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PODCASTS | EPISODE 08

Bridging the Gap Between Training and Behavioral Change with Julie Dirksen, Part 1

What's covered

Tom Griffiths is joined by Julie Dirksen, a celebrated author and learning strategy consultant, who integrates behavioral science principles into the design of impactful learning experiences as showcased in her bestselling book "Design For How People Learn" and her recent work "Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change." In this episode, Tom and Julie discuss how learning leaders can enhance their influence on behavior change and expand their toolkit with behavioral psychology insights. They also explore how to bridge the gap between a learner's intellectual knowledge and personal experience to more effectively drive long-term behavior change.

About the speakers

Podcast_Ep8-JulieDirksen_231220

Julie Dirksen

Author & Learning Strategy Consultant
Julie Dirksen is a celebrated author and learning strategy consultant, who integrates behavioral science principles into the design of impactful learning experiences as showcased in her bestselling book "Design For How People Learn" and her recent work "Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change."
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TomGriffiths-1-300x300-1-1

Tom Griffiths

CEO and co-founder, Hone

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Hone, a next-generation live learning platform for management and people-skills. Prior to Hone, Tom was co-founder and Chief Product Officer of gaming unicorn FanDuel, where over a decade he helped create a multi-award winning product and a thriving distributed team. He has had lifelong passions for education, technology, and business and is grateful for the opportunity to combine all three at Hone. Tom lives in San Diego with his wife and two young children.

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Episode transcript

Tom Griffiths: Hello everyone. Welcome to Learning Works. Today our guest is a bestselling author, L&D practitioner, and thought leader, Julie Dirksen. Julie, thanks for joining us today.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, happy to be here.

Tom Griffiths: It's a real treat to have a conversation with you because not just me, but many people at Hone have been glued to your book for the last five years or so as we've been building the company.

It really has been an inspiration as we've thought about how we [00:01:00] design our classes. And I was just prepping for this interview and saw that I first bought the book. In March 2018, which was one month before we got started. So thank you so much for writing that and being an inspiration to so many instructional designers.

Julie Dirksen: You're welcome. It's lovely to hear, you put things out into the world and you hope that they are useful to people. And whenever I hear that, it's really lovely. Thank you.

Tom Griffiths: I'm coming from a product development background, which touches a user experience design. And I just remember noticing some of the parallels of kind of the lean UX movement, a very kind of customer centric, scrappy, iterative approach to designing.

User interfaces, and I felt that was a kind of echoed in the book as applied to learning design. Was that that field, any inspiration or connection for you at

Julie Dirksen: all? Yeah, absolutely. Back in, I'd say the early to mid nineties, when I was getting really interested in digital learning design, I was also looking for help to think about, how [00:02:00] user interface influence things. And so remember first picking up like Jacob Nielsen's usability engineering book back in the nineties and things like that, because I actually think that there's a continuum of where does the information need to live to best support performance. And sometimes we want the information to live inside the learner's heads or the user's heads.

They need to know it. They need to be able to use it with real facility. And then that's a training problem. But sometimes the best place for the information is closer to the point of performance. So it might be, job aids or it might be performance support, tools or things like that.

But sometimes we want to just build it into the interface altogether. And it could be anything from like microcopy in the interface all the way to, we're just going to create an intelligent system that does a lot of the decision making for you. And so there's this continuum of where does the information you deliver to support performance.

And if it's on one side of the continuum, we make it learning and developments problem. And if it's on the other side of the continuum, it's things like [00:03:00] user experience and design. And I think that division is a little bit artificial and we should all be talking to each other a little bit more.

So, so yes the idea that some of those ideas, coming from disciplines like UX and some of those sorts of things, finding its way over into The book I hope was deliberate. I hope it was there. Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think was one of the reasons that I went with my publisher because I was such an admirer of what he did with that book in terms of making a first book for people getting started with user experience for web based things.

And I was one of the questions I was thinking about with. Design for how people learn was what would that first book look like for people coming into learning design? And so many people come into learning design because of domain expertise. They know a lot about their topic. They know their subject They're an expert in whatever it is that they do and so they want Those people to teach other people but they know an enormous amount of their topic and very little about like How do they translate that into?[00:04:00]

A good learning experience for other people. And so that was the hope or, the mission statement of that book is to help specifically that audience with some of the real fundamental things about learning design so that they could make better choices when they were creating their learning experiences for their own audiences.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, absolutely. That's a beautiful connection. Like you say, not just inspired by UX or intellectually connected, but there's a continuum for a learner or user where they, how they pre learn things or they, using them in the moment and it's the same kind of techniques and mindsets.

To adopt on both parts of that spectrum. So, really, I think, achieved that mission, as you say, of helping people get into instructional design. And if folks haven't had a chance to pick up a copy, definitely do go read Design for How People Learn. Because it is really foundational and accessible and pragmatic and really helped us a lot.

But we're here to talk about your second book, Julie the follow up, which is Talk to the Elephant with a subtitle of [00:05:00] Design for Behavior Change. We'd love to just hear the backstory on What you thi think needed to be out in the world and what led you to write the second book?

Julie Dirksen: So, talk to the elephant. Design learning for behavior change. One of the things that I think we need to think about in learning design is supporting behavior change, because anything certainly in any kind of workplace learning is there to support behavior change and there's always this sort of special class of problem with learning design where I always describe it as they know what to do, but they still aren't doing it.

And we all have those, we all have behaviors, we know we should do, and we're still not doing right. I know I should, eat more fruits and vegetables, or, we know that we should save, do a little bit of a better job of saving for retirement, or that, we know people know they should wear their safety glasses, but if they're not handy, sometimes they skip it, or we know that we're supposed to make good notes about in the client record, after the sales call, or document our code for computer programmers or whatever these things are, right. We all know that [00:06:00] there's some stuff that we should always be doing and it's if you whether it happens or not and especially when we look at things like all of the compliance training that's out in the world or, things like that theoretically, you should pay attention to it.

And yet sometimes it's real hard. And 1 of the things with this is. If the problem, if the gap between where the learner is and where they need to be is just the knowledge, right? If I know this thing, then the behavior will happen. We've as instructional designers or learning designers have good toolkits for that, right?

We can help people understand things. We can help people remember things. We've got, a whole Sort of area of educational psychology that will point to strategies, whether they get used or not is a different question. But there are a bunch of strategies for helping people learn and remember things.

But if the problem isn't what they've learned and remembered, the problem is, are they make, instead of bridging the gap between knowing and doing, are they actually making it, I know the thing, I know I should wear my safety glasses, but are we actually, are they actually wearing their safety [00:07:00] glasses, when they're doing things where they could you have eye injuries.

