of body of work that's that's congruent. So what does that look like? Well, today we're going to be speaking to you about theories of behavior and some models of behavior change. So that should be, hopefully, quite interesting. Then tomorrow, not tomorrow. Then for the next episode, we're going to be looking at theories of motivation and breaking some of those down and explaining, you know, where motivation comes from, how it exists, and things like that. In our third episode, we're going to look at the role of coaching and reflect on how coaching can help people, potentially look to change their behaviors, and, some extent, change their ways of working in the workplace, and address things like motivation. So Episode Three on coaching. Episode Four, we're going to be looking at goal setting and theories of goal setting, which is obviously an important factor of behavior and behavior change. Episode Five is going to be about habituation, which is really all about creating habits that stick. You know, once something's a habit, you're more likely to do it, and that behavior becomes more consistent. And then the last episode of a Series, Episode Six is going to be trying to look for some really, you know, practical, real life examples of how people are managing their behaviors, maybe with some some guests to speak about experience in their sectors and things like that. So that's, that's, that's it. That's series three in a nutshell. So I guess what we really love is that, if you are interested in how to change your own behaviors or how to enable behavior change and people around you and support it, we love if you walk away having listened to all of these episodes thinking, I know what I can do. I know some things I can try that will help me help other people to change

their behaviors, because I've got to be honest, the most powerful and the most enabling things I've done in my career have come about because I've looked to change my behavior. Yeah, skills and knowledge is important. It's useful and absolutely crucial in certain in certain parts of my working life. But it's the stuff where I've changed my behaviors that I've just revelatory. It's really fairly transformational if you do it in a good way. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I try to avoid the word transformation, no, no, because I know it feels, if you haven't been through the process, it can feel really Empress. New clothes selling. Yes, it can. Is the only metaphoric thing. And if that doesn't make sense to people beyond your read, hands, Christian answer, it must be hand screen, I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a fable about trying to flog ideas that are more than they that seem more than they are. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And but it is. It fundamentally changes the way you view the world and the way you do things. Yeah. And interestingly, later on, you're going to be speaking about street King, so I think maybe that'll fit in with the Emperor. I'm going to be talking about streaking before everyone gets excited or horrified. Actually streaking in the context of habit forming. I'm going to just talk about some very basic transformation, behavior change stuff that

I use. And then we'll, we'll go on to talk about in more detail, in habituation episode, I think, yeah, cool. So it's creating streaks of good behavior. It's not about taking your clothes off. This is not necessarily appropriate. Yeah, who thought that? The couple of industries where that is appropriate? Not many. Yes, cool. Okay, so that's what we're doing. So it's kind of exciting to have a theme for the series. So quite excited about that. In terms of the episode, we're going to be doing what we usually do, right? So straight into some definition discussion and a research round up and a list of a week some stories from a keyboard, from our experience in the workplace, a couple of final thoughts, and then a bit of a check in and check out. As ever, we're posting stuff onto our website. You can go there and download some.

Some content, if you like, yeah, there's some really, really useful things on there. And we'll be doing the WoW mail. Nice to see a number of you subscribe to that

both an absolute pleasure and also put some real pressure now that that number of people scribes is growing, yeah, content, which is great. So thank you for helping me get focused. But yeah, we'll be popping some stuff into the mailing as well. Yeah. So www dot the WoW podcast.org. You can sign up to the newsletter there,

please, please, please. We love to hear from you on Twitter, LinkedIn. We've also got a Facebook page, but

if you want to get talking to us, then we would love to hear what you think of the content. Yeah, any questions you've got, because some of this stuff was new to us too, right? We're exploring it, so we're really interested. Yeah, cool. Alright. Do you want to run us through some definitions? Yeah, let me. Let me kick us off with

some definition. Now, on the I would just say, I'm not going to go through all of the ones that were on the slide. So I would encourage you, if there's terminology that we come across during the during the session, during the podcast today, and you don't understand it. It may well be that it's already defined in on the slides or in the website, but I'm going to pick out the ones that I think are really, really important to frame this conversation. So one is from study.com on behavior, and it the definition that they they use is, in psychology, behavior consists of an organisms external reactions to its environment. Other aspects of psychology, such as emotions, thoughts and other internal mental processes don't usually fall under the category of behavior. So sometimes I think it's really important to define what it's not as well definition. So I also want to pick up on we talk about motivation, and I've picked out one from psychology and society, and I've picked out quite a lot of stuff from psychology, because ultimately, behavioral change sits alongside the field of Economics and Psychology, yeah, and it's quite often it's come out of some of some of the area of economics, because of nudge and

