5
Relearn
The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
—Alvin Toffler
While the first step of the Cycle of Unlearning—unlearn—is about what aspiration or outcome you want to achieve and why, the second step of the Cycle—relearn—is about the how. How do you start to relearn? It’s simpler than you may believe. You think big about that aspiration or outcome you want to accomplish. Next you start small by doing something that’s really easy to do. We take this approach because it enables people to get started easily and feel successful quickly. When paired with deliberate practice, this helps build confidence and gain momentum to take on greater, even more difficult challenges over time.
Relearning is a process of experimentation to try new behaviors and take in new data, new information, and new perspectives. By considering all this new input, we challenge our existing mental models of the world and adapt our thinking and behavior to achieve extraordinary results.
In many ways, we’ve stopped learning how to learn, so we have to relearn how to do it. Similarly, we have to relearn how we gather and respond to new information—how to see in a different way, listen in a different way, and then be open to changing the way we act as a result.
For example, when working with executives I always ask where they spend most of their time. Invariably, the answer is “I’m very busy and spend most of my time in meetings.”
“So how effective are those meetings?” I continue.
That’s when their faces sink.
“Not as effective as I would like” is the usual reply.
Researchers have found that middle managers spend about 35 percent of their time at work in meetings, while upper managers spend fully 50 percent of their time on the job in meetings. But, according to surveys, executives rate more than 67 percent of these meetings to be failures—resulting in a loss of more than $37 billion each year in lost productivity in the United States alone.1
So why does this practice of ineffective meetings go on—and on and on? Put simply, because people keep applying the same methods they have always used and observed. They become conditioned to what they and other people do, or what they believe brought them success in the past, even though these same methods often won’t bring them success in the future (if they ever did at all). They fail to recognize the issue, hold themselves accountable to outcomes, or tackle what they should unlearn and relearn. They don’t transform themselves and the organizations they lead as the world transforms around them.
In this chapter, I consider the mechanics of relearning, including how to reduce learning anxiety with safe-to-fail experiments that enable us to get out of our comfort zones and push our knowledge thresholds further. Edgar Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explained that “Learning anxiety comes from being afraid to try something new for fear that it will be too difficult, that we will look stupid in the attempt, or that we will have to part from old habits that have worked for us in the past.”2 I draw on the work of BJ Fogg, a behavior scientist, director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, and creator of Behavior Design as well as the Tiny Habits® method. Finally, I explore how you can start to experiment with new behaviors to succeed or fail gracefully—and relearn as a result.
Always remember, the best way to create new behaviors—for yourself and for your organization—is to demonstrate them yourself and show people you are committed to improving how you work, how your systems work, and how everyone could work. As a leader, people will follow your example, resulting in a ripple effect across the entire organization. Slowly, simply, and with small steps, everyone starts to relearn new behaviors, opening themselves up to new information, new insight, and new perspectives of the world around them.
This is how we relearn and take the next step: to break through and harness the power of information we gather to inform our decision making and adapt our thinking and behavior, aligned to the overall aspiration or outcome we wish to achieve. Here are the necessary conditions I have identified to take the second step in the Cycle of Unlearning: relearn.
The Three Necessary Conditions of Relearning
Effective relearning requires being very clear on exactly what it is that you want to achieve—and how you want to get there. Better decisions? A higher-performing team? Increased customer satisfaction? Whatever it might be, isolate your desired outcome and then quantify it. It’s not enough to say, “I want to get better.” Be very clear about exactly what you mean by “get better” and how much you want it to increase (or decrease). What are the actual behaviors you wish to observe and measure? Quantify and constrain them. A clear and concise outcome would be something along the lines of “increase customer retention by 15 percent in the next eight weeks,” or “improve employee job satisfaction by 25 percent over the next six months,” or “reduce our time of ideas to market by 20 percent in 200 days.” Your unlearn statement should be audacious, and your first small step actionable.
When you are clear about the aspirations and outcomes you desire, you’ll be able to properly explore the behaviors to attain them, determine the right steps to get there, and then know through measurement and data whether or not you’ve achieved them. Set big aspirations and outcomes, but start with small steps. If there is any question about what it is you hope to achieve, or if your proposed outcomes are fuzzy or hard to discern, then chances are you won’t actually do anything different at all—you’ll simply default to doing what you’ve always done, which won’t get you where you want to go.
