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Feb 17
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743: How to Achieve and Flourish in the New World of Work with Keith Ferrazzi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Keith Ferrazzi reveals fresh best practices for working and leading in the post-COVID world of work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four critical shifts teams need to make
  2. Two tiny tweaks that vastly improve team morale
  3. Time-saving alternatives to time-wasting meetings

About Keith

Keith Ferrazzi is a bestselling author, speaker, investor, philanthropist, and executive team coach who helps teams transform enterprises. As Founder and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, its applied research institute, he coaches executive teams in top organizations to achieve extraordinary outcomes. He formerly served as CMO of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels. He is the author of the new book, COMPETING IN THE NEW WORLD OF WORK: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest.

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Keith Ferrazzi Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, this is an extraordinary time because your name reminds me of my father, and time together always reminds me of best practices and clear action. You’re one of those individuals that I really enjoy these conversations with.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you, Keith. I enjoy chatting with you, and it’s fun to be speaking to you live after I’ve read your books before I had a podcast. And you got some more coming and a big research project. What’s the scoop here?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, so the peak of the pandemic, I saw this not only as a horrible disruption of the world, but I saw it as an inflection point; an opportunity. And what I want anybody listening to think about is “Have you really captured this pandemic and this disruption as an opportunity for your career and for your team and for your organization?”

We benchmarked 2,000 executives and entrepreneurs, and asked the question, “How do we leverage this pandemic to leap forward to work, not go back to work? How do we change the ways we’re leading? How do we change our business models? How do we really think about workforce redesign during this incredible disruption time?” And we’ve been chosen as the number one pick of Harvard coming out of the pandemic in terms of books, and this has been a massive research project that I’m excited to share with your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, we’re excited to hear it. So, you interviewed all these folks, and you asked them specifically, “Which work innovations from the pandemic had the highest return and ought to be kept, held on to?” So, can you share what are the top one, two, three themes that folks are relatively unanimous about?

Keith Ferrazzi
I’ll give you three themes, which you’ve asked for. The first one that I’ll give you is how much collaboration transformed during the pandemic, and I’ll give you a number of very distinct practices. Because we were in crisis, org charts and positional authority, they went out the window. Anybody who could lead change was given the opportunity to lead change. If you had an idea, if you had a way of working around a crisis situation, you could step into the void and you could fix it.

Now, that was extraordinary. We saw people emerge without titled leadership into significant leaders. And I want to make sure that we keep that going. I’ve never been a particular advocate for managing org charts or thinking about your team as who reports to you. When I was a kid at Deloitte, I had a vision that Deloitte could be a great marketing organization, and I started leading toward that end, and I became the chief marketing officer at Deloitte before I was 30. Before they even made me partner, I was the chief marketing officer of the company.

So, the opportunity for all of us to step into the void and see a vision for improvement or opportunity, that was afforded to us. Now, the second piece that we saw was, because of hybrid work, we could think of our teams as an unbounded way. We didn’t have to think about geolocation. We didn’t have to think about anything. We could think of “Who do we want to collaborate with to really achieve this vision?” And that’s one of the big tips I want to leave everybody here with.

Your team is whoever you need to get your job done. Now, if you imagine that, who do you need to get your job done is your team. Then the next question is, “How do I let them know that they’re on my team if they don’t report to me? And how do I invite them in to really co-create extraordinary new advances?” And the answer is just that. You reach out to individuals that you want to collaborate with, and you say, “Here’s a vision I have for how things could be better.”

And then with that, you say to them, “But I could never get there myself,” humbly speaking, “Maybe we could work together and achieve that together. We could co-create a solution. We could take that hill together.” The next thing you know, you’re now a leader of another individual who, working together, is going to achieve something that you couldn’t have achieved on your own.

We saw that happening all over the pandemic. And in the chapter that we have in the book around collaboration, we saw that hybrid work put all of that on steroids. We could really be unbounded in our collaboration and there’s a ton of things in there also on best practices on how to start rebooting the way we think about work in a hybrid work environment, which most of us aren’t thinking of today.

So, for instance, we think of the way to collaborate is through meetings. Well, the best organizations were collaborating asynchronously. They were collaborating in Google Docs and other things so that we didn’t have all of these droning meetings one after another. So, we started using the tools in a more effective way to reboot the way we were collaborating, and that was very powerful as well.

So, all of that, I would say comes under the theme that you were asking for, one of the themes, which is, “How do we really fundamentally re-imagine the way we collaborate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And I’d love it if you could share a fun favorite story or two that shows that in action.

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, sure. It’s a big company one, it’s the first one that I think of. So, Unilever has always done business planning in very traditional ways. They cascaded business planning down from the CFO and the CEO, figure out the budgets, then they work with the executive teams, then they give everybody their budgets and they’d trickle it down.

Well, what happened was one individual, an HR person in North America, so here’s an HR person in North America had an idea, which is “Why aren’t we crowdsourcing innovations and growth opportunities for next year 2021 that I guarantee we wouldn’t have seen at the executive team, at the central headquarters in London?”

So, Mike Clementi came up with the idea that we should be crowdsourcing among the top 300 leaders in the world, not the executive team only where the growth opportunities were. And he ushered that process into being, and they literally ground-up the business-planning process instead of top-down. Another example is a learning executive inside of Federal Express was asked to host these townhalls on behalf of their chief operating officer and chairman.

Well, typically, these townhalls were one-way broadcast conversations, but this person said, humbly speaking, “Why are we, when we’ve got the technology, we’ve got breakout rooms, why aren’t we asking people questions of what risks they’re seeing in the Federal Express platform, what opportunities they’re seeing to serve customers differently?”

So, instead of a one-way townhall, they started inventing two-way dialogues, once again, breakout rooms, opening Google Docs, having people give their ideas, and they created a very two-way collaborative engagement with thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So, those are two very small examples of massive companies that fundamentally rebooted real important processes in their business because a single individual saw hybrid and collaboration and crowdsourcing and innovation as something that didn’t have to be limited to a small group of people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Another theme in your book I want to dig into is you say that there are six decision dials that can impact the way we work. What are we achieving with this framework? And what are the dials?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah. So the book was divided into two sections. The first half of the book focuses on how all of us need to change the way we work and lead, and there are four components to that. One of them is agility, the other one is foresight and, really, how do we look around corners and run an agile operation. And then the one we just talked about, collaboration. And then the next one, which is really a hot issue today, which is the subject of resilience and mental wellbeing.

