How To Shift Mindsets & The Art of Influence (With Julie Dirksen)

big picture in terms of your system. Yeah, we can do training, but you do understand that there's a whole slew of other variables that are impacting whether or not this behavior is going to happen, and so we can push on this one, the training one, but let's make sure we're keeping an eye on all of these other things at the same time. And so I think that the benefit in this book for people who are coming in as learning designers, coming in as training people, is to have a little bit more vocabulary to have that conversation with stakeholders so they can say look, here's the part we can help you with. We're pretty confident we can do that.

Welcome to the Product Agility podcast the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world-class thought leaders and practitioners. Why, I hear you ask. Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep-rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence.

Welcome to the Product Agility podcast. This week sees us joined for technically the second time because we're joined by Judy Dirksen, who recorded an episode with me over a year ago regarding Judy's first book. I say that tentatively because I'm not sure if you might have sneaked out of another book that I didn't know about, but your first book, design for how People Learn, which is a phenomenal book, changed how I design my learning interventions and is a fantastic complement to schools of thought, such as training from the back of the room. So, yeah, those first two episodes. They were some of our highest performing episodes of the year, in the top 25% globally for our podcasting platform, which is the world's biggest. So that is, yeah, nothing to smirk at. They did fantastically well because it was great content, and so I have been so excited to get Judy back and I think I even mentioned it when we spoke before, julie, because you were talking about this new book. You were writing and all of a sudden, this new book appeared and we are here to talk about it.

So, judy Dirksen, welcome back to the Product Agility podcast. It is lovely to see you again.

Yes, thank you for having me. These are such fun conversations. I'm really glad to be back.

Yeah, I'm hoping this will be fun. The conversation we had beforehand was fun, although not really on topic, and we didn't record it. Julie, I think for anybody that is looking to understand more about behaviour change and how we as teachers, coaches and if it's a human's leaders, I'm going to cast them very broadly here can help people on that behaviour change journey, understand people's motivations, how we design these interventions. I think your work holistically has a huge amount to offer. Now. Your new book is called Talk to the Elephant and I'll hold it up to the screen here for those of you that are going to be looking at this on YouTube, or maybe it's on TikTok or something as well. Talk to the Elephant. Talk to the.

Elephant Design Learning for Behaviour Change yes.

Yes, but that's the full title, which I didn't do. So Design Learning for Behaviour Change. Julie, would you mind, for those people that haven't listened to their first episodes, perhaps give a little introduction to yourself and then tell us a little bit about your new book, if you will?

Yeah, absolutely so. I identify as an instructional designer, which means that my whole kind of professional world is about designing good learning experiences for people, and I have been doing this since basically the early 90s. I was doing training for a finance company and trying to understand what made for a good learning experience, and I got really interested in technology. I wound up being a project manager on the development of a front-end system for their customer service group, which also got me interested in things like user experience design Although we weren't even calling it that yet, it was still human computer interaction and user-goal engineering, yeah, so it was things like that, and so that I think is always colored my perspective about designing for learning, which was also this kind of piece of making sure that you really understand what's going on with your users.

I did my graduate degree in instructional technology at Indiana University, which also had, I think, a very strong focus on again what we are now referred to as user experience or UX design and things like that, and it's interesting because I think I've always played with both of those areas and I don't really consider them different disciplines so much as a continuum. You either, when you have a challenge, you either want to fix the user, which is usually a training problem, or you want to fix the system, which is usually more of a UX problem, and so it's where along the continuum does the information need to live to best support people? But I got interested in the behavior change piece because I felt like I had all these good tools in my toolkit for helping people retain things or helping people learn stuff or helping people develop skills. And then it came to a project that I got involved with in kind of the mid-2000s, which was an AIDS and HIV prevention project, and I got really very involved because we had a group through one of the universities their School of Epidemiology, had this in-person intervention around AIDS and HIV prevention that they wanted to translate into online and online environment, and so we were helping with the online piece. But I was realizing that all the tools in my toolkit were about information delivery or skill development and that neither one of those were really the problem here, because by I don't know, 2005, 2006, I think the message had gotten out about the importance of condom usage to prevent the spread of HIV, and so it wasn't an information problem at that point. We weren't trying to just communicate that this is functionally how it works and this is functionally the behavior that you should do. It was related to a lot of other things and their curriculum that they had developed in person.

One dealt with a lot of stuff. It turns out that people's mental health, emotional health, relationship health, physical health all of these kinds of things play into decisions that they make about things like condoms, and so I was looking at this and going, if it isn't a knowledge problem, what tools and strategies as a designer am I using to help with this? And just didn't feel like I had the right tools in the toolbox to try to tackle this problem and so kept looking at it. I wound up working on some health and wellness materials in like 2007, 2008. And wound up working with some behavioral experts in that space and around.

Then we started getting books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge, the Richard Dahlern-Kesson's Dean book with behavioral economics, and we really started to see a blossoming of this field that was pulling from a number of disciplines like behavioral economics or public health or psychology or finance or safety, coalescing into a single domain around behavioral science. And as I got more involved with that, there were some great models and frameworks in there and not a lot of them were making their way back over to the people who were designing learning interventions, and so that's what I was trying to do with this book was to take a lot of the things that are useful in behavioral science and try to translate them for people who are primary function is learning design.

So the seeds of this book were so long time ago.

