Your Brain at Work

The Real Science of Habits

Episode Summary

In this episode of Your Brain at Work, we unlock the secrets to embedding effective and resilient habits. In today’s environment of accelerating change and overwhelming demands, building strong habits – those that become default under pressure – is more crucial than ever. Organizations need strategies that work quickly and scale easily, and are more helpful than telling people to rely on repetition. For over 25 years, NLI has been embedding habits quickly and at scale in organizations, transforming cultures in the process. Whether you're looking to build your own new habits or lead your team through transformative change, we’ll cover the strategies and key insights that help you succeed. Discover how to leverage the power of neuroscience to create lasting, impactful habits that support your goals and withstand the pressures of modern life. In this session, Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro, will explore the latest neuroscience research on why the right habits are so important to build and how to do it in a way that sticks.

Episode Transcription

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Emma Sarro: Hello! Welcome, Happy Friday, everyone.

 

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Emma Sarro: I'm your host today, Emma. Sorrow, you know the rules as you all are joining. Find the chat button. Drop in where you're coming in from today. I'm just outside of New York City, as as you all know, Boston very nice.

 

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Emma Sarro: It's warm here, finally

 

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Emma Sarro: awesome. I love seeing all of this all right. So for anyone who doesn't know my name is Dr. Emma Saro, and I am the director of research here at Nli. I've been here for almost 4 years.

 

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Emma Sarro: and happy to have all of our regulars back for any newcomers. Welcome. We're excited to have you here with us for the 1st time today, and as you continue to keep dropping in where you're coming in from today, just a little bit of a summary of what we're talking about. So in today's episode, we are talking about the real science of habits at scale.

 

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Emma Sarro: So more than just individual habits, like building the habit of drinking more water or shutting off the light when you leave a room. This is really building habits across hundreds or even thousands of people at the same time at scale and quickly. So before we get started and introduce our guest today, I just suggest to push everything aside, distractions, windows, phones, whatever for just about an hour enjoy this. It's really applicable to everything that we do every day.

 

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Emma Sarro: and, as you know, we love Guest interaction, so continue to drop questions in the chat or the Q. And a. And we'll try to answer as many as we can. So I'm excited to welcome someone else. You know him very well. He coined the term neural leadership when he co-founded Nli just over 2 decades ago. Actually, about 25 years ago, he has a professional doctorate and 4 successful books under his name, one in the works, and a multitude of bylines ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and many more

 

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Emma Sarro: welcome. David Rock, our co-founder, and CEO.

 

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David Rock: Thanks, Emma, good to be back with you.

 

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Emma Sarro: Good to be back. Yeah. Just another Friday, right?

 

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David Rock: Just another Friday, this time from the mountains of France. It turns out the base of Mont Blanc. Look, it's very pretty big, snowy mountains and green hills. It's really beautiful.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yep, definitely jealous.

 

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Emma Sarro: well, so, as many of you might know, we've been building habits with our partners for 25 years, so we do understand the best way to do it. And also there are also many misconceptions or conventional wisdoms, as we like to call them, that kind of get in the way of people building habits, and not to say there aren't many people that talk about them, books about habits, how to best change your habits individually.

 

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Emma Sarro: But what we're talking about here is changing a culture shared set of everyday habits in an organization, building habits at scale and fast.

 

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Emma Sarro: So it all starts with an origin story, right, David. So I'd love to hear how you became interested in habits in the beginning. What was the start.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, it was kind of an accident. In a way, I was writing a paper on the neuroscience of leadership. And this theme really emerged. This was the very, very 1st paper in 2,006 on this space. And this theme emerged of basically attention changes the brain

 

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David Rock: and that it's the role of leaders to basically focus attention. In fact, the 1st paper was called The Neuroscience of Leadership was published in Strategy and Business Magazine. It went on to be one of the biggest, most shared papers of all times, and they put it into a kind of special edition later again, and got reprinted lots of places. But the basic article said that attention changes the brain. It's the leader's role to focus attention.

 

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David Rock: And this is based on the insight that attention literally creates circuits or embeds them. And it's a very short leap from that to realizing that to create behavior change at scale, you need to be focusing everyone on what to do. More of.

 

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Emma Sarro: Ing.

 

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David Rock: Not what to do, less of, because if attention changes the brain, you want people to do the thing that you want them to be more like right? And so we started to see that like culture change involved getting a lot of people to focus on the right new things. And so it started really, really early, right back

 

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David Rock: in the early 2 thousands that we realized that culture change was about. You know, it's kind of focusing attention in that way. And and then, when we started to do when we started to do like wide scale culture change, which kind of 1st started around 15 years ago it really became clear that

 

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David Rock: we needed to think in terms of habits, because essentially, if people needed to rely on remembering, things wouldn't change, right. Things had to be habitual. So the kinds of culture changes we were working on needed to be habitual. If you wanted people to be more inclusive, to be more innovative to be more collaborative, whatever it was, you needed that to be the way things worked right the way things were done.

 

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David Rock: It was really interesting. There wasn't at the time. And there really still, isn't anyone else thinking about habit activation at scale. So there's lots and lots of experts thinking about. You know

 

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David Rock: how you build individual habits, but no one had really been studying.

 

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David Rock: You know what if you're trying to build habits in 10,000 people or 100,000 right? And so that's the path that we took right from about 15 years ago, we said, All right. Well, let's let's become the world leaders in habit activation at scale. And we definitely are, we've got a crazy amount of data now and insight from probably a thousand different experiments since then.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, across hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, that's really, it's really interesting. Because we think about many organizations want to change. I mean organizations try all the time transformational changes. Why, why is it important to do more than just some kind of awareness event? I mean, why are habits just so critical in the day to day.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, there was this really interesting body of research we started to see. I'm trying to remember when it was, but

 

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David Rock: was a while ago, like maybe 15 years ago, where we saw that there's this huge emphasis people put into kind of making change a priority.