but its roots in psychology, and it's really important to understand that. So motivation is an internal process that directs and maintains behavior. Motivation is an internal process that can cause someone to move towards a certain goal. There's a whole load of issues with the way they've conflated all of those terms. But ultimately, in order to change behavior, you need motivation to do Yeah, two others. One I want to pick up is nudging, because we might mention this at various points, nudging became all the thing, all the thing recently, particularly since about 2008 when Theda and sunset promoted their book nudge, improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. And so I'm going to go straight to them for their definition, which is a nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the change architecture that alters a people's alters people's behavior in a predictable way, without forbidding any objects, without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, to count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates, yeah, putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not. So what we're really talking about is getting people to want to change easily, rather than forcing them to Yeah, yeah. It's not a nudge. If you change the rules, right? That's not a nudge. That's just forcing you to change. It's about using, yeah, and it's using people's ultimate motivations for their own good. So they might want to do something, but it just may seem too difficult, sort of facilitating of these types. That's exactly, exactly, right? And then the last one I want to pick up on is intervention by the Cambridge dictionary, because dictionary, because I think it's really useful an intervention is action taken to become intentionally involved in a difficult situation in order to improve it or prevent it from getting worse. Yeah, okay, okay. And I think it's really important to understand intervention is about intention, yeah. And it's about

it's about how we get involved. And things aren't easy, because it's really easy, a lot of things change. This is about stuff that isn't stubborn. Quite often, yeah, is where we look at stuff like this, yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of sort of intervention work in areas of things like medicine and things like that, which is worth keeping in mind. So, you know, a lot of work comes out about but in the workplace, we maybe design interventions in a different in a different way. Yeah, cool. Those are kind of, there are other you know, we run through things like influence environment, we talk about opportunity and capability, and I think they're all worth having to look at. But for me, those are the four that are really important to understand what we're talking about. You need to understand what is behavior, the role of motivation and changing behavior, what nudging is and how you can start to use it, and also what an intervention is cool. So probably the best place to start, as always, James, do you want to give us a bit of a research round up? I would love to add.

Of research. So I tell you what I'm going to run through today, that would be great. All right, so I'm going to start with something called dual process theory, which is actually a theory of thinking. It's a reflection on how humans think. I think it's an interesting place, because obviously the way we think, to some extent, shapes our behaviors. Then I'm going to go from that into a fairly old model of behavior, which is from Kurt Lewin, a 1936 model that I think is really interesting and useful as a starting point. Then I'm going to jump forward to this century and run through a model from UCL, which is called the behavior change wheel. And the behavior change wheel is interesting because it's both a theory of behavior and what affects or determines an individual's behavior, but it also brings in some thoughts around interventions and intervention functions and some behavior change tools that people can use to try and influence behaviors. Then I'm going to touch on ethics, because I think ethics is really important in this area, and I know it's something that we'll reflect on over the series, and that for me, is the end of our research around that Sound like a plan? Sounds great. Let's get started. Let's do it. Okay, so dual process theory, this is actually one of my favorite little nuggets of information that's out there, and dual process theory comes from originates quite a while ago, but it's actually been popularized in the behavioral economics world in the same way that things like nudge have brought some of the psychological aspects of these things to life, particularly Danny Kahneman has done some work on it. What dual process theory says is that humans actually have, broadly speaking, two different streams of thought, or two different ways of thinking, and certainly in Danny Kahneman work, he refers to them as system one and system two. Other people use different language for it. So humans have a system one for thinking and a system two for thinking, and they do different things and behave in slightly different ways. System one is the evolutionarily older system. It's, you know, it's been around for a long time, and fundamentally, it's quite unconscious. It's sort of autopilot. You know, you do things without really thinking of them. You make decisions. You use a whole lot of shortcuts in the ways that you think about things and and you're just fairly automatic in your thinking, in and in your decision making. So that's system one. It's it's a quick process. You think of things really quickly. You make decisions quickly, and it doesn't take much effort. However, it's got some flaws. System two is a much more evolutionarily modern way of thinking, and this is, you know, much more of a frontal cortex of a brain, and really active as a thinking process,

