The secret to change that most people overlook

Yesterday I was asked to brainstorm with a team who is making a lot of change. They asked me questions about how to help the changes stick.

Change is the activity that causes us to break old habits. Behavior is really just habit. It’s what served us well until this point, and some event or opportunity is causing us to need new habits.

Creating new habits isn’t easy. We have to create new neural pathways. That takes work. We have to experiment, practice, and decide if we like the outcomes of these new behaviors. If we like…we will repeat.

In an earlier post, I mentioned The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. In it, he describes that habits get formed when there is a cue that evokes a behavior. That behavior then creates an outcome. If that outcome is positive…we keep the behavior. Over time and repetition, the neurons that craft that behavior become deeply connected and we are ‘wired’ to conduct the behavior automatically. When behaviors reach automatic, they take less effort and we are able to conserve that energy for learning something new. Duhigg references the cue-behavior-reward cycle and notes how it programs where we spend our energy.

Cue — Behavior — Reward

Yet, what I see in organizations, parenting, and relationships is that we tend to look past the ‘reward’ component of this formula. When change is introduced, the entity making that introduction often simply expects behavior to change in the desired way…