Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

172 Pages·2017·1.19 MB·English

by  Owain Service

From Owain
To Sophie and Dylan
From Rory
To Elaine
From Owain and Rory
To our friends and colleagues at the Behavioural Insights Team
CONTENTS
Foreword by David Halpern
Introduction
1 Set
2 Plan
3 Commit
4 Reward
5 Share
6 Feedback
7 Stick
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Thinking Small in Action
Appendix 2: The Golden Rules
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
Think small to reach big
A
ll of us – from prime ministers, to parents, to public servants – often find
ourselves in situations in which we are trying to help someone achieve
something. It may be our friends and colleagues, our kids or our clients.
Sometimes it’s ourselves.
It’s a curious and wonderful thing about the human condition that we are often
a mystery to ourselves. We really do intend to live more healthily, to not get
irritable with those we love and to achieve the goals that we set for ourselves.
But the world is full of temptations, distractions and other pressures.
Furthermore, our heads and our lives are already full of well-worn pathways and
habits. As soon as our minds are distracted, as they inevitably will be, we find
ourselves back on a path we had meant to leave, our alternative goal receding
into the distance.
The Behavioural Insights Team, or Nudge Unit as many soon called it, was
established by the UK government in 2010. Its soft motto was formed by the
words in the Coalition Agreement that brought it into being: ‘Shunning the
bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support
and enable people to make better choices for themselves.’1
Whatever you think of the success or failure of that particular project, and the
role of the Behavioural Insights Team within it,2 it is hard to disagree with the
basic idea that, in principle, it’s good to ‘encourage, support and enable people
to make better choices for themselves’. As parents, friends and colleagues, we
do it all the time. The question is, could we do it better? In particular, could we
use the insights from the last fifty years of behavioural science to arm ourselves,
and those around us, with a better set of techniques and skills to follow through
on choices made, and achieve the things we want to?
I think the answer is ‘yes’ – and this is exactly what this book sets out to do. I
also think that putting these tools into the hands of everyone is important. I have
always felt strongly that the work of the Behavioural Insights Team, and
psychology more generally, should be open. This is not just in the interests of
institutional transparency, but because this is a body of knowledge that should be
‘democratized’, or open to all.
Behavioural scaffolding
Building new skills and habits, or achieving our (behavioural) goals in life,
involves very much the same art and logic that is required for building a
structure. From a simple arch to the Statue of Liberty, building structures
requires much planning and careful construction. When it’s all complete it’s easy
to forget the delicate stages and phases it went through to get there.
If any structure is to survive, be it behavioural or physical, it needs strong
foundations, and to be wisely placed, to take the weight and stresses it will be
subject to. As you start to build, its cement and structure will be weak. To
succeed, you will need scaffolding to support its initially delicate joints and
links. You will need to keep on building the scaffolding too, protecting your
structure from the wind and rain as you go. But do it right, and the time will
come when the scaffolding and covers can be dismantled. Your building will
stand tall and strong on its own, serving its purpose, whatever that may be.
In this book, Owain and Rory have taken the lessons of the wider
psychological literature, and of the Behavioural Insights Team itself, and turned
them into the steel poles and joints that you will need to build ‘behavioural
scaffolding’ of your own. Just like steel scaffolding, it takes a certain skill and
plan to put it together. Look at scaffolding when you pass it next and admire the
techniques used to make it strong enough to support the mightiest of structures.
It is braced and connected with a quiet beauty and certainly not randomly
scrambled together. This book seeks to give you those same skills, as well as the
components you need for your project.
One of things I hope you’ll find as you read Think Small is not just that you’ll
succeed in some goal that is important to you – or someone you are trying to
help – but also that you will acquire a set of skills that you will subsequently find
helpful in many areas of your life. This is certainly what the psychological
literature suggests.3
It’s sometimes remarked that our kids don’t come with manuals – neither do
we. It’s a part of the human condition that our minds and behaviours are
complex and multifaceted. Our ‘instincts’ only take us so far in trying to figure
out what drives what we do, how best to shape it, or how our best-made plans
can be blown off course by forces and habits within ourselves as much as around
us. Hopefully this book will help you to succeed in something that is important
to you, or someone close to you.
I also hope it will help the many people in public services and other
professions whose job it is to help others achieve their goals. Teachers, doctors,
social workers – you are the army of good-natured ‘nudgers’ whose skills and
hard work help the rest of us learn more and live better. If this book, and the
research that stands behind it, can help you to do your work even a little better,
then it is among the most important things the Behavioural Insights Team has
yet done.
Good luck – nudge well and wisely!
David Halpern
Chief Executive, Behavioural Insights Team
INTRODUCTION
The Job Centre
Paul1 is sitting in a job centre in Essex, on the outskirts of London, waiting for
his appointment. Paul is twenty-four, has had a few brushes with the law and has
never managed to hold down a job. In the past, that didn’t matter. He’d usually
found work pretty easily, bouncing between a range of formal and informal jobs.
But times have changed. It is May 2011, in the middle of what has become
known as the Great Recession, and the employers that would have taken him on
in the past are much more cautious now. Paul hasn’t had a job for seven months
and things are becoming very difficult for him – he’s got a young daughter to
support and is starting to fall behind on his rent. He’s desperate to find a job, so
has swallowed his pride and reached out to the job centre for help.
Across the desk from Paul is Melissa. She has spent years helping people to
find work, but has become increasingly frustrated by the system. She spends her
days assisting jobseekers to fill out endless numbers of forms. Forms to calculate
your income; forms to get you onto the benefits system; even forms to confirm
you are who you say you are on the other forms. Over the previous year, Melissa
had seen hundreds of people’s motivation and confidence slowly drain away.
She wanted to do more to help, but often felt like she was battling the system,
the economy and sometimes even the people she was trying to help.
All that changed for Melissa and Paul when they began taking part in a new
initiative. It wasn’t your typical multi-million-pound project, supported by a
team of brash consultants and lots of new technology. Instead the focus was on
the small changes Melissa could make to the way that she helped Paul and others
to find work. Though the changes were small, when added together they would
reset the way that Paul would think about looking, preparing and ultimately
securing a job.
Melissa would normally have begun by asking Paul to start filling in forms.
But now she was encouraging Paul to think about why he was at the job centre
and why finding a job was important to him. He told her about how he wanted to
provide for his family. Melissa wasn’t used to having the time or incentive to
have these conversations, but found it came very naturally to her. She then asked
him to set himself a specific goal for getting back into work. Times were tough,
so Melissa encouraged him to be ambitious but also realistic. Paul set himself a
goal to find a job in the next three months, ideally in the construction industry.
Paul was then encouraged to break his goal down into steps, like improving
his CV, replying to job adverts, asking his friends who were in the trades to
speak to their bosses, and getting the new tools he needed for the construction