We are often encouraged to think big because it implies that we want to achieve great things. After all, if we had the choice, why wouldn’t any of us go big rather than small? But we have shown that when you have an ambitious, long-term objective, you are unlikely to meet your goal if you don’t get the small details right along the way. To achieve big, you need to think small.
The science
To understand why thinking small makes sense, we need to understand the science of decision making. That’s why, in writing this book, we have examined hundreds of studies that look at how we go about achieving our goals. In particular, we have seen the importance of understanding the different ways in which human beings process information and take decisions. We have a slow, reflective system; and we have a fast, automatic system. The slow system enables us to learn how to drive a car. The fast system allows us to drive effortlessly once we’ve mastered the art.
The key to thinking small is to understand how and when to deploy the slow system, and how and where to encourage the fast system to take over. This isn’t easy, because although the fast system enables us to live our lives in a complex world (for example, driving a car without having to think actively about using the pedals), it is also prone to make systematic errors. At the same time, we don’t have sufficient mental ‘processing power’ to take all decisions using our reflective system. We have limited cognitive bandwidth, and will fail if we go beyond what our attention span can handle. That is why the small details matter. Thinking small helps us to reach big goals by using the relative strengths of the fast and slow systems, while avoiding the pitfalls of both.
One of the most important illustrations of the fast and slow systems in practice is understanding the effect of time. Our fast system has a strong preference for rewards in the present and would prefer to delay effortful decisions till tomorrow. Our slow system is capable of understanding that there might be a more virtuous set of preferences, but only if gratification is delayed until tomorrow and more challenging decisions are grappled with today. Many of the tools of a thinking small approach are aimed at helping to lock us into this more virtuous path, including by co-opting the fast thinking system as a friend and not a foe.
Thinking small, reaching big
Thinking small provides you with the scaffolding around which you can build your goal and set about achieving it. It shouldn’t be thought of as a set of rigid rules, so don’t worry – you won’t have to apply each of the seven tools in every situation. But of course, the more supports you put in place, the stronger your scaffolding is likely to be.
Like any structure, you begin with the foundations. It starts with how you go about setting your goal in the first place. This was where we began to encourage you to engage, at a deep level, your reflective system. We encouraged you to spend time thinking about what you want to achieve in the first place, drawing on the evidence from the wellbeing research to help you focus on improving your life at work, rest and play. And we showed that breaking your goal down into manageable steps will help you to reach your ultimate objective faster. We then set out how to set yourself up for success by planning how to achieve your goal. In particular, we highlighted how you can use ‘if-then’ plans that cognitively link actions to specific moments in our daily routine. By repeating these actions in response to the same cues, we can start to develop habits that automate actions that might previously have been effortful and challenging. You will slowly find your fast system taking over.
We then set out the tools that will help further strengthen your scaffolding by keeping you motivated along the way. In helping you commit to achieve your goal, we wanted you to understand how you could overcome the tensions all of us encounter between our present and our future selves. By making a written, public commitment to a future goal, we are much more likely to follow through on our intentions. Next we highlighted that reward systems can be very effective, but they can also backfire if – yes, you’ve guessed it – you don’t get the small details right.
We also saw how most people seem to think of achieving goals as a personal betterment project. But that working with others not only makes achieving your goal more enjoyable, it also increases the chances of getting there. We also highlighted how vital good feedback is – because it’s hard to achieve anything if you don’t know how well you are doing along the way. In addition, we examined the ties that hold your scaffolding together. We saw that you need to undertake deep practice in order to really hone your skills and to experiment to find out what works best for your specific goal. And lastly, we encouraged you to take the time to reflect and celebrate when you do reach your goal, not only to enjoy the fruits of your labour, but also to learn the lessons that can help spur you on in your next challenge.
Common sense and counterintuition
Despite the evidence that shows how effective this set of tools can be, we know that there will still be those who will reject our methods. We anticipate that there are likely to be two central criticisms.
The first is that small thinking is fine for small goals. But sometimes you have to make big changes if you are to achieve anything substantial, and for this you need a completely different approach. People are likely to point to the emblematic examples to make the point. If we turn our attention to the unhappy subject of war for a minute, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Europe was on its knees, we needed a Marshall Plan (in which the USA gave $12 billion in economic support to help rebuild Europe) and not a set of little initiatives. Sometimes you need to take big, bold steps, it will be argued. Indeed, Tim Harford has recently argued that marginal gains work fine for continuous improvement (à la Sir David Brailsford and Team Sky), but huge leaps often come from more radical innovations and changes. To make a cycling comparison, he cites the Scottish racing cyclist Graeme Obree (nicknamed the Flying Scotsman), who twice broke the world hour record in the 1990s by radically changing his riding position and bike design.1
But the point is not that we shouldn’t set our sights high or make major changes. Far from it. It is that focusing purely on the lofty, distant goal is unlikely to help us work out how to get there. The Marshall Plan had a bold vision, but also a clear plan of how to execute it. And this is a really critical point. Lots of people have amazingly ambitious, long-term goals. But few make them happen. And that’s where small thinking comes into play. As we argued in the opening chapter (‘Set’), it’s not good enough to have a distant dream. The key is to connect that dream to the realities of daily life. So if you want to turbo boost your team’s performance at work, or even turn around a failing school or hospital, it is unlikely you will achieve these goals without identifying the series of small steps necessary to get there.
