Behaviour Design, Being Perfect, And Pan-African Possibilities

Good morning friends

Today’s letter is a mixed bag of musing. I couldn’t think of a clever way to hold it all together, so I hope you enjoy the meander as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

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/ Strategy

I introduced you to BJ Fogg’s work in my letter entitled Change Your Life with Tiny Habits.

Fogg has co-authored a great guide on “How to Do Behaviour Design” with David Ngo. Because the link is tucked away at the end of his book Tiny Habits I didn’t feel like I could legitimately share the link with you, but here are some insights to get you going.

Fogg talks about using this approach to build ‘tiny machines’. I love that metaphor. A quick, get-your-hands-dirty approach to testing a business idea or indeed any idea. This process will help you iterate through multiple options before over-investing in one approach.

It’s a 7-step model, that starts with Clarify and ends with SnapTesting. In between it has MagicWanding, Crispify and Starfish.

Fogg and Ngo note that we often fail because we don’t clarify what outcomes we want to achieve. This is exacerbated in an organizational context where we can all walk away from a team meeting with a different sense of what’s needed.

Clarifying means, “Imagine a year from today and the project is a total success. What does that look like?”

Have the discussion. Speak about the project’s aspirations – those are statements about the dream – AND the outcomes, the outcomes tend to be more specific and often have a quantitative component.

At this point, we often stop. Particularly in our personal lives. We have the dream. We might even have specified the outcomes. But outcomes only come after action. We need to act to generate outcomes. This is where the Magic Wand comes into play.

“Magic Wand” is generating as many behaviours as possible that may help achieve the outcomes. Of course, the ideal behaviours are those that are possible to implement and have high impact.

Then Crispify them, in other words take those ideal behaviours and get specific. Fogg and Ngo list 11 questions that help:

• Who?
• Is doing exactly what?
• For what duration or frequency?
• At what time?
• For how long?
• Where?
• In what context?
• With whom?
• Using what tools?
• At what speed or intensity?
• With what outcome or result?

If you can answer these questions, you can take a massive step forward in your project because you’ve envisaged all that needs to happen to get moving. You have already neurologically walked through the process. You’re primed for action.

I particularly love their Step 6 – Starfish. They say, “Imagine a starfish with its multiple arms connecting to its centre. Reaching the centre is your ultimate target behaviour. The arms of the starfish are the possible sequences for the behaviour to happen.”

I often see clients and businesses frustrated, they can’t get to the ultimate behaviour straight out of the starting blocks, so they give up. Generally, its reframed as ‘we’re waiting until we can get it absolutely right’. Often that means ‘ain’t gonna happen’.

The Starfish approach means that you can generate all the teeny-tiny steps that could eventually shift you closer to the end goal. The point is to get started.

The final step is the best. Do a SnapTest. We often overinvest in an idea, not having explored it thoroughly. The SnapTest is just that, find a way of taking your idea into the market and seeing what feedback you get. Simply put select ten people that you can test the idea with. Get the feedback. If it doesn’t work, start again.

Clarify, magic wand and crispify your way to the next step.

/ Self

Building Tiny Machines takes one into ambiguity, you’re trying to imagine the future.

That’s often stressful. I thought Edward Brown’s anecdote in the Tassajara Cookbook might help you be a little more self-aware. It certainly helped me.

“Sometimes when I was cooking, my former partner Patricia would ask if she could help. My response was often not pretty, neat or presentable. The lid comes right off, and I would explode: “No!” How could an offer of assistance be so traumatic and irritating?

…I couldn’t get it for the longest time. Finally, I realized that I was still trying to make myself into Mr. Perfect Grown-Up Man…Someone’s asking, “Anything I can do?” implied that I need help, that I am somehow not competent…Ironically, the desperate attachment to being the perfect grown-up meant being a moody, emotional infant with strange prickliness.”

When you find yourself being triggered, pause and explore, “What’s really going on inside?”

/ Soul

There are multiple reasons to love Remy Ngamije’s The Eternal Audience of One. It starts like this…

“Beginnings are tricky because there are no countdowns to the start of a start. There is nobody to point out that this moment right here is where it all begins. Life starts in the middle and leaves people trying to piece the plot together as they go along. The only certainty is this: everything that is not the end, must be the start of something else.”

Ngamije’s protagonist – Seraphin – is, like the author himself, a Rwandan-born, Namibian raised and studied law in Cape Town.

It’ll make you laugh, yet throughout the pain of dislocation, of endemic racism, of privilege and the lack thereof, stabs through. Long after the book was over I found myself pondering Seraphin’s astute observations of the world, his profound disconnection from himself and the consequences for himself and those who cared for him.

It is a read that connects to you to young Africa, to how history echoes into our today and the possibilities that nevertheless emerge.

That’s me for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed our time together.

Karl

PS: If you’d like to know more about my coaching practice, click here or email me and let’s make time to meet.

(This letter was first published on 26 July 2020)