Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Falling In Love With Your Challenge

by

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

Unpacking Change

by

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

by

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

Bundles and Stacks

by

Two powerful approaches to creating healthy habits are to bundle or stack behaviours together, by design. If we can learn to connect what we do in small ways to other things we can make big changes more easily.

For innovators seeking and making change, these two approaches can help break down a big goal into small, manageable actions.

Bundles

A bundle is a way of tying together two behaviours that don’t normally go together for positive benefit. It takes something you dislike and pairing it with something you like. For example, imagine doing uncomfortable rehab exercises while watching your favourite TV show. Maybe listen to your favourite music while doing your taxes.

There are many activities in our work that are tedious, unpleasant, or undesirable to do. By bundling those with something you do enjoy it can make those unpleasant tasks easier to do.

Consider the barriers to your service that might be unavoidable: how can you bundle those with something positive? How can you make the worst, but necessary, aspects of what you offer, better?

By considering a bundle, we can design for positive outcomes in spite of issues we cannot design around. This is particularly relevant for healthcare (e.g., dental visits, medication taking) or activities requiring paperwork or queuing.

Stacks

A stack is pairing small activities together to produce a larger effect. For example, consider listening to podcasts or e-books while running. This allows you to learn and exercise at the same time.

Another example is drinking a glass of water every time you check your email. This one accomplishes the goal of keeping you hydrated while ensuring you don’t check your email too often (preventing frequent trips to the bathroom).

We can design our ‘stacks’. Practically, this means creating an inventory of jobs to be done and pairing them together when possible. By simply knowing what has to be done we can create stacks that get tasks done together.

Design Considerations

The key to both activities is to break down what has to be done and mapping it out. This can be done using simple paper, sticky notes, a whiteboard, or tools like Miro or Mural. This activity has the added benefit of articulating what has to be done. It is a useful awareness-building exercise to reveal all the tasks and subtasks involved in our work.

Once completed, consider pairing tasks and activities together. What pairs might work? What systems can we put in place to help make things easier?

After pairing, the next step is to prototype and evaluate Try things out. If you wish to drink water with email, consider setting a glass or your favourite mug beside your computer. Create the prompts to remind you to try things out. These are new behaviours so it may take some time to get it right. If, after many attempts, the behaviour hasn’t changed (the bundle didn’t take, the stack didn’t work), try a different one.

The key is to keep trying. Whether this is for individuals or organizations, the key is to keep trying and learning. The more attempts you make, the more you will learn and the more likely you will succeed.

This behavioural strategy is both simple and easy to try and test even if changes are often difficult. If you need help in making these changes and designing for them, contact us – this is what we do.

Using Theories for Change

by

The concept of Theory of Change is meant to provide program planners and evaluators with guidance on how to make sense of the mechanisms that guide how something transforms. Theory of Change as a technique is usually visual, participatory and consultative in nature, and is something that is developed alongside the program itself. What is given less attention are the change theories that underpin a Theory of Change.

Confused? You’re not alone.

Clarifying this is critical if your Theory of Change is to have any meaning.

Change Theories & Theory of Change

Change theories are based (largely) on psychological and sociological evidence applied to human behaviour at different levels. These levels include:

  • Individuals
  • Groups (e.g., teams, families)
  • Organizations
  • Communities
  • Societies & Systems

Some change theories will apply at all of these levels, while some are designed more specifically for a specific level. For example, Kotter’s 8-step model for leading change is primarily an organizational change theory.

Change theories are meant to describe what is to change and explain how change is to come about. These serve as the bedrock for what a Theory of Change is meant to convey. A Theory of Change links the structures and resources tied to a specific program, unit, or process with various change theories to explain why it should facilitate transformation.

Design Considerations

While we might have a viable change theory, we might not have a strong design. We often see organizations that seek to make changes that their programs or policies were not designed to accomplish. For example, cognitive rational change theories are built upon the basic assumption that knowledge informs attitudes and beliefs which influence behaviour.

If your program or service doesn’t have a design that facilitates information accessibility that allows your end user (those who are the focus of your service) to understand and use that information, it’s unlikely we will see change. Just-in-time knowledge delivery (e.g., doing a Google search) implies that people have the means (e.g., tools and technology), the literacy, the skills, and the opportunity to access and use that knowledge, otherwise it’s not likely to facilitate change.

Being able to locate a family doctor isn’t useful if you can only do it at a time and place when such a professional isn’t needed.

Theories of Change can help us plan our programs and service offerings and plot the points of impact, but without good change theories and design considerations it’s quite possible we won’t achieve what we set out to do.

Want to learn more about how to develop Theories of Change and what an understanding of social and behavioural science and design can do to help you learn and create impactful programs? Contact us. We’d love to connect.