Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(79)
“Just to clarify, we’re designing for X, right?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” someone replies.
“Okay, great! Just wanted to be on the same page. Thanks!”
This Ninja move may seem like a no-brainer, but you will be doing everyone a favor by making the objective clear.
2. EXPLORE BEHAVIOR OPTIONS TOGETHER
Once the aspiration is clear, then you explore behavior options.
The Ringleader
When leading a group in Behavior Design, you can either run a session of Magic Wanding, which I explained in chapter 2, or you can use the Swarm of Behaviors worksheet and ask people to fill in the boxes with different behaviors that will lead to the aspiration.
I find that Magic Wanding produces a broader range of behaviors in a carefully guided small group. But if you have more than twenty people, the moderating gets unwieldly. For large groups, hand out the worksheet for the Swarm of Behaviors. With minimal instructions, your family, your work group, or your entire company—I’ve done this with more than a thousand people at the same time—can succeed in finding behaviors to fill in the swarm. Your choice of method depends on your group and your leadership style.
The Ninja
You can Magic Wand on the sly by asking questions like these at the right moments.
What do you want to happen? If we had magical powers, who would do what?
Imagine we could get anyone to do anything. What’s the ideal action we would get them to take?
Consider this scenario of Ninja Behavior Design: You are in a meeting about your local parks. You’re a volunteer. The director wants more people to use the parks. You recognize this as her aspiration.
To help the meeting succeed, you affirm her aspiration then use the Magic Wand questions outlined earlier.
When you invite your team to think in this way, the meeting will get more interesting for everyone because you’ve done two things. You’ve helped everyone go beyond the abstract by focusing the meeting on a specific objective. And you’ve helped everyone see many potential solutions. As a result, the group won’t settle on the first idea.
Thanks to your Ninja use of Magic Wanding, what felt like an intractable problem five minutes ago now feels solvable.
3. MATCH YOUR GROUP WITH GOLDEN BEHAVIORS
Once you have a big set of potential behaviors, you are ready to figure out which ones you will turn into realities. As I explained in chapter 2, you want to match people with behaviors that will have an impact, are easy to do, and are motivating. Ideally, the behaviors you select will have all three characteristics. These are your Golden Behaviors.
The best way to match your team with Golden Behaviors is with the Focus Mapping method. You can do this as a group. Collaborating as a family or a work team will give you the benefit of many brains. And when you reach consensus during the Focus Mapping process, your group will be primed to support one another as you turn the Golden Behaviors into realities. Of all the methods in Behavior Design, Focus Mapping as a group is my favorite.
The Ringleader
I’ve taught hundreds of teams how to use the Focus Mapping method to pinpoint the Golden Behaviors for their projects or their own self-improvement.
Focus Mapping as a group uses the same overall framework that I described in chapter 2, but there are some important additions.
As with individual Focus Maps, you begin with a set of behaviors written on cards. The behaviors written on these cards come from Magic Wanding or the Swarm of Behaviors worksheet.
As the Ringleader, explain that there are various rounds in the Focus Map and that in round one they will be placing each card along a vertical axis, putting behaviors with a high impact toward the top of the spectrum and behaviors that won’t have impact toward the bottom.
Have your team members take turns putting a card onto the Focus Map until all the cards are placed. Then have people take turns -resorting the cards up or down without having them explain why they moved a card. On each turn someone can move one card. They just read the card and move it. Sometimes a card will get moved multiple times when people disagree on where it should be placed. That’s normal. (Don’t worry. Just keep the process moving.)
Keep going until everyone is happy with the arrangement of the cards. When you have consensus, you’re done with round one.
In round two, your team will take turns sliding cards side to side along the feasibility dimension. Explain that they should put behaviors that they think they could get themselves to do toward the right and behaviors that they don’t think they can get themselves to do toward the left.
Have your group take turns, and one by one people can move the cards side to side until everyone is happy with the arrangement.
At this point, after some brief comments and adjustment of the behavior items, you will find your Golden Behaviors in the upper right-hand corner of the landscape. Lead your team in a discussion of how many Golden Behaviors you want to make into a reality. You might pick only one or two. (Picking more than five is rather ambitious.)
The surprise for most teams is how quickly and easily they reach a consensus about which behaviors to focus on and which to forget about for now. What might have been a long and tense process gets streamlined into a session the Ringleader can run in about thirty minutes. And everyone walks away happy about the result in most cases. (To get more guidance on running a group Focus Mapping session, see my instructions at FocusMap.info.)