Once you are clear on the aspirations and outcomes you hope to achieve, enlist other members of your team to assist along the way. They, too, will be inspired to pitch in and to become engaged in your efforts—further moving you toward the results you seek.
Necessary Condition One: You’ve Thought Big, Now Create Options for Small Steps
Let’s say you’ve decided that your aspiration or outcome is to increase customer retention by 15 percent in the next eight weeks. Using the approach I describe in this chapter, you won’t try to achieve this entire outcome all at once—this would actually be counterproductive to your efforts and those of your team. Instead, you’ll want to outline a series of small steps that will move you toward your desired outcome in an achievable, steady, and sustainable manner. This will enable you to create fast feedback loops and feel successful as you start to see progress toward your aspiration or outcome.
After you have clarified your desired outcome, you then brainstorm options for small steps that will take you toward your desired outcome. List them all. Challenge yourself to create as much optionality for yourself as possible. List new and old behaviors, and those in which you have skills, are a novice, or are simply curious to experiment with. The more options you put down, the more likely you are to find the behavior that will work for you. This is a method Fogg teaches in his Behavior Design training.
Now that you have created a number of options, identify the first small step you believe is aligned to achieving that high-level outcome you desire. Take that small step and celebrate the results, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. This challenges the brain’s natural resistance to uncomfortable, uncertain, or unknown tasks as you start to reprogram your neural pathways, engage in new behaviors, and relearn. The simple act of starting is progress, so celebrate it and feel successful that you’ve started. This small step is your first safe-to-fail experiment, which transitions you to a new way of thinking and behaving.
There is probably no better example of thinking big and starting small than when, in 1963, President John Kennedy announced that the United States would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s. This was a tremendously big vision, one that galvanized the entire nation. It was easy to understand, compelling, and huge. However, when NASA got to work to achieve it, the organization had to create many thousands of small steps to get there—including the incremental advances required to conceive, design, build, test, and ultimately deploy a wide array of innovative hardware, including rockets, lunar modules and landers, space suits, oxygen-generation systems, and even food for the astronauts to consume on their journey (and systems for them to dispose of their waste).
While you may not be planning to land a human being on the moon, breaking down your effort into small steps will help you achieve your aspiration and outcome, whatever it may be. Work backward from where you want to be to where you are today. What are the steps you believe you’ll need to take? What is that very first step?
Consider the Disney team that developed the MagicBand. They wanted to increase their customers’ intent to return to “the happiest place on earth,” so they reimagined the park experience and worked backward from there. They started small with the prototype of the MagicBand. They progressed to simulated walkthroughs with the executives, and then to working with a select group of 1,000 customers within a subset of resorts, restaurants, and rides, and so on—deliberately taking on greater and more difficult challenges.
Serena Williams wanted to win one more Grand Slam. She started small by working with her coach to introduce new, tiny changes to her footwork, shot setup, and speed of play. Each cycle, each experiment informed her thinking and guided her behavior for the next cycle and the next, toward extraordinary results.
Necessary Condition Two: Find the Right Behavior that Aligns with Helping You Achieve the Outcome You Want
One of the most difficult aspects of relearning is the problem of finding the right behavior to help you achieve the aspiration or outcome you want. In his approach to Behavior Design, BJ Fogg calls this behavior matching. The purpose of behavior matching is to find the right behavior that aligns to your level of motivation and ability as you aim to achieve the aspiration or outcome you desire.
Let’s say you and I both want to learn how to play guitar. We might go to the same teacher, who teaches us using the same methods, but you excel and I don’t. Why is that? It may have nothing to do with the teacher and everything to do with the differences between you and me. You might be, for example, more of a visual learner, while I may be more of an auditory learner. So when the teacher gave us both lessons by reading sheet music, you got it straight away—that prompt matched the behavior of learning music that was better for you. I, on the other hand, struggled because I need to hear music to learn it. The prompt of reading music didn’t solve the behavior matching equation for me to learn music.
Behavior matching often requires iteration and alignment to individual competencies, skills, and preferences. It’s another reason why you need to experiment with many behaviors because you may need to try various options to find the right behavior for yourself. Doing smaller, faster, cheaper iterations on different behaviors will help people find the one that works best for them more quickly. It’s also easier to recover from unwanted results, fail gracefully, discover that it wasn’t the right behavior, and move forward if you start small.