and it leads to probably more considered decisions. But it's it takes a lot of effort. You know, this is when you're focusing, you're applying a lot of effort to making your decision and and it's a slow process, it's logical, it's rational, it tends to get some pretty good outcomes, but it's fairly slow. So those are over two different processes that humans have for thinking. And of course, our behaviors are to some extent affected by our thinking. Some of our behaviors are a result of considered thinking from system two. But a whole lot of human behavior is actually as a result of sort of unconscious reasoning and unconscious decision coming out of system one. So I just thought that was an interesting starting point to get people thinking about where some of our our thinking and behavior comes from. So moving on. One thing I want to say is, you know, we're going to be speaking about behaviors, and we're going to be speaking, to some extent, about changing behaviors. So I just wanted to call out that people think about, sort of the argument of nature and nurture in relation to human characteristics and sort of behavioral traits and things like that. And for our purposes, we're going to kind of ignore that argument, or we're going to totally ignore that argument and just say that a lot of behaviors for humans have a result of learned things in their lives, and are things that we can change so nature, nurture can take place somewhere else as a discussion, as far as I'm concerned for the moment, and that kind of means we're going to also shelve the whole plasticity of personalities. There's a whole debate that's going on, and lots of research around what level of plasticity do we have around our personally, how much does it change? Yeah, which kind of underpins some of this behavior stuff? Again, huge debate. Get into it. No doubt. We'll talk about it another time. But for now, this is focused on very much what you can do and what you've learned try and do things that you want to change. Yeah, it's about understanding where your behaviors come from, what shapes your behaviors, and what you can do to try and influence them and change them a few years so model number one. Model number one is an equation. Yeah? Happy days. We love an equation. It's like my favorite, yeah, we do. We do. And guess who it's from. It's from Kurt Lewin, yay. I'll pin up.

I found out this week that Kurt is actually the 18th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. What do you think about that?

I don't know. Having having recently passed my research methods. My first question is, who's 18th? Decided he's 18. How has the data been collected? Yeah. Who knows what? Who knows anyway, he's more popular than I thought he might have been. I'm not surprised. It's also got quite distinctive.

A he does have a distinctive name and a distinctive look. Maybe we totally got to put that. Yeah, well, we'll put that up. We'll tweet. We'll treat pictures of Kurt to people. Um, okay, so, so anyway, he had a behavior equation from 1936

and on the face of it, it's really, really very simple, but I think it's worth reflecting on, because it draws out some things that were at the time maybe not considered as common knowledge. And like a lot of great models, it seems like perfect common sense once you know about it, but you know over time it wasn't. So his equation is b equals F, bracket, P, comma, E, lovely, close bracket. And really, all he's saying there is that an individual's behavior is a function of them as a person, P and their environment, right? So, so the real step forward in thinking in this model is that it's not just an individual that affects their behaviors, but their environment affects them. So, you know, individuals affect their environment, and environments affect the individuals, and that sort of messiness of the interaction between the individual and their environment shapes their behaviors.

So it seems really simple and it seems really obvious when, when you drill into it, P is a little bit more complicated than it first appears. So P as person actually includes the entirety of that person, including their past, their present, things like their expectations of a future, their personality, their capabilities, their motivations, their desires, all this kind of stuff. So it's quite broad, a broad base of personal traits captured in p and the E for environment includes

things like the physical environment, but also things in there can can be brought in from their social environment and the context they're operating within. So behavior is a function of a person and the environment. And some of the really important things that came out of this really was the idea that an environment affects an individual. Now, from this model, what you can see is that you can see that the same person will behave potentially or exhibit different behaviors in different environments. So me in one environment will behave one way, and me the exact same. Me in a different environment may behave in a different way. And that's quite powerful, because that means that one can change an environment, and that through changing an environment, you change the behaviors of an individual. And it's also, I think it's a really useful way of both giving you some kind of explanation and also giving your watch out clause for when your behavior changes. And you can't quite put your finger on white and the example I would give is when you go back to family reunions, right? Totally, you will behave one way at work, and then you will go home, and you will find yourself behaving, responding to that environment in a completely different way. And

look, it doesn't. It doesn't the equation doesn't necessarily help you change that, but it does help you understand that it's not necessarily a failing of yours. You are somewhat programmed to behave in respondents to certain environments. Your environments affect your behaviors totally and just in the same way that the same person behaves differently in different environments, almost the inverse of that's true, which means that me as a person, as I evolve and change, I will behave in different ways in what is physically or socially the exact same environment. So me, an environment today, will behave differently to the me that would have been in that exact same environment, say, 15 years ago. So the duality of influence between my life story and me as a person and my environment, and the fact that both those things affect behaviors an important starting point I believe, in understanding behavior. So simple model, really simple equation, but pretty helpful.

Okay, so let's jump on from Kurt's behavior model to something a whole lot more contemporary. So I'm going to look at a piece of work now from UCL in London. And I actually picked this up, University College, yeah, University College London, that's right. And I actually picked this up, I went on one of their summer school programs on behavior change two or three years ago now, and a lot of the course was based around this model. And I quite like it. So this is the model called the behavior change wheel, and it does a couple of different things. It's a wheel. It's three concentric circles in the center of a wheel. They've got a green circle. Again. Check out our slides. I've got a green circle, which is a kind of theory of behavior, and it talks about, what are the factors that contribute to a behavior, then the sort of mid section of a wheel. So the next circle out is a series of intervention functions. So these are the types of things that you could build into an intervention that would allow you to attempt to modify or influence behaviors. So each one of those intervention functions would act on one of the behavioral functions in the inner circle in an effort to sort of modify it or reduce deficiencies in it, or whatever phrasing you want. And then.

