Hey guys and welcome back to ChangeWired podcast, the podcast for leaders, founders, change agents everywhere and anywhere, Humans who are committed to growing what matters Growing yourself, your community, your vision, your character, your career, Growing, your career growing. We are here about the tools, the systems, the most effective concepts and practical takeaways and things you can build to help you change more effectively and help change stick again, whether you're creating change in yourself or those around you. And by the end of today's podcast, you're going to have a very practicable, simple, research-backed, very important tool in your toolkit for change which will help you to help yourself to change and do hard stuff when the going gets tough, as they say, and also this will help you to help others to change and stick to change when things get hard. And you know, I truly believe that it's important to nail just not just the simple stuff, but the hard stuff, the stuff that somebody has to get done in order for the system, for things, to get better. Somebody has to do the hard work as well, not just simplifying, looking for shortcuts and figuring out how to make everything more optimized right Sometimes. You just have to do the hard work and do it consistently. So how do you do that? How do you help yourself and others to do the hard work when you don't feel like it, when you don't have time, when it's inconvenient, when you don't have energy? How to do that? So keep that in mind. That's what we are going by the end of this very short podcast.
But I want to start with a phrase that I got from the book by Dan Heath. He is a researcher, a journalist. He writes an amazing book about systematic change, about change in general, how to change people, how to change the world, how to solve problems, and he has this amazing book Upstream how to solve problems before they happen. And I love this phrase in the book your zip code is more important than your genetic code. Again, your zip code is more important than your genetic code.
There is plenty of research and data showing that what matters, what seems to have the greatest outcome on people's life, is not their internal potential, their talent, but the ecosystem that allows, that promotes, certain innate talents or predispositions to either flourish, to sprout or not. I like this comparison, this metaphor of a garden or a plant. If you want to grow a beautiful garden, first you want to take care of soil, Because even the most amazing trees, seedlings and seeds will not grow if you put it in a dry soil that has very few to none nutrients and it's in the place where there is no rain, no sunshine, right. It's very hard to grow a garden like that, even with the best seeds kind of like plants and without proper ecosystem, without proper setup of what's around us, it's very hard for our talents and our innate abilities to deliver results, effectiveness or all the great stuff that we see in the world. Think about Silicon Valley and hot spots of entrepreneurship like that. It's not that the people who are there that are special, it's the ecosystem that is special, it's the resources, the connection. Yes, you are surrounded by like-minded people. It's the finances, it's the learning opportunities, it's the finances, it's the learning opportunities, it's the conversation that you overhear in coffee shops. All of that create a perfect environment for a plant of entrepreneurship to spread.
Speaker 1You think about blue zones. If you don't know what it is. Those are areas and you can Google them everywhere. On Wikipedia, you can chat GPT, obviously.
Speaker 1Blue zones places on Earth that were centenarians, were people who lived to 100 and more without diseases, where those people are concentrated, blue zones, and they studied those zones and they figured out certain aspects that those zones have in common. But what's even more interesting for me is there were experiments and there is a documentary on Netflix with the guy who authored the book Blue Zones. So there were experiments where they tried to manufacture blue zones in areas which geographically didn't look much like blue zones in the climate etc. But because they figured out that social aspect of it and the ease of accessibility of certain things like walking spaces were the most important things, so they tried to manufacture those blue zones. And it's hard to obviously measure whether people will live to one hearted or not. So they just measured health outcomes in certain communities. People will live to one hearted or not. So they just measured health outcomes in certain communities and they redesigned communities. They created more walking spaces, they made healthy food more prominent and more available, they created those communal spaces where people could make friends walk together, exercise together, right? So they did these experiments and they improved health outcomes without having to preach to people what is healthy or not healthy for them. So it's the ecosystem.
Speaker 1It turned out that places geographically don't matter that much when for us humans, social, environment and ease, accessibility of things is so much more important, right? So next time you're trying to preach to people to yourself, don't look at appreciating people or changing people's minds. You know, in change management, change leadership, in the corporate environment, they always talk about how you need to communicate really well, why it's needed to be done and how it's going to be done and what it means to people, etc. Yes, but what matters even more is actually the ecosystem you create, so the things that you want to do become easy, accessible, defaults, visible. So it's almost like a foolproof system for people to do the right things.
Speaker 1I always give the simple example of a fridge to do the right things. I always give the simple example of a fridge. If you put all the healthy food, all well prepared and deliciously cut and accessible, and make it super easy, and you remove all the junk from there, guess what people are going to eat. Or guess what your kids, your family, are going to eat. If you put a fresh bowl of fruit which is washed, you know, pre-cut if needed for the day, If you put that out, guess what people are gonna do. They're not gonna be going and looking for some junk. Uh, they're gonna eat what's available. And the same in the work environment right. So it's the ecosystem and that has been proven by so much research and again upstream book by dan he's how to solve problems before they happen. Uh, they talk a lot about ecosystem, about designing the environment and in general, Dan Hees writes a lot about that.