And then what we did is we said, “Once you begin to lead in these four fundamentally different ways, where do you apply this philosophy to?” You apply it to reinventing your business model, reinventing the way your workforce works, and to, whether or not, we, as organizations, are led by the north star purpose, which became a very important aspect of a lot of businesses.

So, what you’re referring to in terms of these dials is inside of a chapter called “Workforce Redesign.” One of the things that really happened was we started to realize that the old ways we thought about work needed to be rebooted. So, of course, we’re all now thinking about “Are we physically proximate or are we remote?” So, that’s a dial going one way or the other.

Now, when we really dug into it, we realized it was a spectrum. It wasn’t just an and or or. The hybrid spectrum of how we work together actually includes a dimension that isn’t even on that dial which is called asynchronous. How do we work asynchronously? How do we work in a way that doesn’t even require meetings? How do we work in a way that collaborates in the cloud where I don’t give a damn if you’re physical or if you’re remote? It doesn’t really matter.

The other thing is whether or not you’re domestic or global. Now, on my personal organization, and this, Pete, could be something you’d be interested in, I designed an entire marketing function at Ferrazzi Greenlight. Now, we coach executive teams. I designed an entire marketing function out of the Philippines. I used to have marketing executives in my company that were about 85,000 in their base salary and their job was what I called high-touch marketing, curating relationships with executives that could ultimately buy our services. High-touch marketing, very high touch.

But there was a lot that I wanted to do around search engine optimization, there’s a lot that I wanted to do around content marketing, email marketing, etc. that I never really put as a primary because I didn’t see the return on investment for it from the kind of money that I’d dispend in the United States on marketing executives.

I ended up hiring folks out of the Philippines, an entire marketing team at, on average, $25,000 a head, who are every bit as good as the professionals I was hiring at $85,000. They work on my time zone, they’re incredibly English literate, and driven, and ambitious, and thoughtful. And so, I really, this outsourcing conversation, many organizations are now totally rethinking the boundaries of where they’re hiring. And I’m sure you’ve read a lot about that in the marketplace, but we can live anywhere and work anywhere.

And so, why doesn’t an individual like yourself, Pete, even, anybody who’s a solopreneur, whatever, you can be thinking about building a team that you were never able to think about before, both from a global perspective, gig workers. Now, we’re dealing with a choice. Do we even want to hire a full-time employee or do we want to hire an individual who’s an expert on an hourly basis that can really change the game in our strategy?

So, all of those are workforce dials that we look at in the chapter of re-engineering the workforce. I guess the one tip I would say is if you can start thinking about hiring globally, you can get incredible value for some of the employees that you hire. Anybody listening should consider that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah. I have had great results myself by pursuing that approach. Okay. And we got some extra dials here, huh?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, look, what I really want to make sure we have time for is to get to some that which really starts in the book. There were many organizations that were fundamentally caught on their heels during the pandemic. On March 13th, I sat on a March 11th in a room with an executive team that had major presence in China, and this topic of the pandemic was only a mention at one point during the discussion, and that was just a few days before the shutdown.

Yet, the question that we looked for is, “What organizations foresaw the pandemic and were able to react to that risk whereas others did not?” We found an organization called Lockheed Space. Now, Lockheed, interestingly enough, didn’t even have operations in China, yet they had a simple process I highly recommend for all of your listeners whether, again, you’re a team leader, a company leader, or a solopreneur. They brought together, on a monthly basis, a group of individuals that would look at the marketplace from different vantage points.

“So, Pete, you’re going to handle the customer vantage point. What’s changing from the perspective of the customer? Dave, you’re going to look at competition. Jane, you’ve got technology innovations. Sue, you’ve got the focus on macroeconomic policies and finance.” And then, once a month, as a part of a natural meeting, they would spend five minutes, and everybody on the call reported if they had a major risk that they saw from their vantage point, or if they saw a major opportunity that should be pursued from their vantage point.

Now, sometimes, they would go beyond that five-minute meeting and nobody would have anything to say. Fine. Or, somebody would say, “Hey, I just read this blog about some virus in China. Maybe it’s worth us taking a look at in terms of a disruptive force.” At that point, they wouldn’t even gut-dive into it to disrupt the meeting. They would say, “Let’s have an assessment meeting to determine whether or not we move into some form of planning or watch and observe.”

Well, Lockheed Space saw this in December of 2019, they had their assessment meeting in January, and went into planning and went fully virtual in February. Fully virtual in February. And how many of us, if we had had that insight and wisdom, we would’ve shorted so many stocks, we would have invested in other stocks. As individuals, we’ve got to leave some space and time in our lives as individuals, as leaders, to assess risk and opportunity that are from different vantage points that we may not be seeing every day.

That was one of the biggest takeaways that I saw which is us realizing and, interestingly enough, it moves interestingly into the agile question. We practiced crisis agility during the pandemic. Now, I was working with Delta Airlines, coaching that executive team moving into the pandemic, and we were going to reinvent the travel industry and we’re doing a great job of it, and, all of a sudden, they lost 90% of their revenue in a day.

Now, they went into daily agile sprints. They assessed the situation from all different vantage points, “Where are the risks? Where are the opportunities?” They planned for a day. They went and did it. At the end of the day, they did a standup, and said, “Okay, what did we achieve? Where did we stumble? What are we going to do the next day?” Every single day, they went on an agile sprint willing to assess what was going on from the external marketplace.

Now, the power of that is that model of agility is well-practiced in technology companies while they’re programming and designing software. It’s well-practiced among any organization doing strong project management, but it’s not practiced in many executive teams. It’s not practiced by most of us leading our work, running our work in small agile sprints.

I believe what we saw in the pandemic was this crisis agile that is going to become the new operating system for any organization. We are living in volatility. We’ve got to lead in agile where we’re constantly assessing and re-assessing pivots and movement and readjustments, and we can’t just be planning on a quarterly basis anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful that the five minutes assignment was all it took to be like, “Oh, okay.” And then to have it on the radar and then go deep. And so, I’m curious, for folks looking to implement something along those lines, do you have any favorite ways that you think about breaking up the world of stuff to be on the lookout for?

Keith Ferrazzi
Of vantage points, yeah. In the chapter called “Foresight,” we actually have a list of the vantage points. But the reality is every company is going to be a little different. The ones I gave you make the most sense, which is by functional area, you know, sales is dealing with competition, marketing is dealing with customers, your IT folks are dealing with technology advancements, your CFO, your accountants are dealing with… etc. Those are natural.