Outer section of the behavior change wheel. So, you know, I guess the tire of a wheel is a series of policy categories. And these are things that you know, states could do, to some extent, at a policy level to try and influence the broader system that they work in to modify behaviors. Now, this is in this model designed as a roughly a sort of governmental type policy structuring. But these, these policy categories could work in large organizations as well, but we're going to not spend too much time on that. What we're going to do is we're going to start by looking at the very center of a wheel. So this is their sources of behavior. And actually, just before I do that, I'll say the behavior change wheel is actually itself a synthesis of 19 other behavior change models. So what they did is they went and they looked at who describes behaviors, what they're like, and tried to combine them into

a single a single view that they thought was evidence based and helpful. So what they came up with for those sources of behavior was three broad categories, and they said that behavior is a function of an individual's capability, their opportunity and their motivation, right? So these are the things that are there. So one, what are my motivations? Two, what are my skills and abilities? And three, what opportunity do I have to exhibit behaviors? And I express this as the phrase calm, be so capability, opportunity and motivation equals behavior. Now there's actually a little bit more detail to this. So if we look at something like motivation, they talk about, you know, what's my automatic motivation and what's my reflexive motivation? And this kind of links into some of the dual process work around system one, system two. So automatically, what do I want to do? And if I step back and reflect on something, what do I want to do? System one thinking, system two thinking. So motivations split that way. Capability then has a couple of different components as well. So within capability, we've got my physical capability. What can I actually do? What are my physical abilities and also psychological capabilities? So that's about my emotional ability to do things and process and behave in certain ways, regulate and things like that. And then under opportunity, opportunity splits as well. So opportunities got two sub components. It's got physical opportunity. So within my perhaps built environment or my office space, what are the things that I have an actual opportunity, physically to do, and then social opportunities for that piece here. So within the social framework that I'm working in, what social opportunities do I have? What permissions do I have? What rights, what obligations, things like that. So the coming together those capabilities, opportunities and motivations, will determine, or heavily influence, behavior that I undertake in any one of those situations that comes up. So that's the starting point for their model. And then what they say is, let's move on from understanding what determines a behavior and start to look at how we can create an intervention that helps us

attempt to influence the behaviors of an individual or a population of people. And here they call out a series of intervention functions. They've got nine intervention functions, and what they say is that each one of these intervention functions has an ability to fundamentally address a deficit in one of your sources of behavior. So the intervention functions actually map through to the sources of behavior. I'm not going to go through how they map, but you can find this information in other places if you want. But if we start, well, I'll read through the list of a nine, then I'll reflect on a couple of them. So the intervention functions are education. So you can educate people, which will, to some extent, change their source of behavior. You can persuade people, you can incentivize people. You can coerce people. You can train people. You can enable people. You can do some modeling.

You can do environmental restructuring, and you can introduce restrictions, and those are the intervention functions, but they say, can be used in different combinations to modify the sources of behavior. So if we take something like education, education could be a powerful tool. Education could modify an individual's reflective motivation. It could also, through maybe physical education or sort of emotional education, modify an individual's physical capability or their psychological capability. So as an intervention function, education would act on those sources of behavior, and each one of those nine intervention functions has an ability to act on the underlying source of behavior in different ways and in different combinations. So they're important as intervention functions if you're looking to design a suite of initiatives to. Change behaviors in certain ways,

then the outer ring is policy categories. And I'm not going to spend too much time on these. I'm just going to read them, and you can look at them in your own time if you'd like to. So their policy categories are environmental and social planning, communication and marketing, legislation, service provision, regulation, fiscal measures and guidelines, right? And those are all sort of policy level things that you can do to look to address, I guess, sort of populational behavior.

And in addition to these intervention functions, the behavior change wheel actually has a bit of a supplement. It's got a series of 16 items that it raises as a behavior change toolkit, and these are specific things that people can do to look to change behaviors. And the 16 items are, firstly, goals and planning. So goals and planning are a tool that can fit within some of your intervention functions as an effort to change behavior.

