Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Falling In Love With Your Challenge

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Humans are strongly motivated by two forces: love and money*.

When pursuing change and seeking to better things we often look at ways to gain more money as the solution, but what about love? What if we fell in love with our challenge?

(*Money can be a proxy for security, safety, and opportunity.)

Love as a Change Strategy

Author, broadcaster, finance and plant-medicine coach Geoff Wilson encourages people to try love as a means to growth and change. He recently spoke to this on Earth Day and encouraged his listeners and followers on social media to try falling in love with the earth. Instead of arguing about the reasons why we should care for the earth, falling in love is something that transcends reason. It breaks us out of the usual patterns of motivation and persuasion.

What if we took the same approach to falling in love with the earth that we do with humans?

Practically, this might mean buying and caring for a plant or more fully using our bodies and senses to embrace our connection to the earth. You might try walking barefoot on the grass to feel the earth, not just see it.

Increasing the sensory and emotional aspects of change reframes things for us. What if we fell in love with our organization or business? What if we cared for our neighbourhood or customers the same way?

If I want to change something why don’t I fall in love or why don’t I leverage love and power together?

This simple strategy has enormous power attached to it. This approach is much like Adam Kahane’s work on connecting Power and Love for social change. Geoff’s approach is also similar to Arthur Zajonc’s work on mindfulness as contemplative inquiry.

Be more mindful and open your heart, eyes, and senses and you might find change looks and feels differently.

Photo by Leon Wu on Unsplash

Creating Glue: Viewing Change as an Index

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Change-making is not a singular thing, rather it is viewed more as an index. That means that the more of these different factors that are present, the greater the likelihood of change.

We recently concluded the first season of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast looking at this idea of the index and introducing the last of the ten factors: glue. Glue brings together our strategies, processes, techniques and tools (one of the other factors).

Ten Factors for Change

The previous factors that have each been profiled in episodes in that first season are:

  1. Knowledge
  2. Skills
  3. Confidence
  4. Outcome Expectations
  5. Conditions
  6. Environment
  7. Social Support
  8. Time and Space
  9. Tools
  10. Glue

This first season has focused on the building blocks of change. These ten factors that if applied in earnest can help us to grow and transform organizations, communities, and ourselves. We can think of these in two groups: individual-focused change and shared-focused areas of change.

A big myth that we’ve covered this season of the podcast is that we are the masters of our own change and destiny. While we do contribute a big deal to our own change efforts, we can’t separate ourselves from the communities, organizations, families, and teams around us who enable, constraint and support change.

The more of these things, we do the better, the quality of our performance, the amount of persistence and endurance of our efforts. The more likely we are to change specifically glue are the techniques, the methods and the strategies for change. They are something that connects all of these other factors together in the implementation of some type of plan to make changes.

Lessons from Season One

The first is that change Isn’t a single thing. It’s more of a combination of things that we think of less than the list and much more as an index. Second, tools, techniques, strategies, and practice are the glue that ties all of these individual factors. Third, we can design change if we know what to do, and we can draw these 10 factors together to help us innovate and create a difference in the world we’re looking to make.

This is a design challenge. Glue is the systemic design of our organizations or our own personal practices that build up strategies to leverage all ten of these. We’re rarely successful with all of these, but by viewing them as an index it gives us something to focus on for improvement. We also can optimize those things working well to compensate for those areas that are not. Success comes because we have many avenues to change, not just one or two.

This is a different way to view change, but one that we’ve seen show the truth in our many years of working as change-makers and strategic designers.

If you want to learn more about this, please contact us and we can help. Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo by olia danilevich

Unpacking Change

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Change through design is the fundamental feature of innovation. This page and the innovation toolkit that it’s a part of are one of the ways we seek to share our experience of innovation.

Innovation is very natural, but also something we can learn.

To provide alternative ways to learn about innovation and change-making we’ve launched a new podcast. Rather than serving as another web-based radio show, Censemaking is designed to do more. It’s a short-form summary of a new idea in practical change-making every episode.

The first season of Censemaking is focused on the fundamentals of change. Each episode in the first season will focus on one of the ten central pillars of change. Episodes are about 10 minutes long and, just like Censemaking itself, meant to be enjoyed over coffee or over your next break.

Ten Factors for Change

The ten factors of change are both individual and contextual and will be covered in each episode in the first season. These factors are:

  1. Knowledge. The bedrock – no knowledge or no change.
  2. Skills. How we apply knowledge and transform it into activities, action, and change. 
  3. Tools. These tools are what allow us to transform our knowledge and skills into something.
  4. Confidence. Confidence is the bridge between our dreams and vision and our capacity to undertake the work needed to make them real.
  5. Outcome Expectations. We are more likely to hit what we aim for than not.
  6. Time & Space. This is the most under-appreciated and poorly understood concept when it comes to real innovation.
  7. Conditions. Having the right conditions to innovate and having that creation play a useful function when those you seek to serve are ready is as much alchemy as it is science. That doesn’t make it worthy of neglect and it’s something we can design for.
  8. Social Support. Great change doesn’t happen working alone.
  9. Environment. The space around where we work — the context — matters.
  10. Glue. This highly non-technical concept reflects how we line things up together to hold them. This is our strategy and the design for how we transform it and learning into real change.