 

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David Rock: I think. Actually, the insight came around 2010 there was a fast company article called Change or Die, that talked about people who'd had open heart surgery, and and like literally had to change like how they lived, or they would, you know, not make it, and just very few of them would change.

 

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David Rock: And then they made a little tweak in sort of how they interact with people and put them in groups and got them working on simple habits. And there was this massive difference in whether people would live or die. So so the the argument there was. Even when you give people the ultimate motivation.

 

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David Rock: it doesn't mean that that would change. There's some other mechanism to change. And we started to dig into this. And there was turns out there's decades of literature showing that we put too much emphasis on motivation factors

 

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David Rock: like trying to get people to care trying to get people to, you know, realize they have to change and not enough emphasis on kind of working out the most effective steps to take and then supporting them right. And this was the emergence of our priorities, habits, systems, framework, with habits at the core, and we realized there are better and worse ways of doing priorities. But the real thing, the company's getting wrong was the habit work. They just weren't doing it. And then you need systems that support all that. So that that was kind of the beginning of our thinking about

 

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David Rock: kind of phs, with habits at the heart of it. And

 

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David Rock: the real work is getting a lot of people to just you know, it's the knowing doing gap right, actually getting people to do things is really different to getting people to care.

 

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David Rock: And they're very, very different. They're linked. But very different kinds of activities.

 

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Emma Sarro: Right? Yeah, I mean thinking about how and why people invest in some kind of behavior. Try a new behavior, do it again, continue to do it. There are so many things that get in the way of us acting so we've really kind of pulled. Those apart, you know, are other, and we'll dive into this kind of in detail. But are other people doing it? Do do I care enough? Are the tools available for me? And this applies when you're learning new habits, too. I mean, do you have those tools

 

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Emma Sarro: accessible to you to even do the behavior? I mean, are they available? So that's why the systems come in like, are those tools available? Do people have the capacity? Do they see their leaders doing those behaviors? Do others do it like the whole idea of somebody standing like a whole line forming of people. We end up standing in the line because we see other people standing in the line. So we're just.

 

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David Rock: We're we're motivated to do those kinds of things. So we had to kind of tap into all of those to get people to change their behavior.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, there's a whole lot of social motivations that end up being really, really big. And I just looked at change or die. It's actually 2,005. It was 20 years ago that that came out. I had 2010 in my head. It was 2,005 that that article came out such an interesting provocative article that I think at the time just spurred us to look into this question of of you know, if it's not motivation, what is it? And I think soon after that we started to talk about phs, so

 

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David Rock: you know, when you think about change across a lot of people, there's just really different factors to individuals and all that which we can dig into. But what are some of the misconceptions from your perspective? What are the some of the misconceptions about habits as we as we think about them. What's in.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, there is a lot. And so I should say, we've been kind of like diving into the science of habits. Again, what's interesting is all of the stuff that we've been talking about for years still applies, and as new research comes out, it just further kind of supports how we've been building habits, and one of those is one of the ones that I find really interesting, and I think a lot of people find fascinating for their own lives is just like, how do we

 

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Emma Sarro: get rid of all those old habits? I mean, we, you know, we build all these new habits, and we try to do these new behaviors, but sometimes, you know, under pressure, as habits do, they're our default behavior. They just appear when we're rushed and we're under pressure when we're under threat, which is what happens in the workplace. So how can we get rid of those old behaviors that just like stay steady, and and what some of the research is saying.

 

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Emma Sarro: and something that you mentioned before. David, is just that when we're trying to build a new habit when we think about that old one as a way not to do like. Don't think about the pink elephant kind of idea. It actually strengthens that behavior. We want to get rid of. So we have to somehow disrupt it first.st And there's this really fascinating study, that kind of tested this exact thing. They built habits in people. And they said, You know, do this new habit, but also think

 

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Emma Sarro: about the other one. You're not doing versus just do this new habit. And when they had both of those habits in mind they could build a new habit. Just fine. You can build a new habit on top of an old one. But the old one stays, no matter what. And so we need to find a way to just disrupt the system in a way. So as an organization. Take away those things that you were doing in the meantime, take away access to the plastic bags. I know that's 1 of the things that we've been.

 

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Emma Sarro: That's always an example that I think about, because I was always forgetting my canvas bags, and until the stores that were trying to get rid of plastic bags, took those bags away and made them unavailable to me. I didn't develop that new habit. So think about organizations taking away access to those things. That's the way to kind of re make your brain flexible again. And then you're able to build something new, and then that stays

 

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Emma Sarro: in the way that we build habits.

 

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David Rock: So it's like, don't focus on the habit you want to get rid of.

 

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David Rock: Focused on the new.

 

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David Rock: you know, on the new action that you want to take. And there's, you know, there's lots of other good researchers out there talking about what those habits should look like. They should be simple enough that you can do every day. They should, you know, connect to other existing habits. So they're really easy to recall. And a couple of those other good ideas are true. But we've been. We've been looking kind of deeper than that. And how do you design the right habits for the right

 

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David Rock: size, audience, and all this kind of stuff as well. But what are the other misconceptions.

 

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Emma Sarro: Well, one that we've been talking a lot about is, you know. Is it just doing thousands and thousands of this behavior over time? Is it repetition? Or can we use another way? And you taught? You've talked a lot about attention. So why? So it can either be, you know, focusing high density of attention on something or attention, density or just, you know, doing that behavior a thousand times before it builds a habit. So talk a bit about attention density, because I think that's so interesting.

