Precipitating Events and Rewards in Making a Habit of Learning
June 2018
Establishing better habits around learning is critical to improving philanthropic practice. What needs to happen before and after habit change to make a new way of working stick?
I recently read a fascinating article called “5-A-Day: Learning by Force of Habit” by Julia Coffman at the Center for Evaluation Innovation. Full disclosure: Julia asked me to read it, and I work for Julia, and so I did. It’s fascinating nonetheless.
Our focus of late is in large part about the habits and factors that impede and enhance learning across the philanthropic sector. In her article, Julia asserts that we can improve learning by building a set of five core habits into the way we work:
- Making our thinking visible
- Asking powerful questions
- Combating our biases
- Attending to causal inference
- Answering the “now what” question
Julia offers steps for strengthening those habits, drawing largely on content from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. If you haven’t read her article yet, take an estimated 13 minutes to read it here.
Her article brought up a couple of questions for me about what comes before and after habit transformation that I think require further consideration if we truly are going to be successful in building better learning habits, particularly in philanthropy.
Before: Does habit formation require a precipitating factor or event?
An initial step in building better habits is to identify what Duhigg calls a keystone habit. Changing a keystone habit triggers a process that, over time, can change different things about the way we act. They help people to experience small wins that make it easier to change in other ways.
In her article, Julia offers examples of how keystone habits work. For each, I found myself thinking about the precipitating factor or event that preceded habit transformation:
- Julia’s move from a paper to an electronic calendar. Julia talked about how her keystone habit of moving from a paper to an electronic calendar led to other changes in how she communicates. Those new ways of working now help our team to learn. Two significant precipitating factors contributed to her habit change — our Associate Director moved from Washington, D.C., to Colorado, and I was hired two months later (increasing our staff from two people to three). We badly needed a better way to easily access information about each other’s schedules and workloads.
- Weight loss trial participants recording what they ate. A National Institutes of Health study found that asking overweight people to write down everything they ate at least one day a week was highly effective in helping them to lose weight because their food journaling enabled them to recognize patterns in their eating. While we don’t know the exact precipitating factors for participants, we have to assume there was something that got people to the weight loss trial in the first place — for example, consistent failure at dieting; a health scare; an upcoming significant life event.
- Turning new parents into loyal shoppers. Duhigg offers an example of how the store Target uses data science to identify shoppers who are pregnant (e.g., buying particular vitamin supplements) and then targets them with coupons at a crucial time in their lives when they are buying lots of supplies (also described in this New York Times article). Target is highly successful at turning parents-to-be into loyal shoppers for all of their needs, not just the baby’s (which will be convenient once the baby comes and the parents are tired and time-strapped). The keystone habit is getting new parents to use Target as their primary shopping destination. The precipitating factor is pregnancy, a time when major change creates opportunity for shifting people’s habits — even those so ingrained as shopping and brand preferences.
Each of these keystone habits was instituted during periods of transition that resulted from a precipitating factor, when either (a) the old way of doing things wasn’t working anymore (calendar; dieting) or (b) a new way of doing things brought immediate, larger rewards (savings at Target and the efficiency of shopping at just one store).
So it seems something needs to happen first, before a habit changes. The pattern seems to be important events or factors that trigger periods of transition or instability that then trigger habit formation or transformation.
I started thinking about foundations and precipitating factors that might help staff to adopt better learning habits. We’ve been making the case that we are more effective when we are better learners; it helps us to get better, faster results. While there is a strong case to be made that this is true, as Julia noted, most people don’t act in their best interests (does anyone?). “Because it’s better” doesn’t seem like a strong enough sell. Following field-wide “best practices” also doesn’t seem like a strong enough sell.
So my questions are:
- How can we trigger a precipitating event or capitalize on existing ones? If we want to think about where to start, perhaps instead of thinking about what staff need to do better learning, we should think about our opportunities for changing the way we learn. For example, if a convening is coming up that previously has not been very successful (precipitating event) and staff realize they need new tools for planning and executing it (instability), that might be a good place to start.
- Are there specific times in the life of a foundation when it would be easier to shift habits, when more people would recognize the need to change? This is especially important for people who think their systems are good enough and might not buy into incremental rewards accruing because of better learning. Leadership transitions could be excellent precipitating events, with many changes in staff and systems. But short of that, what counts?
After: How good do rewards need to be for a new habit to stick?
According to Charles Duhigg, habits have three parts: cues that act as a trigger; the habit or routine that follows; and a reward that ensures the pattern repeats.
Reading about the habit loop, I started thinking about the importance of the relative weight of the new reward. It needs to outweigh the old reward by a perceptible amount for the new habit to stick. Otherwise your two outcomes would be two points on the same indifference curve, even if one habit ultimately will lead to a better outcome.
With Julia’s calendaring example, she recognized the need for a new habit. For a while, though, she held on to her old habit and used two systems — her electronic calendar and her tried-and-true paper version. At some point, she committed to the new system. What made her realize it was worth it? What was the larger, demonstrable reward she experienced that helped her adjust a habit she had practiced for 20 years? Was the online system that much more useful, or was it too much work to keep two systems going simultaneously?
As we think about building better habits, we need to consider how much (bigger) a reward people need to experience for the new habit to take hold, as well as how immediate the reward needs to be. This is especially true for rewards related to learning in philanthropy, which are often both intangible and on a time delay. In our minds, it can be hard to connect the reward back to the learning practice when the reward comes some months down the line. We need to find ways to bolster rewards to make it easier for people to recognize the connection and value of rewards to learning practice.
Kat Athanasiades is Senior Associate at the Center for Evaluation Innovation. Twitter: @KatAthanasiades