Then our toolbox, it seems to has historically been to just tell people louder and more emphatically that they should do the thing. And I think that's not good enough as a toolbox. And there's been an enormous amount of stuff happening in behavioral science in the fields of behavioral science, which is yeah.

Kind of coalescing now into its own kind of domain, as opposed to being part of a number of different scientific domains. And and I think there's a lot of useful stuff that's been happening there that we could be leveraging and learning and development and haven't necessarily been. And so that's the the evidence behind this book, which is how do we design learning experiences in a way that we're helping support people actually doing the thing?

Cause we can't make them do the thing, that's. That's about incentives or management or a number of different things, but I think there are things that we can do in learning design, but it's [00:08:00] also useful to be able to say, okay, this is the piece of stuff that kind of comes from learning design.

And then this is the stuff that's not under our domain as learning and development people. And you need to pay attention to that too. We can train all day long, but if the incentives incentivize the wrong behavior, the training's not going to move the needle on that but being able to look at those things a little bit more clearly and make sure that you're solving the right problem.

So that's the gist behind it. The elephant is specifically from a metaphor from Jonathan Haidt. He's a psychologist and he talks about how our brains are like a rider and an elephant and it's a very reductionistic view of the brain, but it's, I think, still a useful metaphor for certain things, which is that a big swath of our brain is concerned with interacting with the physical world and our feelings and what we perceive and sense and how we control our physical movement in the world, and he calls all of this the elephant.

It's your visceral, emotional brain. And then you've got the logic stuff, [00:09:00] which is right behind your eyes, prefrontal cortex, logic, impulse control, planning for the future, considering consequences, executive reasoning, all of this kind of stuff. And that's a rider.

And we have a tendency in learning and development or in most training applications to talk to the rider. Here's the logical argument for this. We will talk in big abstractions, here's the big abstract benefit of it. It's going to happen sometime in the future. We don't know when and whenever most behavioral issues come from when they're when your physical senses are telling you something different than your intellectual knowledge and the example I always use for that is handwashing.

Right? So if I look at my hand right now, it looks pretty clean, but I know intellectually it's not clean enough for Food prep or medical purposes or something like that, but it's the intellectual knowledge that knows about like germ theory and stuff. And your elephant's like, I don't know. It's not too bad.

Seems. Okay. And so those tend to be the things where we have a lot of [00:10:00] those struggles. As behavior change things where our past experience or our current physical senses are telling us one thing and our intellectual knowledge is telling us another. So if you take something like texting while driving, we intellectually know it's bad.

And if you've had personal experience of it being bad, then you've got both. The sort of the elephant and the rider know it's bad, but a lot of people have gotten away with it a bunch of times, so their intellectual knowledge is texting while driving is bad. Their personal experience of it has been actually, it's not so bad.

I can get away with it. And so when we get that conflict between what are. Our personal kind of physical experience of the world is and what our intellectual knowledge of the world is, then it starts to become a bit of a push pull. And so the title, the book talk to the elephant is it's not enough for some of these behavior change challenges to just make the logical abstract argument.

You have to do things like give people the physical experience of what the consequences are like, or engage. [00:11:00] Social proof as a way of norming things or use stories and emotional impact to help with it, or, things like that. And there's a whole slew of strategies people have been using for a long time, but one of the nice things in the behavioral science is that they've brought together some frameworks and some tools that you can use to help really get specific about what is the problem that we're trying to address here.

The real reason that's behavior isn't happening and it's not. Because somebody hasn't yelled at them enough, it's because maybe they've got a lot of fear, anxiety, or discomfort about performing this behavior, or maybe because they've had a lot of experience getting away with it, and it hasn't seemed to matter, or maybe it's because The social norming is informing, they're looking at role models who are showing the wrong behavior and they're believing that and not the, what they're being told and things like that.

So there's a whole slew of those kinds of things, but trying to be more specific about where's the problem and what's a more targeted solution that [00:12:00] will hopefully help us with it.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, that makes complete sense. Moving from, I know what to do to, I'm actually doing it. Is a huge leap and all the examples you gave in people's personal lives totally rang true for me.

We also see it in the leadership of management space, of course, as well. A lot of people know in theory how they should be given feedback or conducting a coaching conversation, but actually getting people to do that and know when to be triggered to do that is a different thing. And certainly, as you say, there's.

It's been a lot of work and established, I would say products in the market that know how to impart the knowledge, but then a lot of recent and interesting innovation around how we can actually drive the behavior change. So I'd be curious to dig a little deeper with that example in the workplace, because I think.

It's a difficult challenge, right? There's the knowledge part, which we know we can do. You said incentives and environment are hard to affect [00:13:00] change in as a learning designer. So there's this kind of gap in the middle of how I can be more effective at then driving behavior post learning experience. We'd love to hear any anecdotes or advice you have for how people should be designing those kinds of learning experiences for a management 101 type program.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, 1 of the things in manage and, the kind of management arena is how much of what, good management looks like is driven by habits. And so habit. Research is a big area in the behavioral science space. And so being able to really look at, what is it going to take in order to get these, some of these behaviors to become automatic and so forth. So like one of the researchers who stuff I like a lot is Richard Goldwitzer, who researches habit formation. He does, he tells what he refers to as implementation intentions, or sometimes you see it described as like action planning or something like that.

And it's very much of, if X happens, I'll do Y. Right. Some of the estimates, researchers [00:14:00] like Wendy Woods and people like that talk about how much of your day is driven by habits. And so, for example, a good manager, a habit might be giving feedback to employees or something like that, or following up on the status of work or communicating things at the right time.

Or, there's a number of these different kinds of things or effective delegation or looking at the motivation of people, there's a whole slew of things and there's a number of different behaviors that live underneath that. Right? And so that's an area where typically in a training environment, we're like, here, we're going to send you to this class and you're going to go to it for a day or 2 days.

And you're going to learn this method of giving feedback. And then we know people go back to the workplace and don't particularly change their behaviors. And one of the things that happens is automatic behaviors. They're probably stored in different brain regions. They operate a lot without you having to pay attention to them.

That's the nice thing about automatic behaviors and these things that are habit driven is that they require a lower [00:15:00] amount of effort to continue, but. Now you need to interrupt it, now we need to interrupt the old habit and consciously make a decision about when am I going to insert a new behavior?

