How Serious Are We About Learning?
Posted: July 26, 2012 Filed under: behaviour change, education & learning, health promotion, innovation, public health | Tags: behaviour change, Dan Pink, discovery, education, innovation, Jonah Lehrer, knowledge integration, learning, mindfulness, organizational change, psychology, public health, Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, social innovation, social systems, Steven Johnson, systems thinking, Toronto, University of Toronto 6 Comments »
How Serious Are We About Learning?
When journalist and book author Daniel Pink tweeted the above image the other day it provoked thinking about what real learning means and what it takes to achieve it. We produce enormous amounts of knowledge, yet struggle to put it into use, but we also teach much and learn little because the systems we’ve designed for education and experience don’t match our expressed interest and rhetoric around learning.
In my graduate course on behaviour change I would ask students on the first day why they were taking the class in the first place. Aside from the few students for whom the course was required everyone else was doing it by choice because there were many others to choose from. So why would they choose this one?
The answers would vary, but inevitably I’d hear over and again that students love learning and wanted to understand more about behaviour change, because they were interested in change and some would even say they were good at it and wanted to help others do it.
These are all well-meaning and said in a spirit that I think was honest and true. Except the reality is that it is likely a big, huge lie and one that we all share in its telling.
I would counter with two things:
- Loving the idea of learning something new is different than actually seeking out learning opportunities and that most of us love the former, but are not so enthused about the latter;
- The only people who regularly welcome change are babies with soiled diapers.
To illustrate the first point I simply ask people to consider the last conference they went to where there were options on what sessions to attend. How many of the sessions did they attend that featured content that confirmed or gently extended what they already knew versus content that was new? If you’re a health promoter doing community engagement work, sessions on Bayesian modelling for epidemics might offer far more learning than a session on working with diversity in communities (particularly if that is what you already do). Even more, how often do people go to sessions from people they know or have already seen speak? Chances are, many.
One could argue that there are subtleties that a conference presentation might offer on a familiar topic that are worth attending and while I would say that has merit, most learning that has impact is uncomfortable at some level. It extends our thinking, challenges our beliefs, or re-arranges our worldview — in ways small and large.
Wanting knowledge and living learning
Many people will say “I love change”, but that is usually in the context that everyone else is changing, not them. When I was the boss and said “things must change” it was very different than when my staff or my boss would say “things must change“. As a behaviour change educator and intervener, I need to be mindful of my own ironies and resistance to change. So should we all.
The same thing goes for knowledge. Academics are famous for ending studies with “more research is needed”. We never seem to have enough knowledge. There are two problems with this idea.
The first is that, in dynamic and evolving environments, we will never have perfect knowledge that fits like a glove, because the contexts are always novel. This isn’t to say that evidence isn’t useful, but ‘good enough’ knowledge might be a more reasonable demand than ‘best evidence’ in many of the situations where complexity is high and so is change. That’s why data gathering techniques like developmental evaluation aren’t attractive to those who need certainty.
But there is another problem with the knowledge quest and that is one of integration. In our efforts to seek more knowledge, are we integrating what we are learning from what we already have? Are we savouring the data we collect, the articles we read, the Tweets and blogs that get forwarded are way?
We quest for more, but should we quest for better?
A newly published paper synthesized research on event horizons on memory and found that shifts in activities around an event — boundaries — can prompt forgetting and recall. We remember transitions between activities, but they also prompt forgetting depending on the mindfulness associated with the act. When we are deluging ourselves with more data, more media, more everything, we are increasing the potential remember rate, but due to the volume of content, I would surmise that we are increasing the forget rate much more. Simply reflect on your high school or undergraduate education and ask yourself if you remember more than you forgot about what you learned.
We are so busy with our search for new knowledge that we interrupt opportunities to learn from what we have.
Serious learning means non-doing
Returning to the tweet from Dan Pink, it’s worthwhile considering what it means to learn and the systems we have in place to facilitate learning. The tweet links to a discussion of how German companies give their employees five days of off-site continuing education each year. This concept of Bildungsurlaub is a leave designed to allow employees to stretch their thinking and integrate something new. Not only is off-site learning important, but the time associated with integrating material is critical.
