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.

Puerto Rico Part I: Rare Finds in a Rain Forest

Lani and I were recently visiting some of her family in Puerto Rico and managed to spend a few days in a mountainous tropical rain forest called El Yunque. (It’s a national forest.) We hiked around verdant landscapes populated with giant ferns, tree frogs, and climbing vines and scrambled our way across mountain streams feeding into waterfalls.

El Yunque is also where we met Frank, shown at right (last name omitted to protect his privacy). A longtime electrical engineer, Frank had a personal crisis that initially dragged him down but ultimately led him to a life as a park ranger, something he’s done now for 15 years. “I work as close to heaven as you can get,” he says.

Frank will be 72 this year, though in person he looks a decade or two younger. (The light breezes of the mountains and Frank’s obvious gusto for his constant level of physical activity probably has something to with it.) He does a whole set of ranger-y tasks: trail maintenance, guiding visitors, search and rescue, etc. He roams around with a wide-brimmed hat, a hand-carved walking stick he made himself, and a necklace with a large ivory-looking tooth on it. A few times a day, he leads short hikes for visitors starting about two thirds of the way up the main mountain. Lani and I were lucky enough to get him all to ourselves on a slow afternoon. We wandered with him under the variegated canopy.

Less Taxing To Do Lists: A Self-Justification

I have a quirky way of making to do lists. As you’d expect, I include all the complicated things I need to get done by breaking them down into simpler steps. But I also make sure to include super-basic items that take almost no effort, as well as a few that I’ve already completed and can check off without actually doing anything. For some reason, the list looks less daunting this way.

Here’s an example. I’ve been slogging through my taxes over the past couple of weeks, and I made a point of writing in really easy items along with all the important complicated stuff. Things like gathering up the W-2 forms that came in the mail from our employers and creating the pile of tax-related receipts I will eventually need to deal with. I even gave myself kudos for filling out the cover page of a tax organizer from the accountant we work with. Of course there are other to do items that make my brain sputter and fizzle. (Itemizing? Ack!)

Lani finds the odd mélange in my to do lists amusing, but now I’ve found some scientific backup. It even has a fancy, scientific-sounding name. It’s called the endowed progress effect.

Update From the Office Disaster Zone

There’s an old adage in the consulting world that execution is more important than planning. The world is full of fantastic plans that just sit on a shelf covered with dust. But even an uninspired plan, if well-executed, can amount to progress.

Looking around my office at the moment, there’s an element of that consulting lesson to be seen. When I first started this blog, one of my goals was simply to clean up my space. I wanted to remove the towering piles of paper, magazines, envelopes, file folders and other sedimentary layers that have built up on the floor, my desk, my side table, the filing boxes, and just about everywhere else. My plan was to focus at a manageable level: sorting the mess in a quick and dirty way without getting to caught up in any individual item. A couple of months later, there has been some progress, but I’ve lost a lot my original momentum. But rather than harp on what’s gone wrong, here's a quick inventory of what has gone right:

• I can see some of my rug (seriously, that’s a major improvement)
• I have a big box of stuff to file, and I’ve gotten rid of three bags of trash/recycling
• I’ve hunted down some unexpectedly large dust bunnies that had been hiding out
• I found lots of stuff: From the useless (five-year-old bank statements), to the useful (a binder from a seminar I once took on grant writing), to the exciting (a list of the salsa dance moves I learned for my wedding)

The piles are smaller, but plenty is still there. So, I think I’ll call this a partial success. (OK, maybe a very partial success.) Time to build on what’s worked so far.

Game Changing

It's no easy thing to radically alter how people perceive the tasks that they do. But I recently came across a very basic, powerful example: a former colleague of mine, techie columnist Chris O’Brien, signed his kids up for an online game, Chore Wars, that turns their chores into a warriors-and-monsters role play. Chores are labeled as adventures that enable the kids to gather gold pieces and fight all sorts of nasties. Chris’ eight-year-old son Liam took on the persona of a bearded hunter named ElZorro Bernardo, who carries a sword and fights basilisks.

These days, when my son wakes up, he says, "Dad, I've got to do my "Chore Wars." He often wanders into the living room to fetch the laundry I folded the night before and then heads to the dishwasher to empty it. All without a nudge from me... When I notice [my kids] haven't done a chore, I'll open the full dishwasher, for example, and tell them, "Cool, looks like I get to claim 'Chore Wars' points for the dishwasher." They'll come running over and intercept me before I can start unloading.

In one sense, this isn’t surprising at all. Kids love games, so why shouldn’t a game get them motivated to do chores? In another sense, it’s amazing. (Seriously, it's amazing!) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen my five-year-old nephew have a tantrum when he’s asked to clean up his toys. And any amount of threats or rewards (“you can’t have dessert until you clean up”) don’t seem to make a difference.