 

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David Rock: Yeah. It's a term that I haven't talked about for a while. When I was working with Jeffrey Schwartz on the paper, the neuroscience of leadership. It was actually in that paper, and we talked about it for a few years afterwards, and for some reason kind of went sideways. But it's actually a really important idea. It's something we intuitively all know our attention. Density watching a webinar in real time is very different to watching a recorded webinar. Right, we literally pay more attention. Our attention is less distracted by other things.

 

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David Rock: We're really focused and partially, that's from the feeling of other people. Watching gives you an increased synchrony.

 

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David Rock: and there's some positive social pressure. And you know you're wondering if other people know whether you're watching or not, and all sorts of things. But so it's a higher attention, density, much higher attention, density. If you tell people you're going to do something in your team, for example, right? And then maybe they've forgotten all about it. But you think that they're remembering. And so you pay a lot more attention to that task.

 

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David Rock: And so attention, entity is basically the amount of effort put into attention multiplied by time. So you can put a real.

 

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David Rock: you know, focus of attention on something for like 10 seconds, 3 times a week, but really, really focus on it. And you'll actually get a lot more change than sort of just repeating something without paying attention. And there's interesting stuff actually, in Jeffrey Schwartz, one of his early books, the minds and the brain neuroplasticity which is the brain changing doesn't work at all. If you're not paying attention. In other words, if you if you've like.

 

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David Rock: you know, if you have a stroke and you're trying to regain.

 

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David Rock: you know, use of, you know. Let's say your left arm, and they give you exercises. If you don't actually pay attention to the exercise, if you just move the arm and you don't pay attention to it. You actually don't get the neuroplasticity. And they did some really clever experiments around this. So so basically, it's focusing attention and intense attention over time. And there are really clever ways of doing that, like social focuses attention. Right? So a 5 min conversation with a group of 5 Peers

 

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David Rock: will be much, much richer than you know, spending a lot of time on your own over the week. So there! There are ways of like increasing the focus of attention that I think we need to. We need to think about.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, no, it's so interesting. I mean attention. It's it's such an interesting concept. I mean, I love the idea of just imagining the spotlight just focusing on a part of my brain. It gets all of the best neurochemicals. It becomes the neural connections become so much stronger. And it's just so much easier. So if you're able to find ways to focus people's attention like the social aspect which is like one of the biggest drivers for our attention.

 

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Emma Sarro: or, you know, like, so other people are doing it. Or this is really important for my role. It has like a higher purpose.

 

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Emma Sarro: You're able just to like, amplify the effect of that action. You're more likely to learn it in a day as opposed to months, let's say.

 

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David Rock: Yeah. Yeah. And there's this thing that is out there in the in the world of like, you know, it takes 30 days to build a habit or 90 days to build a habit or something like that.

 

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David Rock: It's the intensity of attention multiplied by time. So how focused to answer John's question, intensity of attention multiplied by time. But yeah, so there's this whole perspective of oh, it takes a lot of time to build habit. If you pay attention. You'll notice that you actually build habits every day, lots of them little ones.

 

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David Rock: and the second or 3rd time you go to a new hotel room you'll have a pathway that you'll have for years and years and years

 

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David Rock: without paying a lot of attention. You'll have this map, so you've built a habit. It's just a simple habit. You meet someone new. You don't know their name. It's an unusual name. You'll say it incorrectly in your brain a few times, and then you'll say it out loud to the person. They'll correct you. But you won't be able to remember the correct name, because you've embedded the wrong name really fast, right? So we actually build new habits pretty quickly, and we build them all the time if they're relatively simple.

 

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David Rock: and there's no existing habit in that domain. So it's yeah. It's really quick to build habits. It turns out it's not 30 days now. More complex habits can definitely take time, especially if there are other habits that you tend to default to, but there's no like one rule of you know. All habits take, you know we'd be lost if all habits took all that amount of time, we build habits really quickly.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, no, it's so true. I mean, that's probably why I actually just did a recent kind of deep dive into the habit, literature and the variance of what this habit literature shows is, how long does it take to build? A habit is like from

 

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Emma Sarro: 4 days to well over a year. So that's so highly variable. And that just means that there are so many factors that we have to deal with when we're building habits. And when you're asking people in a study to do it, you're adding a whole other factor. So if it matters to us, it's in our day to day, you know, we have to drive this way to go to work. We like these things that are like really important. You kind of pick that up, and you make that habitual really fast because it

 

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Emma Sarro: it matters the reason our brain evolved the the ability to build habits. It's because we're always thinking about, how can we do things more efficiently with less cognitive load, so habits are our default.

 

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David Rock: It's really 2 or 3 repetitions of something. The brain starts the process of what's called long term potentiation. So as soon as you do something 2 or 3 times the brain says, Oh, I should get this out of the prefrontal into the basal ganglia, so that I don't have to pay attention. And I can, you know, keep my attention on new things. So it's actually a really, you know, pretty quick process. So that's 1 of the things we have wrong. It's not like habits. Take forever. Although you've been doing some research on different levels of habits, different complexities. You want to share some of that.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of came out of a discussion that we've had as well. But there are different complexities of habits. We all think about them. There's the, you know, like turning off a light when you leave. You're flossing after you brush like that's very simple, or, you know, having a drink of water every time you see a post-it note. But then there's the complex ones, too, complex habits like a whole gym routine, for instance, or making your way to the gym, or a really complex

 

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Emma Sarro: way of getting home from work. So those are more complex habits. And so I think it's important for us to understand and kind of break these habits out. If we want to build

 

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Emma Sarro: habits in organizations, we want to make sure if we're building a lot of them that they're all very simple, right? We want to make it easy and seamless in the day to day, but sometimes those complex habits will take a while, and so we need to kind of give it the time. And then the attention pun intended to like kind of build that habit over time. And maybe if it's a very complex habit, like sometimes our.