Where I live, there is a gym and there is a group of people they have WhatsApp group, it's called Sunrise Squad, and adults in their 40s, 50s, 60s and they get together for workouts and they do stuff, fun stuff, fit stuff on the weekends and they celebrate birthdays and holidays together in a fit and fun way and they don't preach to each other. I joined this group but I don't do much with them. But it's interesting to watch them how they don't again talk about, you know, we need to be healthy or we need to get fitter. They just do stuff and they created an easy, accessible culture of health, wellness and fitness, Silently promoting this idea of people like us do things like this and we exercise together. We do other mouthier stuff together and whoever enters or joins this ecosystem is going to do that without them again having to talk to them about those workouts or doing stuff. That is good for you.
Speaker 1It's about, again, the ecosystem and for us, human beings, social aspect of it is one of the most important aspects and that's why people are a part of your ecosystem. So there have been a lot of studies and research showing for example, there is hard data on when you sit in proximity to a high performer, you're going to be more productive, more effective, more motivated, more energized by about 15% and there was what is it? Five feet of a high performer. But then the opposite is also true If you sit in the proximity of a low performer, you're going to be 30% less productive, less effective. For high performer it's 15%, For low performer it's 30%. We are like they call it also the chameleon effect. We absorb the energy, the vibe, the practices and rituals and, yes, even performance from the people who are around us. That's how social aspect, how strong social aspect is.
Speaker 1So when, again, designing for change, for health, for wellness, whether that's for yourself or for people around you, for your company, for your community, Don't talk about that. Create rituals, Create a social accountability. People like us do things like this. Create ease, visual reminders, a corner for meditation or a pillow for meditation or the stretching corner, some creative routes around your office, around the building, so people walk more right, Put some stuff I don't know where the staircase is, so people certain sayings about hard work, about challenges. So walk there more often to show people by example. All of this matters a lot more, creating this ecosystem environment than, again, you preaching and communicating, however clearly.
We absorb things by osmosis beliefs. Even our work ethic leaves even our work ethic. But I also want to, as promised, I want to focus on something else. I want to focus on what stops us from doing the hard thing. We created these goals, these visions, these north stars, this ambition for us or organizations or people around us, and then, when the going got tough, we didn't follow through. See, this morning actually not this morning, it was yesterday night I read a newsletter from BJ Folk, one of the top researchers of behavior change, and in the newsletter he had this image which he trademarked and it's called Ability Change and Ability Link.
Speaker 1Oh no, Ability Chain, Ability Chain. And in that chain he has five links Money time, physical effort, mental effort and then routines. Money time, physical effort, mental effort and then routines. And in the new study he talked about how, when he proposes organizations, for individuals or groups to design for habit, for behavior change. You need to make sure. You need to think of what gets in the way when you have no time, when you have no money, when you are low in physical and mental effort and energy, when you are out of your routine. Like, what's your plan for that? Motivation is not consistent, Motivation is not reliable. So he recommends to design behaviors for ease first. Effectiveness and ease in order to even have a chance for any behavior to stick. So start small, start very easy. So none of this links in the ability chain money, time, mental and physical effort, routine or getting out of a routine. So these affect your plan the least.
Speaker 1But what I expanded on and what I want to add here, Back to this idea that but yeah, we have to do hard stuff as well, and sometimes we just don't have the time to build it up, even though it is a lot more effective. So what do you do when you actually have to get people done, get yourself to do hard stuff consistently? And that's where I add guardrails to this ability chain, created by PJ Fogg and guardrails and it's not a new idea guardrails are things that prevent us from falling, from doing worse when we are at our worst. They help us to do better when we are at our worst. So next time, when you design for behavior change okay, now you have your aspiration, now you have your goal, now a set of behaviors that you want to do, that you want your community to do, your company to do, people you lead. So you have a set of behaviors and those are not easy and you understand that they're hard, Instead of thinking how can I motivate my people?
Speaker 1Again, remember, motivation is very inconsistent and it's hard to design for, Not impossible, and there are companies who help with that, who do that. We need to learn how to increase our motivation as well. But it is inconsistent and we need to create systems, guardrails, so the behavior we want people to do is easier, more accessible or people are more accountable, even when they have no time, no money, very little physical and mental energy, and it's very inconvenient. So what's the plan for them for the worst kind of circumstance? What's the plan for when things go south?