Number two is feedback and monitoring. Number three is social support as a way to change behavior. Number four is shaping knowledge. Number five is natural consequences. Number six is a comparison of behavior, so I guess sort of benchmarking. Number seven is creating associations. Number eight is repetition and substitution. Nine is comparison of outcomes. 10 is reward and threat, which obviously links into incentivization and coercion within your intervention functions. Number 11 is regulation. Number 12 is some antecedent. Number 13 is around identity. Number 14 is having scheduled consequences to behavior. Number 15 is self belief, and number 16 is covert learning. So the 16 behavior change tools

can be used in a mixture of ways to create interventions to change your own behavior, or to create sort of intervention initiatives in an effort to implement behaviors of others. And if you're interested in learning more about this, they actually have an app that you could look at. It's called the BCT taxonomy app. You can grab it, certainly on iTunes. I think it's on Android as well. So BCT taxonomy, that's the behavior change toolkit taxonomy, and it details something like 93 I think, specific change tools that could be used across these 16 toolkit categories. So that's a bit of a messy description of something that's quite complicated, but hopefully it gives you a bit of an insight into, I guess, the relationship between sources of behavior in the center of a wheel and the ways that you can look to influence those sources through a series of intervention functions and a series of tools. What do you think? Speechless? Oh, no, I'm not speechless. I just

just, I think, I think it's a really useful wheel, yeah, and I don't know how to feel about the tool kit. It's a really interesting supplement piece. And quite often I feel like supplement pieces are added to theoretical models. When people don't feel that they are direction enough, it's certainly practicalizing. Yeah, and I'm not, I'm not convinced how much I believe there's evidence next to the tool, how much this is we this is how we'd like you to do it, potentially. Yeah, and it's difficult, isn't it, because I know that a lot of UCL work feeds into a lot of governmental work, absolutely. And so therefore, I'm always looking at this with a lens of, what are you trying to get us to do? And where is it? Where have they had to or where have they been asked to make modifications based on government policy? And that's a really harsh thing. And I know that's a really strong academic piece,

but I yeah, I find it difficult. How do, what do I think about it? I think it's really good. It's really hard for me to say I don't think it's really useful model. It calls out to lots of things I see as challenges. I actually use the two inner circles quite regularly

in my coaching for myself. Prompt me to think, Am I really thinking about all the different ways that I could stress these people further what they're doing? Yeah, and that's sort of your intervention design. And I kind of have a different you mentioned the policy stuff, yeah, I have a different list that's really similar. But this the gray list helps me, the policy list of things, helps me think about the different ways that I can encourage change in people, yeah, but I think that's got a whole load of ethical issues, which is why I'm kind of pausing for a moment, because I think

it's always a sign of how good a tool is when I start thinking about the ethics of it, because it means it works, right? We're going to talk at some point in the future about goal setting, I know, in relation to all this stuff, and there's a massive ethical debate about that. There's only an ethical debate because it works, right? There wouldn't be an ethical debate about some of these psychological tools. Um, there'd be no debate, right, right? No. You go and play with yourself. Really interesting. The ethical debates come out when you start to see them working, and not necessarily always in the way that you intended or recognizing.

Have repercussions. Yeah. So, so I don't know, I feel a bit Jedi like, I feel like I kind of should say yes, it's really good. And in my experience, I see how this is helpful, how it is useful, and how people can

change behavior based on it. But then it begs the question, right, which I think you're probably, well, yeah. So, yeah, the next thing that I wanted to touch on was ethics. And, you know, I guess for me, just because one learns ways that one can try and influence the behaviors of others, it does not in any way to me, mean that one should try and do that. You know, who am I, to some extent, to change the behaviors of others? And for me, this, this sort of decision making process gets complicated, because somebody will say, Well, surely we should change some of these behaviors, if it's for a good reason. And then the question is, well, who defines what that good reason is? Who defines what the socially right outcome is? And it gets a little bit complicated and a little bit messy. So I guess for me, it comes back to intentionality and and awareness and mindfulness of what you're doing and if you're involved in trying to create behavioral change initiatives. But one thing I'd say that that you really should do is you should look yourself in the mirror and decide if your intentions are benevolent or if you're trying to do things but maybe you're less benevolent, and just be clear in your unconscious. And I think that's all I was going to say about ethics, yeah. And I would just add on to that, if you look yourself in the mirror and you decide your intentions are genuinely benevolent, then think about the ramifications that are unintentional. Yes? So there are things that could happen that could be completely under so I'll give you a really practical example. Something I think about a coaching all the time is I all the time is quite often I'm asked by organizations to help people think about their longer term career. Yeah, and there will come a point in that conversation where longer term becomes medium term and short term. And there is then people may start to consider Oh, am I run out of time.