But in any given business, you’re going to have your own nuances. And I would say one of the things you should do as you start this process is ask your team, what vantage points they think we should be looking at on a constant basis. Now, I’d mentioned this to you, Pete, that we created an entire video series around the book that helps any team move through each chapter, and anybody who buys the book gets that free video series.

So, if you go to RadicallyAdapt.com, and you purchase the book wherever you want to purchase it, just let us know that you bought the book and we’ll send you the video series. It’s all on trust. But the power of that is that in the section of “Foresight” we actually walk you through all the details of how you can set that up for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. All right. Well, so we talked a bit about agility, foresight, and collaboration. How about resilience and wellbeing?

Keith Ferrazzi
So, that was one of the more exciting ones to me personally for a number of reasons. I have felt for a very long time that teams needed to build a greater relational competency inside of their teams because you know me, the guy who wrote Never Eat Alone cares a lot about relationships. And as I came along with subsequent books, we have double-clicked on how important those relationships are to functional teams and organizations.

And what I saw happened during the pandemic was what I know brings greater relationships among people and brings greater empathy among people is the willingness to be authentic and vulnerable. This got dialed up during the pandemic significantly. I saw grizzled white shoe-type old leaders being vulnerable, crying in fact, on townhalls where they were talking about the fear that they had for their parents’ health who were in a nursing home, or a spouse that was diagnosed with COVID early on in the process before we knew what that meant.

And I saw that vulnerability and that shared sense of openness, and I was proud of that, and I knew that that was something that I think we had opened a door that we’d never be able to shut again, thank goodness. Now, the question then is, “What do we do with that vulnerability? How do we resolve it? And how do we help people have greater resilience?”

Of the teams that I saw be most successful, they were the ones that had a different social contract. They owned each other’s energy. They lifted each other up. They asked how people were doing openly, and then when people were hurting, the team rallied around that person. Now, I feel like there was an old myth associated with work of the past, which is your resilience, your mental wellbeing, that’s your responsibility. And it’s not even your responsibility; it’s your private affair, and we’ll leave you to it.

Whereas, what happened in the pandemic was there was much more transparency around all of this. And some teams did a very simple practice, they called an energy check, which I love and I advocate, which is in your meetings, just every once in a while, ask, “What is everyone’s energy level?” And I’m not just talking about in the afternoon. I mean, going into a meeting, you say, “What is your energy level these days? Put in the chatroom from zero to five what your energy level is.”

Now, anytime somebody puts a two or below, then you pause, and you say, “Pete, tell me, you put a two. Are you okay?” Now, Pete might respond, “Well, my kids had a restless night, and I was just up all late last night with my kids.” “Great. Sorry to hear that and hope they’re okay.” But they might say, “Jane, why did you put a two or why did you put a one?” “Well, my spouse has just been diagnosed with needing a kidney transplant.” Now, I heard that in teams, and the person who particularly said that had been sitting on that information without sharing it with the team for two weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, because nobody asked, like it doesn’t live anywhere. It’s nothing like, “Hey, anyone’s family need an organ transplant?” Like, that just doesn’t pop up.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s not part of the vernacular. But where it used to happen organically, and this is what we found across the board, where it used to happen was in the casual walk down the hallway, or the lunchroom conversation, or the coffee-break conversation. Now, that’s where these kinds of conversations happen, but in the remote or hybrid world, they don’t happen organically. And if you make it a purposeful process, it actually happens.

What was most interesting is that we found that…we’d been coaching teams for 20 years. We had a diagnostic tool that we used in coaching teams, and what we found was that teams that made a…one of the areas is relationships. Teams that didn’t pay attention to relationships purposefully eroded their relationship score on this test.

So, one of the tests is “I am deeply committed and connected to my team.” That’s a scale of zero to five. Well, those that didn’t have purposeful processes around it went down on the score. But, interestingly enough, those that decided to have these kinds of energy check-ins, or they hosted a meeting…one of the things we recommend is a personal/professional check-in meeting where the whole meeting’s intention is “What’s going on in your life personally and professionally?” so people just share what’s going on with them.

And those teams that had these purposeful processes, actually, their scores rose above what they were when they were in physical meetings together. So, people claim that remote work eroded things like innovation and relationships. It only eroded work if you didn’t do the things you needed to do more purposefully. If you did them, it actually improved the qualities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful in terms of it’s like, “Well, yeah, if you’re just kind of going with flow, yup, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s not going to be so rosy.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it’s lazy. It’s lazy and you’re going to suffer lazy results. Now, we spend a lot more time on this, “When is a wellbeing and resilience question?” We had major partners like Headspace and Weight Watchers all working with us to create innovations, and we found a number of things. Number one, as I sort of mentioned, just the awareness and the collectivism gained around “We own each other’s energy. We’re going to serve each other. We’re going to take care of each other,” that was the highest lift in scores and mental wellbeing.

But there was no question that we needed to make sure that people were aware that they had to take a more proactive responsibility for their own wellbeing, their own mental and physical wellbeing. There were people who just sat down in the morning and they didn’t leave all day. They didn’t get their workouts, they didn’t take a break, they didn’t take a moment for themselves. And, by the way, because they didn’t leave any time for email or anything else, that time got squeezed into their evenings and weekends. They were just one meeting after another.

So, what we learned is that there are a set of personal routines that you need to adopt, and the most important thing is, if you’re a leader, you adopt those personally. Like, block your workout time, block your walk with the kid time, make sure that small breaks that you’re taking, you actually put them on your calendar so you’re signaling to the organization that they need to have those routines for themselves as well. Very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so you mentioned a few personal routines, and we love that sort of thing here. Anything that came up again and again as being super powerful and restorative or good bang for the buck in terms of rejuvenation per minute?

Keith Ferrazzi
One that was really funny that nobody did until, all of a sudden, somebody cracked the code, one of them was end meetings five to ten minutes early.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that does feel great for everybody. No rushing.

Keith Ferrazzi
Right, it does, but guess what? Nobody ever does it because you’re in the flow of the conversation then we don’t end the meetings five or ten minutes early. So, what one group, I remember who this was, I think it might’ve been FedEx, they did something brilliant. They started meetings ten minutes late so it’s easier. Everyone is used to ending on the hour but if you start meetings ten minutes late, then that’s where the break is, and so I love that simple idea. And once companies started adopting that, that was kind of breakthrough. It’s so important that ten minutes to walk into the other room and give a hug to your significant other, or go check on the kids, or whatever it is, so powerful.