And so one of the things I like about Goldwitzer's implementation intentions is when X happens, I'll do Y. So I'm going to look specifically for the opportunities to interrupt some of my automatic behaviors. When I see that particular criteria, I have this behavior. I'm going to pull out and I'm going to use and so it could be, when I get a status update in an email, I'm going to use that as an opportunity to give employees feedback or When I find myself delegating a task, I'm going to stop and make sure that I ask these specific questions to make sure that I'm, like doing delegation the way that I think it should be done.

Or when I am communicating, I'm going to, put a certain, whenever a certain, a lot of change is happening, I'm going to insert some things into my calendar to remind me that. I need to do a regular kind of [00:16:00] communication burst of people to make sure that they're up to date with all the things that are happening.

And it can't assume that everybody knows whatever it might be. But but that's cause we, we talk about this when we get into the DEI stuff of unconscious bias and I'm like, well, the whole point of unconscious bias is that it's unconscious. And so if you don't realize it's happening, you're going to have a hard time interrupting it and replacing it with something else.

And so really looking for those triggers or looking for those things that are an opportunity for me to stop the automatic behavior and do something different is I think a huge opportunity. And I think it's very relevant in when it comes to leadership or management.

Tom Griffiths: Following on from that, some software, some theories and products make use of nudges which obviously are also to do with behavior change in the moment or after the training experience but there's some debate on their effectiveness.

So, yeah. would be curious if you could share your perspective on the efficacy of a nudge type approach.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, and nudges are an interesting one [00:17:00] because I think a lot of people came to the area of behavioral design via the book Nudge, which came out, and I want to say it was either 2008 or 2010, but it was along with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, kind of some of the seminal texts that got people interested in behavioral design, and it certainly was part of my kind of understanding of it was one of the first things where I was like, Oh, that, there's a deliberate design choices that we can make around supporting people and behavior change and things like that.

I do think it's, the book. And this isn't necessarily a criticism, but it was a product of its time. And there is some contention in the field about the idea of these little nudges um, which is often, it could be a matter of choice architecture. It could be a matter of using a default setting.

It could be a number of different things, but they're usually these little kind of low cost items. I think we. . All fell in love with that idea a little bit and then find that. Okay. Well, it maybe doesn't hurt anything, but it's [00:18:00] also not a way around significant investment in systemic change.

So one of the examples that shows up a lot, and I've used it myself, is this example of just changing the default on organ donation. I think this was, gosh, this was like back in 2003 or something. It's an old study, but but they looked at organization sign up rates in different countries and, in several European countries, it was in like the 80s and 90 percent range.

And then a whole slew of other European countries, it was in the teens or the 20 percent range and things like that. And the difference typically between the 2 was the default. So, in the countries where you were at the 80 or 90 percent range, you would see the default was selected and people had to unselect it.

In order to say, no, I don't want to be an organ donor. And in the countries where the signup rates were low, the box was unselected and you had to actually actively select it and choose to be an organ donor. Well, and then this is great. Right. And everybody's oh, we can use defaults or we can use choice architecture.

We can use a lot of these kinds of things. [00:19:00] And you totally can, but it's ultimately not. Whether you've had this default box on that is going to govern the rates of organ donation in different countries. And, if the goal isn't just people signing up to be organ donors, the goal is actually people being organ donors and successful organ donation saving lives is really your downstream goal, right?

You want organ donation to be used to save more lives of people who are waiting for Organ donation the system that needs to exist to support organ donation from signups to, ultimately it's your family that's going to make these decisions in most cases, not actually the person. So it's going to be about that, it might be about, does your family know that you want to be an organ donor?

Are they aware, those kinds of things. And it comes down to then if the organ is donated, is it being donated in a location where there's [00:20:00] somebody who can actually do it and get it to the person who needs it? And is there a whole infrastructure in health care to support it? So

if the ultimate goal is more people's lives are saved through organ donation, then this is a tiny little part of the puzzle. This is not the thing that's going to change organ donation in a particular country. Now, possibly, big changes are built up sometimes from a lot of like tiny little changes and there are several nudges that You know, probably they're not making a huge difference, but they're part of a whole sort of menu or, set of things that you can adjust to help improve a particular, behavior or set of behaviors or outcomes that you're looking for.

Some of the meta analyses on nudges are mixed in terms of the efficacy, but I struggle with that one a little bit because I think the idea of a nudge is too general to do an effective meta analysis. You need to really pare it down a few levels and look at specifically Oh, is it a [00:21:00] default selection thing or is it whatever?

And I would expect the, there to be a lot of variability rate of the effectiveness of those, depending on what they're being applied to. So I'm not sure that the meta analysis stuff is telling us enough. That's useful about which ones are and which ones aren't effective. But I will admit, I haven't really sat down with those research studies and broken it out in terms of the methods that the, that they were using in terms of, were they making any distinction between different types of nudges? Are we just dealing conceptually with a large category of things that we're calling nudges? And so I don't think it tells us anything that we can act on as designers at this point, but I do think, viewing

any result with a healthy skepticism until you've tested it in your own environment with your own context is a good thing. I think you should be skeptical of these. And you should always test these out because[00:22:00] the, one of the issues with behavioral science is that it is filled with subtleties, right?

Like strategies that make complete sense in one environment completely fail in another environment. And yeah. You were talking about product design and things like that. Like one of the things that Gmail did when it rolled out was the use this exclusivity thing. Like it was hard to get an invite and whatever.

And then later on when they were rolling out, Oh gosh, what was it called? It was their social platform that they were going to do. It was like the Google plus one. They were also using this exclusivity strategy with it. But the problem was like an exclusive access to email

I can still send emails to all the people I know, but , an exclusive access strategy to a platform meant that a few people kind of. and so the strategy of using exclusivity could be considered to be a nudge in that context. And it worked great as long as once I [00:23:00] had Gmail, I could still do all of the email things with it. I just had a, like a fun tool to play with versus that same strategy worked really not well when it came to building a social platform because, You'd go in there and you'd be like, oh, look, there's nobody to talk to.

That's not a great way to propagate a social platform. So, yeah, so being really aware of context, I think is super important when we look at things like nudges or anything that we would categorize in that domain of like small efforts around behaviors.

Tom Griffiths: So being aware of the environment and the circumstances of your learner and then testing it out, maybe it helps in this situation, or maybe a version of it helps that you can iterate towards, or maybe you find that it doesn't have an effect.

Or the intended effect at all. So it comes back to that iterative design loop that we talked about at the start, whether you're designing products or designing learning experiences that's really helpful. Speaking of models that may carry some more weight, you referenced the COM B model in your work a lot.