People have different behaviors that help them move toward the aspiration or outcomes they want. This is why individual and organizational unlearning is hard—you can’t use a unilateral behavior (or set of behaviors) that works for everybody because people are inherently different. You can, however, deliberately practice the systems of the Cycle of Unlearning and Behavior Design to help people find the right behavior that helps move them toward the aspirations and outcomes they want to achieve and aligns to their specific interests, skills, and inclinations—individually.
Necessary Condition Three: Starting Small Is Even Smaller than You Think
Let’s go back to my example of “increase customer retention by 15 percent in the next eight weeks.” Generally, when I work with clients to determine what small step they should start with, whatever it is they come up with is still too big. They leap to the big single-step solution and deconstruct it into a series of tasks to complete. They don’t scale back to small steps to experiment with and grow into. They define success as completing all their predefined tasks, not cultivating new behaviors by taking small steps and course correcting as they progress.
Ticking off tasks for big-bang solutions will not help you relearn; that should be unlearned. Focus on your high-level aspiration or outcome and try to create scaled-back steps toward it. This is what will help you validate your aspiration or outcome, your small step, and create evidence that you are on the correct path to where you want to be.
For example, many people harbor the aspiration to live a healthier life and be more active but struggle to know where to start. Some particularly ambitious individuals have set an aspiration to run a marathon in six months, which for many of us might seem extremely optimistic if not impossible. This ambition gave rise to the infamous “couch to marathon” training program, which promises that anyone can go from being a non-runner to a marathon finisher in six months or less.
So how do you start the program? You’ll be surprised (even relieved to know) it doesn’t start by getting off the couch and running an entire marathon, or a half-marathon, or even a mile. It starts really small, so it’s easy to do and start. The program begins by simply getting off the couch and walking for 10 minutes around the block—nothing too strenuous. Then each session deliberately take another small but increasingly challenging step forward, from 10 minutes to 13 minutes, mixing walking with light jogging. By doing this, you slowly and sustainably scale up to a marathon in six months.3
When sitting on the couch, running a 26.2-mile marathon in six months is thinking BIG, while walking around the block is starting small, smaller than you think might be necessary to attain your big aspiration. However, embarking on this easy-to-do behavior means you’ve started, and you can begin to scale from there.
Another key reason for starting small is to make people feel successful as quickly as possible, and to enable them to see the result of their new behavior as they progress toward their larger aspiration or outcome. This is best accomplished by starting really small and figuring out how that moves them toward the next higher-level challenge they wish to achieve.
The key to changing your behavior for the long run is to take small, steady, and sustained steps toward your desired aspiration or outcome, rather than large leaps that will be difficult to accomplish and less likely to stick. This means working backward and breaking large tasks and initiatives into smaller ones, each requiring some amount of effort, but not as much as a larger task or initiative.
What are the smallest steps that will keep you moving toward your desired aspiration or outcome, and ultimately to accomplishing it? Work backward from where you want to be, as the NASA engineers did: from a shuttle, from a lunar pod, from a satellite, from a rocket, from an engine, from a spark. Make a list and then make these steps even smaller. Ask yourself: What could I do in a month? What could I do in a week? What could I do in a day? What’s my smallest step? Write them down, quantify, and constrain them. Then get ready to get started.
Behavior Design and the Fogg Behavior Model
BJ Fogg has focused his study and research for more than 20 years on Behavior Design and exploring methods and models for creating new behaviors. Relearning requires adapting your behavior by discarding old ways of thinking and doing in favor of the new and discovering the new behaviors that will enable you to achieve extraordinary results. But, as we all know, discarding old behaviors and creating new ones is no easy task, whether in the workplace or in our personal lives.
There’s perhaps no better example of this than New Year’s resolutions. Whether it’s to lose weight, find a better job, pay off credit cards, start eating healthier, get fit, stop smoking, or any number of other resolutions we make each year, most are doomed to failure. In fact, research shows that by the second week of February, 80 percent of these resolutions are abandoned.4
Why? In many cases, people take on aspirations or outcomes that are too large, too dramatic, and too difficult for them to do. This slows the feedback cycle, increases the difficulty in making progress, and does not allow people to feel successful along the way. It’s far better to break large aspirations and outcomes into small, readily achievable steps that will continuously move you forward toward the success you seek—providing fast feedback mechanisms as you progress. Compounding results builds your confidence to deliberately practice tackling greater and more difficult challenges. Instead of trying to run a marathon tomorrow, start small by walking around the block tomorrow and then building each day from there—small step by small step.