So for those listening that noise means, uh, Jane, uh, you're probably talking a bit too much, but um, effectively, I guess the thing around is, you may still have the best of intentions, but there may be unintended consequences to what you do, yeah, and so you may then, so, for example, you might help colleague think about their career in a longer term, but that colleague may then start thinking, Well, hang on, is this right job for me now? Yeah, where do you sit on that? Where's your loyalty to the person or the organization, right? Yeah. And there's loads of knock on effects. In other ways, I think there's a really, there's a really fabulous example, which I might try and put up on Twitter, actually, which is about behavior change. When people, with the best in the world, you build a pavement for them to go around the grass, not what people do. And actually, what they've done is

by encouraging people to go certain direction. They've almost done it, but not quite, and then they've ended up ruining the grass. And I'll put it up to explain it, but it's really helpful. It's about understanding

how you go about things, why you do it, and then also just making sure, just checking in with yourself why you're doing it. Is this, do you really want to change other people's behavior because it helps them a little bit, because it helps you? Or is there mutual? Mutual is fine, but just be honest about it. Yeah. And I guess the very last thing is just to remember that you know, those of you that we're speaking to now are learning how to influence the behaviors of those and the world is full of people who want to influence other people's behavior. So all around you there are efforts to influence your behavior. Some you know, that's just life. But man, if I could, if I could, say one thing to everybody listening, take the model. And every time you see the government announce an initiative or a change. Think about what are they trying to change people's behaviors to do? Because ultimately, governments would far rather you changed your behavior than they had to force you to. It's more expensive, right? You have to regulate it far better to get you to do it by little prompts and helping you. So just, just be aware of that, and signage and, you know, built environment structure, yeah. And the other thing I would say is, government have this helpful so does every marketing and communication agency and organization ever. So if people are trying to make you buy things, they understand that a lot of these interventions are around that, yeah, 100% All right. So list of a week, you want to run us through the list of a week. List of week this week is a total cheat, because it's more research, but it's one of my favorite, favorite models. It's used in particularly, we use it quite a lot in sport. So those who don't know, I work quite a lot with sports organizations who are trying to encourage more people to take it up with physical activity and running and things like that. Anyway, it's a model firm 98 six,

Al, and it has sit it's called the trans theoretical model, as far as I know. Well, that's how I know it, and it has six stages of behavior change I'm just going to run you through. So our list of six is the six stages of the trans theoretical model this week. And.

It's really helpful. I find it when I'm thinking about my own behavior and how I change it. So step stage one, pre contemplation, which is when there is no intention or awareness of wanting to change behavior. Stage two is contemplation. You're aware there's a problem that exists, but there's no commitment to action. And the way I liken this to is you're sitting on the sofa, you're conscious that you haven't got off the sofa, but you're aware there's people on the so on the telly, you're doing some exercise, and you're like, Well, you don't even, you're not even at the home stage. You're kind of like, Hmm, I am conscious. I probably shouldn't be sitting in front of telling I should probably be doing no reason to do it.

Preparation is stage three, and that is where you intent on taking action. So preparation is where you've gone from a place of nomads problem to actually trying to do something about it, but you haven't done it about it. And very practically, it is the moment at which you get your phone out, watching the telly, and you book a gym session, you take up an offer of a free induction, or you book on to so for me, it was the point on Christmas Eve where I pulled out my phone and I signed up for a Pilates session in Edinburgh for new year because I knew I needed to get back into it. It's the one of the biggest challenge with the preparation stage is you might be intent on taking action, but unless someone visibly shows you a place where you can take that correct next step, you probably get stuck there. Fine. We all get stuck in preparation all the time, stage four action. So when you actively are modifying your behavior, really important to understand what that means. There's a great quote that I can't remember from Einstein, and it's about how if you do the same thing, you get same results, right? So if you keep doing the same thing and keep trying to crack your nuts, in that same way, and it don't crack, it's probably because you need to do something different to get a different result. So the word that I really want to highlight in that stage four is active modification behavior. You need to do something different to get a different result. Sure, it's also really important that if you end up back at that stage, because you're in a loop that you keep trying to do something different and something about like idiots, doesn't it? Yeah, he might have done. I will try and look it up. In fact, I will look it up because it's really important this correctly, but ultimately, I'm scientistically right about a lot of things. Stage Five, maintenance, sustain, change. When new the new behavior replaces the old. It's the point at which you can say to people, look them in the eye and say, Yeah, I'm back at the gym. James is just very highly put point of view, put Einstein's quote, and it's not about idiots, no,

it's insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. He's harsh, but he's got a point. So the maintenance is stage five,