Yeah, I wound up having a whole conversation with my publisher about whether I should put a picture of a condom on the very first page of the book, and we ultimately decided not to. But I'm like, if I'm leading with condom usage, you know it's all easy after that, right.

Yeah, I know. Well, I was musing over potential episode titles. Actually I'm just trying to fit condom usage too. I can't quite think of what it will be after that.

And now the environment has changed too, so some of these things are more complicated, because there's medications. I wound up working on an oral prep curriculum in Botswana last year because we were trying to help develop a micro learning strategy for one of the international healthcare education groups, and so I wound up learning about all about oral prep, and so the answer is changing.

Now it's not just condom usage anymore, but it's still. It's really interesting to get into these different areas and to look at what else is going on that influences whether or not people do a particular behavior, because our answer traditionally has to tell them louder and more emphatically that they should, and that's not the right answer. In a lot of cases, I think there's a distinction between what people's physical and emotional environments are and what their intellectual knowledge is, and that most of the behavior change problems that we have, most of the really tricky behaviors that we struggle with as humans, tend to have a disconnect between those two, which is where the title comes from right. Your intellectual knowledge, your impulse control, logic, reasoning, verbal thinking, stuff like that is this part of your brain that, in a metaphor from Jonathan Hayweaver too, is like a writer. So you have a little writer sitting on back of a huge part of your brain that's concerned with, like, the physical reality of your world. What do you see here? Smell, touch, tastes? How do you move around in this world? How do you control your physical self? There's gross motor control and there's fine motor control, and there's visual perception and auditory perception and processing inputs and all these kinds of things. So there's this whole big swath of your brain that's concerned with what is the world looking, feel like and how do you feel about it. So you get your emotional area in the middle of your brain, you get the limbic system and the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which regulate a lot of emotional cues and things like that, and just a huge amount of your brain is tied up with how you perceive the physical world, how things feel, what you feel about them, what you're perceiving, and so that's all the elephants.

The idea is we've got this intellectual knowledge and then we've got all of this data coming into us about what the world, what our immediate experience in the world, is, and so one of the things that happens is when our intellectual knowledge doesn't agree with what our physical environment is telling us. Those tend to be the behaviors we struggle with. So exercise is good versus this is painful and unpleasant. So my intellectual knowledge is this is a good thing to do. My physical world is this is not fun, I don't like it, and so those tend to be things where you do much better if you can find exercise you actually like. There's very clear science on if you need more durable exercise motivation. You really need to find something you actually like doing.

Continuing to force yourself to do things you don't like is, and can be, a complicated thing. That was difficult, but I feel good afterwards or I feel a sense of satisfaction or something, some positive affect out of it. I should say, for retirement, nothing is different today if I failed to set up my retirement account, like today is very much like yesterday. There's nothing different about my environment. There's the intellectual knowledge. I still haven't done this thing that I was supposed to do. But I should wear sunscreen. But in a lot of cases, if you're not, it's not. The problem isn't sunburn, which would be more of that kind of immediate visceral feedback.

The problem is that kind of prolonged sun damage that leads to skin cancer decades from now be Compared organizational context where you have and if I try and go ground it in something here which is perhaps they're really contextually relevant to to our listeners if, in a situation where intellectually someone can understand the benefits of not Planning, and in a huge amount of detail Upfront, but yet they've got their boss breathing down their neck, believing that if they don't do it in this way, but they're not gonna get that, Reward?

yeah, there's a whole bunch of variables that kind of come into play. So one is what are the incentives in the environment? Because whenever people do something quote-unquote wrong, it's always that behavior always makes sense. In some context we talk about bounded rationality. What is within the boundaries of this person's world? What's the logical reason they're doing this thing that we don't like that they're doing, right, is it? Because, oh my, my quick and dirty example of this is I was working for a company that was an insurance company and it was about entering insurance applications from multinational policies.

Multinational policies are super complicated because you've got to deal with the laws of all the countries that are involved, and they were. We were working on the seed learning course and the stakeholder of the subject matter expert said you know what we really need to emphasize? We need to emphasize the importance of accuracy. And I was like, okay, tell me more. And he's like I don't seem to care if they're entering the data into the fields, can we just tell them how important that is? And I'm like, of course we can Remind me again. How are they compensated for the work? And he's oh, the number of applications to do per hour. I'm like all right. Do they get any feedback on their accuracy? And they're like no, I don't think they do and I'm just like you see the problem right. We can say accuracy important, but that's not what's being communicated about this environment, that's not the behavior that's being incented, the behavior that's being incentive to speed, and there's literally no feedback on accuracy. So there's no consequence to it. And so, as long as your incentives are this misaligned, it does not matter what we're gonna say in this training program. That's not gonna fundamentally change the behavior.

So when we look at something like project planning the idea that you would use an agile method where you've got a goal or you've got a roadmap or something, but you don't do these big knockdown, drag out the gap charts or you know whatever it is and I I Worked for a company many years ago that did traditional P&P certification training, so I'm very familiar with but the big, dense version of project planning part of it is if that was the thing that gave you satisfaction as a professional was to Optimize all of these variables and figure this all out. Or is that with the behavior that was rewarded, or do that make you feel like you were productive? Does the idea of launching into something without that kind of roadmap feel insecure. The model that I lean heavily on the book is one from Susan Mickey in University College London, but they talk about she. The model has combi, which is the person capable of doing the thing. So if it's more of an agile, roadmap driven method for project management, then are they capable of doing it? Do they feel confident? Do they feel like they know all the pieces, that they know how to do this? Have they seen somebody else do it? Do they feel like, okay, I've seen it work, let me try it? As opposed to I Understand all the words you're saying but I just don't see how this is gonna work. That's a those are very different views on it.

