Charles Duhigg, Westmont President's Breakfast Speaker

Last week I heard world renowned author, Charles Duhigg, tell a packed Coral Casino audience how to be more productive in life and work. It was part of Westmont’s series on “Conversations About Things That Matter.”

In his introduction of Duhigg, Dr. Gayle Bebee said that today we need character and capability to build strong organizations. Duhigg held the audience spellbound with his stories about the power of forming more productive habits. Today I bring you a summary of Duhigg’s fascinating ideas.

Everyone is so busy these days. Being busy has taken on a sign of being successful. If we can say we are busy,  we think it must mean our nonprofit or business is booming. Duhigg says the opposite might be true. Busyness can replace actual productivity.

Being busy may not be a sign of being productive.

Genuinely productive people are not the ones racing through their day quickly completing their check list of to-dos. Rather, people who actually accomplish important work are those who think more deeply. They take the time to be contemplative. Time to assess their goals and explore a variety of roads to success. Once they identify a productive habit to spur them on to success, they teach it to others on their team.

Duhigg gave the example of how Starbuck’s teaches their young servers to respond to an upset customer. It’s called the Latte habit—and it works. Baristas are taught to habitually respond in a certain way to customer complaints. The result is the workers feel more in control of their life.

Have you ever noticed how your brain seems to power down when you are acting from habit? The goal, then, is to create productive habits for yourself and teach them to your team. Research shows that 40 percent of the time we act from habit and 60 percent from choice. So, Duhigg suggests we form our habits intentionally through contemplation.

Analyze and create your habits carefully.

Habits have three parts: Cue, Routine, and Reward. In the Starbuck’s example, the cue is a customer complaint, the routine is the Latte response, and the reward is feeling in control. If we want to change behavior, we simply need to change the cue and the reward. And teach our teams to do the same.

Duhigg outlined three types of mental habits: innovation, focus, and motivating teams. Innovation mixes disparate things together we are familiar with, known as atypical combinations. For example, the movie West Side Story, ended up being an opera, a play, and a ballet by combining Puerto Rico gang activity with Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The result was brilliant and highly innovative.

Creativity, then, is importing disparate ideas and exporting new ways of looking at the world. Innovation brokers engage in this practice routinely. And they must take the time to be contemplative to mix dissimilar ideas in a way that forms a new reality. Busyness thwarts the innovation process.

Get outside your usual comfort zone.

So how can we combine disparate ideas? Where do we find them? We must force ourselves to learn about different things. We often spend our time learning more and more about our favorite topics. If we are a nonprofit executive director, we might actively learn more about fundraising and board governance and organizational development. All are good topics. But invite yourself to explore other arenas like the Maritime Museum, the Zoo, the Historical Museum or the Symphony. Or learn a new dance or take an art class or just walk on the beach.

Duhigg recommends we use situational awareness. Sit down in the morning and tell yourself stories about your day. Contemplate each task or activity you anticipate. The more specific the details, the better. And then change the story by creating a different outcome to the same scenario.

For example, think about a meeting you have scheduled. Who will most likely attend? What will they discuss and who will make which suggestions? How long will the meeting last? Think about what message you want to deliver and ways you can do it. Then change up the story—what if different people are there? What will you do or say? How will you respond in the moment if the conversation gets heated? What will you do if the meeting lasts too long? Being aware of our situation in each moment and having multiple options for action will make us more productive.

Learn how to change your mind.

Everything is automated today. In many ways, that’s good. But research shows that constant toggling between automated activities and independent focus can be unproductive. Cognitive tunneling is our brain’s reaction to too much stimulus. When this occurs thinking stops. So you have to be ready with a new story. Do this by getting in the habit of changing your mind. Remain open and eager for new ideas. Your contemplative practice will make this feel comfortable and automatic.

Move from one mental model to another with ease by changing the story you tell yourself. Visualize what you think will happen and then challenge it. This type of habitual forecasting serves us well. Some of us build more robust mental models than others. We envision the conversations we are going to have with more specificity and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater detail. This effective habit helps us choose where to focus and what to ignore.

Motivate your team by helping them feel in control.

Creating routines through contemplative thinking can make us feel in control. And we can teach this essential skill to others. Motivation expands as we help people feel more in control.

Our workplaces are more team focused than ever before. You might belong to several teams within your organization: program team, executive leadership team, and even the team planning the holiday party.

Effective teams not only have a strong clear of purpose and feel in control; but there is also a strong sense of psychological safety. As team leader you can create a culture of psychological safety by making choices that demonstrate a sensitivity to what team members think and feel, encouraging equality in speaking, and modeling listening.

Do you want to create a strong, productive team? Challenge the members to use contemplative thinking to create habits that help them feel in control and create a strong environment of psychological safety.