Measurement Drives Behavior, Even in the Shower

A tool for behavioral change?

Sometimes lasting change comes from very small adjustments… and a little understanding of how our brains are wired.

My natural pace in the morning is slow. I’m one of those people who always seems to take a good long time picking out clothes, showering, getting dressed, etc. And this used to make me late a lot. But in the past year, I’ve turned the situation around. The new element: wearing a waterproof watch with a stopwatch function.

By starting the timer when I step into the shower, I’ve completely changed my dynamic. I haven’t made any conscious effort to speed up (seriously, none), but that’s what has happened anyway. The only effort has been to look at my watch from time to time. That’s where my brain’s wiring takes over. It can’t see a sequence of times, day in and day out, without looking for patterns. I developed a pretty good idea for how long I should take at the various tasks: showering, toweling off, getting dressed, coming down to breakfast, etc. (A five-minute shower is about average, and eight minutes is slow.) Now I can’t help noticing when I take longer than usual; I find myself taking corrective action without much thought. Slow at one step, and suddenly I speed up at my other tasks. Now, when I have everything laid out the night before, the whole sequence of getting out of bed and out the door is less than 25 minutes.

There’s a basic idea that underlies this change: Measurement drives behavior. Just by the act of measuring something and paying attention to the results, people begin to change what they do. This idea is critical in the business and management world. But there’s no reason it can’t work at the level of personal change, too. The hard part is picking the right things to measure and getting the whole process started. That seems to be what’s going on with my morning stopwatch. Looking at a timepiece was not hard to turn into a habit. 

Bin Laden: Leaders Get One Transformation

He couldn't transform
Al Qaeda twice

There is an old adage that a visionary leader of an organization typically has one major transformation in him, but it’s unlikely that the leader will be able to transform the organization a second time. (It’s an adage that’s particularly common in nonprofit circles.)

Osama bin Laden helped Al Qaeda transform from an organization that essentially carried out its own terrorist acts (9/11, Kenya bombing, etc.) to an organization that acted largely through a group of affiliates (Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Jemaah Islamiyah, etc.) This change was a necessary one, given how much pressure the terror group’s central leadership was under after 9/11 from the continued hunt, drone strikes and the like from the United States and its allies. But it was also a smart transformational move by Bin Laden. To an extent, this shift allowed Bin Laden’s central Al Qaeda leadership to continue to push for attacks against the U.S. and its allies, and get credit for attacks that the central Al Qaeda leadership didn’t actually coordinate.

But Bin Laden didn’t have a second transformation in him.

Puerto Rico Part II: The Engineer Turned Forest Ranger

In my previous post I introduced Frank, who was our guide in the El Yunque rain forest in Puerto Rico. As Lani and I walked along a rain forest path, Frank talked plants and wildlife and then about bits and pieces of his background. Here’s what we learned:

Frank was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to the continent (that’s how many Puerto Ricans refer to the mainland United States) when he was young. You can still hear the remnants of a New York accent in his throaty voice. After high school, he joined the Air Force and was posted with NATO in Europe. He married his high school sweetheart and things went along smoothly. He studied electrical engineering, something that served him well when he left the service. He moved to Puerto Rico where he began working for a large computer manufacturer. He eventually helped the company develop factories that built things like main frame computers – you know, those large, clunky pieces of electronics that existed in the Stone Age, i.e., before advent of the PC. (At one time, tax incentives led a large number of electronics companies to run factories on the island.)

In a matter-of-fact way, Frank told us that his wife died of cancer in the early 1990s. Although he didn’t say the words, I suspect Frank had a nervous breakdown. Frank couldn’t work. He just shut himself off.

“I was depressed, I thought it was all over. I just didn’t want to go on,” Frank explained to us.