According to Fogg, the path to success is to break down the aspiration into small, specific behaviors using a method he calls Tiny Habits. The key is to make something really easy to do, and then use your existing routine as a prompt for a new behavior. If, for example, I set an aspiration to regularly floss my teeth, instead of starting out flossing all of my teeth two or three times a day, I would start with an extremely small action and combine it with a prompt.
I might use the specific wording from the Tiny Habits method, which Fogg calls a “recipe.” For my flossing behavior, the recipe might be: “After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.” Brushing my teeth becomes the prompt for the new habit of flossing. And, after I perform this tiny behavior of flossing one tooth, I celebrate my success immediately—perhaps by looking in the bathroom mirror and saying out loud, “I’m awesome!” Doing this exercise creates a dopamine hit in my brain, reinforcing the new neural pathway. Over time, this habit will naturally grow and expand. As the behavior becomes a regular part of my routine, I can gradually increase the number of teeth I floss until I have incorporated all of them. Success! Then on to the next aspiration or outcome I wish to achieve.
According to Fogg, Behavior happens when three things come together: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt. These components comprise the Fogg Behavior Model, and it looks like this: B=MAP. As Fogg explains it, “Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur. If a behavior does not happen, at least one component is missing.” Let’s deconstruct Fogg’s formula and examine each component.
Motivation is the desire or willingness to do something, often driven by psychological factors. According to Fogg, three Core Motivators are central to the human experience: Sensation, Anticipation, and Belonging. Each of these Core Motivators has opposing sides:
• Sensation
• Pleasure
• Pain
• Anticipation
• Hope
• Fear
• Belonging
• Acceptance
• Rejection
Ability is having the skills and techniques required to do something. Fogg proposes that there are three ways to increasing someone’s Ability: train them and give them more skills, provide them with a new tool or resource, or make the target behavior easier to do. He suggests that training is the more difficult path. If people are willing to develop new skills, that’s great. However, many people resist or resent training. Instead, in many cases you should focus on making the target behavior easier to do. Here are the five factors to consider, according to Fogg:
• Time
• Money
• Physical effort
• Mental effort
• Matching existing routine
A Prompt is something external (an alarm, for example) or internal (walking by a refrigerator in the kitchen, for example) that acts as a trigger or cue for people to take action (run out of the building, in the case of an alarm, or have a piece of pie, in the case of the refrigerator). In Fogg’s Behavior Model, there are three kinds of Prompts:
• Facilitator (high motivation, low ability)
• Spark (high ability, low motivation)
• Signal (high ability, high motivation)
It’s common today for social media companies to send users messages that contain Prompts that are meant to compel recipients to take action. If you’re a Facebook user, you know that if you haven’t logged in for a while, you’ll start receiving e-mail messages from the company that are specifically designed to get you to log back in and use their platform. For example, an email might say that while you’ve been absent from the social media site, you’ve received 10 messages from your friends, someone has posted a new picture, and you have five new friend requests.
According to the Fogg Behavior Model, a particular behavior will occur when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt all come together at the same moment (Figure 5.1). One can visualize the model in two dimensions. On the vertical dimension, you have the motivation for someone to do a behavior, which ranges from low to high. On the horizontal dimension, you have their Ability to do the behavior. Instead of saying that someone’s Ability varies from low to high, Fogg conceptualizes Ability as a range from “easy to do” to “hard to do.”
FIGURE 5.1. The Fogg Behavior Model
As you can see, there is a relationship between how motivated people are and how easy things are to do. For example, let’s say I asked you to eat a new meal I had been working on. If I told you that it only required tasting a teaspoon of the food, because you’re highly motivated by being hungry and the behavior is easy to do, you’re probably going to do it when prompted to eat. If, on the other hand, I told you that the meal was super spicy, which you don’t really care all that much for, and if you had just finished a 10-course tasting menu and my dish is quite heavy, you are unlikely to eat when prompted.
Therefore, when you’re trying to design for new behaviors, it’s best to prompt the behavior by making it really easy to do and reduce reliance on high levels of motivation as a result. If something is really easy to do and people still don’t do the behavior, you’re probably trying to match the wrong behavior to them. They won’t get started, and they won’t be successful with it.