Then we look at opportunity, which is does the physical opportunity support it? Does the system opera supported to the tools supported? Then we look at social. If I seen somebody else do it, have I seen it modeled? Have I experienced it myself with other people, if I do this, what's the reaction of my environment, people in my social environment gonna be? Is my team gonna be on board? Are they gonna fight me on this? All of these kinds of things.

And then we look at motivation and within motivation. We want to look at things like are they confident? Do they see this as an important skill? Is this the goal that they have or are they resistant to it? Do they have the perception that it will be useful to? They have the perception that it's gonna actually fix some significant problems for them? Do they see it as part of their identity is to be good at this? So are they capable of doing?

It is usually an infer in educational problem, right? Our traditional tool set of how do you teach people things, how do you develop skills, will work fit really nice into capability. But it's these other areas. So what does the opportunity look like? And then what are there? What does their motivation look like? That become Really important. And if you're solving the wrong problem, if the problem is I Don't feel confident that I can have the conversation to negotiate safe sex practices with a partner, is different than you're not gonna solve that with a motivation thing. Like they're motivated, they just don't feel like they have the capability or the confidence to do it and you're trying to just tell them it's really important, that's not gonna fix I don't feel confident. The two things are just fundamentally a mismatch in terms of problem and solution.

So where does the boundaries of your book, your work, end? Because, because there's some stuff which, like having people learn something, is Enough. But with that then, are we talking about things such as persuasion, find a ways to motivate people. If I think of Conversation that I had God Good kick myself, I really come and do is with, a couple times in the past couple of weeks, somebody saying that actually we believe in all of this and we totally get it and we absolutely want it. But until my boss's boss actually decides to measure us on something other than just the output and the number of widgets we produce, I just don't see the point in trying here and then for me, like that Kind of implies there isn't so much of a learning intervention, that that's just something else at least of that. That condit that bounded context there.

Yeah, and so if we were doing a copy analysis we're looking at that We'd say that's not a capability problem and it's not a motivation problem. It is most likely an opportunity problem and probably what they would define is a physical opportunity in terms of the way that the system set up, which is a little weird to say that something like an incentive scheme is a physical opportunity. It's really more. There's a mismatch in the system and so then when we start looking at solutions for that, we might look at okay, we can't sell this in a big way, but can we carve out some room for a pilot project and maybe try to figure out what measures would we say that we would compare If we were doing a pilot, to an existing one?

Can we get enough line to do just a small pilot of testing this out for something? Very? It's not going to interrupt all the deliverables and all the widget stuff that's scheduled already, but we just want you to give us a small enough thing that it's not scary To. Okay, where we're gonna test this out, and then we'll be able to come back and look at some of this data afterwards, right, and say, hey, look, here's what we found out from this, and you have to be prepared in those instances to be able to come back and be like yeah, guess what, it didn't help on some of these measures, but we did find this result or something like that, because the the challenge often is, if you're putting your opinion up against somebody else's opinion, that's whoever is the check wins in those cases, and so what's? Something that is Small enough that doesn't feel like a real loss to them but is still moving you forward in some way.

Okay, would be a thing to look at there.

Yeah, trying to find that sweet spot. Where is it? There's enough value to show that it was worthwhile. We're not so much that it's going to be too painful for them. We're not gonna be too embarrassed if it doesn't quite work out.

Yeah, yeah.

I love both your books, but I couldn't help but feel every time I read through them that I ended up applying it really broadly, if that makes sense. So for example, in your first book, design for how people learn, you talk about the gaps, and Now that's that form of spot of every engagement I have with a client. Oh, okay, it's talking about the different types of gaps and explaining what the gaps up I can help them feel and the gaps that, unless they want to engage me in a different way, I just won't be able to feel for them. I can't change. I can perhaps motivate them to look at some of their environmental gaps, but I can't change environmental gaps. That's not my, that's not my, that's not even my remit. Yeah, absolutely, I don't know. Is that as a coach or a consultant? That's why I wonder design for people learn and design learning for behavior change, and what we're talking about with both of the books really is effective mechanisms for change?

Yeah is that a fair summary?

Yeah, and the Some of this stuff. It was in the first book. Chapter 8 is very much about motivation, and so this is Expansion and some of the stuff that I was talking about in that book, because there was so much more to there's so much more to talk about. I do think they have a whole chapter about what's really a training problem and what's really not training's responsibility.

Chapter 7.

I think I don't know if you've gotten to that one, but something about a million dollars. If you gave somebody a million dollars and they could do the thing, then it's not a trading problem, but it is question, though that still becomes. Unfortunately we don't have a million dollars to hand out every time we need a behavior. I'm sure they in the US, if any, issues on their most recent uptake of the COVID, the COVID booster. Covid, it's not a booster, I think it's technically a new vaccine but the adoption wasn't what certainly the CDC was hoping for and some of those people are Adamantly dead set against it. But then there were a lot of people who just weren't making time for it and those people, if you gave them a million dollars, they probably would have gotten vaccinated people who are not fundamentally opposed. But the people who are just like I can't be bothered. If you gave them a million dollars, they probably do it. So it wasn't an issue of that. They were so dead-setting that in that particular population they're so dead-set against it. It's an issue that like it wasn't convenient or wasn't easy or they didn't feel compelling, and that's not something where I can give you more information about the nature of the vaccine and probably change that behavior. That's something where we have to figure out other. Can we figure out a way that Literally make it simple for you, or can we figure out a way that answers a problem for you? Or we figure out a way that, like Pretty much always making the behavior easier is usually helpful in terms of so some of these other things like like social modeling or Persuasion messages or something it's hit or miss. You always want to test those Because it's not clear if they're gonna land right with your audience. But something like how do I make the behavior as easy as possible? That one pretty much always is at least somewhat helpful. So there's those pieces of it.