Could [00:24:00] you unpack that for us and how it relates to behavior change design?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, absolutely. There's a number of been a number of kind of different behavioral models that are coming out of different domains. And, so there's a lot of the stuff that was done by the behavioral economics people again, the Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and you get the behavioral insights units and some of the models that they have.

There's one called East, which is easy, something social, and different things. And honestly I think that a lot of them have useful things to offer. So I'm not a 100 percent like this is the only good model. But the 1 that I've leaned into is a model called COM-B and it was developed at University College, London by Susan Mickey and her team there and her colleagues and so forth.

People like the Atkins and Robert West and paul Tadwick has worked with that and he wound up doing the technical edit on the book, which was great because he could tell me all the places where I was getting it wrong. They did a research survey across several of the different behavior change models that were coming up and formulated something called the behavior change wheel, which is [00:25:00] an attempt to bring it into a single coherent model for this.

And that goes all the way. To several things that are not part of, the learning or training or any of those kinds of things like incentivizations and regulation and legislation and, just a whole slew of areas. But COM-B, which sits underneath as part of the behavior change wheel, but a smaller piece of it looks at.

It, learner capability or user capability opportunity and motivation and within capability, it says, are they physically capable of doing the thing? Are they psychologically capable of doing the thing, which gets into a lot of the space that learning and development deals with training and skill development and, those kinds of capabilities, knowledge opportunity gets broken into a social opportunity and, physical opportunity, and so social opportunity would be, am I seeing this model by other people? Do I have social support for it? If I do this behavior, will the people around me, provide help and assistance with it? Or does my social environment fight with this?

[00:26:00] Physical opportunity really goes to all those user experience kinds of things, does the system to support it? Do I have the materials I need nearby? Am I operating in an environment where I reasonably can do the behavior? Do I have what I need? And then motivation breaks out into reflective motivation and automatic motivations.

Reflective motivation are things like our stated goals. What goal do I have around this? It also gets into things that you can reflect on, like your values or beliefs about things. And automatic motivation is all of that unconscious habit driven stuff that we're doing without really thinking about it.

And so, depending on where the issue exists within those, and it can be in all the domains, or it could be in just part of them or something like that, then you can start to map those across to different kinds of interventions. So, for example, if the behavior is reporting safety issues on a construction site, well, I need them to be physically able to do it. I need them to psychologically be able to do it, which means they need to be [00:27:00] able to recognize hazards. I need them to have the social opportunity. If they report a hazard, is everybody going to be mad at them? Or is it going to be supported? Is management going to be annoyed because it's slowing down the job?

Or is that behavior going to be, reinforced essentially by the social environment? Does the physical environment make it easy to report a thing, or is it complicated and difficult and, then you get into things like additional enablement. If the safety issue requires, a harness, because we're working at heights.

Is that readily available or does somebody have to like, drive back to the office 45 minutes away to get it? Well, that's going to govern whether or not you engage in that behavior. And then in motivation, is this awkward and unpleasant? Or is this something where I feel. We've, we talk a lot in organizations about psychological safety, right?

Reporting a safety issue, physical safety issue has to go, goes to the psychological safety issue of what's the response be? Are people going to be mad at me? Is it going to be reinforced? Or is it going to be derided [00:28:00] if I do this? Well, that's going to play into the motivation piece as well.

Or what do I see when other people do it? Or what's the overarching belief around it? Do I see safety as part of my job? Or is that like the safety manager's responsibility? Do I see it as something that I can get better at? Or is it just I just need to follow the rules. It's just a compliance, base thing.

Those, all of those issues play into whether or not this behavior happens. And if you're Like just yelling at people about it which it does seem to be the way that a lot of that goes if you're just compliance focused then, that messes with some of these other domains and can cause its own set of problems around the behaviors actually happening.

Tom Griffiths: So it's quite a wide. Ranging framework that allows you to think through I think it was capabilities, opportunities, motivation in the environment to do some task. And then as a leader manager or learning designer, you can reconcile what conditions need to be met to give the highest chance of success using that as a model.

[00:29:00] It's so wonderful to hear you list off. The research and researchers in the space and some of these models that are immediately actionable and no doubt in the book, you make them very practically useful to a learning experienced designer, but I'd be curious why you think, this behavior change approach isn't more universally adopted already in people's learning design strategies.

What is it about, where we are as a field that perhaps means that. This hasn't caught on so much and made the book so necessary.

Julie Dirksen: It's an interesting one because I first got interested in this back in kind of the mid 2000s. I was working on a project. It was an AIDS and HIV prevention project.

So they were specifically, and they were looking at the online presence to serve an audience to hopefully help lower AIDS and HIV infection rates. And 1 of the things is by 2005, 2007 everybody knew that safe sex practices were going to lower AIDS and HIV rates.

It wasn't a knowledge problem [00:30:00] anymore around things like condom usage or whatever it was. And so given that was not knowledge that everybody had, then the question is, well, what are we doing here to help people with this? And that particular project, which was out of the university of Minnesota school of epidemiology looked at a number of factors like people's mental health had an impact on those choices.

People's physical health had an impact on those choices. People's social health. Did they have strong social relationships had an impact on those choices? People's level of sexual maturity had an impact on those practices. If they were comfortable talking about things, they were going to be more comfortable negotiating condom usage with a partner or something like that.

And so there were a whole slew of things that were beyond just, hey, condom usage, good. That Had an impact on that project, and I was really like looking at that one kind of feeling like, oh, my tool set is an instructional designer is very information driven. It's very much. How do I convey this information?

And it didn't have nearly as much of the stuff as I wanted to see around. [00:31:00] Well, if it's not that information problem, what are we doing with this? And so that's why I was looking for other things. As I mentioned, the behavioral economics stuff had an influence, but then the COM-B stuff had an influence.

And one of the things, one of the other pieces of the COM-B model that I do is that they have followed this across into a library of different interventions. They have a library of. The behavior change technique taxonomy has 93 different interventions that they've seen in the research literature.

And some of what they're doing with that is a coding mechanism for looking at research so that you can do a little bit more apples to apples comparison across different domains. And they're also working on some. ontologies around it so that they can do this because stuff was coming up in safety or finance or public health or psychology or behavioral economics.

And so you want to be able to look across to start to identify some strategies that are going to be more or less effective, but it really is going to be this accumulation of things. It's rarely like there's no magic bullet. You're never going to fix these. And [00:32:00] honestly one of the biggest challenges for most of these behaviors is competing priorities.

We all have 37 different things that we're supposed to do with any minute of any day. And we have to pick which ones are more important. And so a lot of times we're not just convincing people that the behavior is important. We have to convince people that it should be at least in the top five of most important things.

