Behavioural Sciences in Corporates - Part 13 - Stairs or Elevator...

Dear Readers - The first vaccine shots were given in the western world and mega plans are afoot to undertake one of the largest inoculation exercises in history. Enough is already being written about what a year 2020 has been, so I'll not contribute more to that. But let's look at the future and assuming we'll all be back to being in public places soon including our offices, I thought of covering an interesting topic about "behavioural change" in support of the goals that each of us may have set for 2021. Welcome to the 13th in a series of articles on joining the dots between Behavioural Sciences and Corporate world. Feel free to read, share previous articles.

Moving on from Philosophy of Sciences to now Accounting my journey of finding a problem worthy of research continues and it feels like progress is happening (more on that in coming months).

This article is based on a recent research paper " Behavior change" by Angela Duckworth, James J. Gross. Based on my reading of the paper, I cover concepts of conflicting goals, immediate vs. delayed rewards and leave you with thoughts of how to avoid falling into the trap of recursive bad behaviours / habits in your own personal and professional life.

It ain't easy to change behaviour

Let's accept it, behaviour change is difficult but not impossible. For example, how many of us have found ourselves making a New Year resolution to start a physical activity after month's of lockdown (measure the waistline now -:)), eat a balanced diet only to find ourselves drifting away from it after a few days of enthusiasm. When we fail to make healthy choices, it is common to blame our lack of willpower. However, any successful behaviour change calls for self-initiated and other initiated actions (i.e. based on our ecosystem).

Stairs or Elevator

At our workplace, we almost always find ourselves having to make a choice of taking stairs vs. elevators. Metaphorically, this is the equivalent having to take easy vs. difficult path. However, it is a bit more intricate, so let us focus on a couple of underlying phenomena to help make fundamental changes in our behaviour.

Consider the figure below... According to Duckworth, Gross "taking the stairs is a behaviour that advances the enduringly valued goal to increase physical activity. In contrast, taking the elevator is a behaviour that advances the momentarily more rewarding goal to be comfortable. These goals conflict insofar as it is impossible to both take the stairs and the elevator at the same time."

This fundamental difference in the timing of reward i.e. instantaneous vs. delayed can make a huge difference in our behaviours. Let me take a few examples:

1. Instilling Continuous learning habits vs. procrastinating upskilling oneself
2. Undertaking good practices in software design and development vs. taking shortcuts under the garb of speeding up delivery
3. Eating healthy food vs. snacking up during WFH when junk food is physically accessible
4. Reading a story out to your kids or having a healthy conversation with your spouse, friend (long term healthy relationships and lower stress levels) vs. spending time on social media (instant gratification)

Why not switch to the stairs?

So, knowing we should take stairs, why don't we actually do it and "why don’t goal conflicts resolve spontaneously in favour of the behaviour that, upon reflection, we know is better for us in the long run?"

The answer according to Duckworth, Gross's paper is "present bias, the tendency to care more about our current experiences than about what might happen to us in the future."

There's another interesting phenomenon, whereby "it is easy to imagine that our future self will take the stairs on all future days, thereby licensing the present self to take the elevator now—when, in fact, such overly optimistic projections are unlikely."

Few examples again:

1. I'll start exercising from next week as soon as I finish this important work assignment
2. I'll start eating healthy food from tomorrow but let me dig into this slice of pizza
3. I'll finish that data science course later as I'm too busy to focus on it at the moment

What if, there's no tomorrow i.e. you get a high BP because of that work assignment stress or eating pizza or you get outpaced in your current role by that fresh graduate who's much more adept at solving data science problems?

The promise of starting good behaviour in future shouldn't give us a default license to indulge in bad behaviours today. Unfortunately, for many of us, that future doesn't arrive and we keep up our bad behaviour.

Avoiding the traps

Having now covered how our mind works between short term and long term rewards, how should one change the behaviour? Duckworth, Gross provide an iterative cycle of "Situation, Attention, Appraisal, Response". They call this the "process model of behaviour change" wherein behavioural responses are the outcome of a recursive cycle in which features of our objective situation are selected for attention and appraisal, which then may lead to a response. In the case of plans, personal rules, and habits, the perception of a situational cue may trigger a response directly, bypassing the appraisal stage, as indicated by the dotted line.

The recursive cycles that generate behaviour can come into conflict. For example, it is possible to experience, at the very same time, the impulse to take the stairs and the impulse to take the elevator. Our mind takes the shortcut of "taking it easy" and so the trick is to objectively pay attention to the situation, appraise it and then give response taking into account the short term (sacrifices) and long term goals (benefits).

What's your 2021 goal?

Having given these tools and tips, let me throw you a challenge - pick up one personal or professional goal for 2021, apply the recursive cycle every time you get a feeling of regressing back to bad behaviour and tell your brain to think differently and try and stick to the good behaviour.

I hope that this gives you enough motivation to introspect during the EOY 2020 period, do a self-assessment of what changes you'd like to bring about in order to stick to achieving your 2021 goals. It is going to be an exciting year ahead and hopefully, we'll all be wiser from the pandemic and embrace good behaviour and habits towards a sustainable future.

Speaking for myself, I am undertaking Doctoral studies for achieving longer-term goals rather than for immediate rewards and I surely intend to make strong progress in that direction in 2021.

Behavioural Sciences in Corporates is a fascinating area and there's so much for us to learn and share with each other. As always, I sincerely welcome your feedback and comments on this series.