The other thing is blocking out time for you to think, do emails, and do asynchronous work. So, for instance, if you’re doing asynchronous collaboration where you’re working on a Google Doc with a group of people, block a half of an hour to do that as if it’s a meeting and protect it as if it’s a meeting. “That’s my half of an hour time to do that work,” and you tell the world that, “That’s my time, and, no, you can’t take that time just because it looks available. It’s not available. That’s my time to do my asynchronous work,” because, otherwise, as we said earlier, it’s just going to get squeezed into nights and weekends, but blocking that time is really precious and important.

So, that was another really important routine. Those are the things. What we found was that the stuff around meditation, etc., it was all very powerful but, at the end of the day, if we don’t change the way we work, none of that stuff can keep up with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. Well, Keith, tell me, any final top do’s, don’ts, implications from this stuff, particularly from the vantage point of either a frontline manager or an individual contributor?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, I feel that one of the greatest things we can all start to do is start to shift our meeting time out of meetings. We need to make meetings the enemy. And if we imagine saying, “Okay, how can I not make somebody of a meeting with me on this but, actually, free up time?” So, I tell you, like one of my employees who does work for me, actually she’s the individual that helps manage my speaking business, individual contributor.

And we used to have a weekly meeting just to get an update, “How’s the speaking business doing?” and she would go over all the things she was doing and I’d banter back and forth, etc.

And now what she does is she sends me a five-minute recording that I can listen to at my leisure with a quick update. And then if I have any response or feedback, etc., I just shoot her another recording back. It is the easiest thing in the world for me and it has freed up a half of an hour block of time that my administrative assistant is so grateful that he doesn’t have to have as a weekly meeting.

So, start asking yourself, how can you take meeting time off of the people around you off of their agenda. Let’s say you’re going to throw a meeting with your team, and you’re going to talk about X, Y, and Z, give you a piece of information. What we found was that during the pandemic, if you have 12 people in a meeting, only four people feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting. The average is only about four people of 12 feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting.

If, on the other hand, you send, we call it a decision board, out to folks, and say, “Listen, we’re not going to have a meeting on this topic. I’m going to say we’ve got a problem. The problem is we’re falling behind on inventory right now. And I think the solution is X and some of the struggles or challenges I know we’re going to have is this,” and send that out to everybody, and ask everybody at your leisure, “Add to the document.”

Now, you want to do a document that’s a SharePoint document or a Google Doc where everybody can see each other’s answers, and say, “You put your point of view in there.” So, now in a meeting, which you might’ve called a meeting with six people, all six people are going to get a chance to see each other’s point of view. Everybody will be fully heard.

Then you look at it, and then you decide if you even need a meeting. Maybe the problem has already been answered. And if you do need a meeting, you’ll be able to see that, really, we’re only two people that really had an opinion that mattered, so I’m going to have the meeting with these two people and let everybody else off the hook.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s powerful. Also, some of these people will say, “Well, listen, I think the better person who should be weighing in is so and so.” So, now, originally, you might’ve invited six people but maybe eight people get a chance to weigh in. These other people wouldn’t have even been invited. So, the biggest thing that I can say as a takeaway is start thinking about how you rethink some of the fundamentals of how you work personally. And one of the great evils of wasted time is meetings, so make sure that you work hard to eliminate as many of them as you can, move to asynchronous as best as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And for your speaking business manager, with your quick video recordings, I love Loom myself. Is there a tool you’re using and digging?

Keith Ferrazzi
We’re really simple here on this, and that’s the other thing I found out, Pete, which is it didn’t matter what technology people used. We could jerry-rig anything. It was more about, “How do you rethink the way work is?” The fact that she could literally just send me an audio message in Slack so that if I wanted to, they’re all housed there. Or, if we wanted to get lazy, she could send me a voice text right on her iPhone. But the point was it’s not about the technology. It’s about the mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Well, now, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you give us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve always been a thoughtful curious agile person. I want more information and I love changing my mind. It means I learned something.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. That’s good. Sorry, I’m just thinking of…

Keith Ferrazzi
Hobgoblins

Pete Mockaitis
Spiderman and Green Goblin and my kids.

Keith Ferrazzi
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say that my favorite research is the Gallup organizations research on employee engagement, when they really cracked the code and realized how fundamental relationships were. One friend at work was the greatest predictor of an employee’s engagement. And it’s interesting, so many organizations just dismissed that as a critical element of what they focused on, engineering for their employees’ happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say The Great Gatsby, and that has nothing to do with business. It just has to do with the plight of a man who was deeply insecure, trying to aspire into a society that he didn’t think welcomed him. And that feels a lot like my life as a young man when I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, a poor Pittsburgh kid trying to do better than my family history had been.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Keith Ferrazzi
I love this new tool called MURAL. It’s a whiteboarding tool. And I love getting on and whiteboarding things and collaborating. But I love it when it’s virtual and I love it when I can pass around between members of meetings, live asynchronously, grow. So, these days, I’ve really started to love this whiteboarding technology called MURAL.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
Ten minutes every morning. So, snooze to me isn’t go back to sleep. Alarm awakes, I push snooze and I do two things. I spend just a bit of time being grateful and I think about why I’m so grateful. And I happen to be, in my household, not to get too private, in my household, I need my space when I’m sleeping, so my significant other stays on that side of the bed. But that last ten minutes is my cuddle time, just time to be warm and intimate, and excited about the day, and so gratitude and connection to me to start the day couldn’t be used for anything better.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Keith Ferrazzi
Oh, yeah. It is that, “We can’t get there alone and, therefore, people are so important. And the currency for deeper relationships is generosity. Find the folks that matter to you and be of service.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to connect or learn more, where would you point them?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, RadicallyAdapt.com is where we’re engaging with folks and will be for a while around this particular book. RadicallyAdapt.com. You will get all the information that you need to get the video series for free, which we’re really excited to put in your hands. Obviously, if you want to get the book there, you can do that as well. RadicallyAdapt.com. Thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it might be broader than we want for this time, but I would say, going back to my core roots, every single one of us have to recognize that your opportunities in this world will come to you not only because of your competency but because of your relationships, so build a relationship action plan. After today, literally just pick the five people who are most important to your progress and success, and be of service to those individuals.