The question of what's a training problem and what's not a training problem Ostensibly, the incentive system is usually not a training problem. It's usually something you can't fix from the learning point of view. However, you can flag it for people. You can make it clear that, hey, as long as you're only compensating for speed, not accuracy, you're gonna have an accuracy problem and I'm happy to put something in the training about it. But let's be honest about how much impact that's gonna have. So I do think being able to name some of these things at least gives you, I think, something that's a little bit easier to have that conversation with people because a ton of stuff gets Jammed in the training box. Right, we're gonna fix it with training every time something really embarrassing happens with an American corporation.

Oh yeah, the CEO will show up and promise that they're gonna do training.

It's part of the script, it's part of the apology we're really sorry that we did this Incredibly stupid thing where we're gonna do more training, and it's if we look at big picture in terms of your system.

Yeah, we can do training, but you do understand that there's a whole slew of other variables that are impacting whether or not this behavior is gonna happen. Yeah, and so we can push on this one, the training one, but let's make sure we're keeping an eye on all of these other things at the same time, and so I I think that the benefit in this book for people who are coming in as learning designers Are coming in as training. People needs to have a little bit more vocabulary to have that conversation with stakeholders so they can say look, here's the part we can help you with. We're pretty confident we can do that. Here's the part where we're happy to give it a swing, but you do understand that we're really saying we don't think this is gonna change the fact that you're currently in sensing just widget production and not, they say, long-term quality or overall team development or whatever, the whatever we think the benefits gonna be of this other practice.

Yeah, I know it's making a lot of sense to me. I can think of Every large change initiative that I've been involved in or around. When the system doesn't change, individuals can do their best, but you're. It's very difficult to achieve systemic change unless you are the person who is Responsible for changing the system. I think it's as Peter Senki said in the fifth discipline you have a hardy push against the system, the harder push back.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's so true, and I think it's hard for people who are brought in, and I think it is leadership. There's an element of teaching in leadership. I think they're reading your book and seeing how you talk about how to write, how to communicate, how to send emails. It will get people's attention to sign up. If it's all about what the marketing and the PR because ultimately you know, everything is learning. If you're trying to change from state A to state B, there's probably some kind of learning involved in that and I think it is really hard for individuals to appreciate that. Well, you can only push against the system so hard You're.

There's so much you can do within that context, I suppose then, also frustrating for Trainers, and they make reference in your book times when Perhaps you've been asked if you can create some training and the question was what that why? Yeah what is it we're trying to solve with this? And I think it's really hard when you're brought in to do some training. We're brought in to lead something and educate people, and the system just isn't set up for you to be able to succeed.

Yeah, absolutely, and one of the things that I think is really important is making sure that you're treating If our learner is this person like a software engineer or something like that we're trying to teach them something Then you need to consider who their other audiences are. Else needs to be who else is where we get into social opportunity. If this person has these constraints on them and has these pressures and has the incentives and all these kinds of things, who are all the Players around it? Because if we're gonna need to change the Product manager or we're gonna need to change the stakeholder, we're gonna need to change these then you should be considering these people as audiences for what you're doing as well.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from a lot of people who do training and organizations and workforce training and things like that Is that managers don't reinforce the training. Once people go back to the office or the floor or do whatever it is, it's okay. Then you need to treat the managers as your secondary audience. What are they? You're very busy people. They got a lot going on. How can you support them Doing the right thing to support their workers? Is it about giving them a better toolkit? Is it about being honest with Stakeholders about how much time is gonna take for the managers to reinforce this behavior, is about setting expectations For what their responsibilities look like to reinforce this behavior, because a lot of times they aren't taken into account at all.

Right, we do an audience analysis with the workforce and we create this training product. We send it out there, but nobody even goes and talks to the managers about how. What does it need? What is it gonna look like to reinforce this thing that they're learning and training so that it's going out there, and how can you support that audience? They need their own training. Do they need resources? Do they need time? What's it gonna take?

basically, yeah it's so difficult to know where to draw the boundaries, though. How big and complex do you want to make stuff before?

it comes out manageable. Well, that just isn't the budget to do that. I'm thinking of the quote in your book where being able to focus so that you're not ignoring things, but you're trying to simplify stuff enough so that it makes sense. So it's again that Peter Senghi talks about this in the fifth discipline doesn't is that? We love to break things down because it's big and complex and we just can't handle it. So we break it down to simplify it. But then we missed the boost, that holistic Perspective, and it's. How do you then create a holistic perspective? And I recall a who was it? It was a tech lead I was talking to in an organization and with their product manager, actually, and the challenge that they were facing was we know we need to serve this audience with what we are producing and we know that there are three or four or five audiences beyond that who also need to be satisfied and we can deliver something we think is gonna work. But we think it's gonna work for the sixth tier.