A read of the literature on innovation and research shows consistently how time off, quiet time, slow time and down time all contribute to discovery. Robert Scott Root-Bernstein’s brilliant Discovering, Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, or Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From are all books that dive deep into creative production and show that great discoveries and innovations come from having time (with limits) to integrate material to learn. Freedom to create, explore and sit and mindfully reflect are all united concepts in the pursuit of good learning. Not everything requires this, but big concepts and bold ideas do from mathematics to science to social science and philosophy.
Yet, at an organizational and systems level, where is the support for this? Even university faculty (the tenured ones at least) who have generous vacations and sabbaticals are finding themselves crunched for time between the fight for one of the ever-fewer grants, increasing numbers of students and teaching demands, and the added push to ensure knowledge is translated. The image of faculty sitting and reading and thinking is truly an imagination. Most of my colleagues in academia do little of this, because they are out of time.
In the corporate and non-profit world this is worse. Every hour and day is to be accounted for. The idea of sending people off to learn and to think seems anathema to productivity, yet research shows incredible powers associated with taking a break and doing less and not more.
Getting serious about learning
To illustrate the scope of the problem, the University of Toronto holds one of the finest academic library systems in the world and has over 11.5 million books and 5.7 million microform materials. It is one university (of many) in one city. Add in the local Toronto public library system, the network of universities and other libraries it is connected to, local and global bookstores and all the content freely available online that is not part of this system and I challenge anyone working in social innovation or public health to say with conviction that there is a lack of knowledge out there on any important topic. Yes, we don’t know it all, but we don’t do nearly enough with what we do know because there is so much.
We will not read it all nor can we hope to synthesize it all, but we can do much with what we have. Just looking at my own personal library of physical books (not including all I have in the digital realm between books and papers) it’s easy to see that I have more than enough knowledge to tackle most of what I am facing in my work. Most of us do. But do we have the wisdom to use it? Do we have the systems — organizations and personal — that allow us to take the time and soak this in, share our ideas with others, and be mindful of the world around us enough to learn, not just consume?
When we spend as much time creating those spaces, places and systems, then we can answer “yes” to the question of whether we’re serious about learning.
Enough knowledge here?
A Complex View of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted: December 28, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: behaviour change, complex adaptive systems, complexity, design, design thinking, health, new year's resolutions, simplicity, systems thinking 5 Comments »
A Happy, Simple New Year (CC- WilliamCho)
The end of the year is coming and, despite good advice and the warning about how they don’t work, you’re still determined to come up with a really good New Year’s Resolution and this year, dammit, you’re going to stick with it.
It’s simple, right? Make a commitment, come up with a plan to stick to it, and you’re ready to go.
Firstly, change in human systems is rarely a matter of simplicity, which is why New Year’s resolutions tend to benefit the diet industry and fitness clubs, but few others.
Another reason lays in the meaning of the term simple. Simplicity implies that there are relatively straightforward mechanisms that underlie a cause and consequence, that these can be predicted with reasonable certainty and consistency, and that we can derive “best practices” from such events given their reliability and efficiency. When we see something as simple, we usually have a high level of control.
Yet, it is the very nature of human systems that makes control such an elusive concept when wish to change something. Complexity science provides us with a different way to handle these problems. It provides a means of understanding complex situations — those where there are multiple causes and consequences that interact and change dynamically — that represent the lives of human beings. Rather than predict what is going to happen based on flawed assumptions of control, complexity science helps anticipate change and prepares people to adapt to these changes wisely.
Diet and exercise tend to be near the top of New Year’s Resolutions. Typically, people will make a resolution to start an exercise plan and reform their diet all in one swoop. The thinking is akin to “go hard or go home”. The problem with this is that what we eat, how we eat, and the activities that we do on any given day are part of a complex weave of activities that shape our lives. Few of us have jobs or lifestyles where everything is the same day to day. If you have children, you’ll know firsthand that even with the most regimented schedule for them and you, every day brings new surprises. But for the most part, these are little surprises that happen consistently and, consistent with a complex system, you adapt.