And I would say, measure the current relationship status you have with them. Zero means you don’t know them; they don’t know you. A five means you could call them up on the weekend and cry about something that you’re disturbed by, so it’s that end of the extreme. A three is what we normally call a friend at work, just an acquaintance. I want you to try to move those five people into being fours and fives, not twos and threes where they usually reside. So, build a relationship action plan.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Keith, this has been a treat once again. I wish you much luck in the new world of work.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you, Pete. And thanks so much for your generosity of this amazing audience.

Feb 10
0

742: How to Break Bad Habits and Make Good Habits Stick with Wendy Wood

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Wendy Wood reveals recent science behind habit formation and how you can use it to reshape your own behavior.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The trick to building habits
  2. Why context is so crucial for habits
  3. The one question to control your bad habit

About Wendy

Wendy Wood is a behavioral scientist who is Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the book, Good Habits, Bad Habits. For the past 30 years, she has been researching the nature of habits and why they are so difficult to change.

Resources Mentioned

Wendy Wood Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Wendy, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Wendy Wood
Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk to you about habits, one of my favorite topics here. Could you start us off by telling us about a habit that has been transformational for you personally?

Wendy Wood
So, it’s hard to isolate any one habit that we have that makes a huge difference in our lives because so much of what we do is influenced by our habits, depends on our habits, much more so than we realize. I’ve done some research on how much of our daily lives is habitual in the sense that we’re repeating things without thinking a lot about them, just sort of responding automatically. And almost 43% of what we do every day we’re doing out of habit. So, habits contribute to an awful lot more than most of us imagine.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is intriguing and I was just about to ask you for any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way with your research, it sounds you already got one. But anything else leaping to mind?

Wendy Wood
I think that for your audience, the biggest question is, “How do I change bad habits, unwanted habits?” And most of us do it by exerting willpower, making a decision, but habits don’t work that way. Habits are really part of the non-conscious processes in our brain so that habits form as we repeat behaviors, and they change as we repeat behaviors, too. So, changing habits is not at all what we think it is. It’s not what we usually try to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s sort of like a definitional point, like if we’re calling it a habit, it’s not even an effortful initiative of our proactive will that we’re going for, but rather kind of like something operating in an autopilot-y part of ourselves, definitionally speaking.

Wendy Wood
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Wendy Wood
So, we think of our brain as processing information, as a single unit that tells us when we like things, that records memories, but, in fact, our brains are made up of multiple separate systems that only sort of work together. And the habit system is something that is part of our non-conscious. So, you have habits, I have habits, our dogs have habits. We all learn through experience. It’s a very basic way of learning and it really guides a huge amount of what we do, particularly at work.

So, one of the things we found early on is that people who have jobs actually have slightly more habits than people who don’t, and that’s because our job structure our day so that we’re repeating the same things. You go to the same place, at least you used to before the pandemic, if you’re an office worker. Many of us are still not quite back in the office. We go to work at the same time each day. We wear similar types of clothes. We stop for lunch around the same time. So, work really structures our life in ways that make it very easy for us to form habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued with research on the number of habits. Tell us, how many habits do we have on average or the rough range for people?

Wendy Wood
I don’t think there’s an exact number. As I said, 43% of the time, you are acting on habit. So, almost half the time you’re doing things automatically without thinking and without necessarily making decisions. And you can see why that would be useful because you don’t have to think carefully about how you’re going to get to work today, or think about where you’re going to go for lunch. Usually, we just do what we’ve done before. That sort of work for us in some way. It might not be the best thing but it’s the easy thing and we just repeat it and do it again.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I could see how, sure, conserving mental thought energy is something that we accomplish there. Could you paint a picture for us in terms of for professionals, and maybe all of mankind, like what’s really at stake or possible here? Do you have maybe any startling statistics or inspiring stories showing us what really is possible if we master or fail to master habit-building as a skill?

Wendy Wood
Well, you’re building habits all the time. The skill to master is building habits that work for you, that are rewarding, that are consistent with your goals, and so that’s the skill that everyone needs to focus on. And you do that by repeating behaviors that are productive, that save you money, that are healthy. So, habit memories build as you do the same thing over and over again.

You don’t build habits by decisions. You build habits through repetition. Repeating a behavior in the same context so that the next time you’re in that context, that’s the behavior that springs to mind, and it takes many repetitions for habit memories to form. And that’s why they’re so challenging, is they stick around. So, it takes a long time to form a new habit, and it takes a long time for habit memories to decay.

Pete Mockaitis
You said many repetitions, and I’ve read some numbers cited that are different in a number of places. So, Wendy, could you weigh in on how many reps or how long does it take to form a habit?

Wendy Wood
Yeah, you’ll read lots of things about habits out there because people are fascinated by them. They should be. There’s something that is part of our unconscious that we don’t have access to. We don’t have awareness of how our habits work so it’s really fascinating to speculate, and there’s lots of speculation out there in the literature. But what science tells us is that it takes probably about three months of repetition, almost every day, for a habit to become really strong so that you do it without thinking, so that it becomes an automated part of your everyday life.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, you said about three months, and part of me thinks that that’s a tricky question, like, “How long does it take to form a habit?” Sort of like, “Well, how long does it take to master chess? How long does it take to fall in love?”

Wendy Wood
You’ve got it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s going to vary wildly based on some contexts and individuals and what you’re achieving. And I’m thinking about when we interviewed BJ Fogg who wrote about Tiny Habits, and his take was, “Well, hey, if it’s super easy and doesn’t require a lot of effortful motivation, you might find that you’re installing habits quite quickly.” Is that fair to say that the time it takes can really vary based upon just how big or small or hard or easy or motivated you feel about something?

Wendy Wood
Well, probably not with motivation because habit memories don’t depend on how motivated you are. Instead, they depend simply on repetition. Repetition and whether you do things in the same way each time. So, you’re absolutely right, it takes a long time to master some things. Playing a Chopin piano concerto, it took me a long, long time to learn how to do that. Playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on the piano? That I can do. So, how long something takes really depends on how difficult the behavior is, how complex it is. Your intuition is absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess when it comes to habit difficulties, I guess it’s true. Like, if it’s wipe off the counter after making coffee in the morning is a lot easier than head to the gym and do an elaborate workout routine each morning.