and then stage six. And it's interesting that it's a stage is relapse, okay? So it's acknowledging that it happens quite a lot. So relapse is falling back into all patterns of behavior. So for example, not going to gym for a protraction period of time. And I think it's really important that really upstage is in there, because actually, for me, it is a constant moving through these last four stages. So there was a period where I didn't really exercise ever for health. It was purely for enjoyment. Then when I did, I kind of constantly moved between preparation, action, maintenance and relapse, right? It's and a lot of it's weather based, yeah, so I enjoy, I enjoy walking really hard to get out of the get up the enthusiasm in a wet, sort of windy day. I don't mind the winter. I don't mind the summer. Autumn is an absolute deal breaker if it's pouring with rain. So it's about acknowledgement of that and then going back and thinking, okay, so what can I do differently during those periods of time to ensure that I keep up the habit or behavior change so I like it. It's useful, and it's really important to know that you learn every time you go through it, right? Yeah, it's not quite iterative, but it feels like, well, they talk about the upward spiral, right? So every time you go through a lapse or a relapse, you learn, yeah. So as long as you go back and change, modify, then you will keep learning until eventually again, right? And I guess maybe you relapse a little bit less frequently, or to a slightly lesser extent each time. So that's part of what I the way I would describe it, I get better at relapsing, right? Yeah. So every time I pull off the wagon of my gym going, I know which things I love enough, yeah, that I will spend the money on do. So, for example, the most expensive thing I do is going to the Pilates place that I go to. The cheapest thing I do is hill walking. But I know in bad weather that the hill walking ain't going to cut it. So I am conscious that I will put aside a bit more of my finances, yeah, to be able to buy my way out of the problem, because I know that if I pay the money to go and do the sessions, I will a go do them, because everybody's expensive, but also I really love it. So that's a lesson that you learn. It's a real lesson that I learned that I will it's very rare. I'll move heaven, and I'll even change work meetings to go.

Because I really love doing it, yeah, so, but I don't necessarily want to do it all year round, so it's kind of about learning. For me, I like that model. I think it's helpful, and I think it that's really useful for individuals thinking about their own behaviors, either at home or in a place of work. I mean, it's, it's kind of walks you through a way to plan changes to your own Yeah. And absolutely, it's the model that gets used to quite a lot with sports coaches and professionals, about how to encourage people to get back involved and understanding that this is a constant process. Yeah, spiral, yeah. And when you here in the UK, we've got a lot of apps for couch to 5k Yes, that pop up and this, you can see how this really so it's astonishing how much that plays to an understanding of putting that tool in people's hands versus people having to go and look for it is about giving them the ability to compare. Yeah, because actually, what used to happen a lot of the time in sport is that we understood that there was contemplation phase where people wanted to take action, and we understood there was action, and we didn't really understand the stage between it where people actually stage between it, where people actually need to put those preparation and making that easy, yeah? So it's really hard still to fight. So sport versus physical activity, pilates, I can just book it on my phone in two minutes. Yeah, I use PayPal. It's done, right? Sports actually really hard to get still,

yeah? So couch 5k was a really good, right way of saying here, it's all in your hands now, yeah, you can actually do this yourself. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right, so let's jump on and maybe look at a couple of Tales from a keyboard. Okay, did I start one off? Or, Oh, why don't you? Okay? So I guess mine is maybe not so much for my own keyboard, but just something that I thought was really interesting to do with behavior change. And you know, when we talk about some of the things that affect behavior, we talk occasionally about, you know, sort of social perception and to some extent, support from others, and visibility of achievement and all those positive reinforcements that you get from being able to celebrate something in a public place. So humans are fundamentally social beings, and we like to be recognized by other people. So the thing that I'm going to touch on in my story is actually to do with behavioral finance, which is a fascinating subject. Anyway. It's all to do with how people choose to behave about their money. And there's some really interesting dilemmas in the world about this, particularly around how do you encourage people to save responsibly for their own retirement, and how do you get them to behave well with their money and invest it as opposed to consuming it when they don't really have it, things like debt, all kinds of good stuff. But one of the things that I think is fascinating is some work around getting people to be better at saving, particularly people with low levels of income, where an effort to save really results in a sacrifice of a current consumption that might be useful. And they've done a bunch of tests in I think it was in Kenya, around how you can help try and improve savings rates amongst these really poor communities. And they did a range of things. So they brought in things like matching. So if you save the equivalent of one US dollar, I'll give you one. And they brought in things like, if you saved we will send you a text message to say well done, or whatever. So they brought in a bunch of interventions like that to try and help people save more. But for one that was actually most powerful, that actually worked more than matching which blows my mind is that what they did is, instead of sending you a text message or matching it, every time somebody met their savings targets, they would receive something like a bit of a medal or a token, something that they could share in a public space. So what you found was people living in effectively huts and low level accommodation would receive something that they could display sort of prominently on their mantelpiece. And what that did is it made savings a conspicuous action, so suddenly I can celebrate my saving. I can get social recognition from the fact that I've done saving. And the value of that social recognition and social interaction was so powerful that it was more important in changing people's behavior than doubling the amount of money they actually had. So in terms of a lesson, you know, using your network and using your relationships to really help you is a really powerful thing for behavior change, I believe, well, I look it's, it's just the most fascinating thing. Because I think, as always, the commerce, consumer society and the commercial world figured this out ages ago. Yeah, with keeping up the Joneses, right? Yeah, they played on the fact that we wanted to be show that we had earned more, could afford, had been productive enough that we had this car or that house or whatever. And what this does is say, I want to advertise the fact that I could have spent that money, but actually I've chosen to do something else with it, because it's and it's just it's so obvious, when you think about it, is it? Is? It's annoyingly obvious. Yes, right? Yeah, I know. Cool. What about you? Okay, so mine's about changing my behavior, as always i. I like to navel gaze. So one of the things for me was around