But then we don't know about the sixth tier until probably like two, three years Probably, until after it would when everything's run through and you see if that Hypotheses we had about a very large thing being really vague. So I want to mention who is about a really large thing, whether that actually pays off. So what do we do? I always said to you have an opportunity to say who is the ultimate person you're going to serve. But you also have to appreciate that in your context right now. Hey, what's the boundary you can draw which means that you can sleep well at night but also declare some success when you get it? And it's how do you know where to draw those boundaries?

Yeah, because once you start looking at the entire system, it gets over real me really quickly. I have a talk that I do on systems thinking 101 for learning and development people and and I showed this big, huge Systems map and I'm like, okay, if we're just focusing on this one little teeny tiny behavior it's a little teeny tiny dot in this big map how do you ever feel like you're getting at it? And that's why the quote that you're referencing, which is from John Cutler, who talks about how, like, we're always balancing this right, if you're trying to Accommodate the system, it's too complex and it's too overwhelming. But if you really focus tightly on a behavior, sometimes you're ignoring really important outside consideration. So if your goal is to improve plastic waste in the ocean, right, you could focus very tightly on the behavior of people sorting their plastics right at the you know point of household recycling. But of course the problem is way bigger than that. Right, the problem is what kind of plastics are manufacturers making? What, once people sort these things? Where does this stuff go and what's actually happening to it? And is there a market for post-consumer Plastics or is there? Are there good places for this to get done? Is it economically viable all of these kinds of things, and at a certain point you need to. Obviously, people who are operating at a policy level have to consider all these things and really have to look at different things that they're dealing with. But at a certain point you can't design an intervention in One year with a budget of X that's going to fix the system. So you have to pick an entry point and kind of work. From there you might be able to say, look, in order for us to feel like we're actually accomplishing something, we need to have a few and a few places where we're impacting how this works within the community. So it might be the education for the consumer who's sorting the recycling, but it might also be we got to look at which vendors we're using for the plastics recycling once it leaves the household and gets Collected, or something along those lines.

There's an example in I think it was a nudge that people really love, which is this idea of like defaults. People are more likely to accept a default Selection and they talked about organ donation. It was looking at the rate of organ donation, people signing up to be organ donors in different countries and the places where the box was checked and you could uncheck it if you wanted to, but the box was pre-checked Would have organ donation enrollment rates of like 80 plus percent, and the countries where you had to click the box it was empty and you had to click it to say you wanted to be an organ donor. They organ donation rates were only about 20 to 30 percent, and people love this example because it's magical. Hey, just use defaults and it's gonna fix everything.

The truth is, organ donation is a complex system itself, and if you really want to improve the situation for organ donation, it's more than just is this default box selected. If your particular problem is, we've got a finely honed organ donation system set up, we just can't seem to get enough people to sign up for it. Maybe that default thing is gonna help with that problem. But even there we're really have to ask the question of ultimately, the people that really make decisions About posthumous organ donation are the family, and so if your solution isn't is an encompassing some kind of intervention for the family, then it doesn't matter what box they checked.

I love the fact you've got a system thinking for.

System thinking 101 kind of thing yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to talk to you about doing that, doing something like that with you, because it's it's one of my hobbies that's sad to admit, and I think I'm an avicet it too. I've been using it for I Know Eight or nine years now, I think, and it plays a large part in kind of a lot of what I do, like systems mapping, and I think there's a huge amount of benefit into just Talking through potential cause and effect and looking at behaviors and looking at motivations and trying to map out a broader system, particularly in the organizations I work with, where it's Ordinarily it's product development.

In large organizations that haven't really Excelled at product development because they've been very much kind of agile e-tech firms, they're trying to move towards a much more of a product mindset and I systems, systems mapping, systems, modeling Whatever we, whatever I choose to cause it in any given day. It's such a lovely way for people to come up with hypothetical cause and effect models and then to run experiments against to say we want that behavior to change. Did this with one organization where we mapped out developer behaviors To the motivations and looked at the level of training and face-to-face training versus non face-to-face training and the level of pressure coming from product on them. It actually came out with something which they were able to. Then they did this before they flew out to India and if you and Someone that was involved in a story might be listening to this, so high coffee if you're hard, if you're listening, you know they use that some of the ideas that are generated from that to go to help the developers get better and I think that's a lovely way of modeling all through for behavior change or figuring out who you train and how you train and how you get people working Better together.

I will be launching some workshops.

Oh great on it to just help people understand a very basics of it, and but how you use that to generate experiments which you can then go in the experiments to learn, to learn more about the system rather than to try and achieve the specific goals.

One of the things I occasionally comment on is the fact that there's two characteristics that I always see you with difficult behavior change Problems. One is competing priorities, and I think that's just the world we live in. Everybody's got 37 different things. They should do with any every minute of every day, and in order to get on the list, you can't come in at 36. You got to come in in like the top five or it's still never going to happen, because we most of us don't ever get down to the bottom of the list. We just keep turning through top items or things that are easy. One of those two, but the other one I think that is more relevant and is very much.

I think a systems issue is delayed or absent. Feedback is Is present in pretty much every behavior change problem. I've ever seen delayed feedbacks, part of it too. Right, if I don't put on sunscreen today, that could cause me problems in like 10 or 15 years, but I'm not gonna get sunburned, probably because I'm sitting in the shade and things like that. I should probably still have sunscreen on.

I think you want to go put some on Julia's fun. I think we can. We can put the podcast wait, yeah, thanks.