And that's a lot harder than just getting them to put it on the bottom of the list where it's going to sit there for a really long time and never happen. And so, that's a real challenge. Of not only do I need you to believe this is useful, I need you to believe it's useful and, a top priority.

And a lot of stuff. Most people are not convinced of that at this point.

Tom Griffiths: And as we all know, our work environments have got more and more distractions every day. So making it onto that top five is a challenge. And perhaps, yeah, phase one was getting it on the list at all. And now phase two with behavior change, actually, you're getting it to the top three to five.

So people do it.[00:33:00] One last question before we wrap this first part of the conversation on the big picture and the new book, as you were reflecting through your career and looking back, what were some of the behavior change design projects that really stood out to you and why?

Julie Dirksen: The one, obviously I've mentioned through the university of Minnesota was really foundational for me. And then also in 2008, I was working, with an organization that was looking at, helping people with all of those kinds of health behaviors. Right. So it might be quitting smoking or, better dietary choices or exercise or sleep or managing stress or any of those kinds of things.

And it was, like I said, it was 2008. So it was a little early for smartphones. Because that's really where it would have naturally lined up is to be a smartphone app, but it was a little too early at that point, but it was a really interesting project. And I got to learn a lot from the different people that were associated with that one, because, we know what all these behaviors are, right?

We know all the things that we're supposed to [00:34:00] be doing that we still struggle with. Because, health care is amazing. The innovation that's happened in health care and we're getting really good at fixing some of the surgical techniques are amazing. And the medications that are available are amazing.

And, granted, there's still a lot to be done there but really, things like the genetic testing to identify different kinds of diseases is amazing, and that's just more a matter of getting the cost down on that and having it be more ubiquitous, but there's all sorts of problems that we can solve in healthcare now that we couldn't solve five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, all these kinds of things, but, a huge amount of our healthcare costs go to behavioral things, right?

Okay. We can give you a good blood pressure medication, but do you take it regularly? Or we can give you medications to help you manage your diabetes. But there's also a bunch of behavioral stuff that you really need to be doing. If you want to get this under control or, any of these kinds of things where there's an enormous behavioral component.

That's still a big part of the cost that we're seeing. And [00:35:00] so, you If we fix all the mechanical stuff, we still have the human behaviors that are going to be persistent. So trying to figure out better and more useful methods of doing that. I'm doing a little bit of work right now with, michelle Segar, who's out of the University of Michigan and looks at exercise motivation quite a lot. She's a researcher there and she specifically looks at helping people with the issue of people who feel like exercise is a chore and that they should do it and transforming that attitude from making it from a chore and kind of turning it into a gift.

And one of the findings that she's seen with a lot of stuff is if you keep thinking exercise is horrible and unpleasant and painful and whatever strangely enough, that's going to impact your ability to maintain, maintain and do to do exercise and that if you can figure out we've all heard the no pain, no gain and all of these kinds of things.

Well, if you're somebody who's coming from. Somebody who struggled with exercise, if you're trying to make yourself do an exercise that's painful and unpleasant. [00:36:00] Hey, guess what? You're not going to do it all that much. And so it's far better for you to say no, this isn't the right exercise for me.

I'm going to find something that is more enjoyable or isn't painful or isn't unpleasant. And I'm going to do that. That's a way better answer than I'm going to muster up all my willpower and continue to force myself to do something that's painful and unpleasant. But we don't. I think we believe there's some kind of virtue there.

If you can force yourself to do the painful and unpleasant thing, that somehow better turns out probably not. It's probably not better. A, it's not that much more beneficial as an exercise than many other things that aren't painful and unpleasant and B nobody's got that much willpower.

Generally speaking, you need, you really do need to find something if you're going to do it. Yeah. On a long term regular basis, you need to find things that are not awful, which shouldn't be that revolutionary an idea. And yet here it is. So proven by

Tom Griffiths: science. I like it.

Contemplating going for a run in the cold and the rain this morning was something I needed some help overcoming. I love [00:37:00] the analogy to progress in medical science, right? Where we can solve the practical, physical, biological parts of the condition. But we need to innovate and progress ourselves in our understanding of the human part of the motivation.

So I think it's fantastic to have the book out there. That will really help to move the field forwards and have more people versed in how to solve that part of the equation. So, thanks for taking us through the high level there. Let's wrap it there for part one. And when we come back, we'll talk part two, which is how you actually put behavior change design into action in your organization.

Thanks for listening to Learning Works. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast for our exciting lineup of future episodes. Learning Works is presented by Hone. Hone helps busy L& D leaders easily scale power skills training through tech powered live learning experiences that drive real ROI and lasting behavior change.[00:38:00]

If you want even more resources, you can head to our website, honehq. com. That's H O N E H Q dot com for upcoming workshops, articles, and to learn more about Hone.

Tom Griffiths: Hello everyone. Welcome to Learning Works. Today our guest is a bestselling author, L&D practitioner, and thought leader, Julie Dirksen. Julie, thanks for joining us today.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, happy to be here.

Tom Griffiths: It's a real treat to have a conversation with you because not just me, but many people at Hone have been glued to your book for the last five years or so as we've been building the company.

It really has been an inspiration as we've thought about how we [00:01:00] design our classes. And I was just prepping for this interview and saw that I first bought the book. In March 2018, which was one month before we got started. So thank you so much for writing that and being an inspiration to so many instructional designers.

Julie Dirksen: You're welcome. It's lovely to hear, you put things out into the world and you hope that they are useful to people. And whenever I hear that, it's really lovely. Thank you.

Tom Griffiths: I'm coming from a product development background, which touches a user experience design. And I just remember noticing some of the parallels of kind of the lean UX movement, a very kind of customer centric, scrappy, iterative approach to designing.

User interfaces, and I felt that was a kind of echoed in the book as applied to learning design. Was that that field, any inspiration or connection for you at

Julie Dirksen: all? Yeah, absolutely. Back in, I'd say the early to mid nineties, when I was getting really interested in digital learning design, I was also looking for help to think about, how [00:02:00] user interface influence things. And so remember first picking up like Jacob Nielsen's usability engineering book back in the nineties and things like that, because I actually think that there's a continuum of where does the information need to live to best support performance. And sometimes we want the information to live inside the learner's heads or the user's heads.

They need to know it. They need to be able to use it with real facility. And then that's a training problem. But sometimes the best place for the information is closer to the point of performance. So it might be, job aids or it might be performance support, tools or things like that.