 

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Emma Sarro: we build culture principles with organizations. A culture principle could be considered a more complex habit. And so we give organizations more time to build that, and we break it up into kind of small behaviors. Kind of stack them up.

 

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David Rock: Right, so it might be a month or 3 months to build one larger set of habits, like, you know, create clarity. Might be a month or 3 months of like really working on that more and then broken out into things you're learning every week and different things. So so yeah, I guess. Let's talk about habits at scale. There are lots of principles of habits individually, but

 

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David Rock: but when we think about habits across large numbers, it's kind of a different formula. And just for a sense of scale. You know, we're working on some 300 partners a year. But many of these partners are very large scale projects like it's not unusual for us to be tackling 100,000 people

 

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David Rock: at a time, you know, give, you know, giving them the habit of, say, growth mindset in one quarter across 100,000 people, right? Or the habit of speaking up across 150,000 people. So we're often working on real scale, which gives us an ability to kind of experiment or follow the science experiment and follow the data. And we're about, you know, we're about 10 years old into really having data now.

 

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David Rock: of this stuff. So it's it's, you know, we've got data from an enormous number of projects and all that now. But a couple of the principles when you're talking about scale

 

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David Rock: often with scale. Now you're talking about English as a second language for a lot of people. You're talking about people in many different countries, different levels of education, different kinds of jobs. Right frontline, you know, frontline cleaners through to, you know, nuclear physicists in one company sometimes. Right? So it's really interesting. The habits have to be a certain like have a certain quality, right? They need to be, you know, growth, mindset focused so telling you what to do more of.

 

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David Rock: And they need to be simple enough that everyone could could apply them

 

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David Rock: and relevant to all levels. But they also need to be kind of one thing, not like. Sometimes people try to put 2 or 3 focuses in a habit. So you know, quite specific. One of my favorite habits is one we built for Microsoft 10 years ago, which is, it's really just 3 words, but there's so much in it, it's ensure shared understanding.

 

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David Rock: ensure, shared understanding. And there's so much in that habit of like really making sure people have the same understanding. You do right. It's 1 of the 1st habits in our deliver solution which is around accountability as well. Right? Like, really, in that one we call sync expectations. It's the same kind of thing right? But ensure shared understanding such a powerful habit. You can imagine, like, you can really build that habit across a lot of people, and just how much of a difference that would make to have that so

 

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David Rock: like they need to be simple, like literally 3 words for a habit is wonderful. You know no more than 6 or 7 at the most, so the few words, the better clear, relevant to all levels and one focus and then also have a good theory base that you can explain the habit from like, we want to be able to explain the neuroscience of why that habit matters and how to do it really well.

 

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David Rock: And you know, for example, for in shorthand understanding, there's really interesting science around the different biases. And then some really interesting science on kind of how you do this just right with creating mental images and things. So that's basically at scale, you need a different kind of habit, and you just kind of take these things into account. Anything you would add. There, Emma.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I mean, that came up a lot in the literature. And like, how can you kind of like accelerate the process of habit, formation and habit building. And it's something that requires a lot of kind of planning before, like you want to build a set of new habits. So you know even the name of the habit has to be simple, and it has to be like, well understood, across multiple types of people, multiple roles and everything. And also, is it easy to do? Is it an easy action?

 

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Emma Sarro: So if it's something that's complicated, and there's something much easier that people can do in its place. Then they're going to do that behavior, especially when they're rushed so. And is it also fluent in their work? I mean, lots of people talk about habit stacking or piggybacking. It's kind of the same thing, is it something? They're always lots of opportunities. We have these. If, then, plans, can you engage in this.

 

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David Rock: Let's talk about that, because that goes to kind of someone's question they just asked.

 

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David Rock: and that ensure shared understanding is a habit. But it's not necessarily actionable yet, and we won't say, Oh, the way you've got to do this is exactly this step. It's more like, we'll say, look the way people build habits is with something called. If then plans right, and if then, plan is a concrete situation and concrete action.

 

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David Rock: and so we'll more like explain the science of ensure, shared understanding, explain the science within plans, and then help people have their own insights about the right. If, then, plan to set right, and when people come up with their own one, they have that insight moment they're much more engaged. So people will across 20 people, you'll have.

 

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David Rock: you know, between 10 and 20 different. If then, plans, someone will say, Oh, you know, whenever I'm finishing a meeting I'm going to double click on the agenda and have people read it back to me. Someone else will say, you know, every time I have a 1 on one.

 

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David Rock: Ask, you know, ask people to to summarize the meeting at least 3 times. So people come up with different ways of actioning this. And and that's actually how you build. The habit is that if, then, plan is the gold standard of kind of embedding the habit, but it's it's and I've given a bit of a clue there like you want people having insights

 

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David Rock: right about the habit. And you. It's fantastic. If that insight is in a social context.

 

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Emma Sarro: Okay.

 

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David Rock: So if you're trying to build a habit of ensure shared understanding, you want lots of people working on that idea, having an insight about it and working on just that idea, and then coming back to another idea like another week or 2 weeks a month later. So it's 1 habit at a time.

 

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David Rock: giving people insights and doing that socially. That's kind of our formula for getting people into the doing, and then kind of coming down to. If then, plan. So that's sort of the working framework that we have for habits.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, our secret nli framework. Right?