Speaker 1As ambitious, inspiring, motivated leaders, you often think well, I want people to do this, how do I motivate them? How do I create more incentives? But a very, very essential question to ask is but okay, what if people not motivated don't have time, energy and don't want to do the thing, how do I ensure that they actually still do at least the minimum stuff? And that's where guardrails come into play. And what are guardrails? Again, it's the systems that prevent us from falling metaphorically. But to give you more examples, in a company, it's those things. When, let's say, you want people to not check email at certain hours. Let's say you want people to not check email at certain hours, then you create a system that doesn't allow them to check their email or their Slack or whatever that is, at certain hours.
Speaker 1If you want people to be more customer-centric but they might not be in the mood to speak well to the customer and to go to extra mile, now what is a system that you can put in place to make this behavior almost impossible to fail? Maybe there should be some accountability, some reporting system. Like many companies do not reviews, but when a customer has to evaluate how the person on the other side of the call performed, Like what are the systems? Maybe accountability you remember how we talked about how social aspect is so important. Maybe it's having a not stand up Monday morning but stand up at the end of each day to keep people accountable. Or maybe midday, like, how are we doing Customer centricity? What did you do? What did you do? How did you handle this or this or that situation? Right? Make people share and make people more aware. Make people feel more accountable. So even when they're not motivated, they still going to follow through because they feel accountable. That's why people hire coaches. It's like, yeah, I'm not going to feel motivated, but this person will check in with me and I will feel bad if I, day after day after day, say that I'm not able to do that, even though I said it's important and I'm going to work on my goals.
Speaker 1Social accountability Don't underestimate the effect of it. Guardrails at home or again workplace for your family. If you're trying to eat healthy, eliminate all the bad stuff, and that's when it's night and you're bored and you're hungry and you're stressed, you don't reach out for that cookie, because the cookie is at the store where you have to go and that additional work will prevent you from, so to speak, falling. And if you want to not skip your workouts, who can you make? Keep yourself accountable. Maybe a few training sessions, maybe a workout, maybe somebody calling you like hey, Angela, you waking up, are you going and working out and make it a call from a person. Who do you feel bad if you don't follow through? Who do you don't want to look bad in front, right, if you're a leader?
Speaker 1Like, how can you keep your people accountable because they keep you in high regard, so how can you check in with them regularly to make sure that they feel like they are accountable? So those are guardrails where you ask okay, my people will be busy, overwhelmed, overworked, not have a mental, physical energy and I'm going to be asking them often to do what's inconvenient and uncomfortable and I still want them to do it. Like, what are the systems in place to ensure that? And it is a much more important question for long-term follow-through and getting the results, the ambitious results that you want. It is a much more important question to ask what we're going to do when we're all at our worst then, what systems we have in place, what ecosystem we have in place. It is a much more important question than asking how do I motivate my people? Because, yes, you can motivate your people and the strong enough Y will carry people through the hardest times, but they're still going to have a lot, a lot of weak moments and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to design for optimal motivation. That's where you want to create systems, guardrails which don't allow people to fall.
Speaker 1And that is again the principle also for systematic change, for self-change. Because if you think about your last misstep or your last failure where you didn't show up as you wanted to show up, what did happen? Was it because you lost motivation or was it because you didn't have time, you were busy, you were overwhelmed. Your physical, emotional, energy, it was out of routine, it was inconvenient. So now that you know that, how can you create a system, how can you put a system in place to make sure that you follow through, even when you feel like it's the worst day ever?
Speaker 1So that is the main takeaway of today, guys, Whenever you design for change, for personal, for changing your team, for changing your community, in your family, in your company, your inspiring goals will keep. People will start the movement, the going. But to keep the going, even when the going gets tough, you need to have guardrails, systems in place which will answer the question how do I make people follow through, how do I make myself follow through with action when I'm and people are at our worst, Whether that's lack of time, of money, of physical, mental, energy, inconvenience all of this will break the most audacious goals and visions. And that's it for today, guys, Guardrails. And we are not what we aspire to be, but based on research and data, our ecosystems. So be good, be great at designing ecosystems and see how easier it's going to be to change people's minds and help people take action. Thank you, guys, for listening. I thank you for tuning in and being such an amazing willing to learn and change and get out there and do the hard work.
Speaker 1Change agent Guys, please do a rate review our podcast on iTunes, on Spotify, on Stitcher, on Podcast Addict, wherever you find your podcast. It means a lot. That's how we change the world, a couple of years at a time. Share this podcast episode with your family member, with your team member, with your leader. Help people change their thinking, so we change our doing, so we change the world. Be an agent of change with me. Share this podcast episode rate review or help it reach more ears. And until next time, dear leader, change agents, keep growing, keep tuning in and together we'll change the world. Have an awesome day and talk to you very soon.