If your diet consists of a lot of take-out food, pre-prepared foods like frozen dinners or canned goods, the idea that you will suddenly start cooking at home, eating healthy meals and changing the portion sizes right away is setting yourself up for failure. This change alone requires shifts in your time (now you need to shop, cook, clean, and plan in advance), which suddenly changes how you use the rest of your time as it might impact upon work, play, social activities and so on. This isn’t to suggest that such investments in this new lifestyle are not worth it, but that simple shift will drastically change not just your diet, but your lifestyle as a whole all at the same time. That’s a lot of stress to put on the system that is your life.
An alternative is to make small shifts, ones that don’t upset things too much like perhaps making one meal on the weekends. Once that is in place, perhaps change the meal to allow for leftovers so that one day or two you pack a lunch instead of eating out. Maybe then shift towards changing the lunch options you choose when you do eat out one or two days per week. The key is to take one thing, do it and do it well and then build upon it by introducing another thing. Over time, your schedule will adapt and you’ll find the ways to make the changes without them feeling so big.
Exercise is the same way. Rather than sign up for a year’s membership at the gym and workout 2 hours a day for the first week only to find yourself so sore and tired that you can’t imagine going back, try upping the activity level you engage in with different strategies. If you don’t go to the gym at all, starting there might not be the best option. Try walking a little more around your neighbourhood or take the stairs when there is an escalator. Maybe get off the bus one or two stops early and walk the rest of the way home. Once you start doing that, try a day pass a gym and do some very light weights or some simple cardio workouts like walking on a treadmill. As you build up over time, you will find what works and doesn’t work in terms of your likes and dislikes and what seems to be effective. This is called feedback, another critical component of complex systems.
By paying attention — being mindful — of what you’re doing and how it is working, you can start to build a longer-term strategy or pattern of activity that moves you along to where you want to go. It also prevents you from the let down at having not achieved your goals, but setting yourself up for success rather than failure. In doing so, you work with the complexity of human systems and our daily lives rather than against them.
New Year’s Resolutions: If You Must…
Posted: December 26, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, health promotion, psychology, public health | Tags: behaviour change, communities of practice, health behaviour change, health promotion, new year's resolutions, psychology, research 4 Comments »
We Resolve To No More New Years Resolutions! (CC - Meddy Garnet)
The holiday season now takes a shift away from the goodies and rich foods that start with Hanukah and (almost) end with Christmas. There’s one last big day left*: New Years Eve/ Day.
* In Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK we have Boxing Day today, the day when all the unsold merchandise for Christmas goes on sale and people do silly things like camp out overnight on Christmas Night so they can get a deal the next morning. It’s just like Black Friday in the US.
People often wake from the sugar-induced near-comtose generated by all the treats on Boxing Day to realize that their new holiday pants fit tighter than expected, that the number of wine bottles in the recycling are hard to count, and that the return to everyday life that comes after the holidays might not be as jolly given the absence of any holidays to look forward to. Add to that the myriad “year in review” lists and recaps on television, print and the Internet and its quite natural to want to make a New Year’s Resolution.
The answer to that is: don’t do it. They don’t work and the whole thing is one big fallacy.
But evidence never stopped people from doing things before — even physicians and scientists — so if you must make them, here are some recommendations from a person that teaches a graduate level health behaviour change course on how to be a little smarter about goal setting:
1. Be specific. Declaring that you’re going to be healthier in 2011 isn’t providing much to go on. Does that mean that you’re going to eat better? And if so, what does that mean? A big mistake is that people keep their goals too general and thus, never really know if they’ve acheived them. One rubric to use is the S.M.A.R.T system for goals. S.M.A.R.T. refers to goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Framed. The closer you can adhere to these, the more likely you are to achieve them.