 

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David Rock: Secret. It seems.

 

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Emma Sarro: And not anymore. Yeah, but yeah, we're tapping into all of the things that provide great environments for people to build behaviors and be open to the behavior. So the social piece, do you have social change champions, people at all levels role modeling the behavior. You know, we talk about the like emphasized importance of leaders doing those behaviors because we pay more attention to what the leaders are doing than anyone else.

 

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Emma Sarro: So that kind of speaks to the attention piece and the insight piece we talk about insights all the time. The benefits of having an insight are overwhelming. Right? We have the motivation piece. It generates a bigger memory it generalizes, which is the idea that you're speaking to David is. We also want these habits to be able to be done in all different kinds of contexts. It's not just only when you have a check-in meeting with your

 

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Emma Sarro: team, it's, you know, with your team, with other working groups in, you know, when you're in front of different leaders. So we want people to be able to generalize these habits. The same kinds of behaviors in different contexts, virtual in person, all the different, like things that come up.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, like, in short, understanding is something you do with customers, with your peers, with your boss, with like everyone. And it comes from the insight that

 

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David Rock: we often have really different ways of seeing the world. I'm just going to take a couple of questions. It's an interesting one from Laura. So the social aspect is really important. There's a number of benefits from like working on habits socially, and, in fact, that was kind of the secret of the fast company change or die. Story is that when they got people in social units working on this like, they literally changed their lives. And that was the major thing they did.

 

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David Rock: And we also saw research from University of Colorado a few years ago that the number one reason people do something is they believe everyone else is doing it.

 

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David Rock: There's a huge outlier in that kind of normative effect. It's called so. So the social aspect gives you that normative effect. There's another way to look at it, called the panopticon effect, which is basically thinking you're being watched. So if you if you learn something with peers and say you're going to work on it. You think that everyone remembers they usually don't. But you feel like they do, and you don't want to look bad and wanting to not look bad is a big, big driver.

 

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David Rock: It's called positive social pressure. So there's that there's also like, every time you see people or interact with them. You're kind of reminded of that commitment that you made. So it's bringing your attention back to it.

 

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David Rock: So there's all these different aspects of social. But one of the big ones is when you learn something in a social context, that learning itself is stored in a really different way in your brain, and the short summary of that is, it's stored in a network with social information that happens to encode really richly and automatically right? So, in other words, if you learn about a new way of using an AI, but you learn it with people

 

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David Rock: that information stores in a network with who was there, how they were feeling. There's different status levels of everyone. The interactions that happened like all of that stuff, encodes automatically and stays encoded for a long time. And so you're putting new information in a network with information that naturally encodes easily as opposed to sort of learning. Non-socially. So, there's there's the social learning aspect. There's the panopticon effect. There's the positive social pressure. There's the normative effect. There's lots of different reasons why

 

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David Rock: habits learned socially through insights over time. It's just a really really good way of kind of forming those habits. And then, as we lift up to the whole organization, super super super critical, that you have the most people as possible working on the same habit at the same time.

 

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David Rock: So we talk about, you know, we talk about everyone to everyone model rather than a top down model. So we want everyone working on a little bit, all at the same time, rather than a few people working on a lot slowly

 

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David Rock: and most kind of change in leadership programs are like focus on a few people learning a lot. Slowly, we think it's better to give a few things to everyone relatively quickly, and have everyone focus on that. So it's a different way of thinking about habit.

 

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David Rock: you know, about scaling habits.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, no, it's a great point. And you know, a question from Juliana is really interesting, is, you know, are they having? Can everyone have the same insight?

 

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David Rock: Yeah, it's interesting, you know. If you let's let's use this example. Right? You know. Ensure shared understanding. Right? You introduce the science of why we don't have the same understanding right?

 

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David Rock: And some of the biases you introduce that you introduce what it looks like when you do have the same understanding. You do examples of it, and people have quite different insights. There's no like across 20 people. There'll be probably 5 to 10 different kinds of flavors of insight people have, but they're different, and then they'll set different kinds of actions. And if you're overly prescriptive with exactly what they'll need to do, you're maxing out. You're maximizing certainty. But you're minimizing autonomy.

 

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David Rock: People have a pretty strong reaction to autonomy threats being told what to do. So you'll be careful. You want to give people insights about the habit and get get them to come up with their own actions. But it is very, very possible using manager led learning. We've taken like 3 habits to 100,000 people in a month, a lot.

 

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David Rock: And let's say, growth, mindset, right experiment, value progress. Learn from others the whole organization working on experiment all at the same time. But it's done through managers. It's done through giving managers a short video to watch with their teams at the team level, either standing around or sending. So you're using the social pressure of the team unit

 

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David Rock: to push this out. And it'll happen different days, different times. So it's not like you're trying to put everyone on a training program all at the same time. It won't all happen in that week, but it'll it'll largely happen in that time. So we find with Manager led learning and giving people, you know, punchy, short content on one habit at a time you can. You can really get to a lot of people.

 

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David Rock: Really, really, really, quickly.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah. And Gn's question is or comment is really interesting. This asynchronous versus synchronous learning. We talk a lot about that. And you know what can be effective and whatnot. And if you do have asynchronous learning, I mean, how can you incorporate that or find ways to incorporate that social aspect? Because that kind of allows you to have those insights later.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, you can. You can learn something synchronously and then have to go and teach your team right? Really interesting. So like, Hey, you know and and know that you're gonna have to report out to your peers on how that went that has a lot of social learning in it. Right? You actually might learn the initial content, non-socially right.

