Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(83)
Your first step in troubleshooting is to examine the prompt. Are people getting your e-mail with the invitation? Maybe it’s going to their spam folders. Perhaps inboxes are jammed. Find another way to prompt the enrollment behavior—personal invitations via phone or handwritten notes.
If you’re sure your group is getting prompted (you personally delivered those handwritten notes) and if your results are still miserable, move on to the next step in troubleshooting. In cases like this, I like to map out the situation using discrete segments on the Behavior Model.
In the upper right-hand corner, envision all the people who have responded to your prompt and joined the walking challenge. I call that segment the Dolphins. They are both motivated and have the ability. They did the behavior—signing up for the challenge when prompted. In the upper left-hand corner are the people who did not sign up when prompted. They’re motivated, but for some reason, the walking challenge seems too hard to do. I call this segment the Turtles.
In the lower left-and right-hand corners are the people who are not motivated to join the walking challenge: the Crabs and the Clams. The Crabs have the ability, but they don’t want to do it. The Clams have neither the ability nor motivation. As you strive to get more people involved besides the Dolphins, focus first on the Turtles and use the Ability Chain to figure out how to make the behavior easier for them to do. Forget about the Crabs and the Clams for now. They are unlikely to join, and you shouldn’t waste time on them.
When I teach this segmentation at my boot camp, I find that this is one of the most enlightening and disruptive insights for people learning Behavior Design. Innovators often try to solve for all four segments at the same time. Or they figure that they should focus on the toughest segment—the Clams. Both approaches are a mistake. In Behavior Design, you help people do what they already want to do. The Crabs and the Clams don’t want to join a walking challenge. The Dolphins and the Turtles do. So you help the Dolphins and the Turtles first.
When you’ve done that, find a different activity for the Crabs and Clams that they would enjoy—playing table tennis, joining a cooking club, or riding their bikes. Or set them aside and have a blast walking with the Dolphins and the Turtles.
That said, there is one situation when you can try to reach the Crabs (and maybe the Clams). This exception is when there is a behavior someone must do, something really important like getting a flu shot. In those cases (and only then) you can shift gears and also appeal to the Crabs.
If for some reason you must get the Crabs to join the walking challenge, find an aspiration that would align with their joining. If your initial campaign framed the challenge as having fun while getting healthy, and that is not resonating with the Crabs, find something that is meaningful. This may take some research, and not all Crabs will resonate with the same aspiration. But imagine these potential changes to your campaign.
Join the walking challenge and get free passes to the Friday concert series
Join the walking challenge and talk face-to-face with top management
Join the walking challenge and get free walking shoes
In these examples, you are not revisiting the Swarm of Bs and matching people with another behavior. You are doing what I call the Queen B Solution. You keep the behavior (because you have to) and frame it with other aspirations. (You’ll see a true example of this in the next story.)
This use of my Behavior Model for segmenting can give you and your team surprising clarity. As you share this way of thinking with teammates, you start raising your colleagues to Ninja status. And they can then apply their energies in areas where they will get results and not waste time pursuing the Crabs and Clams.
Sometimes the process of changing together unfolds in a straightforward way, with you and your crew hitting all the steps I’ve laid out. But the beauty of Behavior Design and the methods from Tiny Habits is that they are flexible. Now that you’ve seen the broad strokes of the change-together process, let’s see what they look like in real life. Let’s call these two true stories “Tales of Two Transformations.” The first story brings back a Behavior Change All-Star who has been with us before. The second story is about using the Tiny Habits method to increase resilience in a workplace that is rife with unavoidable stress—a hospital.
Family Change: Succeeding with a Learning Disability
CLARIFY ASPIRATIONS AND OUTCOMES
Amy’s daughter was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten. A neuropsychologist said that Rachel was the smartest but most scattered kid he’d ever seen. Amy knew her daughter was a deep thinker, but it was as if the ramifications of every little action slowed Rachel down to a snail’s pace. She had trouble following directions because she was often lost in thought. Decisions were painful to arrive at. But almost all of Rachel’s teachers agreed that she could be successful if she found a way to harness all those thoughts and process them more quickly without losing sight of the need to finish a worksheet or answer a direct question. By fourth grade, Rachel was in Special Education, and Amy was struggling to help her finish her homework every day, and all Rachel wanted to do was play video games or play outside.
Having used Tiny Habits and Behavior Design to grow her business and navigate a difficult relationship with her ex-husband, Amy didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t use what she’d learned to help Rachel. The first thing she did was figure out Rachel’s larger aspirations, which took some time and creative questions on Amy’s part. It turned out that getting good grades, earning the teacher’s approval, and learning her multiplication tables were not as important to Rachel as doing what she wanted to in the moment. Amy kept pushing to find Rachel’s own unique why behind the behaviors she wanted to do and those she was avoiding (doing her homework). Knowing that finding the right aspiration was the key, Amy used the Queen B method: She set out to align the homework tasks (a requirement) with an aspiration Rachel already had.