2. Keep quiet. There is a school of thought that suggests that advertising your goals to the world (make them public) is a strong way to motivate change. The thinking here is based on theories of social norming and pressure that suggest that the fear of letting others down will motivate you to succeed. That might have some currency, but it paradoxically fails for reasons that have little to do with others and much to do with our brain. Research from NYU psychologist Peter M. Gollwitzer and his colleagues (PDF) found:
When other people take notice of one’s identity-relevant behavioral intentions, one’s performance of the intended behaviors is compromised. This effect occurs both when the intentions are experimenter supplied and when they are self-generated, and is observed in both immediate performance and performance measured over a period of 1 week. It does not emerge when people are not committed to the superordinate identity goal.(p.616)
Some other resources on this are available here. This isn’t to say that you can’t share aspirations with people, but when you declare you’re going to do something out loud ( following S.M.A.R.T) and get feedback from others, your brain starts to imagine that you’ve already accomplished the goal and is already diminishing your motivational fire.
3. Do it for yourself. Another reason these publicly stated goals might cause problems is that often we announce goals that we want to believe in (or believe others approve of), rather than those we want for ourselves. A large body of evidence suggests that we’re much more likely to do things that fit with our self-concept and values than those that challenge or complicate it. Self-determination theory is the foundation for this concept. Author Daniel Pink wrote an accessible piece on this in his recent book Drive. This can be applied broadly or more specifically. For example, with regards to weight loss, there are a lot of options to assist that from changing the food you eat and the way you eat (not dieting, which is a far larger fallacy than New Years Resolutions and persists even more) to exercise. Perhaps running on a treadmill is something that bores you to tears, so try a group dance class instead. If you’re not a fan of salads, try doing more with beans, oatmeal, nuts, fruit or smoothies. There are lots of ways to get the same place, but choose the things that you really like first.
4. Be social and connect. Even if you’re not announcing your goals to the world on YouTube or doing all the things you want to do first, it is still important to be social. Research on social networks and health show remarkable links (pun intended) between our social networks and our health behaviours. Smoking, obesity and mental health are all enhanced by having strong social networks (however you connect — this isn’t just about Facebook or Twitter). Building strong connections with people can offer so much benefit in terms of keeping you healthy, informed and “human”.
5. Help yourself by helping others. If you want to reach your goals, try helping others reach theirs. Working with your friends and family to support them in reaching their goals can actually strengthen your own resolve. Communities of practice are groups of individuals that are motivated to support each other in solving particular problems that often fall outside of traditional lines of work, discipline or problem domain. These collectives are often self-organized and volunteer-oriented and because of that, they capitalize on many of the aforementioned points. Find a community of people tackling the same problems and offer your assistance and wisdom. In doing so, you might find that you start to work through your own challenges and issues. Research on complex systems shows that small, incremental changes over a long time will produce much more stable change than radical upheavals at once.
New Year’s resolutions are problems because they often set us up for failure. Perhaps the one resolution that you will want to follow this year is to skip the resolution altogether and commit to doing something small often and enjoying yourself and those around you while you do it.
Wayfinding in Complex Systems
Posted: May 8, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, emergence, social systems, systems science, systems thinking | Tags: behaviour change, complexity, emergence, health promotion, innovation, knowledge translation, public health, setting, social innovation, social networks, space, systems thinking, wayfinding 2 Comments »
Where am I?
One of the more taken for granted aspects of human life is knowing where you are. You probably have a clear sense of what you’re reading this on (e.g., laptop, mobile device), where you and that device are situated (e.g., home, office, sidewalk cafe), and where that situation is located in the world (e.g., city, state, country). In some of these settings, this could be viewed as a simple issue where there are clear markers, conventions and shared realities that dictate where you are. If I say “I’m at my desk at home” that conveys a very clear sense to those who know me about the physical space I’m in and where that space is located.
Online, things are a little more tricky because the locations are not tethered to something physical, only addresses that point to some server that presumably brings to Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, BBC News, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, create your own Star Wars movie, or wherever you’re intending to go. As diverse as these sites are, you still have some idea of where you are and where you’re going. The space in all these settings is defined by markers such as addresses, navigation bars, and the limits of the screen you’re using whether it be a 24 inch monitor, an iPad or a handheld phone. This is more complicated. So while I might be visiting the JMIR site, I could be on many of the hundreds of articles published, the author area, the editorial pages or somewhere linking between them. If I have multiple browser windows open, I could actually be at two places at the same time. But in each case, we can deduce through some effort about where I am.