 

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David Rock: But you'll focus much more because you know you've got to teach your team. And then when you teach your team, you'll have really strong social pressure, social learning. And then, knowing you have to report out to your peers, even if that's digitally. So now you've got something that's very scalable. You can have 10,000 managers, all like asynchronously learning something in their own time.

 

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David Rock: but asynchronously sharing it with their teams in a synchronous way, right with their team, and then asynchronously sharing it out. And now you've got a lot of social learning, but you're maximizing the synchronous and asynchronous kind of partnership. That's what we've done with the lead solution. Lead doesn't stand for anything unusual, I know for us. But lead is our

 

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David Rock: foundational leadership program across, manage yourself, mobilize others, drive results, and with lead individuals go in on their own time and have, you know, do this learning? But then they'll come together in in synchronous, you know events, webinars, or in person.

 

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David Rock: to kind of really focus and share out what they've learned, and they've often got to go back and teach back as well. So that's a program that can scale to, you know, huge numbers of people using a similar kind of format.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. And, Michael, there absolutely is a lot of power to face-to-face meetings, and you can do very similar kinds of have similar results with in virtual settings, as well, you know, like ensuring that cameras are on. So you can see some of those social cues. They're all different things you can do. And we've talked about this a lot in our in our recent brain-based design facilitation workshop is really all the different ways you can design depending on the platform

 

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Emma Sarro: to really engage the learning centers of the brain. And this is so applicable to building habits is you do have to learn the behavior. And then it's, how do you then sustain it over time, and we've done a lot of work on building specific tools for sustaining those behaviors over time.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, someone brought up Niles.

 

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David Rock: and I guess it's making me think about sort of the 2 windows that you can help. People build habits right? We lift up a little bit and think about training and and all this, that there's a window. You can build habits which is essentially, you tell people you've got to do a training program or encouraging them to join some kind of learning experience right in a cohort.

 

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David Rock: And you're kind of requiring them to pay attention. But it's essentially just in case learning. Now, just in case learning is done best, like just before they have to use it so that it feels relevant. Right? So you're not

 

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David Rock: doing something they'll need in 6 months. They're about to do performance conversations season. Give them a good training on how to do that just before. So it's still just in case learning.

 

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David Rock: and the more positive pressure there is the better in that. In terms of other people, social learning, insight, learning, all that is fantastic. And that's been our world. For a long time. We've been thinking for the longest time about the other opportunity for learning, which is when someone is stuck right. When someone's having an issue.

 

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David Rock: they're having a conflict with someone, or they're just not sure how to approach an issue, or they're struggling to solve a problem. So when someone's actually stuck, we have a name for this. It's called an impasse. I think in American. It's impasse in Australian. It's impasse.

 

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David Rock: I'm in Europe right now. I'm not sure what it is, but it's

 

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David Rock: when someone has an impasse, right? You've got this opportunity to help them. If you can build a habit right? And we've been. We've been for years and years and years for like 15 years we've been building these one page guides, making them as simple as possible. We call them gist guides for particular purposes like for, let's say, a check in a monthly check-in with someone. Right? We've got a 1 pager that you can is

 

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David Rock: oh.

 

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David Rock: like what you attempted to do. Instead,

 

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David Rock: at the beginning, solving for different events a lot and.

 

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Emma Sarro: Oh, no!

 

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Emma Sarro: Oh, no! I think we lost David.

 

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David Rock: Well.

 

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Emma Sarro: Oh, there you are!

 

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David Rock: Yeah, if somebody.

 

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Emma Sarro: You're in the mountains someplace.

 

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David Rock: Yeah. Yeah. The Internet dropped out for a second.

 

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Emma Sarro: It's just that.

 

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David Rock: So I'm saying, we built. We built gist guides. GIST. So a gist guide is giving the gist of of something at a at a glance.

 

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David Rock: And what we realized in building lead that there was an opportunity to get people into the habit of

 

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David Rock: of like asking an AI for it sort of started it started out for us with like, let's let's get an AI to have all our gist guides so that you can basically say, Hey, can you show me the best way to, you know? Deal with this conflict? And then we got ahead of ourselves and ended up putting all of our research and all of our guides and all of our programs and all of our books, everything into this AI,

 

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David Rock: and so now, what we're trying to do is get people in the habit of every time they're stuck on something, or feeling kind of something's not working, actually checking in with the AI

 

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David Rock: and and the AI either coaching you like asking you questions to help you think this through, which is fantastic

 

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David Rock: or sharing ideas from neuroscience, but in both cases the idea is to help you be smarter, not just outsource, you know. So some of you would have seen it. We just launched it last week. We just had to show people. It's amazing

 

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David Rock: if you're from a company interested in a demo of Niles. Just put your company name and Niles in the chat, and someone will organize that shortly. So the week or so just put Niles in your company name, someone will reach out. But the idea is a really really different habit of like anytime. A manager in particular is stuck.

 

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David Rock: not sure what to do, having trouble solving a problem that they actually go to Niles, and I think tuning Niles this last week. Every day I've been working on

 

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David Rock: on him and teaching him how to coach. You know better and better and better. And I've actually been putting some like real challenges in like my own stuff. And it's actually spooky. He's been really helpful. I'm embarrassed to say he's been really helpful and coaching me through some very, very real things that's been very helpful. So that's helping me. I'm going to start.

 

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David Rock: You know, getting into that more of a habit of, you know, just calling up Niles, so he'll be in an app shortly, I think, within a month or so. He's in that. But he's now available to go into companies at any scale.

 

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David Rock: And that's really cool. So so that's gonna be a really interesting habit to kind of disrupt leadership, you know, poor leadership and poor management. It's gonna be a very, very interesting habit to kind of build.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, can you imagine being able, I mean building that habit of being able to easily ask for support right away? I know we have a poll that our team is asking us to drop in might be a good time to see if anyone you know would like any support on Niles or our brain-based design facilitation course, so we can drop that poll in. But I'd also.