Of course, there are an almost infinite variety of possible behavior alternatives, and every one of us is unique—we have different drives, wants, and needs. Again, the key is behavior matching: matching people with the right behavior, something that they will be motivated, able, and ready to accomplish. When considering the behaviors that might be right for a particular person, Fogg suggests following these two maxims:
Fogg Maxim #1: Help people do what they already want to do.
Fogg Maxim #2: Help people feel successful.
Relearning in Action
As Fogg demonstrates, if you’re trying to create a new behavior, then the best place to start is to make something really easy to do. This means that you’re not relying heavily on motivation, which enables people to get started more easily. You think big about an aspiration or outcome that you want to accomplish, but you start small by doing something that’s really easy to do. First, by getting people to start small, you’re creating a safe-to-fail environment, and you enable people to feel successful quickly. Second, by linking their new behavior—the first small step—to the big aspiration or outcome they wish to achieve, you encourage them to feel a sense of progress toward the larger outcome, generating greater momentum, confidence, and success. This deliberate practice is paired with experimentation to find the matched behavior to help them take on increasingly challenging steps, aligned to achieve the desired aspiration or outcome.
Here’s an example. Whenever I coach executives, they always have an aspiration or desired outcome to increase their effectiveness. As we commence the Cycle of Unlearning, I ask them to get specific on what effectiveness means to them. Is it better individual, team, or customer outcomes they seek? I get them to tell their future story of what success might look like if they solved the challenge they decided to tackle really well. What would they be doing? What would be happening? I listen for the new behaviors, and then we quantify and constrain them—for example, a 50 percent increase in employee job satisfaction in the next eight weeks. We then decide where to start and what’s holding them back.
Identifying and writing down options for small steps that could make them successful—and the obstacles that are stopping them from getting there—is key. Invariably, the topic of the effectiveness of meetings—where they spend 50 percent of their time—comes up. I encourage the executives I work with to add an extremely small new behavior to their existing routine of meetings: to pause five minutes before the end of the meeting and ask each participant how effective the meeting was in achieving the outcomes that he or she wanted. Then go around the room without interrupting and listen to everyone’s response.
Adapting their behavior with this tiny tweak inevitably has a huge effect on the overall effectiveness of the team for a number of reasons. First, it demonstrates a new behavior in the leader. Second, it shows a leader modeling new behavior by actively sourcing feedback, measuring their effectiveness, and trying to improve their ways of working. This demonstrates that they wish to improve the system for the entire team. Finally, this can have a ripple effect across the organization because other people will recognize the new behavior in leadership and mimic it.
Doing something small can have a systemic-level impact and network effect, making something magical happen in the organization. As people share their takeaways from the meeting, you get to listen, learn, and test your assumptions of what you believe has taken place in the preceding investment of time together. Did it achieve the intended outcomes? Is everyone aligned? What are the gaps in terms of knowledge and alignment? As people share their viewpoints, new information is shared within the group, and you can check whether or not your implicit assumptions about the effectiveness of the meeting are accurate. This knowledge informs what behaviors you should adapt to improve your (and the team’s) effectiveness for the next meeting.
Stopping Behaviors
When we’re trying to unlearn, we’re also stopping behaviors that we do, realizing that some of these are prompted by very simple things, such as what people say. One thing I constantly coach executives and leaders to avoid is, when someone on a team says they don’t know how to do something, automatically responding with the answer. Providing the answer is the most counterproductive response from leaders to the situation. If you want to build capability, you should be teaching the person to problem solve and figure out the answer for themselves—not endlessly giving them the answers. Making people aware of the prompts and the behaviors they perform can also help them realize this leadership conditioning and modify their behavior accordingly.
The Fogg Behavior Model is also helpful if you’re struggling to stop a behavior. One tactic is to remove the prompt. Consider the executive’s unlearning statement from the last chapter:
I will unlearn decision-making in three months.
I know I have when:
• 100 percent of decisions are safe to fail.
• 100 percent of my direction is what is to be achieved with context of why it matters.
• 0 percent of my direction is how to achieve it—the accountable individual will decide.
• 0 percent of teams I lead demonstrate learned helplessness for their decision-making responsibilities.
When I sat down with the executive after she wrote this unlearn statement and started to consider the small steps she could take to achieve her desired outcome, she came up with great new behaviors to experiment with, gather new information, and relearn. She started with, “For the next day, when someone asks me what to do, I’m going to tell them to decide for themselves.”