But it is one of these things where, like, the behavior today is not gonna have any immediate consequence and intellectually I know that there is going to be a consequence down the road. I'm visiting my, I'm visiting my folks right now and my dad just had some surgery to remove a spot on his face last week and I know, genetically the precedent is there. Is that enough to change my behavior? That intellectual knowledge some days, yes, some days.

Yeah, I gotta Gonna try and be brief Not one of my fortes, I think. I don't know if I feel like a I'm trying to channel.

Peter.

Senghi or something, but I think it was in the fifth discipline where he spoke about learning the piano and they say they like delayed feedback or absolute feedback, because imagine sitting in front of a piano and you're there and you're reading the music and you're pushing the keys, but it's gonna take two weeks you to hear it.

Yeah, it's Very difficult to learn and the feedbacks laid like that. But then it's also this we are really terrible at thinking further ahead and that's why I think systems mapping can be really useful, because it's never gonna be. It's not looking for accuracy here, but at least we put a bit more rigor of thought into the potential unintended consequences into the future. And I think this is where there's two examples. One is around organizations where they Of all, very much output driven the product teams really want to be outcome driven, but they are part of actually they said they've got a, they said bosses, boss, but also that's part of a much larger organization and they simply cannot influence up. They just want to know what stuff, how many things, you're putting out, when are they gonna be out, and actually To tell them the. For the product people I've been involved in these conversations, I've been around it. It's a hard challenge. But for those product people to say, look, if we actually look at user behavior and we create hypotheses and we actually can we increase, change user behavior in this way by this much, we think it will come to another point but yeah, whatever, how many things and what date? Yeah, actually to see that payoff is going to be really Slow, because in these types of organizations where you're an old kind of tech firm You're going to one was a more modern product organization often the speed at which you can get your products into the customer sounds Isn't actually that quick and they matter stuff it's already been promised is already quite long. So actually, the absence of feedback on this lovely idea of delaying that it was gonna be very hard to convince people of that.

And then the slightly more personal one is just around mental health. Yeah, it's something that I manage, have managed, sometimes really badly, often really badly, sometimes not too badly. But for the last 20, god, yeah, 20 plus 20 plus 20 years now. And I always say to myself, if I'm not doing the work like I'm done and if I'm not spending every day doing a bit of work to stave off the real lows, then it will get me. But I still don't do the work some days and I can still hear myself saying do the work. And I still don't do the work because right now today isn't a problem, I'm too busy, because it's something really important I feel I have to do, but then give it a week or two and I'll absolutely pay the price for not doing the work, yeah yeah.

Yeah, very different examples where human and what you probably have almost certainly gotten better at over the years is recognizing when it's starting to downhill slide a little bit. And so hopefully, even if you sometimes can't prevent yourself from from engaging in a little bit of a downhill slide, you arrest it a lot sooner than you used to. You recognize okay, this is going badly, I need to do something Otherwise. I know, I know the painful position that I've been in the past when I don't do that and when we look at it organizationally. So you have you at least shortened your feedback loop on that one a little bit, like you don't let it go quite as far, maybe, or something like that. Yeah, so we all organizationally, I think, absolutely pay your same gaze, 100% relevant in this. And I didn't remember the. It's been a while since I've read the fifth one, so I didn't remember the piano example, but now I'm going to go look it up because that's beautiful.

That's perfect. I think it's from there. If it's not, I will find out where I got it from. I'm pretty certain.

Yeah, yeah yeah, he does definitely talk about the key uses, those models of typical system Things, and one of them is absolutely that delay loop and stuff like that where it comes in, and I think that is 100% the most common scenario that I've seen in in some of these kinds of things. And some of this stuff is about know that forcing yourself to do a thing or forcing other people to do a thing is usually not a great strategy. And I'm working with Michelle Segar. She's out of the University of Michigan, she does exercise, motivation and even though, again, like doing the work for mental health stuff, doing their physical health stuff is good, but as long as you're forcing yourself to do something, you don't like motivation, the history of the motivation for that is not great, and so a big part of what she does when she works with people is reframing it. This isn't something I have to do, this is something I get to do. It's not a chore, it's a gift I get to give myself and figuring out exercise you actually like to do and some of those kinds of things as opposed to you're going to, you're going to unless there's something else that's very strongly motivating you. You're going to be very bad at forcing yourself to do things that you hate and so trying to figure out how to reframe it.

We were talking a little bit about, like marketing stuff. I'm trying to reframe my relationship with marketing from something that I currently hate doing to something that you know. I'm trying to figure out how do I make it a gift that I either give to myself or to the people in my audience, or something in terms of things that are genuinely helpful to them, that I'm sharing, as opposed to I'm trying to promote myself Like I'm trying to promote myself. Framing is one I really struggle with. I'm very bad at it, but I like to share things. I like to help other people. How can I reframe this in a way that I don't feel like it's just ingenuous, but that it's a sincere way to do it? So I haven't quite mastered this one yet, but I'm trying to reframe my relationship with marketing my own materials and services so that it's not something that I'm dreading doing the same time.

The whole issue of some days. You just don't feel up to it. That's okay. What we've seen a lot in behavioral stuff is where it turns into a spiral. Right, I haven't smoked for X number of days. I smoked today. Now it doesn't matter, I'm just going to throw my hands up and smoke again.

