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Dear readers,
As our purpose, as the ForBetterOrgs team, is to help you increase your organizational-wide impact, today we’re sharing with you an explainer about shifting webs of behavior.
Enabling behavior change for yourself and for others around you is a key pillar to any kind of impact, so we hope that the lens of webs of behaviors will come handy to you from now on. Enjoy!
Shared knowledge accelerates impact, 🌿
Raluca & Bülent
Shifting Webs of Behavior
Read the whole explainer here: 6 min read
(…) It might be very hard to sustain the new behavior of getting up at 6 in the morning if you go to sleep at 2am, have dinner at 11pm and finish work at 10pm, even if you apply all the things in the traditional playbook focusing on helping you get up at 6am.
So, it’s worth taking a look at what behaviors are “around” the behavior you’re aiming to change - whether we’re talking about individual behaviors, team behaviors or organizational behaviors. This is where the practice of shifting webs of behaviors comes into place.
(…) One of the models that supports this practice is BJ Fogg’s Behavior Grid.
In a nutshell, the Behavior Grid offers you clarity on the type of tweak you want to apply on existing or new behaviors.(…) Let’s take a few examples from the Facets of Change bootcamp, to illustrate the point.
The first example is about doing a new behavior for a period of time (green span):
1h of deep work each morning for 1 month
Applying the idea that I would need to tweak behaviors linked to this desired one:
I would also need to stop doing an existing behavior (black path) - stop going to sleep after 1am, in order to be able to wake up earlier, with more energy;
For the intended duration of the desired behavior (1 month), I would also need to have dinner before 8:30pm (blue span) in order to be able to go to sleep earlier and sleep well;
Also, for an extra boost of energy before the deep work session, I would need to increase the intensity of an existing behavior (purple span) - a bit more exercise after waking up;
I would also need to continue doing familiar behavior (blue path), like continuing closing the laptop at 8pm;
Some specific actions (dot behaviors) that would help me with the desired new behavior of deep work sessions would be: setting recurring deep work sessions in my calendar for that 1 month (green dot), clarify areas to (deep) work on (purple dot), or designing how a deep work session would actually look like (blue dot);
Finally, I would need to decrease the intensity of an existing behavior for that month (grey span) - more specifically, decrease the times when I need to facilitate working sessions before noon. This has an impact on my ability to actually focus during the deep work session, and not have my mind wander towards imagining how that other session would play out.
So, what I’ve done was to:
Clarify the behavior tweak that I want to put into practice: new behavior for a month;
Identify behaviors linked to the one that I want to have an impact on;
Identify tweaks to these other linked behaviors, using the Dot-Span-Path / Green-Blue-Purple-Gray-Black matrix offered by the Behavior Grid;
Decide on the minimum viable behavior tweaks that I actually want to put into practice.
Strategy & Organization Goodies
1/ Roger Martin makes some good points about why start-ups are not exempt from doing strategy.
The best are the best because they learn better and faster. They learn by starting with a clear strategy logic and by keeping testing and improving it.
ForBetterOrgs take: a highlight here is put on the assumption that doing strategy takes a lot of time. Then the logic goes like this: “I don’t have lots of time on my hands, so focusing on strategy is out of discussion.” Maybe it’s worth revisiting that initial assumption.
2/ Matt Watkinson reminds us that one of the tests of a good strategy is whether it can be understood by the people using it.
ForBetterOrgs take: if we look at a strategy as the story we tell ourselves about the way forward, it makes sense to have a coherent story, that is not confusing to the ones who hear it and tell it to others.
If we look at a strategy as a decision making enabler for the day to day decisions (minimally through the question: “which of the options is more aligned with our strategy?”), it makes sense that if the strategy is confusing people, they won’t use it in their day to day decision making.
3/ H3Uni has a great summary about the Three Horizons tool if you ever need a recap or to share the concept with others.
The future can be perceived through three lenses:
Horizon 1: Continue Business as Usual
Horizon 3: Vision of a Viable Future
Horizon 2: Innovation towards the Vision
ForBetterOrgs take: the Three Horizons popped up recently in several conversations we’ve had about the continued relevance of products and businesses.
What happens when you only focus on a Business as Usual that is subtly losing its fit for purpose?
4/ David Lancefield offers his view on practicing strategy in an uncertain world in Strategy+Business.
Change behaviors: Refresh mindsets. Adopt new roles. Facilitate a new strategic dialogue.
Extend strategic frameworks. Build more foresight capability. Master the linkage between exploitation and exploration. Explore ecosystems wisely.
Power up the tools. Harness the power of strategy software-as-a-service. View AI as a new teammate.
ForBetterOrgs take: each of the sentences above is worth expanding and exploring further. For example, we’re actively investing in the areas of foresight, business ecosystems and biomimicry to make better sense of practicing strategy in an increasingly uncertain world.
5/ Geoff Marlow writes a provocative piece about the Future of HR.
(…) HR has the potential to become a Centre of Excellence for cultivating the capacity of the organisation to shape its future.
In this role, HR would support senior executives in making the mindset shift in their role from making decisions to creating conditions.
ForBetterOrgs take: similarly to Geoff, we’re also noticing how HR is missing from most of the Strategy & Organization work that is being done by the organizations that we’re connected with. Hopefully more HR teams are becoming aware how their H1, continuing the Business as Usual, is losing its fit for purpose - and are able to connect with a H3 vision for a viable future and innovate towards it through a bridging H2.
6/ Harold Jarche shares a model for coherent organizations.
Effective, or coherent, knowledge-sharing requires not just collaboration, but also cooperation and especially connections (communities). This is what makes a coherent organization.
ForBetterOrgs take: such an insightful way of conveying organizational coherence through the interweaving of various ways of coming together. Might be worth reflecting how this model applies (or not) to your own organization.
Interconnections
Picks from disciplines (vaguely?) connected to Strategy, Org Design & OD
1/ Data Visualization: If you’re curious about various ways of visualizing data, Data Viz Project offers a comprehensive collection of data visualizations. A snapshot:
2/ Botany: Colossal found an archive of drawings showing the Complex Root Systems of 1180 Plants. Worth some contemplation √
3/ Mycology: Watch the explanation of how Physarum polycephalum (a species of slime mold) can make “decisions” and solve mazes, even though it’s a single-celled, brainless organism. Fascinating 10 min video that invites to many analogies to how organizations “solve mazes”.
Thanks for reading the OrgDev Newsletter!
See you again next week. ✌️
This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi,
creators of ForBetterOrgs.com, with the aim to inspire and equip you to increase your organization-wide impact.