Social systems, particularly those with multiple overlapping layers of organization (individuals within teams within organizations within communities) are complex. Understanding where someone is within that system provides only a partial sense of where a person really is. Consider social networks. Below is an example of a social network taken from a paper I published in 2006 with Tim Huerta that looked at the Web Assisted Tobacco Intervention community of practice.
Web Assisted Tobacco Intervention Network
Social networking maps are very useful for illustrating to people where they might fall within a social cluster, but more importantly, it also shows where others fall in relation to themselves. So while we’re obviously familiar with who we know, we might be less familiar with who knows us, and almost completely ignorant of who those we know are familiar with. These secondary connections are commonly referred to as weak ties, popularized by the work of Mark Granovetter. Often the most powerful changes come from mobilizing these weak ties — in large part because the further away from the starting point you go, the more diverse the elements are that you engage. Engaging diversity, creates conditions for new patterns of behaviour to emerge and thus, innovation, learning and change.
It sounds pretty simple: map the network, find the connections, exploit those connections and (shazam!) you have change (e.g., knowledge translation! healthy behaviours!). Unfortunately, as a phrase often attributed to H.L. Mencken suggests:
For every complex problem there is a solution that is neat, simple…and wrong.
Social networks are gaining in popularity. Recent mass-market books by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler and the newly released book by social network scientist Albert-Laslo Barabasi have (or will) accelerate this. But what is missing from the discussion of social networks is place and theories of taking these complicated visuals and translating them into strategies for navigating complex environments. Maps of social networks are great as a start, but they actually offer little practical advice on where to go or even where you are in terms of knowledge space. Yes, you see where you are relative to others in a graphical representation, but social networks for collaboration are layered with organizational bureaucracy, likes and dislikes, technological and time constraints that are easily forgotten about when one maps out connections on chart or PowerPoint presentation.
In other words, social networks are treated as complicated, when really they are complex in the manner in which they are negotiated. Wayfinding is considerably more complex when one considers the reality of trying to navigate through a social network to get something done. Just as design thinking might be viewed as a stance, its value goes beyond seeing things different towards actually producing new things that have value. Likewise, social network maps provide us with a stance for viewing the social landscape differently, but offer little in understanding how to traverse that landscape.
For knowledge translation and public health, better wayfinding in complex, rather than complicated systems is the next step in the journey towards navigating a path to health.
Indispensibility and Organizational Change
Posted: February 26, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: behaviour change, innovation, organizational change, organizational learning, Seth Godin, social innovation, systems change, systems thinking Comments Off
Seth Godin‘s recent book throws out the challenge to its readers to be indispensable in the jobs that they do. This is a tall order for most, but Godin points to ways of thinking, approaching problems and examples of how even the most mundane, mechanical jobs can be more when we bring the best of ourselves to what we do each day — no matter what the job is. He wants us all to reclaim our genius. The message is an unusual one in that it applies very well to individuals — you and me — but is a lot harder to apply at the organizational level. This is an important issue for those wanting to create better, healthier systems and it is here that the role of individual and system can get confounded.
Mike Myatt, from Blogging Innovation, wrote a critique of the indispensibility position in terms of its implications for organizations. His post, a fair and appreciative one regarding Seth’s position in many areas, is nonetheless critical of the idea of fostering indispensibility in firms:
A well managed company does not allow itself to become dependent upon the performance of any single individual. Those individuals who attempt to hoard knowledge, relationships, or resources to attain job security should not to be valued or viewed as indispensable, but should be admonished as ineffective and deemed a liability. Corporate talent that cannot be shared, duplicated, distributed, or leveraged is not nearly as valuable as talent that can.
It is here that I first disagree. Godin is not advocating for valuing the hoarder, rather he is suggesting the opposite: unparalleled sharing and generosity. Someone who hoards will not advance system change: period. Systems rely on exchange of information and intense conservation of knowledge or information reduces the response capacity of a system (which could be an organization). An organization that relies on a hoarder for survival hasn’t been paying attention or created processes of openness that allow information to move through the system. If you have a hoarder, one needs to ask: how did we create an organization that enabled that person to become so important? How can we transform it so that person’s unique talents can come out and that knowledge that is sharable and distributed gets to whomever it needs to when its needed?