 

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David Rock: Let's do that out of the way, and we can get back to some some people's questions. Yeah, no. I think there was other things we wanted to cover. I don't have the list in front of me.

 

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Emma Sarro: Oh, yeah, yeah, we did want to talk about how we measure the habits. Right? So we don't only just build the habits and walk away. We also figured out how to actually measure that impact. What's getting in the way, you know, we ask about that. The intentions to act in different ways to make sure that the habit has the best chance of actually building. And we have this great story of we call it our Bcp measurement. But it's so much more than that. But that's what organizations get. It's like a score.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, so so, Bcp is interesting. We realized that we were in the habit business at scale about 10 years ago, and we said, well, we need to be able to measure them, and it took us a long time to think about the right way to measure at scale, not individually. You got to keep it simple, you know, simple questions. But what we've landed on is the percentage of people doing something weekly now.

 

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David Rock: And we look at the percentage of people doing something one to 3 times a week, which means it's a habit.

 

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David Rock: but also like 4 to 6 times. And above that. But it's really interesting data. And we've been able to collect a lot of data and compare different solutions, different modalities like in person versus virtual different countries, different industries, whether we customize something or not. So all these different variables here to get really rich data. So we know, for example, if you're going to customize something, you'll probably get 9%

 

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David Rock: more habit activation, which you know across a thousand people is another 90 people with these habits for customizing. So you can really think about

 

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David Rock: habits in that very specific way. The other thing we started to do, which we've never done before is we've started to actually license that methodology, the Bcp methodology to organizations, particularly larger ones who join our data set and really be able to measure habit activation across all kinds of learning programs. So that's that's something you can talk to us about. If that's of interest as well.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it is really interesting, because it's there are so many challenges in really measuring something that's like, been effective in any of the organizations that we work with. There's so many factors that get in the way. But you know, we really dove into the research on how individuals intend to act so. Not only how many times are they doing this, but then also are others other people doing it? Do they have the the right intention to do this behavior?

 

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Emma Sarro: Do they have the tools available? So we can kind of see pulling from this like theory of behavior, and why individuals act. What is getting in the way? And how can we make sure to sustain this behavior? And we also have data from organizations over time to kind of prove that these habits are sustained.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, no. It's a really interesting space. And every summit we share that out. We've got our summit coming up this this November.

 

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David Rock: We can perhaps share the dates out for that. And a link. We're just starting to kind of get the program worked out. You'll see an amazing roster of speakers in a couple of weeks be announced some really interesting scientists. So we always share out our latest Bcp data, every summit kind of what we've what we've learned and what we've found. Speaking of Summit, I know we're going to be doing a lot on AI. I think there's some really interesting habits as we move into the AI world, I was really curious to see

 

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David Rock: the number. One use of of Gen. AI is kind of as a personal assistant sort of personal coach, like people using it to talk to, you know, sort of having someone to talk to which is is really interesting. I think that's going to create very new habits and kind of change. People's, you know, change people's whole kind of way of working and thinking. So it's it's really interesting, do you? How do you use? How do you use, AI? How often are you talking? Having a chat.

 

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Emma Sarro: How often am I talking to Niles? Well, I'm trying to talk to Niles every day, and for anyone who was here last week you heard that we could have a conversation with Niles, or we can type and have kind of like a typing conversation? I use it in both ways. I asked Niles for help on writing kind of like advertising blurbs for our sessions, for, you know, outlines to different kind of like documents. And how am I going to outline the science or this

 

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Emma Sarro: this you know, talking about this concept, or help me with a you know, a conversation I'm about to walk into, and I I appreciate both the the texting conversation as well as the the verbal one.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, it's interesting. We're trying to optimize Niles for like, just verbal. So just quickly ask a question. And so you don't need a screen. But sometimes you want to be able to upload things and all of that. So I think there's all sorts of really interesting new habits are going to come into the AI world just like noticing when something could be done by AI. So you can save your brain that way. Which also brings up an interesting point. Laurie asked a question about safety habits. So it's an interesting question we often get asked is like.

 

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David Rock: you know, this habit, this approach to habits like, what can it apply to? Can it apply to technical skills? Can it apply to leadership skills? Can it apply to safety skills? We've actually found it applies really powerfully to just about every skill set that we can break into 3 major chunks. So some skill sets are

 

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David Rock: need a lot more than 3 chunks and a lot more than like a month. They need like 6 months, or, you know, a year like learning to be a surgeon is not 3 skills you learn in a month. Right? So it depends sort of on the size of the space. So there's a chunk size question. So growth mindset, we can teach in a month. Being more inclusive, we can teach in a month

 

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David Rock: mitigating bias. We can just teach in a month. So if we can break it into 3 chunks that you can learn in a month. Great, sometimes 3 chunks you can learn in 3 months, you know, a little bit more complexity. But we find that unit of 30 days is really powerful. So we've done a lot of work on safety. We've helped a lot of companies build safety cultures. We've we've done some really quirky projects as well, like partnering with healthcare companies to build habits around the use of healthcare resources.

 

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David Rock: Obviously, you know, we've got these 16 different modules from, you know, just better conversations to better feedback to psychological safety. The newest habit set that we've built is around accountability. A solution called Deliver.