And there were. I was working with somebody who's a smoking cessation expert and she had a whole thing where she's a few laps wait at least a couple of weeks before you try to do it again. Just few laps, more than once. I don't think it was just a single lapse. There is actually nothing about a single lapse that says you're on a downhill slide. But that is our perception, right? I was trying to really hard to do the thing and now I failed, and so now I'm just going to throw my hands and give up. So reframing that is, oh, didn't work today, let's try again tomorrow. That is going to be a better attitude for prolonging the behavior as opposed to now. There's no point. And so the streak thing and holding tight to a streak it can help with motivation, but at the same time it has some issues with it If it all goes wrong. We're getting into some weeds on that one.

Yeah, I know I mean, if I bring it back, I suppose a little bit is that. It's interesting to mention the smoking cessation because that is in the UK when they had a big push that many years ago they used the trans theoretical model for that.

Oh yeah.

So they either procrastinate, declare a trans theoretical model of change. What I really liked about that was and I think this is so true for anybody that is trying to change themselves or is working with people and trying to get them on their journey, whether it is what I mentioned earlier on about outcomes over outputs or, I know, trying not to take estimates as commitments or not doing estimates at all or different ways, doing roadmapping and so they have a granular project plan, or anything like this is that we all too often mistake changing for change.

Yeah.

And that actually you begin to change. If then you are changing and it's that maintenance period then of trying to really embed those, either for you to embed those new papers or for you to support other people in those papers, that's where not the hard work is, because that's when you enter into your laps and when you go back and then you have to when you start again. That being able to contemplate that the reason you were started, that change in the first place is still valid, I think, diminishes for some people after you've had a few failures. Actually, the motivation wanes when you just think, oh, do you know what? Maybe I'm really don't think this is so much of a problem. Maybe I think the solution which has been presented isn't really solving anything.

Yeah, so to. By the way, smoking cessation is absolutely not my area and it has an extra level of complication in the physical addictive piece of it and so 100% don't speak to.

It's a complex area, but the protest can decrement. It looks at the idea that there's you have a mode of pre contemplation. It's changing, isn't really on your radar. So if we apply it to smoking, you're not really thinking about quitting contemplation. I'm starting to think about it, preparing, as I'm actually taking some steps to get ready to do it, and then there's an action phase where I'm actually doing the thing, I'm trying to quit smoking, and then maintenance is where you can lower your vigilance a little and just maintain, and so protest can decrement. I think is a good model.

I actually use a slightly different one, a little bit more in the book, which is it comes from some risk risk assessment ladders and they did it for smoking cessation. There's a research word on that and I think also texting while driving or something like that. But it, but I did the generalized version, which sort of says hey, where are people along the path? So if number one might be, they don't know about the behavior at all. So if the behavior is not using, in this case it's a negative behavior, but ever but not using estimates, or am I saying that right? You were just talking about it, okay, not. You say estimates, right, so they don't know about it at all or what the benefits are, why it's important or even really what it looks like. So there is an education function there. That's clearly something where we've got an education gap and I can educate you about this. But then we look at it. Maybe they understand the behavior, but they aren't convinced. They're like I don't think that's going to work with my team or whatever.

So then we start to move into more of a persuasion piece, and so we might do things like here let me show you some examples of how this is worked, or let me see if there's a trusted social source who can talk to you about their experience, or let me show you the benefits. If you don't understand, let me show you, let me formulate it some way. That and looks into persuasion, and so it might be that they aren't convinced, or it might be that they're convinced, but it doesn't seem like a priority to them, because 37 things, right, that you have to do all the time, and we're still doing persuasion, but we're not persuading you that it's good. We're persuading you that you should bump it up the list, right, then it might move into okay, I'm ready, but now I'm not feeling, like the idea of doing this feels going without a net and that's too scary. And so then it becomes how do I support you? Or how do I create an environment where you can do this in a little way so it's less scary? Or how do I give you some social support or somebody to coach or guide you on this, or something like that? How do I help you with that anxiety piece, as opposed to how do I persuade you? What kind of support is going to make you feel comfortable jumping into this?

And then it might move into okay, we've been doing it a little bit. I could expand it, but again I'm just feeling overwhelmed and busy and this feels like too much. So it might be about some kind of practical support at that point, like how do we carve out some time for you to do this thing? Or it might be about like okay, I'm doing this, but I don't feel like I'm doing it quite right and I'm not nailing it like we're trying, and so then it might be about coaching, or it might be about some tips or hints that can help you, or some resources that can be just in time when you bump into a situation and things like that, and then once we move into, okay, I need, I did this, it worked, I'm in, but I'm still swimming upstream here in the organization.

So then it might be about social support, or it might be about some kind of accountability thing, or it might be about goal setting to make sure that you're continuing to invest in the behavior. And so the point of it is at every step we move down here, what's helpful at that point probably changes a little bit right. Here it's just information, here's maybe it's more persuasion. Here it might be coaching or practical assistance or something to ways to scaffold it so that you're not having to make the big jump right away. Here it might be something around habit formation or feedback or kind of accountability or support or something like that. And so one of the big difficulties we have is when we're coming in with more information when really what they needed was a little bit of social support.

Missing each other there.

Yeah, yeah, and there's a lot of that going on, right, and the truth is no people move through this at different rate. Not everybody hits every single step, and so is it about having a whole kind of flush of resources that can meet people where they are at the right time, or is it about something where we're constantly doing a check in and finding, okay, how are you doing great, what do you need? Here's a set of things that we can apply to this right, but it's not about telling people that are more emphatically that it's good If they're already convinced that it's good, and the problem is it just seems scary, right? Those kinds of things don't always fit together.