Wendy Wood
You got it, yup. Yeah, and that’s true in our jobs, too. There are some things we do that are relatively easy and straightforward and we can form habits for them pretty quickly, quickly being several months. But other things are just much more complicated and never ever become completely habitual.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I see.

Wendy Wood
So, let me give you an example, and this is all part of the idea, the evident research evidence that people have multiple components in their brain, multiple systems, that work somewhat separately. So, very productive writers, if you’re a productive writer and you’re pushing out those pages every day, you probably have a habit to write at a certain place, certain time of day, maybe you write for a certain number of hours, or get a certain number of words on the page. Most really productive writers have these habits that get them to writing. But the actual writing isn’t done out of habit.

Habit is too   a mechanism. That’s your creativity. So, habits and conscious thought, conscious decision-making creativity, they both, together, allow us to do very complex tasks but both are required because if you’re a great writer but you don’t have good habits, then you’re struggling to get yourself to write.

You’re struggling against yourself, “Do I want to do it today? Will I be successful? How do I do it?” You’re wasting all that energy before you even start writing. So, that’s why it’s so important to get your habits in sync with your goals, get them aligned with your goals, your conscious desires. And if you do that, then your habits will help you achieve them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. And I’m thinking, well, the quote that comes to mind, I think, has been attributed to many different writers is, “I write when I’m inspired and I make sure to be inspired at 9:00 a.m. each morning.”

Wendy Wood
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Which I kind of summarize as, “Okay, there are some creative things going on as well as a discipline, habituated thing going on seeded, hands on keys at that time and place.”

Wendy Wood
Yup, “And things are quite and nobody’s bothering me so I have a chance to actually be creative,” which is no guarantee. You’re not going to be creative every day. If you’ve written a lot, you know some days are just crap, you just don’t produce things that you want to keep. But if you have a habit to write, the next day you’ll be back there, and that day, things might work better.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, so let’s maybe apply some of these goodness that you lay out in your book, Good Habits, Bad Habits in terms of thinking about some professionals and habits they’d like to make or break, how do we start with break? Let’s say, folks are like, “I look at my phone too much. I’m always scrolling TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, email when I should be unplugged from work and rejuvenating but I just find myself, ‘Whoa, how did this happen?’ Here I am on my Facebook on the phone.” If folks have that habit they’d like to stop, what do we do?

Wendy Wood
It’s very understandable if people have that habit because our phones, and social media sites in particular, are designed to be very habit-forming. They are set up in ways that make it really easy for us to form habits to use them, in part just because we can take them everywhere. You can take your phone on the bus, you can take your phone to the office, you can take it into important meetings, people take it into the restroom. You can take your phone everywhere. It’s always accessible so it’s always available to be used, and it’s very rewarding. You get on your phone and you learn stuff. So, it has the components of habit formation built into it.

And the challenge is we need to control those forces in our lives, as you said. So, one way to do this is to make it a little bit harder for us to use the phone, and that’s not the way most people think about changing their habits. Most people think, “Okay, if I have a problem with using my phone too much, I need to make a decision, exert some willpower, figure out how to control this thing…”

Pete Mockaitis
“Become a hero.”

Wendy Wood
Exactly, become a hero. But your habit memory will long outlast your desire to control this behavior. Habit memories stick. They don’t go away very easily that some researchers think that once you have a habit, it never goes away. So, the best thing you can do is to put some brakes on it. And we call that adding friction to the behavior.

One great way of adding friction, if you’re in a meeting, is to take your phone and just put it face down because that reduces the cues that you will see to pick it up and look at it again. You’re not going to see the alerts in the same way. Another way is to form a habit of putting it in your briefcase, your backpack, your purse, and zipping it so that you actually have to unzip it in order to use it.

Now, all of this just sounds a little too simple, which is, I think, why people don’t do it but there’s great research evidence showing that it does work. In fact, probably the best evidence comes from anti smoking campaigns.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, do tell.

Wendy Wood
So, the last century, middle of the last century, about 50% of Americans smoked, and then we all learned that smoking causes cancer so we all got concerned about it, but our behavior didn’t change a whole lot. It didn’t change really until the government started putting friction on smoking. So, they banned smoking in public places so you can’t smoke in restaurants and bars anymore, can’t smoke in the office, which makes it just a little bit more difficult to keep being a smoker.

They added taxes onto the cigarette purchases so that’s a little bit more difficult to afford to be a smoker. And then they started removing cues, so that it used to be you could just go into the store and pull a packet of cigarettes off of the shelves, but you can’t do that anymore. You have to ask somebody for the brand…

Pete Mockaitis
To show your face in shame.

Wendy Wood
Exactly, for the brand that you smoke.

Pete Mockaitis
“I need nicotine from you.”

Wendy Wood
And you have to remember exactly what kind, and there are five different variants on every brand that’s out there, so you have to describe it to somebody. They make it work. You have to work for it. And anything you have to work for, people are less likely to do. So, that, now, with after removing cues and adding friction to smoking, only 15% of Americans actually smoke, which is an amazing success story but it was done through friction.

And friction on a behavior that’s even more addictive, more habit-forming than your phone, because there is an addictive component to smoking, obviously, it’s that nicotine jolt that you get when you smoke, but friction helps control it. So, thinking about your experience, in terms of friction, helps give you control over habits that you may not want to continue.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s intriguing and I love a good story with numbers, so thank you for that. And now I’m thinking in contrast to e-cigarettes, like JUUL, really proliferating perhaps by just the opposite, like there’s so little friction in terms of, well, high school students like sneakily are using them in their schools because there’s no smell, there’s no need to light something up. It can be done, hide it in the bathroom or a locker, the exhale or whatever. Friends, family, colleagues can’t smell and judge you in terms of like, “Oh, you’re a smoker, huh?” so you don’t have that stigma there. You have a couple puffs without a whole cigarette.

Wendy Wood
Yeah, for high school students, it has all the benefits and few of the downsides until their parents figure out what they’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Until they get some friction, of course.

Wendy Wood
Yeah, parents can be friction in that case. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Some real penalties. Okay. Well, so that’s really handy, so friction. Now, you mentioned in the book, context, repetition, reward. Where do we put friction in the context bucket or we make the context harder to do?

Wendy Wood
Exactly. You set up context that make repetition a little bit harder, require a bit more thought on your part. And it’s amazing how influenced we all are by the friction in our lives. There’s great evidence that people who are closer to gymnasiums actually work out more often, and that’s not how we think about working out.