 

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David Rock: That's proving really popular. So there's a really powerful habit set. So we've we've been at a frame up 16 different, you know, 30 day habit sets. We could. We could do more, but that those are sort of the central ones. But we found we can apply it to just about anything that people want to learn as long as it's within that that chunk size which I think is an important question.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah. And it's interesting because we're doing a lot of work right now on what we're thinking about like, amplify this idea of amplify. We talked a bit about it in an earlier session on the stuff of thought we called it. But in our process of kind of reverse engineering, a skill. Let's say the skill is working better with AI. How can we kind of pull apart the most

 

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Emma Sarro: critical behaviors that someone could build to work with AI better. And if we can build it out from 3 main behaviors, you're going to get better if you build those into habits at working with AI. So what are the critical behaviors that we can turn into habits, and then people can become better. So like metacognition is one of the ones that we're talking

 

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Emma Sarro: be a big, a big area of conversation at some.

 

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David Rock: Thinking about thinking. Yeah, all that Luke's bringing up a really important point. If people use AI to do the work for them, they're going to become less intelligent, they become less critical thinkers. They're going to become worse thinkers. We've tuned Niles not to actually do that, but to help help. You have insights. When you have insights, you get smarter.

 

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David Rock: You actually need to have those insights, not just answers. And then, even when we're introducing neuroscience, it's actually to help you understand humans better or yourself. So that again, you're having insight. So Niles is tuned to make you smarter as opposed to like offloading.

 

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David Rock: you know, offloading kind of work. And I actually agree with Luke. If people just offloading the way they email and the way they communicate and not thinking it's not healthy. I wouldn't respect that person. In fact, there's research showing that we are not, that we much prefer content and communication stuff from humans than AI, and we significantly downgrade when it comes from from that. AI. So it's important. I think it's just.

 

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David Rock: Is there an efficient way to make people smarter faster.

 

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David Rock: So you know, you're about to go into a 1-on-one. You're really upset with that person, and instead of going in and yelling at them, you ask just the right question that, you know helps that person have an insight. They improve their performance, and then you should go and do that next time, you know, because you've learned that you weren't just told by AI to do it. And I think that's the difference. Is that you?

 

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David Rock: How the AI interfaces with people is really important. We did a session you mentioned called the Stuff of Thought. I think it was one of our most interesting. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that because I presented it. But I got a lot from it. It was really interesting and just kind of thinking differently about the AI space was that session? So I think oh, we'll just put it in the chat as well. Got a couple more minutes. Any other questions that you wanted to cover Emma.

 

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Emma Sarro: No, I mean, this is sparking. I feel like we could go on and on about this, because we're diving into the world of AI right now, which is really a lot of what we're thinking about here. And we talked about Niles. And how do we build Niles to be exactly what leaders need to make them better at their jobs. But also the question a lot of people are asking, which is, how do we work better? How do we develop our team of AI agents? This is a question that keeps coming up.

 

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Emma Sarro: How do we collaborate with them like, what's the difference between collaborating with AI versus a person and leaders need both of those skills now. So we're going to be talking a lot about that at Summit. But it is something that everyone is asking, because it is going to be something we need to address.

 

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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, let's wrap up in a minute. Just a couple of other quick questions. So if you're interested in test driving Niles, just put your organization name and the word Niles. Someone will follow up with you, and give you a chance to to test drive that we're we're definitely

 

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David Rock: making those test drives available and getting people getting people in there using it. We're about to do a big update in the next, probably early

 

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David Rock: next week and do a big update. He's got even more powerful. It's really amazing how quickly we're able to make Niles smarter faster itself. But yeah, I'm literally using it as a coach. He's doing really well, like, Wow, this is, this is quite something. So that's Niles. And you know, we're talking a little bit about the habits that the what we found as a formula is, we can focus people on

 

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David Rock: on

 

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David Rock: like 3 habits over a month, and if we can break a content area into 3 habits that you learn one a week for a month.

 

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David Rock: We can do really big things, and that can scale. So that's been our formula.

 

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David Rock: So you know, we have a grow solution around growth mindset. And you know all sorts of different solutions. But essentially, that's the formula. One last quick question, can AI think critically, yes, AI is definitely thinking critically. But AI can help you think critically, more effectively. And one of the fun. Things we just put into Niles is at the end of a coaching session with you. He's going to say, Hey, would you like some thoughts on how I've noticed the way you think.

 

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David Rock: and he's going to give you some like hacks based on patterns he's noticed in your thinking to like, go and work on to actually, literally think more critically, he'll actually keep making you smarter by watching how you interact with him. Which is a little interesting.

 

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David Rock: So yeah, lots lots of fun. So I encourage you to check out Niles. Thanks everyone for putting that in. I think we'll wrap up there. Thanks, Emma. Thanks everyone for being here super interesting time. The summit this year will be releasing a lot about habits, a lot about AI, and look forward to continuing, continuing the conversation. Emma, back to you.

 

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Emma Sarro: Yeah, thanks, David. This was a lot of fun. We could have gone on forever, and we could have gone into the question about hallucinations. But maybe that's for another session. So, as you know, we're right. In the middle of the early stages of summit planning our theme this year is thrive through complexity.

 

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Emma Sarro: virtual, global, November 12th and 13.th So if you haven't looked yet, please take a look at our page. Buy a ticket, get there. We're going to have Niles will be throughout the sessions. He'll be probably taking center stage on a few of the keynotes and many more well-renowned researchers, experts, leaders.

 

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Emma Sarro: But if you enjoy today's conversation, you will love our podcast, show. So make sure you subscribe. You can hear past Friday's webinars, all of the ones that we've been mentioning. Look for your brain at work wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts like spotify. And this is where we officially say goodbye for the week. We will be here next week, but on behalf of myself, David, and everyone behind the scenes, thank you for joining us, and we will see you here next week same time. Thank you.