The podcast is introduced and hosted by Cameron Norman, our President, and this first episode explains how this came about and introduces these ten factors.

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Habit Design: A Starting Place

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Among the greatest means to promoting sustained behaviour change is to create healthy (beneficial) habits. The science of behaviour change provides many recommendations for how to form, break, and maintain good habits.

While we often believe that beliefs change habits, we often find that behaviours themselves can just as profoundly affect our beliefs.

There are many ways to shape the design of habits with good research and we’re going to introduce you to a few of them.

  1. Pay attention. The first step toward understanding habits is recognizing which ones we have — as individuals and organizations. Doing sufficient research to observe and record the degree to which we perform an activity repeatedly is essential. A habit is something that requires little or no conscious decision-making. It’s not that we don’t know it doesn’t exist, we just do it with the most minimum amount of ‘friction‘. Observation, recording, and reflection all contribute to this part of the process.
  2. Model the benefits. All of our habits benefit us in some ways. The key is to determine what those benefits are and if those habits are harmful or detrimental to our goals. By knowing what we are doing we can begin to change what we do. By understanding the benefits of harmful or unproductive habits we can also start to determine how we might be able to replace them down the road with our designs.
  3. Understand history. How salient is a habit? Once we know what we do, it’s important to see how strong habits are. For example, someone who started using cigarettes two weeks ago will have a different habit structure than someone who’s smoked for 25 years. Whether its consumer habits, health, productivity, or otherwise, the salience and strength of a habit is tied partly to a person’s history with that behaviour. The same applies to organizational practices as well.
  4. Model the context. It’s not enough to know what we do, it’s important to understand what context we do it in. The environment is a powerful force in shaping what habits we engage in and to what degree. By understanding our context, including how and what triggers our habit, we can start to begin to re-design this context. This can be done by tracking what behaviour is performed, where, and what other variables were present at the time.
  5. Identify leverage points. A leverage point is something that can be adjusted — amplified or reduced — that can yield large benefits indirectly within a system of activities. Most of what we seek to change is one behaviour among many that are, as we’ve seen, often connected to one another. For example, to use the cigarette example, many smokers cite drinking alcohol as a co-habit (the two are done together). In this case, reducing or changing the way one behaviour is done can also affect the other. This is called habit stacking. It’s having one behaviour affect another.

By engaging in systematic inquiry — observation, interviews, surveys, or reflective practice — we can start to illuminate some of these powerful hidden forces that shape and direct our choices and behaviour.

Try these methods out. The application does not need to be complicated, just systematic.

Need help or want more detailed design research to help your organization change and design for something different? We can help you – contact us.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Fresh Start Effects and Change-Making

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“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now”

– The Internet.

The above quote points to two key truths about change-making: It’s always possible to create a new start and starting matters.

If you are looking to create change within your organization, team, or yourself you need to start somewhere. While it might be true that starting saving for your future makes a bigger difference when done early, that doesn’t negate what you can do today.

Starting and Starting Over

We don’t need elaborated moments for making change happen and waiting for the perfect opportunity to take action is usually a means of avoidance. We just need a new beginning.

The good news is that it’s available to us at any time.

Research by Katy Milkman and others has shed light on why we often use significant dates — things like birthdays, anniversaries, or calendar changes – to make a change happen. This is called the Fresh Start Effect.

Milkman’s research suggests people are much more likely to start and sustain changes if anchored to a specific date or event and that using a ‘start’ can enable them to re-start change attempts that fail. Considering that many of our change attempts end in failure, this is significant.

How To Fresh Start

What does a fresh start look like in practice? The first thing is having a date — the planned start to the change. Your date needs to be significant although that significance can be arbitrary. Whatever the reason, your date must have some meaning to you (and those you’re working with).

The second issue is commitment. Take the date seriously. It’s why anniversaries or significant cultural events (e.g., back to school, New Year’s Eve, holidays) are often chosen – they are symbolic.

The third is a need for persistence. Persistence means continually working on the change even if it starts to fail. The exception is if the change no longer is needed. If you fail, start again.

Evaluation is the last thing you need to do. Evaluate your efforts, make the feedback visible, and make changes to your strategy if it is not producing results.

Bring these together and you can create a new beginning today to create a better tomorrow.

Go plant that tree.

Do you need or want help setting this up for you and your organization? We work with leaders, managers, and founders to create change in people and organizations and create a fresh start for them. Contact us to learn more.

Photo by Johann Siemens on Unsplash