We think we’re making a decision, we’re being admirable people, we’re showing willpower, we’re concerned about our health, and so that’s why we go work out. But, instead, another important determinant is how easy is it to get there? And if you can get to the gym easily, you’re just more likely to work out and have an exercise habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, that’s so powerful, it’s like, “How can I make this easier or how can I make it harder?” Can you just lay upon us example after example of cool stories you’ve heard of folks doing some clever things to do that? Well, one, you could move closer to a gym, which that might seem dramatic, but, hey, if that’s a priority for you. I’ve known people who have moved close to a gym, to a beach, to a forest, to a church, kind of whatever is kind of important and useful for them. They factor that into the planning because that context, that ease versus difficulty really does shape their behavior.

Wendy Wood
Yeah, it’s surprising how impactful it is in a variety of different domains. So, people who are sitting, so there’s one study where researchers gave people, in one condition, a bowl of butter popcorn and a bowl of sliced apples. And in one condition, the popcorn was right close to them and the sliced apples were way at the end of the counter. They could see them and they could reach for them but it was a bit of effort.

In another condition, the apples were right in front of them and the popcorn was at the end of the counter. Again, they could see it, they could smell it, and they could get there, and everybody was told, “Eat what you want.” So, when the apples were close to them, they ate a third less calories than when the popcorn was close to them. They weren’t any less hungry and it wasn’t like people changed their food preferences. Instead, it was just people eat what’s closer and are less likely to eat what’s farther away. We’re very simple in some ways. We’re very simple creatures. And this effect of friction on our behavior is very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, more please. Can we think of some other fun stories of professionals who’ve done things to make things easier or harder and seen cool results from it?

Wendy Wood
Well, one of the ways that you can get exercise very easily in your life is to bike to work. And when communities put in bike lanes, people are just much more likely to bike, protected bike lanes. So, so often, you see these stripes painted down the middle of the road, and as a cyclist, I wouldn’t use them because they’re scary. Cars don’t give you much…they don’t stay away from you in the same way as in protected bike lanes where there’s some fence or some protection between you and the cars.

When cities put in protected bike lanes, people are just much more likely to cycle to work than when they don’t have protected bike lanes. And, again, we think that these things are our personal decisions, that we’re either good people or bad people for doing these different things, but, instead, we’re very influenced by the forces in our environment.

One of my favorite studies was done by a group of researchers in the 1980s, and they were in a four-story office building, and what they wanted to do was they wanted to convince people to take the stairs instead of the elevator while they were at work. So, they started doing just what we all do, which is they thought, “Well, I should convince people that this is the right thing to do.”

So, they put up signs all over the elevator, “Take the stairs, not the elevator. It’s good for the environment. It’s good for your health. Uses more calories. Doesn’t waste energy.” No effect. So, what they did is they decided to add a small amount of friction to using the elevator, and they slowed the closing of the elevator door by 16 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, the whole process of closing the door takes 16 seconds?

Wendy Wood
More than it typically did, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Wendy Wood
They added 16 seconds to it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s enough for me to be like, “Forget this. I’m out of here.”

Wendy Wood
Exactly. And that’s what happened, is that elevator use was cut by a third.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really. I thought it would be way bigger. It’s like that sounds like an eternity.

Wendy Wood
You’re obviously an impatient person.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I can be.

Wendy Wood
But the really cool thing about the study was a month later, they put the elevator doors back to their original speed, and people kept taking the stairs because they’d formed a habit to do that and they weren’t going to mess with the elevator. They just kept taking the stairs. They’d learn how to do it, they figured out, “Yes, it is good for me. It gives me a little bit of a break in the middle of the day,” so they just continued to do it.

And, again, I’m not advocating people change the speed of the elevator door closing in their office, but simple friction tricks like that can be really powerful, much more so than convincing ourselves that something is right, something is the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s an example of a really easy habit that sort of fits in naturally that lock in within a month, so cool beans. So, in good habits, bad habits, with the three bases of context, repetition, reward, it feels like we’ve hit context pretty thoroughly. Can we hear some best practices in the zone of repetition and reward that are within our actionable control?

Wendy Wood
Yeah. So, psychologists used to think that intrinsic motivation was most important, that there was something unique about intrinsic motivation, feeling good because of an activity while you’re doing the activity itself, finding things that make you feel good when you do them, that there was something unique, important, special about that.

And we’ve since learned that it doesn’t quite work that way. It’s just doing activities and having some positive experience. The positive experience doesn’t even have to come from the activity itself. So, researchers gone into kids’ classrooms – math classes – the kind kids don’t like, and played music, gave the kids food while they were doing math problems, gave them colored pens to use for the math problems, and the kids worked on the problems longer just because they felt it was more fun, it was more engaging, more rewarding to do it.

Those are not rewards that are part of math necessarily but if you add them in, they increase our enjoyment of the activity and make it more likely that we will repeat it again in the future so that we’ll form it into a habit. Those kids were more likely then to do math in the future and might form a habit to do their math homework.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s lovely. So, if we could make something more enjoyable from the ambiance, the lighting, the music, the design, the tools, then away we go. It’s true, I like working more with my PILOT Precise RT pen than some junk they gave me at the bank.

Wendy Wood
There you go. And people use this all the time with exercise. People do it intuitively with exercise. You might hate to work out at the gym but if you can listen to interesting podcasts, like this one, if you can find good music, a good book to read while you’re working out, it makes it much more interesting and much more fun, and you’re more likely to do it again in the future, forming a habit. So, you can add in rewards that don’t have anything to do with an activity, and it functions just like an intrinsic reward, something that comes from the activity itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. So, with context, we can proactively think about how to shape things to make it easier or harder to do in the context. For reward, we can actively shape it so we can make something more pleasant or less pleasant. How do you make something less pleasant maybe? If I wanted to make looking at my phone less enjoyable, is there something I can do there?

Wendy Wood
Yeah, there sure is. You can put it to greyscale, take the colors out, and that does a couple of things. It removes cues because it makes it harder to distinguish the different icons and exactly what they are. Then it also removes the rewards. It makes it less interesting for us to get on social media and see different videos and pictures. So, it removes cues, removes rewards, something you can do to control phone use. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. And how about repetition? I guess, just do more or just do less, I don’t know. Anything clever we can do to work this lever?