In addition, we have suggested that sometimes in order to achieve your goal you need to make some changes to your daily routines, so rather than just cutting down how much alcohol you drink you should in fact set up simple but bold rules such as stopping drinking alcohol at home. Or rather than just aiming to improve your work–life balance so you can see more of your family, you should commit to not responding to any emails after 7 p.m. or work from home two days per week. Or, if you’re trying to improve your school’s performance, you may want to redirect your funding from teaching assistants to invest in training that helps teachers to give better feedback to their pupils.
The second likely criticism is a more subtle, and perhaps pernicious, one. It is that small thinking is nothing but common sense. It’s not a huge surprise, some will argue, that breaking your long-term goal down into easy-to-manage steps will make it more likely you will achieve your goal. Nor will many people be amazed to learn that getting other people to help you achieve your goal will make achieving it more probable. Again, we agree. A lot of the lessons in Think Small are what we regard as applied common sense. The trouble with applied common sense, however, is that we often fail to apply it and, even when we do, we rarely do so in a consistent or disciplined way. This is something we have found time and again at the Behavioural Insights Team. Isn’t it obvious, we are asked, that people are more likely to pay their tax if you write them a letter that’s easy to understand (rather than a four-page letter full of complex legal language). ‘Yes,’ we say, ‘so why is it that we continue to send out millions of letters to people every year that are full of legal language that no one understands?’ Or isn’t it obvious that if you agree clear deadlines, roles and responsibilities, track progress and give specific, timely feedback that you will deliver projects on time and budget? Again yes, but why do so many projects over-run? Sometimes it’s difficult for us to apply the simplest of lessons and that’s why we have set out Think Small as a straightforward framework around which we can build our goals.
We have also seen, however, that many of the Think Small lessons are not so obvious. Some of the most important principles at the heart of this book are counterintuitive. Remember the very first section of the ‘Set’ chapter? We saw how we routinely pursue goals that are unlikely to improve our wellbeing and make us happier. It seems that we do not intuitively appreciate the crucial role that relationships, health and giving have upon our wellbeing. Or how we have a tendency to try and achieve several ambitious objectives all at the same time, without realizing that doing so is setting ourselves up to fail.
In the ‘Commit’ chapter, we saw how just telling people what our goals are can backfire, while making specific plans public and writing them down has been shown to have a big, positive impact. We saw too how appointing a loved one to be your commitment referee is not a great strategy – better to have a trusted third party, who is prepared to follow through with the consequences of your commitment contract. We showed how much more willing others are to help than we might imagine (even complete strangers); and how incentives can crowd out our intrinsic motivations if we don’t set them at a sufficiently high level, or – better – in a way that goes with the grain of our underlying objectives.
So it turns out that many of the lessons are not common sense at all. They go against many of our intuitions, which is why we have continually emphasized the importance of getting the small details right. If you do, while you may not become an Olympian or millionaire CEO overnight, you can make meaningful differences to your life and the lives of others.
Sharing and sticking
We thought long and hard about how to finish this book. In the end, though, we wanted to return to themes that have really resonated with us in writing it – which has been our joint goal over the past twelve months.
Perhaps the most important of these is the significance of other people in supporting us to achieve our goals. Think Small couldn’t have been written without the work of everyone at the Behavioural Insights Team and the thousands of people who have helped design and implement our many hundreds of trials over the years. It would also not have been possible without the support of Elaine and Sophie, our wives, who have given us support, counsel and feedback along the way. It was also evident, of course, in our choice to co-author this book. This allowed us to share ideas, challenge each other and make the task much more enjoyable. So we wanted to reiterate one of the best bits of advice we’ve ever been given: be selfish by helping and working with others.
Alongside urging you to work with others, we also encourage you to push yourself by taking on some things that we know will represent more of a challenge. This takes us to the final pieces of the puzzle, which are to keep practising, ideally by focusing on the improvements you can make to the things you find most challenging; and to keep testing, by trying new techniques that enable you to discover what’s working and what isn’t going so well.
We did exactly that when writing this book. We challenged ourselves by grappling with new ideas from the behavioural sciences. And during the writing process, we honed our working practices, testing several different ways of writing together before finding one that worked really well.2 The good news is that overcoming these challenges will help you to develop your own resilience and goal skills. As the great Professor James Heckman has said: ‘Skills beget skills.’ In other words, once you have successfully achieved one goal, you will have set up the scaffolding for achieving future goals. We certainly hope that is true for you.