I would like to address two of Myatt’s issues:
Myatt goes on:
In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who sets out to make themselves indispensable would be the one committing career suicide for two reasons:
- Anyone who is “perceived” as indispensable in their current role completely eliminates any possibility of promotion
- Any good leadership team who finds themselves dependant upon a linchpin will immediately move to mitigate the risk of finding themselves in such an untenable position
Regarding point 1: What would one promote themselves to? This pokes a hole at the dominant model of organizational development that suggests that promotions work vertically (including the entire thinking about why we need directions to move, embedded in the term “promotion”). When you’re the best salesperson on a team doing something you love and are good at and you get a “promotion” does it mean pulling you off the sales team into a management position, which may rely on a completely different skill and mindset? Does this really make sense?
Regarding point 2: If you have a real linchpin, your task is creating a dynamic, exciting environment to let them do their thing well. After all, they are linchpins precisely because they are good at what they do. You’re always in an “untenable position” of not being able to replace them because they are, by definition, unreplaceable. Do you have a work culture that brings in unique talent and nurtures it to allow it to succeed or do you try to create positions that are defined by a set of duties that can be done by anyone?
Myatt’s argument is counter to what Linchpin is all about in its approach. If you create standards and clearly defined roles and evaluate solely based on those standards, which is the position that is being argued from, you will suffer under a linchpin promotion strategy.
Maybe. At least, your business model will suffer.
But that misses the bigger point: Why build an organization around such a model to begin with? Maybe the system needs to change as much as the individuals within it. Maybe then, a linchpin promotion strategy doesn’t look so strange or problematic.
The Genius of Seth Godin
Posted: January 29, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: behaviour change, book, complexity, innovation, inspiration, motivation, psychology, Seth Godin, social innovation 6 Comments »
In his new book, Linchpin, businessman, marketer, blogger, auteur Seth Godin asks the question: Are you indispensible?
Seth, if you don’t know, is a genius. On the first page of Lynchpin he describes what a genius is:
“If a genius is someone with exceptional abilities and the insightto find the not so obvious solution to a problem, you don’t need to win a Nobel Prize to be one. A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck”
By that account, Seth is a certifiable genius.
This blog is about making sense of a complex world and Seth is one of those people that does that, paradoxically, by making things simple. Paradox is a hallmark feature of complexity and one of the reasons why the world is so often puzzling to us. Efforts to quell terrorism lead to more terrorism, exercises in control lead to greater instability (for more examples see another great book by Joshua Cooper Ramo) — that sort of stuff.
Seth is a straight-talker without being arrogant or simplistic. He his assertive without being aggressive. He challenges, while supports and understands. He is a rare being and one that I think deserves a blog post and some promotion.
Some examples? In his book “The Dip” he makes the case for quitting. We often hear that quitters never win and winners never quit, yet Seth shows how that’s not the case. It’s thoughtful and strategic quitting that counts.
In his recent interview on CBC’s Spark, Seth courageous says: “If you can’t get over your fear of the stuff that’s working, then I think you need to give up and do something else” . Few people are willing to say this stuff, but its true. We often fear success, because we’re not supported in doing something that doesn’t fit the system of production created for us in work, school and society from the 20th century onward.
Another great interview from Seth (also on Spark) is available here .
Lastly, I want to say that Seth is one who not only speaks but he acts. He invited a couple thousand of his blog readers to get a free copy of Linchpin in exchange for a donation to the Accumen Fund, which aims to transform the lives of people in poverty worldwide, particularly in Africa. I took up this offer. Seth believes that the world works best when we’re able to tap into our natural motive for generosity and to further back that up, he sent me a SECOND book for free to give to someone else. I’ve done one, well five, better in return. I chose to purchase a five copies of the book for each of the members of my research team; a talented group who form a wonderful linchpin for the future of health promotion and social innovation.
I’ve endorsed a product like this because I think it has a message that is necessary in a complex world of rapid change, where making sense is hard and often confusing. But in an age of uncertainty, stress and the collapse of many of our institutions due to rapid change, Seth provides inspiration, guidance and clear-headed thinking in a way that few others have. If I can offer one thing to Seth in small payback for his inspiration in me, the least I can do is write about him and encourage you to follow his lead and, in doing so, follow you own.
