Change Management

The “Adjacent Possible” Mental Model

September 18, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The “Adjacent Possible” consists of all those ideas that are one step away from what actually exists. One thing leads to another, and when you achieve an adjacent possibile, you may hit upon more adjacent possibles.

So exploring the edges can take you somewhere new that you can’t predefine. The adjacent possible is something that gets continuously shaped and reshaped by your actions and your choices.

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (2010) urges, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

Johnson borrowed the conception from biologist Stuart A. Kauffman’s The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993.) This book examines a fundamental law of evolution: how everything has to evolve one step at a time within its realm of possibility, which sits directly adjacent to its current position. Novelty isn’t an abrupt, isolated happening, but rather stem from the voyaging of what is adjacent or related to what already exists.

Idea for Impact: Start at the edge of what works. Then, explore the adjacent possibile space. You may just get to those streams of opportunities that lead to the next big thing.

When Implementing Change, You’ll Encounter These Three Types Of People

April 6, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To successfully make changes in your workplace, you’ll need to have everyone on board. But don’t try to get them all to accept change at once. Not everyone responds to change similarly; some employees will not react well to it initially.

According to Hans Finzel’s Change is Like a Slinky Paperback (2004,) you must anticipate your allies and adversaries. Determine which of these three groups each of your employees belongs to and adapt.

The Innovators and Early Adopters. Some people love the challenge of change for its excitement and the opportunity to spearhead change. These employees can research the topic, develop prototypes, and act as “change ambassadors” to motivate people further down the hierarchy.
The Careful Majority. Most employees will support change once they’re reasonably confident it’ll succeed. Demonstrate to skeptics what the change will represent and how it will benefit them and the company. Acknowledge concerns—both the spoken and unspoken—and the discomfort of being in unfamiliar territory while focusing on what’s within their control. Eventually, the majority will follow the early adopters’ lead.
The Holdouts. A few employees may resist—and even sabotage—change because they feel uncomfortable about it, don’t believe in it, or can’t see any benefits in it for themselves. If their contentions are worth the time and energy to debate and discuss, make a fair effort to gain alignment on perspective and resolution on position, but be firm with your strategic direction. Get key organizational leaders to give these dissenters reasons and opportunities to get on board, but let them know the price if they don’t accept change.

Idea for Impact: The best managers understand that each employee has different skills, sentiments, wants and needs—and work to put each employee in a position to feel valued and contribute.

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

January 5, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Sure, self-discipline is an asset. Plenty of successful people evidently benefit from having truckloads of it. However, strengthening willpower may not always be easy for the rest of us.

You can increase productivity and contentment simply by altering your environment. Make it easier for you (and others in your life) to confront temptation and adopt the habits you want.

Use stimulus control to shift your behavior:

Want to stop taking on more debt? Freeze your credit cards.
Can’t stop checking your phone for likes, comments, texts, tweets, and game requests? Disable the apps.
Want your household to be more organized? Establish routines and make things easy to put away with clearly labeled receptacles.
Want to switch to healthier snacking choices? Splurge on pre-washed, pre-cut, grab-and-go vegetables.

You’re more likely to start change when you put the stimulus for action into your environment.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get bogged down by thinking that lifestyle changes are entirely about willpower. In a world so heavily baited with pervasive cues and craving-inducing stimuli, the more you can tweak your environment to better condition yourself into your desired habits, the more likely you are to meet your goals.

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

January 2, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The best way to catalyze significant change is by relying on highly specific habits and routines and making time for them amid the busyness of life.

Habit formation relies on consistency. Here’s a simple trick to prevent good intentions from slipping.

Suppose that you want to start a daily walking habit. You set a target to go for a walk for at least an hour a day. But some days, this habit might not be doable.

Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

To prevent slipping on your daily goal and beating yourself up about it, establish two targets: one for the “good” days and one for the “tough” days.

Set the bar very low for when it’s not possible to dedicate an hour to walking. On the tough days, when you’re exhausted, hungry, feeling lazy and unmotivated, or you’re simply not in the mood to walk, you can go for a quick walk. And on good days, when you have more time and energy, go for longer walks. Average out the tough days with the good days.

Make it so easy that you can’t say no to maintaining your habit on the tough days. You’ll decrease your skipped days and sustain the habit’s consistency by lowering your expectations.