But sometimes we want to just build it into the interface altogether. And it could be anything from like microcopy in the interface all the way to, we're just going to create an intelligent system that does a lot of the decision making for you. And so there's this continuum of where does the information you deliver to support performance.

And if it's on one side of the continuum, we make it learning and developments problem. And if it's on the other side of the continuum, it's things like [00:03:00] user experience and design. And I think that division is a little bit artificial and we should all be talking to each other a little bit more.

So, so yes the idea that some of those ideas, coming from disciplines like UX and some of those sorts of things, finding its way over into The book I hope was deliberate. I hope it was there. Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think was one of the reasons that I went with my publisher because I was such an admirer of what he did with that book in terms of making a first book for people getting started with user experience for web based things.

And I was one of the questions I was thinking about with. Design for how people learn was what would that first book look like for people coming into learning design? And so many people come into learning design because of domain expertise. They know a lot about their topic. They know their subject They're an expert in whatever it is that they do and so they want Those people to teach other people but they know an enormous amount of their topic and very little about like How do they translate that into?[00:04:00]

A good learning experience for other people. And so that was the hope or, the mission statement of that book is to help specifically that audience with some of the real fundamental things about learning design so that they could make better choices when they were creating their learning experiences for their own audiences.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, absolutely. That's a beautiful connection. Like you say, not just inspired by UX or intellectually connected, but there's a continuum for a learner or user where they, how they pre learn things or they, using them in the moment and it's the same kind of techniques and mindsets.

To adopt on both parts of that spectrum. So, really, I think, achieved that mission, as you say, of helping people get into instructional design. And if folks haven't had a chance to pick up a copy, definitely do go read Design for How People Learn. Because it is really foundational and accessible and pragmatic and really helped us a lot.

But we're here to talk about your second book, Julie the follow up, which is Talk to the Elephant with a subtitle of [00:05:00] Design for Behavior Change. We'd love to just hear the backstory on What you thi think needed to be out in the world and what led you to write the second book?

Julie Dirksen: So, talk to the elephant. Design learning for behavior change. One of the things that I think we need to think about in learning design is supporting behavior change, because anything certainly in any kind of workplace learning is there to support behavior change and there's always this sort of special class of problem with learning design where I always describe it as they know what to do, but they still aren't doing it.

And we all have those, we all have behaviors, we know we should do, and we're still not doing right. I know I should, eat more fruits and vegetables, or, we know that we should save, do a little bit of a better job of saving for retirement, or that, we know people know they should wear their safety glasses, but if they're not handy, sometimes they skip it, or we know that we're supposed to make good notes about in the client record, after the sales call, or document our code for computer programmers or whatever these things are, right. We all know that [00:06:00] there's some stuff that we should always be doing and it's if you whether it happens or not and especially when we look at things like all of the compliance training that's out in the world or, things like that theoretically, you should pay attention to it.

And yet sometimes it's real hard. And 1 of the things with this is. If the problem, if the gap between where the learner is and where they need to be is just the knowledge, right? If I know this thing, then the behavior will happen. We've as instructional designers or learning designers have good toolkits for that, right?

We can help people understand things. We can help people remember things. We've got, a whole Sort of area of educational psychology that will point to strategies, whether they get used or not is a different question. But there are a bunch of strategies for helping people learn and remember things.

But if the problem isn't what they've learned and remembered, the problem is, are they make, instead of bridging the gap between knowing and doing, are they actually making it, I know the thing, I know I should wear my safety glasses, but are we actually, are they actually wearing their safety [00:07:00] glasses, when they're doing things where they could you have eye injuries.

Then our toolbox, it seems to has historically been to just tell people louder and more emphatically that they should do the thing. And I think that's not good enough as a toolbox. And there's been an enormous amount of stuff happening in behavioral science in the fields of behavioral science, which is yeah.

Kind of coalescing now into its own kind of domain, as opposed to being part of a number of different scientific domains. And and I think there's a lot of useful stuff that's been happening there that we could be leveraging and learning and development and haven't necessarily been. And so that's the the evidence behind this book, which is how do we design learning experiences in a way that we're helping support people actually doing the thing?

Cause we can't make them do the thing, that's. That's about incentives or management or a number of different things, but I think there are things that we can do in learning design, but it's [00:08:00] also useful to be able to say, okay, this is the piece of stuff that kind of comes from learning design.

And then this is the stuff that's not under our domain as learning and development people. And you need to pay attention to that too. We can train all day long, but if the incentives incentivize the wrong behavior, the training's not going to move the needle on that but being able to look at those things a little bit more clearly and make sure that you're solving the right problem.

So that's the gist behind it. The elephant is specifically from a metaphor from Jonathan Haidt. He's a psychologist and he talks about how our brains are like a rider and an elephant and it's a very reductionistic view of the brain, but it's, I think, still a useful metaphor for certain things, which is that a big swath of our brain is concerned with interacting with the physical world and our feelings and what we perceive and sense and how we control our physical movement in the world, and he calls all of this the elephant.

It's your visceral, emotional brain. And then you've got the logic stuff, [00:09:00] which is right behind your eyes, prefrontal cortex, logic, impulse control, planning for the future, considering consequences, executive reasoning, all of this kind of stuff. And that's a rider.

And we have a tendency in learning and development or in most training applications to talk to the rider. Here's the logical argument for this. We will talk in big abstractions, here's the big abstract benefit of it. It's going to happen sometime in the future. We don't know when and whenever most behavioral issues come from when they're when your physical senses are telling you something different than your intellectual knowledge and the example I always use for that is handwashing.

Right? So if I look at my hand right now, it looks pretty clean, but I know intellectually it's not clean enough for Food prep or medical purposes or something like that, but it's the intellectual knowledge that knows about like germ theory and stuff. And your elephant's like, I don't know. It's not too bad.

Seems. Okay. And so those tend to be the things where we have a lot of [00:10:00] those struggles. As behavior change things where our past experience or our current physical senses are telling us one thing and our intellectual knowledge is telling us another. So if you take something like texting while driving, we intellectually know it's bad.

And if you've had personal experience of it being bad, then you've got both. The sort of the elephant and the rider know it's bad, but a lot of people have gotten away with it a bunch of times, so their intellectual knowledge is texting while driving is bad. Their personal experience of it has been actually, it's not so bad.

I can get away with it. And so when we get that conflict between what are. Our personal kind of physical experience of the world is and what our intellectual knowledge of the world is, then it starts to become a bit of a push pull. And so the title, the book talk to the elephant is it's not enough for some of these behavior change challenges to just make the logical abstract argument.

