Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(11)

One day Denny invited me to look at the shower with him, and he put Behavior Design into action.

“We both want a clean shower,” he said.

I agreed.

He saw that I had some level of motivation.

Then he asked me about ability. What seemed hard about wiping out the shower? I told him that I didn’t know what his request meant. Did he want me to use my towel or a squeegee? Should I wipe down the walls? This was Denny’s aha moment. He hadn’t been specific about what he wanted, so the abstract behavior felt hard to do for me. What he did next was brilliant and simple. He showed me what to do. He walked me into the shower, and said, “Okay, when you turn off the shower [prompt], you grab the shower towel off the rack like this, then you put it on the floor and shuffle around on it like this. Then you throw the towel in the dirty laundry and you’re done.” What Denny showed me was so easy, it almost made me feel silly for not doing it in the first place. It took about ten seconds. Once he showed me what to do, my perception of the difficulty of the task changed—it suddenly seemed easy to do.

I have wiped out the shower every day since Denny’s theatrical demonstration. Why? First of all, I wanted a clean shower, and I wanted to please him. So I had at least some motivation. But the behavior seemed difficult. Once he showed me exactly what to do, I saw it was easy, and I zoomed above the Action Line. Fast-forward to today: When it comes to household tasks, an area where I’m not an expert, I know to say, “Show me exactly what you want me to do.” I watch him, and my ability increases.

These are a couple of small examples of how you can use the Behavior Model with other people. We’ll devote a whole chapter to this when we have more tools in our change toolbox.





Three Steps for Troubleshooting a Behavior


We often want to do a behavior—or want someone else to do a behavior—and are met with little or no success. For those situations, I have good news: Behavior Design gives us a specific set of steps for troubleshooting this common problem. And it’s not what you’d expect. Let’s say you want your employees to show up to your weekly team meeting on time, but they consistently arrive a few minutes late. Many managers would get upset, impose a penalty, or shoot dirty looks at the people arriving late. All those are attempts to use motivation to get the behavior of arriving on time to happen. And all of those are mistakes. You don’t start with motivation when you troubleshoot.

You follow these steps instead. Try each step in order. If you don’t get results, move to the next step.

Check to see if there’s a prompt to do the behavior.



See if the person has the ability to do the behavior.



See if the person is motivated to do the behavior.





To do an expert job of troubleshooting a behavior for yourself or others, start with the prompt. Is the person being prompted to do the behavior? You might ask your tardy employees, Do you have a reminder to come to the meeting on time? If they don’t, have them find a good prompt. And that might solve the problem. No drama. No dirty looks. Just design a good prompt.

If that doesn’t work, then you move to the next step. See if people have the ability to do the behavior. Ask your tardy employees what is making it difficult for them to arrive at your meeting on time. (I’ll explain a comprehensive approach in chapter 3, but this question is good for now.)

You might learn that the tardy employees have a previous meeting that ends at the top of the hour and that they can’t arrive at your meeting on time.

With that, you’ve found your answer. It’s an ability problem, not a motivation problem.

But let’s pretend that they have a prompt and the ability, and that it is a motivation issue. In this case, you’d then try to find a way to motivate punctuality. (And there are lots of ways to do this, both good and bad.)

Notice that fussing around with motivation is the last step in the troubleshooting order. Most people assume that to get a behavior to happen you need to focus on motivation first.

This process of troubleshooting can save you some grief both at work and at home. Let’s suppose you’ve asked your teenage daughter to stop on her way home from school to buy some poster board you need for a church lesson. She has your car, and you think that this is a fair request.

She gets home from school that day, and she doesn’t have your poster board. You get upset and explain how much you need that poster board. (Both of those are motivation strategies.) Your daughter says, “Sorry. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

But there’s no poster board the next day.

At this point, you might stomp around the living room, threaten to take away her driving privileges, and make a comment about how unreliable she is. (All three are motivation strategies.)

As you know, this is not a good situation.

Now let’s rewind this story and imagine that you know how to troubleshoot. You don’t get upset when your daughter arrives home without the poster board on the first day. You go into troubleshooting mode: “Did you have anything to remind you to get the poster board?”

“No. I just thought I’d remember. But I forgot.”

So you design a prompt for the next day by asking, “What do you think would be a good reminder for you tomorrow?”

And she says that she is putting a to-do note on her phone.

Guess what? She hands you the poster board with a smile the next day.