Another benefit of having easy-win targets for the tough days is that you nudge yourself into action. Let’s say you target reading an hour a day. On tough days, when you set out to read for just ten minutes, you’ll perhaps get engrossed in more of the task once you get started and find your way into the text. Action begets momentum, and you’ll find it easier to keep going at it.

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

Habits take a long time to create, but they develop faster when you do them more routinely and repeatedly. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the habit. Set the bar low for the tough days and build deep-seated habits.

Real Ways to Make Habits Stick

January 6, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Want to make a new habit stick? Try piggybacking or ‘stacking’ it to an existing one.

Choose something you have no problem motivating yourself to do—say, brushing your teeth—then combine it with some habit you want to acquire. The existing pattern serves as the prompt for the new habit.

Most people have robust morning and evening routines; try stacking new habits into those practices. For example, if you want to do some mindfulness meditation every day, do it after brushing your teeth in the morning. Your wake-up routine becomes the cue to build a new meditation habit.

Better yet, associate the habit you want to achieve with a ‘temptation’ (something you love doing,) like sipping your morning cuppa joe. Your habit stacking plan may look like this: “After I meditate for ten minutes, I will have my coffee.” This way, the habit will become more attractive to you, making it more likely to stick.

Idea for Impact: Good habits build automatically when you don’t have to consciously think about doing them. Look for patterns in your day and think about how to use existing habits to create new, positive ones. Stacking habits can encourage you to remember, repeat, and, therefore, maintain a series of behaviors. Set yourself up for success.

The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

January 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even the more determined souls among us find that New Year’s resolutions aren’t effective.

Some of us don’t even bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore because we always break them. Mark Twain famously wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1863,

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual … New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

We make bold resolutions to start exercising or losing weight, for example, without taking the steps needed to set ourselves up for success. Behavioral scientists who study habit formation argue that most people try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. Starting a new routine isn’t always easy.

Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019,) notes that jumping cold turkey into new beginnings upon the turn of the calendar demands a high level of motivation that can’t be sustained over time. He recommends starting with tiny habits to help make the new habit as easy and achievable as possible in the beginning.

Small Measures, Large Results

Small, specific goals are amazingly effective. Making a New Year’s resolution to “run a marathon this summer” is an imposing aspiration to get started on, but committing to “run two miles in 30 minutes thrice a week in January” is a first operating objective.

Break any big challenge into simple steps and just focus on getting to the first step. Taking a daily short stroll could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Then, regroup and think about step two.

The truth is, if you invest time and have even a little bit of success in any endeavor, you’re both more likely to believe the changes will last and commit more. Success builds momentum.

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Bold promises and vague goals don’t work well. Neither does beating up on yourself for lapses.

Make New Year’s resolutions by establishing long-term targets and making many small resolutions all year round. If you want to lose weight, resolve to pass up nacho-and-cheese and soda for a month.

Take one baby step at a time. Expect some setbacks. The willpower necessary will be small. And you’ll get better results that’ll actually stick.

Focus on Rituals, Not Goals

December 9, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

My biggest takeaway from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) is the importance of shifting your focus from your end goal to what your need to do regularly to reach that goal.

Though goals can provide orientation and motivation, Clear notes that committing to the system makes all the difference. Goals aren’t necessarily the best way to ensure things are done. Thinking about only goals tends to make people believe, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.” This impedes their long-term progress.

Instead, Clear recommends centering on the routines and things you need to do regularly to reach the goal. For example: If you’re a swim team coach, and your goal is to win a championship, the system that you should focus on is training every day, “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

Idea for Impact: A systems-first mentality beats a goal-oriented mindset. “Fall in love with the process rather than the product.”

Seek a Fresh Pair of Eyes

October 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When was the last time your team stopped to ask, “Why”?

“Why are we doing this?”

“Why are we doing it that way?”

You can ask this important question about everything—in your business or life!

We humans are creatures of habit—unquestioned and unexamined. Unless you intentionally ask “why,” you’ll just do things the same way because that the default mode for how you’ve always done it, or that’s how somebody showed you.

Once you’re set in your habits, keep scrutinizing them.

The best improvement ideas often come from people who aren’t stuck in the established ways.