You have to do things like give people the physical experience of what the consequences are like, or engage. [00:11:00] Social proof as a way of norming things or use stories and emotional impact to help with it, or, things like that. And there's a whole slew of strategies people have been using for a long time, but one of the nice things in the behavioral science is that they've brought together some frameworks and some tools that you can use to help really get specific about what is the problem that we're trying to address here.

The real reason that's behavior isn't happening and it's not. Because somebody hasn't yelled at them enough, it's because maybe they've got a lot of fear, anxiety, or discomfort about performing this behavior, or maybe because they've had a lot of experience getting away with it, and it hasn't seemed to matter, or maybe it's because The social norming is informing, they're looking at role models who are showing the wrong behavior and they're believing that and not the, what they're being told and things like that.

So there's a whole slew of those kinds of things, but trying to be more specific about where's the problem and what's a more targeted solution that [00:12:00] will hopefully help us with it.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, that makes complete sense. Moving from, I know what to do to, I'm actually doing it. Is a huge leap and all the examples you gave in people's personal lives totally rang true for me.

We also see it in the leadership of management space, of course, as well. A lot of people know in theory how they should be given feedback or conducting a coaching conversation, but actually getting people to do that and know when to be triggered to do that is a different thing. And certainly, as you say, there's.

It's been a lot of work and established, I would say products in the market that know how to impart the knowledge, but then a lot of recent and interesting innovation around how we can actually drive the behavior change. So I'd be curious to dig a little deeper with that example in the workplace, because I think.

It's a difficult challenge, right? There's the knowledge part, which we know we can do. You said incentives and environment are hard to affect [00:13:00] change in as a learning designer. So there's this kind of gap in the middle of how I can be more effective at then driving behavior post learning experience. We'd love to hear any anecdotes or advice you have for how people should be designing those kinds of learning experiences for a management 101 type program.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, 1 of the things in manage and, the kind of management arena is how much of what, good management looks like is driven by habits. And so habit. Research is a big area in the behavioral science space. And so being able to really look at, what is it going to take in order to get these, some of these behaviors to become automatic and so forth. So like one of the researchers who stuff I like a lot is Richard Goldwitzer, who researches habit formation. He does, he tells what he refers to as implementation intentions, or sometimes you see it described as like action planning or something like that.

And it's very much of, if X happens, I'll do Y. Right. Some of the estimates, researchers [00:14:00] like Wendy Woods and people like that talk about how much of your day is driven by habits. And so, for example, a good manager, a habit might be giving feedback to employees or something like that, or following up on the status of work or communicating things at the right time.

Or, there's a number of these different kinds of things or effective delegation or looking at the motivation of people, there's a whole slew of things and there's a number of different behaviors that live underneath that. Right? And so that's an area where typically in a training environment, we're like, here, we're going to send you to this class and you're going to go to it for a day or 2 days.

And you're going to learn this method of giving feedback. And then we know people go back to the workplace and don't particularly change their behaviors. And one of the things that happens is automatic behaviors. They're probably stored in different brain regions. They operate a lot without you having to pay attention to them.

That's the nice thing about automatic behaviors and these things that are habit driven is that they require a lower [00:15:00] amount of effort to continue, but. Now you need to interrupt it, now we need to interrupt the old habit and consciously make a decision about when am I going to insert a new behavior?

And so one of the things I like about Goldwitzer's implementation intentions is when X happens, I'll do Y. So I'm going to look specifically for the opportunities to interrupt some of my automatic behaviors. When I see that particular criteria, I have this behavior. I'm going to pull out and I'm going to use and so it could be, when I get a status update in an email, I'm going to use that as an opportunity to give employees feedback or When I find myself delegating a task, I'm going to stop and make sure that I ask these specific questions to make sure that I'm, like doing delegation the way that I think it should be done.

Or when I am communicating, I'm going to, put a certain, whenever a certain, a lot of change is happening, I'm going to insert some things into my calendar to remind me that. I need to do a regular kind of [00:16:00] communication burst of people to make sure that they're up to date with all the things that are happening.

And it can't assume that everybody knows whatever it might be. But but that's cause we, we talk about this when we get into the DEI stuff of unconscious bias and I'm like, well, the whole point of unconscious bias is that it's unconscious. And so if you don't realize it's happening, you're going to have a hard time interrupting it and replacing it with something else.

And so really looking for those triggers or looking for those things that are an opportunity for me to stop the automatic behavior and do something different is I think a huge opportunity. And I think it's very relevant in when it comes to leadership or management.

Tom Griffiths: Following on from that, some software, some theories and products make use of nudges which obviously are also to do with behavior change in the moment or after the training experience but there's some debate on their effectiveness.

So, yeah. would be curious if you could share your perspective on the efficacy of a nudge type approach.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, and nudges are an interesting one [00:17:00] because I think a lot of people came to the area of behavioral design via the book Nudge, which came out, and I want to say it was either 2008 or 2010, but it was along with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, kind of some of the seminal texts that got people interested in behavioral design, and it certainly was part of my kind of understanding of it was one of the first things where I was like, Oh, that, there's a deliberate design choices that we can make around supporting people and behavior change and things like that.

I do think it's, the book. And this isn't necessarily a criticism, but it was a product of its time. And there is some contention in the field about the idea of these little nudges um, which is often, it could be a matter of choice architecture. It could be a matter of using a default setting.

It could be a number of different things, but they're usually these little kind of low cost items. I think we. . All fell in love with that idea a little bit and then find that. Okay. Well, it maybe doesn't hurt anything, but it's [00:18:00] also not a way around significant investment in systemic change.

So one of the examples that shows up a lot, and I've used it myself, is this example of just changing the default on organ donation. I think this was, gosh, this was like back in 2003 or something. It's an old study, but but they looked at organization sign up rates in different countries and, in several European countries, it was in like the 80s and 90 percent range.

And then a whole slew of other European countries, it was in the teens or the 20 percent range and things like that. And the difference typically between the 2 was the default. So, in the countries where you were at the 80 or 90 percent range, you would see the default was selected and people had to unselect it.

In order to say, no, I don't want to be an organ donor. And in the countries where the signup rates were low, the box was unselected and you had to actually actively select it and choose to be an organ donor. Well, and then this is great. Right. And everybody's oh, we can use defaults or we can use choice architecture.

We can use a lot of these kinds of things. [00:19:00] And you totally can, but it's ultimately not. Whether you've had this default box on that is going to govern the rates of organ donation in different countries. And, if the goal isn't just people signing up to be organ donors, the goal is actually people being organ donors and successful organ donation saving lives is really your downstream goal, right?

