The Importance of a Change in Environments for Unlearning
This topic came up in a conversation with my friend Stefan, thank you for the inspiration for writing this post.
Habits. They're everywhere. And they're making transformations difficult. Mostly because they're in the way of unlearning.
Unlearning is one of the most important things for any meaningful transformation. By unlearning I mean reflecting, understanding, and finally changing the way you act. In that sense, unlearning is habit change. A habit is basically reacting to a certain trigger with a certain response. Any form of transformation will require people to break certain habits and acquire new ones.
In the defence of habits – they are extremely useful devices that let us navigate our daily life without burdening our conscious thinking with – seemingly – unimportant decisions. They are the rules that make up our autopilot that leaves precious computing power for more important things. One of the more useful habits is flipping the light switch when entering a dark room. How difficult and exhausting would your day be if you would have to use your conscious thinking for that kind of decisions?
But if you want to modify your behaviour, they will get in your way. Habits are the epitome of "that's how we've always done things".
So, if you want to do things differently, you probably need to change a couple of habits.
In his book "Atomic Habits", James Clear describes habits as "neurological loops" that consist of four steps: Cue – Craving – Response – Reward.
The cue is the starting point that sets the habit pattern in motion: It triggers a craving for a state change (to which we will respond, expecting to be rewarded for it).
Our environments are full of such cues that will reliably trigger those pathways. They are such an important factor in determining our behaviour that changing them will even raise the success rate of heroin addiction treatment from 10% to 95%.
But how can such a change of environment look like for organisations?
Types of environment change
- Physical
- Cultural
- Informational
- Responsibilities
- Mission
Changing the Physical Environment
A change in your physical environment is one that you will feel most immediately and most strongly. And it can have a profound effect on people because it signals "This is new" in a way that you simply cannot ignore.
Moving a group of people together into a "squad room" will do more to team building than any offsite team workshop ever will.
Putting sticky notes, scissors and tape everywhere will tell people that they're expected to build, collaborate and experiment more strongly than any presentation on the importance of innovation ever will.
Changing the Cultural Environment
The cultural environment encodes the answers to the question: "How are things done around here?" Even small tweaks and hacks can have a great impact on the cultural environment.
Habitually starting every meeting with a check-in can change the nature of meetings. Ending every meeting with "What's your 15%?" can move everyone from helplessness to action.
Checking Work In Progress limits can shift the conversation from being busy to getting things done.
Changing the Informational Environment
Sharing sales numbers with the team will allow them to understand the market situation. Exposing the most common customer support requests will highlight where customers struggle (and show areas for future improvements). It will also stress that we're here to solve our customers problems, not building a product. Sharing those data also communicates that the team is somehow responsible for moving the needle on those numbers.
Changing Responsibilities
Why are you here?
People joining "initiatives" while also retaining their line duties will live a dual life. One, where they are expected to do new things in a new way, and one where they should behave exactly as always and as dysfunctional as the organisation is. Guess which behaviour will win? Of course, the old habit. Every time. Unlearning must fail, because the old habit is so present every day.
Change responsibilities. Make people part of that project squad full time.
Changing the Mission
Why you are here, Part 2.
What's your purpose here? Are you here to write code, or are you here to build a sucessful product and solving customer problems?
Changing the mission will change the conversation. And people will see that some habits will no longer do. What helped them fulfil their previous mission is suddenly a problem. So they need to create new habits.
Changing (or in many cases: defining) the mission is very powerful, but also very difficult to do without changing other environments as well. Because by changing the mission, you're not removing any old triggers, but rather just try to add new ones.
Unlearning is a pivotal process for any transformation in organisations or individuals. Changes in the physical, informational or cultural environment, the responsibilities of individuals and the mission of people, teams, and the organisation itself create new contexts in which old habits will be left behind and new habits will be formed.
Link Graph
Yeah, I know, the 2000s knocked and wanted to show you their ideas about knowledge navigation, but I really like those graphs, even if they are not the most practical instruments, plus I actually developed a network-based knowledge management system called 'Serendipity' back in the day, so please stop making fun of me.