And I suppose as somebody that is helping people on this journey, building trust and being able to put a relationship with people to help them on the journey but I suppose it's also then understanding your own weaknesses.

If you're brilliant in parting knowledge but a terrible coach, Then I say this is where actually there is an interplay between different actors and this is where I suppose you end up acting more as a group to shift people on this kind of learning and behavior change aspect, rather than just as a solo person in this. And have you seen that group effect before?

Yeah, absolutely. The community piece is often huge around these things, and so communities are the right metaphor, for community is much more of a garden than it is a machine. You don't just plug it in and turn it on. You have to grow it and develop it, and there's definitely practices around how to do that. But that social support can make a huge difference.

For example, one of the behaviors I'm trying to be better at in all of the work that I do is is my accessibility for digital materials. So do all my images have alt text? If for anything I'm publishing online, do I'm paying attention to that? We've paid a lot of attention to the alt text for all the images in the book to try to make sure that they were good and useful to somebody who's using assistive technology to read it. But I will absolutely say that my social circle makes a big difference in terms of how much effort I'm willing to put into it, because I believe in it absolutely. But honestly, I also know that if I don't do a good job on this and somebody sees it, I'm probably going to hear about it from somebody.

There's a colleague of mine and I showed her the cover of the book and she said, oh, that green that has bad color. Green is a tough one to color contrast. And so that's spending down a whole spiral for a day and a half trying to figure out if the color of the font against the background on the color had enough contrast. And the problem is I'm actually good at this there's very clear guidelines for digital, but once you move into print it's different and it's hard to figure out. And so I ultimately had to rely on the artist for the book cover, who had their own guidelines that they were working from, and they said, no, it's fine. And I was like, ok, I hope that's true, but you know, like at a certain point you can't, you can't. You got to really wish them control to.

I know idea, rather you than me. I think we've began for an hour more or less, and I think maybe we should bring the conversation to a close, as much as it pains me to save. I don't know when we spoke last time. I think it almost hit two hours.

Oh yeah.

But I was going to say that perhaps we can get together again and maybe do a live stream or something similar.

That'd be fun yeah yeah, a bit different.

I'd love to do something around systems thinking with you. And audience participation because I'm really passionate and the one thing I pretty said we can both do is really nerd out on the topic.

So yeah, sure, yeah, absolutely, and now I'm always happy to do that. And then live streams are fun because you can usually get like good audience questions and things like that.

So many audience questions we did one on. We've been trying we're doing at least one a month. Make ramp up more. Through my company. She even the questions we get a brilliant. And whenever we start a live stream like oh, here's all the topics we're going to cover, and we get made not even halfway through and someone's oh, but what about this? And you're like, oh, wow, man, you go down that rabbit home and all more questions come in and that's that's the joy of it. It's that participation of it as well. So, yeah, I will get a date in with you and we'll make it happen. Great, That'd be great.

Now, if people, first of all everyone go to where do you get the most money? Where people buy the book, Is it not Amazon? Take it.

I it's hard to tell from royalty statements Speaking of delayed or absent feedback. Royalty statements are not great, so I don't worry about that too much. If people are in the US, the best place is usually the publisher website, which is peach pitcom, because they usually have the best pricing and then they often have coupon codes and also they do free shipping and things like that. I don't think that works quite as well for international, super international. If it's Amazon or whatever, it's usually as good an answer as any. I literally cannot tell the difference between what I get paid from different outlets, so it's irrelevant to me. But if they go to usable learning dot com slash elephants, they'll get links to post to the major. It's got a US bias because that's still most of my audience. But you can, you know, you can translate it for your own availability. This should be available most places. So awesome.

I got mine from in the UK. I want one on Amazon and I. We were going to record this before and I thought the shipping went wrong. It's because I didn't actually complete checkout, because I'm an idiot.

So yeah, yeah happened the other day.

Yeah, I get so distracted by things. Normally important stuff, but it is a fantastic book and design for how people learn.

Still back there, still back there, always up there, yeah.

Two fantastic books that, if you are in, if you are coach, if you're a trainer, if you're a leader, if you're interested in helping people change and really making sure people will call what you say, then I urge you to check up both books. As I said, the gaps in the first book I use whenever I can do because I find it is the cleanest way for me to articulate what I can bring to an organizational party, given the boundaries that I'm being given by them. Yeah, I think it's a wonderful resources. So thank you very much for writing, for writing those books, and thank you so much for taking this time with me today.

Yeah, absolutely, and if people are interested, I'm doing a virtual workshop on kind of the whole model for designing for behavior change and then yeah, otherwise people can find me at my website and consulting workshops presentations all the things.

Give Julie work. I like people coming to podcasts because if you've got good stuff, let's make sure people know about the good stuff. Yeah, exactly, we'll make sure that your work drop is on the show notes and we'll get that in some of our promotional stuff and our marketing side of things. We'll get a date in for a live stream, julie, and we will talk about systems thinking and systems mapping and stuff like that. So be sure everyone to check out Sheave on LinkedIn to follow us LinkedIn. That'll be in the show notes as well, and let's try to close Everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. Yeah, I hope everyone enjoyed it.

Have you enjoyed it, Julie?

I very much enjoyed it. I always enjoyed talking to you sir.

Yeah, such fun, until you need to write another book now so I can get you back, ok. Done OK thank you everyone. Thank you guys, julie yeah.