The book can be bought online below or from your local independent bookseller:
Amazon (Canada)
Amazon (United States)
Chapters/Indigo (Canada)
Barnes&Noble (United States)
Borders (United States)
The Fallacy of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted: January 3, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, health promotion, psychology, public health | Tags: behaviour change, complexity, complexity theory, psychology 5 Comments »
Happy New Year everyone!
Did you make a resolution or two to do things different this year? I suspect there are already more than a few readers who have measured 2010 by the number of resolutions that have already fallen. If so, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re probably quite normal.
New year’s resolutions don’t work in changing behaviour. In fact, research reported by Jonah Leherer at the the Wall Street Journal’s health blog points to the problems with these annual rituals and points out that, not only do some resolutions fail to inspire change, they may just impair change. Among the research that Leherer cites is work from Roy Baumeister and his lab at Florida State University that has looked at willpower and cognition. The article reports:
In a 2007 experiment, Prof. Baumeister and his colleagues found that students who fasted for three hours and then had to perform a variety of self-control tasks, such as focusing on a boring video or suppressing negative stereotypes, had significantly lower glucose levels than students who didn’t have to exert self-control. Willpower, in other words, requires real energy.
Anyone who’s tried to quit smoking, exercise more, or suppress any kind of unhelpful thought knows that its hard work. The article cites another study that looked at the role of cognition and attention and diet:
In another experiment, Mr. Baumeister and his colleagues gave students an arduous attention task—they had to watch a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen—before asking them to drink a glass of lemonade. Half of the students got lemonade with real sugar, while the other half got a drink with Splenda. On a series of subsequent tests of self-control, the group given fake sugar performed consistently worse. The scientists argue that their lack of discipline was caused by a lack of energy, which hampered the performance of the prefrontal cortex.
Since the most popular New Year’s resolution is weight loss, it’s important to be aware that starving the brain of calories—even for just a few hours—can impact behavior. Skipping meals makes it significantly harder to summon up the strength to, say, quit cigarettes. Even moderation must be done in moderation.
When we talk of energy balance in public health we typically refer to issues related to diet and obesity, balancing energy output with energy input from calories. The above research has less to do with this directly and more about ensuring one has the psychological energy necessary to make the changes we want happen.
I’ve discussed this before when referring to organizations. Energy is important to taking information and using it, but so is applying it in a manner that fits with how change happens and on this level much of the conventional thinking fails us. In mainstream psychology, behaviour change tends to focus first on getting the right information, rationally processing it, and then transforming it into a plan of action (goal) that has structure and clearly anticipated and expected outcomes. We place a timeline (consider the Transtheoretical Model and Stages of Change, which suggest 6 months, 3 months, and 30 days as reasonable timelines for thinking about and planning change). We might enlist friends or allies in the battle too or find a role model to follow like with Social Cognitive Theory.
All of this takes place in a very linear, planned way. Yet, that isn’t really how most people change. Robert West and others have pointed out how on issues of smoking cessation (for example), nearly half of quitters had no plan when they finally quit. Indeed, many just quit almost spontaneously. Linear, rational models of change are so prevalent because they make sense to our brain that wants to make things simple, yet change is rarely like this. I would argue that our change processes — individual, organizational or otherwise — are far more complex than this and therefore require a complex model of understanding change to fully address and support change. Maybe we need to create the mental equivalent of catalytic probes to focus the mind or perhaps we need to engage in diverse experiences to transform the way we process information to support new self-organized mental patterns.
What this looks like is something I’m planning to give much more thought to in 2010 on these pages, because on a personal level the linear ways of doing things didn’t work so well in 2009 and not for the world either. Over the next few months, this issue will be explored further on this site and I welcome readers’ thoughts on how this might look from your point of view.
The first stop on this journey will be information, which serves as the foundation for most of the models of change we adhere to and, as you’ll see, not all is what it seems to be.
Best wishes for a great start to 2010 and may the complexity you find bring with it much joy.