Encourage new hires and interns to challenge the “that’s just how things are done around here” mentality when they disagree with it. Until they’ve been housetrained, they’re the ones with the freshest perspective.

Ask them to make a note of everything that they see and doesn’t make sense. After a few weeks, when they’ve become familiar with the organization and its workflow, have them reassess their initial opinions, reflect, and report their observations. Invite them to spend time on the internet looking for how these things are done at other companies and provide suggestions for improvement.

Idea for Impact: Sometimes people are too close to things to see the truth. To get a new perspective on the status quo, seek a fresh pair of eyes.

Many Hard Leadership Lessons in the Boeing 737 MAX Debacle

August 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The U.S. House committee’s report on Boeing’s 737 MAX disaster makes interesting reading on contemporary leadership, particularly the pressures of rapid product development.

The rush to market and a culture of contributory negligence and concealment conspired to ensure that a not-yet-airworthy plane carried passengers into service, resulting in two fatal accidents and a long grounding.

Boeing’s design and development of the 737 MAX was marred by technical design failures, a lack of transparency with both regulators and customers, and efforts to downplay or disregard concerns about the operation of the aircraft.

Of particular importance are the “management failures,” “inherent conflicts of interest,” and “grossly insufficient oversight” at both Boeing and its regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) Boeing failed to offset the design limitations and cost- and schedule-pressures in favor of attention to customer safety. Leadership was fixated on fending off the runaway success of the Airbus A320neo program.

The company relied on too many technical assumptions—and they couldn’t make themselves the space and time to be reasonable about any of this. Boeing’s “culture of concealment” and an “unwillingness to share technical details” are the report’s most damning indictment. Employees spoke but went unheard; indeed, their voices were suppressed.

Lessons from David Dao Incident: Watch Out for the Availability Bias!

August 23, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In the weeks and months after the United Airlines’David Dao incident and the ensuing customer service debacle, news of all kinds of disruptive airline incidents, coldblooded managers, and inconsiderate airline staff showed up everywhere.

The United incident raised everyone’s awareness of airline incidents. Expectedly, the media started drawing attention to all sorts of airline incidents—fights on airplanes, confusion and airports, seats taken from small children, insects in inflight meals, snakes on the plane—affecting every airline, large and small. However, such unpleasant incidents rarely happen, with thousands of flights every day experiencing nothing of the sort.

Parenthetically, the underlying problem that led to the David Dao incident wasn’t unique to United. The incident could have happened at other airlines. All airlines had similar policies regarding involuntary-denied boarding and prioritizing crew repositioning. Every other airline, I’m sure, felt lucky the David Dao incident didn’t happen on their airline.

In the aftermath of the incident, many people vowed to boycott United. Little by little, that negative consumer sentiment faded away while the backlash—and media coverage—over the incident diminished.

Availability bias occurs when we make decisions based on easy or incomplete ideas.

The David Dao incident’s media coverage is an archetypal case of the Availability Bias (or Availability Heuristic) in force. Humans are inclined to disproportionately assess how likely something will happen by how easy it is to summon up comparable–and recent–examples. Moreover, examples that carry a fierce emotional weight tend to come to mind quickly.

The availability heuristic warps our perception of real risks. Therefore, if we’re assessing whether something is likely to happen and a similar event has occurred recently, we’re much more liable to expect the future possibility to occur.

What we remember is shaped by many things, including our beliefs, emotions, and things like intensity and frequency of exposure, particularly in mass media. When rare events occur, as was the case with the David Dao incident, they become evident. Suppose you’re in a car accident involving a Chevy, you are likely to rate the odds of getting into another car accident in a Chevy much higher than base rates would suggest.

If you are aware of the availability bias and begin to look for it, you will be surprised how often it shows up in all kinds of situations. As with many other biases, we can’t remove this natural tendency. Still, we can let our rational minds account for this bias in making better decisions by being aware of the availability bias.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be disproportionately swayed by what you remember. Don’t underestimate or overestimate a risk or choosing to focus on the wrong risks. Don’t overreact to the recent facts.

Change Management

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Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

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When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

Small Measures, Large Results

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

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Once you’re set in your habits, keep scrutinizing them.

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Availability bias occurs when we make decisions based on easy or incomplete ideas.

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