Behavior Change IRL

When I was 16 years old, I trained a mouse to press a bar in a Skinner box .?If the mouse qualifies as an “individual,” then I have been involved with individual and organizational behavior change for?almost 50 years.?

I decided?to list all the approaches I have been exposed to and employed to support?movement from a current reality to a preferred future both for myself and my clients.?The length of the list surprised me. And because of the way my brain works, I had to try to create a taxonomy to organize them.?

Any exploration of behavior change space must?include a deep bow to the granddaddy of them all: Behaviorism.?And since that was my first exposure in that High School class, I will begin there too.

But as I organized the other approaches to behavior change that I have encountered, I realized there was a lot beyond Behaviorism.?Moreover, even recent, best-selling treatments of this domain like Switch and Atomic Habits skip many helpful approaches.??

One yawning gap stems from the fact that traditional and modern treatments of behavior change seem to have this implicit assumption that if we?get the environment right...and the motivation right...and get the obstacles out of the way...then getting from where you are to the new behavior should be a layup.??

Right.

Remember before GPS was widely used, you would ask someone for directions? After describing the way to go, they would tack on that little curse, “you can’t miss it.”?I always hated hearing that because, well, yes you can miss it.

It struck me that the popular recommendations were not fully addressing common behavior change challenges that I and my clients face. Meaning they aren’t really addressing behavior change in real life (IRL).?

For example, here are a few challenges popular treatments leave out:

• they don’t talk about how to find the right objective for you in the first place.?Popular writers (and many coaches) just assume you know the objective and don't question it.??
• they don’t provide much guidance when you miss your objective beyond just “getting back on that horse.”
• Nor do they talk about what to do with that nagging, pernicious voice in your head that not only keeps reminding you that you’re not going to succeed, but also that you have no business even trying, and oh, by the way, you are also a waste of oxygen.??
• Nor do they talk about, perish the thought, if and how to decide when to stop pursuing what you have been pursuing. Believe it or not, but quitting is often a good idea, but few talk about how to think about that.

Given the history, extensive research support, and general pervasiveness of Behaviorism’s principles, what else would one need to help a client bring about change? Quite a bit actually, because 1) we aren’t mice or pigeons and 2) real Life isn’t a Skinner box.??

A Proposed Taxonomy of Behavior Change Approaches

In my mind, you would lose a lot of credibility in your exploration of approaches to behavior change if you didn’t start with Behaviorism and the work of B.F. Skinner .??

You can criticize whether his approach can be applied to all aspects of learned behavior, as Noam Chomsky has .?However, most of what you are using to change your own behavior and nudge your partner’s, your children, and your clients, if you have them, can be traced back to Skinner’s research and insights.??

While we have to start with Skinner and Behaviorism, no one reading this wants to read a treatise on it.??

I always think it is useful to see if you can summarize something in an out-breath.?Here is what I arrived at for Behaviorism:?If you want to change your behavior or someone else’s 1) explicitly define the behavior you want, and 2) align the external environment so that it encourages the change.?

Personally, I don’t think enough emphasis is placed on #1.?To remedy that, later, I will share some approaches that do emphasize more explicitly defining the behavioral objective.??

And #2… align the external environment so that it encourages change…is incredibly multi-faceted, with each environmental “lever” having multiple, nuanced variations.??

For example, the “environment” can include reminders that increase conscious awareness of the desired change, removing barriers to the new behavior, positive and negative reinforcements to increase the motivation to work towards the desired behavior, and many others.??

Given the history, extensive research support, and general pervasiveness of Behaviorism’s principles, what else would one need to help a client bring about change? Quite a bit actually, because 1) we aren’t mice or pigeons and 2) real Life isn’t a Skinner box.???

I have assembled 25 approaches that can be used to support behavior change and long-term goal accomplishment.?Here is my proposed taxonomy for grouping those various approaches:

?I. Start Before You Start

?II. Focus on Both the Destination and the Journey

III. Align the External Environment So It’s Right…for You

IV. Reduce Any Drag from your Inner Environment?

?V. Access the Deeper Pools of Motivation

VI. Change the Game

II and III are directly connected to the core principles of Behaviorism, but the other four sections provide anyone trying to make change IRL with levers they can use to avoid getting stuck or to get traction when they do.

Though it sounds arrogant, I can confidently say that if you stay with me to the end of this series, you will absolutely add to your understanding of behavior change. I can say that because I was steeped in this area before I began, and I learned a lot writing it.

Before concluding this introduction which will constitute Part 1, here are a few frames and disclaimers.??

First, with respect to the taxonomy, it is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.?It is just a way of organizing what’s being used by individuals and those supporting behavior change.?

Second, in terms of the approaches, I cover a lot of ground and I list even more approaches at the end that I did not cover.?I am not claiming to have covered everything, just the ones I have leveraged over the last 50 years.

Third, some of the approaches I listed as separate are insufficient to drive substantive behavior change in and of themselves…they only work in combination with other approaches…and hence perhaps should not be listed.??

The third point is true but ignores the fact that some of the most successful approaches to behavior change, like Alcoholics Anonymous and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, aggregate multiple levers to support and drive life-saving changes.?To my way of thinking, the more, even narrowly focused approaches you know, the more likely you are to be successful.

Fourth, as a scientist, it is rather astonishing how little research there is behind many of the individual approaches I list that purport to help accomplish behavior change.?This is not completely true and I will overview an area that for which a lot of research has been done.?However, coaching methods are a target rich environment for up-and-coming Ph.D. students looking for dissertation ideas.

Fifth, a word about individual differences:?many people struggle, at least some of the time, to achieve their behavioral change objectives.?There are setbacks and resets, and some are never able to successfully make the change.?

Others hardly struggle at all.?They set a target, do what they need to do, and make steady progress. They don’t need all the approaches I present here.?They barely need any support.

Think of this as a menu of options available to you, whether you find the change process easy and are just looking for a few best practices, or you find it harder and are looking for all the support you can get.?

Finally, as this is an overview, an assemblage of approaches, I usually just give a brief description of a particular lever and share links. But I do take a deeper dive on a few approaches that I think are particularly powerful, might be somewhat less familiar, and were thus worth exploring further.??

Who should keep reading this series and what might you get out of it?

Researching and assembling this has been quite an undertaking and I am going to cover a lot of ground here.?It won't be for the faint of heart.

You should read this if the behavior change space interests you, if you are a coach or a therapist and you work with clients who want to change their behavior, or if you are looking to give yourself an edge and add to your repertoire of how to change your behavior beyond what you might have been exposed to in the past.

Though it sounds arrogant, I can confidently say that if you stay with me to the end of this series, you will absolutely add to your understanding of behavior change. I can say that because I was steeped in this area before I began, and I learned a lot in researching and writing it.

Here is the link to Part 2: Behavior Change IRL: Start Before You Start

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is the President of Adsum Insights and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond , a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get off to the best possible start in their new job.