Wendy Wood
Well, repetition is really a function of reward and things that are easy. So, repetition, you’re more likely to repeat a behavior if you enjoy what you’re doing and if it’s easy to do, so it’s a consequence of rewards and context friction.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if I wanted to get a head start, really turbocharge getting a habit going, would it be worth my while to just try repeating something dozens of times, like, “Okay, I wake up, I put on my running shoes. Roll out of bed, put on my running shoes. Roll out of bed, put on my running shoes”? Like, is that a useful thing to do?

Wendy Wood
Sure, if you go running then.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I was thinking about the actual, like, “For the next hour, I’m going to exit my bed and put on running shoes 50 times.” Is that useful?

Wendy Wood
I wouldn’t do it. I don’t think it’s worth it. I think it is worth it to figure out where to put your running shoes so that you’re most likely to put them on when you have time to go running, and actually walk outside with them and start running. So, finding time in your day, finding a way to structure in to make it easy for you to go running will be more successful.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Well, tell me, Wendy, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Wendy Wood
I think habits in the workplace are often misunderstood because we tend to think of work as involving both innovation and habitual repetition, and we don’t realize how much our habits enable that innovation so they allow us to get to the point where we can be creative and innovative, and respond to the challenges that we all have at work.

If you have good habits then you’re not struggling with the preparatory stuff. Instead, you’re doing that automatically, and that sets you up to do what is going to be successful today in meeting the new innovative challenges at work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And, now, can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Wendy Wood
I think my favorite quote was an inaccurate one by William James when he claimed that 99.9% of everyday activities are done out of habit. So, William James is a brother of Henry James, if you are an English major, and he is often considered to be the father of modern psychology. So, the fact that he was such a habit enthusiast is great. He didn’t have much data. He didn’t have anything to back up his speculation but he was a real enthusiast.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite or experiment or bit of research?

Wendy Wood
I think that probably my favorite study is the one that I already mentioned on elevator use but I can tell you one that we did that I think illustrates how hard it is to change our habits, and it was done at a local movie cinema. We got the people who ran the cinema to allow us to show some shorts at the beginning before people watched the actual movie they came to see, and, supposedly, to thank them for rating all of these movie shorts.

We gave them boxes of popcorn to eat. These were free. Everyone took them. And, unbeknownst to them, half of the popcorn was stale, and it was really stale. It had been in our lab for about a week in a plastic bag, so it was not great popcorn. Half got fresh popcorn. So, you see the setup. At the end of the presentation, we collected the boxes and we weighed them to see how much people actually ate.

And what we found is that people who didn’t have habits to eat popcorn at the movie cinema, and there are such people out there, they ate a lot of the fresh popcorn, they did not eat the stale popcorn because they could tell us, it was awful, and it was. But people with habits to eat popcorn in the movie cinema, they were sitting there, they were holding the popcorn, and they ate the same amount whether it was fresh or stale.

And it just shows that our habits are cued automatically even when we don’t want them to be. These people are telling us, “I hate this popcorn. It’s disgusting.” I actually don’t know that I’ve ever gotten such low ratings of anything in my lab before, so people really did hate it but they kept eating it because they were cued by the context that they were in. It’s easy, it’s what they’ve done before, it was their habit, and they just persisted. They repeated that behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there’s so much there and I believe I first heard of this experiment from Katy Milkman’s book. I think she cited you because I hear her voice in my mind’s ear in the Audible version, “Fresh popcorn.” And we had her on the show, and she was great. So, one, that’s really cool. Hey, that’s you. And, two, it’s like, “Whoa,” if you zoom out and think about it, that is a life metaphor. It’s like, “How much stale popcorn do we have going on in our lives that we’re just kind of mindlessly dealing with because it’s easy and it’s repeated, and that’s the context we’re in?”

Wendy Wood
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
There’ll be some soul-searching there.

Wendy Wood
A lot of our habit, they work for us most of the time but not all the time, but we repeat them regardless of whether they working for us. And we repeat them even after they’ve stopped working for us most of the time. It’s just easier to do what you’ve done before than make decisions. And, as I said, we’re simple creatures. At least the habit system is quite simple.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Wendy Wood
Well, the classics are easy to identify as favorites because, early on in the field, psychologists were not only researchers, they were also philosophers, and so they like to think broadly about social behaviors, so it’s really fun to read some of the early thinking. William James, for example, his Principles of Psychology are really fun to read, in part, because he draws on personal experience as well as the research.

And one example is he talks about a friend of his who would come home for dinner and eat and then change into his pajamas. And if he got distracted and ended up in his bedroom before he ate dinner, he’d just change into his pajamas anyway regardless of who was showing up for dinner, what he was doing. And we all have this experience of continuing to do repeat behaviors that we’ve done in the past that, really, we didn’t mean to do right now, but it’s the nature of habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Wendy Wood
I think it has to be everybody’s favorite right now, it’s the computer. I’ve been around long enough so that I was writing before we were writing on keyboards. It makes you really appreciate what you got.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a key nugget or articulation of your wisdom that you share that people go, “Oh, wow, that’s awesome,” they re-tweet it, they write it down, they Kindle book highlight it, they say, “Wendy said this, and it’s brilliant and we love it”?

Wendy Wood
No, there is no such thing.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re so modest.

Wendy Wood
No, although, let me give you an example that I give to people, and this is not brilliant. It’s just practical, demonstrating how much we don’t understand our own habits. And that is all of us can use a keyboard. We can all type on a keyboard, some really proficiently. But if I asked you to list out the keys on the second row of your keyboard, you probably couldn’t do that, can you?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m trying not to look. A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L. Yeah, that’s exciting.

Wendy Wood
You’re cheating.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “J, K, L all in rows, is that true? Yeah, it is.”

Wendy Wood
You see, you could type those things without any hesitation but actually repeating them back to me is hard because we haven’t stored it in our conscious memory. We stored it in habit memory system, and that shows you the difference, the separation, between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you, where would you point them?

Wendy Wood
@ProfWendyWood on Twitter or Instagram. I’m also on LinkedIn and I’d be very happy to converse with people about habits, habit change, challenges they’re experiencing in the workplace with habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Wendy Wood
Yeah. Be clear about what your goals are, and then make sure that your habits support them so that you don’t have to fight yourself in order to meet your goals. And so often, our biggest challenges are our own habits, what we’ve done in the past. You don’t want to put yourself in that position. You’d be much happier and you’d be much more successful if your habits and goals are aligned.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Wendy, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with your habits and research and more.

Wendy Wood
Thank you so much. Great fun to talk to you.