what I've learned around my own behavior change, and what I'm prepared to change to do things. So one of the questions that I always ask myself is, what else am I prepared to do away with or do differently in my life, such that I can achieve this? An example I want to give you is cycling into work. I love cycling. I'm from London. Cycling London is somewhat challenging sometimes, but it reconnected me with my city in a way that I just couldn't have imagined. And like a lot of my changes to my behavior, it was sparked by someone else. There's about three people in my life that have consistently helped me to spot places where I should change things and do things better, because it made me happy. Anyway, I sat down and I really thought about, what am I prepared to change in order to make cycling's work from happening, and what is stopping me from doing it? And so one of the things for me was recognizing that I needed to change my routine in the morning, because I hated going. Those of you who know London, there was this roundabout called Elephant Castle. It doesn't exist anymore, because they made it one way system. But at the time it was, it was literally the most dangerous place in the world cycle, and I hated it, and I particularly hated Russia. I know it's so different, I could just cycle across it. Now. It's brilliant, but I want to avoid hitting it at lunch. And so actually, I have, I made a number of changes. Either I would come to work super early, or I would change my morning meetings with my team such that I could be sure that I didn't have to cycle across Russia. And I guess the reason I'm telling you that is and the reason it's important to understand is I treated it like a project, right? I worked out what was the most like? What were the days that I got on my bike without even thinking about it? And it was really practical stuff. It was the days that I had washed my kit, right? It was the days that I didn't have early morning important meetings so I wasn't having to have time to have a shower. It was the days that I didn't have team meetings, so I wasn't meeting them. It was days I didn't have to go over the roundabout. So I literally looked at what are all the things that stop me from doing it? And then I systematically went through my diary and changed them. Yeah, great. And I know it sounds silly, but I went from cycling maybe one day a week, two days a week, to going four days a week, no question. And you know what I kind of like about that is you brought in two things that are great. So earlier, we talked about how environment influences behavior, and so much of that stuff was like social environment, physical environment, affecting your behavior, and you'd look to change some of that, which was great. And in an episode we did a while ago, when we looked at problem solving, we talked about finding some root causes. And it looks like you spend a bit of time doing some root causes. I love it when the stuff pops up again. I know. And I think, I think, you know all of this, and everything I think about always comes down to reflection. Yeah, you know, how much time are you willing to put into this? And I will tell you one other thing I did. I went out and spent a ridiculous amount of money, inappropriate amount of money, on panniers that would keep my back commitment as well, because it is, but actually, it was about the fact that I really hate having a sweaty back. Oh yeah, okay, it's literally the greatest thing in the world. And I was like stuff it, I'm so this problem in the best way. Problem. I've got some great, very sexy opinions. Yes, all right, um, so that's some stories from the keyboard. Any final thoughts you want to check out? Yeah, I've got one. And my one is really a shout out. If you are trying to change something, tell people, not just because of all of this stuff around checking in, but also for me, it's about help. So let me give you a really practical example. I quit smoking. I've done a few times, but the time it's stuck. I told my team about it at a place that's working. Funny enough. Same cycling. This is cycling place, and someone said to me, What can I do to help you? Shout, massive shout out to Naomi, Helen Nikki, who I used to work with and were incredibly supportive when I gave up smoking, mostly because they all hated it. And Naomi said to me, What can I do to help you? And I was like, I don't know. So anyway, I had this what I did was I printed out my an outlook diary, and I stuck on the wall, and I put a green tick on a day every time. And so Naomi got into the habit of saying to me, where's your green tick. And Nikki, actually, all three of them did, but it was Naomi started the habit, and it's because she was giving up fizzy drinks. Okay? And she said, you know, where's your green tick? Can you not put it up? And it got to the point where on a Saturday night, I would be out, and I would be considering having a cigarette, and all I could think was, how am I going to look name in the eye on Monday and not be able to say I couldn't go two days. We weren't talking about the three months I hadn't smoked. We were just talking about two days. Yeah, and how could I not say that? So for me, if you see someone who's trying to change their behavior, ask them what you can do to help. It makes a massive difference. Yeah, and that's your streaks, isn't it? Oh, yeah. So this is my street. So the streets thing is, I don't worry about how many days it is since I smoked, because sometimes that feels too hard. I just worry about whether I've done it yesterday, and then I look at the evidence for streak. So I did say days on the bounce, brilliant, and I fell one day, right, fine, back on the streets. How many days have I done? Yeah, yeah. Good, cool. Well, I stopped smoking as well. Um.