Introducing this tiny new habit set a constraint on the executive to adapt her behavior. She saw immediate results from performing this tiny tweak, such as how team leaders responded and who took accountability and who didn’t, giving her new information and new insight into what each team member needed. It revealed who to encourage and who to coach. It was safe-to-fail because it was a one-day experiment. However, she discovered a tremendous amount about herself, her team, and the behavioral norms of the organization. All this new insight helped to inform her thinking, make her feel successful in trying something new, and adapt her behavior for the next step in pursuit of the higher-level outcome described in her unlearn statement.
From there, her next new habit and greater but small step was to preface all conversations related to decision making with her intent when interacting with her teams: “I’m trying to move our decision-making authority closer to where the information is richest, the context is best, and accountability lies with the person closest to that situation. Therefore, who do you think is the best person to make that decision? They should decide.” Slowly, but surely, she saw more and more team leaders take accountability for decision making, and, in turn, encourage their team members to take more accountability themselves and so on and so forth—a ripple effect across her entire organization.
A couple years ago, I wanted to increase my own effectiveness and how I used my time. I set an outcome to achieve and consider behaviors I should stop to help me get there and I wrote this unlearn statement:
I will unlearn stress in six months.
I know I have when:
• 100 percent of the time I go home feeling accomplished.
• 25 percent of my work is focused on personal development ideas.
I asked myself what I could do in a month, what I could do in a week, what I could do in a day, and what my smallest step was to get started. I listed the options I believed would help me, the obstacles that were holding me back, and the opportunities I was missing out on. Then I reviewed my own story of future success for the behaviors I believed would help me. I decided that I needed to spend less time on social media; it was something I did habitually that had very little return. Every time I picked up my phone to answer it, check the weather, get directions, or respond to email, I’d invariably end up on Facebook and go down the rabbit hole.
The story I told myself was that I will be more effective with my time, feel less stress, and work on the skills I feel help me grow. One of the biggest obstacles in my way was social media. I needed to remove the prompt for this behavior by deleting the Facebook app from my phone. I still had the prompt of answering my phone, checking email or doing something else on it, but I could no longer check my Facebook because it was no longer there. As a result, I stopped wasting time on social media, and found more impactful things to do with my time.
That, of course, didn’t stop Facebook from trying to get me to reengage with their platform. Facebook recognized that I was no longer exhibiting the behavior they desired of me (logging into their app on a regular basis), so they started sending prompts (emails) to compel me to log back in. But because I had low motivation, no matter how easy they made it for me to log in, I didn’t do it. I didn’t perform the behavior. They should recognize that the prompt they’re using to compel my behavior is not working and try another, as their current approach wasn’t working on me.
Marketers know the power of prompts, and many apps, social media sites, and online retailers use them astutely to drive acquisition, retention, and revenue by prompting customers to perform their desired behaviors—whether it’s logging back in, moving a product into a shopping cart and buying it, or influencing your thinking on critical decisions.
People are different. No two people are exactly alike in every way, so it’s no surprise that behaviors that work for one person may not work for another. You and I, for example, might have a similar aspiration to learn a new skill, but that doesn’t mean the same behavior that works for you will work for me. As a result, you might have to try lots of different behaviors to achieve the aspiration or outcome you want. This is why experimentation is important when you’re trying to relearn.
It’s equally important to make it safe to fail so people aren’t afraid to experiment. Making it safe to fail is about designing good experiments that create recoverable situations that don’t lead to massive catastrophes for individuals or their organizations as they try new methods to relearn. Again, think big about aspirations or outcomes—things we want to innovate—but start with small, tiny safe-to-fail experiments that lead to quick progress, results, and new information to help us succeed. For instance, executives lose only five minutes if they stop a meeting early to ask people if the meeting was effective, but they discover a huge amount as a result.
Thinking big but starting small is a great way to help people be courageous while avoiding catastrophic failure if they make mistakes. They tackle the challenge of behavior matching by solving the equation of what behaviors might work for them (or not) as they move toward their desired aspiration or outcome. Great leaders are great experimenters, but they also know how to manage the downside of risk well with safe-to-fail experiments. Some do it intuitively, while others are more intentional.
When leaders take small steps and relearn, it has a profound impact because people then propagate those behaviors up, down, across, and throughout organizations because that’s what good leadership behavior and norms look like in their company.