You want organ donation to be used to save more lives of people who are waiting for Organ donation the system that needs to exist to support organ donation from signups to, ultimately it's your family that's going to make these decisions in most cases, not actually the person. So it's going to be about that, it might be about, does your family know that you want to be an organ donor?

Are they aware, those kinds of things. And it comes down to then if the organ is donated, is it being donated in a location where there's [00:20:00] somebody who can actually do it and get it to the person who needs it? And is there a whole infrastructure in health care to support it? So

if the ultimate goal is more people's lives are saved through organ donation, then this is a tiny little part of the puzzle. This is not the thing that's going to change organ donation in a particular country. Now, possibly, big changes are built up sometimes from a lot of like tiny little changes and there are several nudges that You know, probably they're not making a huge difference, but they're part of a whole sort of menu or, set of things that you can adjust to help improve a particular, behavior or set of behaviors or outcomes that you're looking for.

Some of the meta analyses on nudges are mixed in terms of the efficacy, but I struggle with that one a little bit because I think the idea of a nudge is too general to do an effective meta analysis. You need to really pare it down a few levels and look at specifically Oh, is it a [00:21:00] default selection thing or is it whatever?

And I would expect the, there to be a lot of variability rate of the effectiveness of those, depending on what they're being applied to. So I'm not sure that the meta analysis stuff is telling us enough. That's useful about which ones are and which ones aren't effective. But I will admit, I haven't really sat down with those research studies and broken it out in terms of the methods that the, that they were using in terms of, were they making any distinction between different types of nudges? Are we just dealing conceptually with a large category of things that we're calling nudges? And so I don't think it tells us anything that we can act on as designers at this point, but I do think, viewing

any result with a healthy skepticism until you've tested it in your own environment with your own context is a good thing. I think you should be skeptical of these. And you should always test these out because[00:22:00] the, one of the issues with behavioral science is that it is filled with subtleties, right?

Like strategies that make complete sense in one environment completely fail in another environment. And yeah. You were talking about product design and things like that. Like one of the things that Gmail did when it rolled out was the use this exclusivity thing. Like it was hard to get an invite and whatever.

And then later on when they were rolling out, Oh gosh, what was it called? It was their social platform that they were going to do. It was like the Google plus one. They were also using this exclusivity strategy with it. But the problem was like an exclusive access to email

I can still send emails to all the people I know, but , an exclusive access strategy to a platform meant that a few people kind of. and so the strategy of using exclusivity could be considered to be a nudge in that context. And it worked great as long as once I [00:23:00] had Gmail, I could still do all of the email things with it. I just had a, like a fun tool to play with versus that same strategy worked really not well when it came to building a social platform because, You'd go in there and you'd be like, oh, look, there's nobody to talk to.

That's not a great way to propagate a social platform. So, yeah, so being really aware of context, I think is super important when we look at things like nudges or anything that we would categorize in that domain of like small efforts around behaviors.

Tom Griffiths: So being aware of the environment and the circumstances of your learner and then testing it out, maybe it helps in this situation, or maybe a version of it helps that you can iterate towards, or maybe you find that it doesn't have an effect.

Or the intended effect at all. So it comes back to that iterative design loop that we talked about at the start, whether you're designing products or designing learning experiences that's really helpful. Speaking of models that may carry some more weight, you referenced the COM B model in your work a lot.

Could [00:24:00] you unpack that for us and how it relates to behavior change design?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, absolutely. There's a number of been a number of kind of different behavioral models that are coming out of different domains. And, so there's a lot of the stuff that was done by the behavioral economics people again, the Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and you get the behavioral insights units and some of the models that they have.

There's one called East, which is easy, something social, and different things. And honestly I think that a lot of them have useful things to offer. So I'm not a 100 percent like this is the only good model. But the 1 that I've leaned into is a model called COM-B and it was developed at University College, London by Susan Mickey and her team there and her colleagues and so forth.

People like the Atkins and Robert West and paul Tadwick has worked with that and he wound up doing the technical edit on the book, which was great because he could tell me all the places where I was getting it wrong. They did a research survey across several of the different behavior change models that were coming up and formulated something called the behavior change wheel, which is [00:25:00] an attempt to bring it into a single coherent model for this.

And that goes all the way. To several things that are not part of, the learning or training or any of those kinds of things like incentivizations and regulation and legislation and, just a whole slew of areas. But COM-B, which sits underneath as part of the behavior change wheel, but a smaller piece of it looks at.

It, learner capability or user capability opportunity and motivation and within capability, it says, are they physically capable of doing the thing? Are they psychologically capable of doing the thing, which gets into a lot of the space that learning and development deals with training and skill development and, those kinds of capabilities, knowledge opportunity gets broken into a social opportunity and, physical opportunity, and so social opportunity would be, am I seeing this model by other people? Do I have social support for it? If I do this behavior, will the people around me, provide help and assistance with it? Or does my social environment fight with this?

[00:26:00] Physical opportunity really goes to all those user experience kinds of things, does the system to support it? Do I have the materials I need nearby? Am I operating in an environment where I reasonably can do the behavior? Do I have what I need? And then motivation breaks out into reflective motivation and automatic motivations.

Reflective motivation are things like our stated goals. What goal do I have around this? It also gets into things that you can reflect on, like your values or beliefs about things. And automatic motivation is all of that unconscious habit driven stuff that we're doing without really thinking about it.

And so, depending on where the issue exists within those, and it can be in all the domains, or it could be in just part of them or something like that, then you can start to map those across to different kinds of interventions. So, for example, if the behavior is reporting safety issues on a construction site, well, I need them to be physically able to do it. I need them to psychologically be able to do it, which means they need to be [00:27:00] able to recognize hazards. I need them to have the social opportunity. If they report a hazard, is everybody going to be mad at them? Or is it going to be supported? Is management going to be annoyed because it's slowing down the job?

Or is that behavior going to be, reinforced essentially by the social environment? Does the physical environment make it easy to report a thing, or is it complicated and difficult and, then you get into things like additional enablement. If the safety issue requires, a harness, because we're working at heights.

Is that readily available or does somebody have to like, drive back to the office 45 minutes away to get it? Well, that's going to govern whether or not you engage in that behavior. And then in motivation, is this awkward and unpleasant? Or is this something where I feel. We've, we talk a lot in organizations about psychological safety, right?

Reporting a safety issue, physical safety issue has to go, goes to the psychological safety issue of what's the response be? Are people going to be mad at me? Is it going to be reinforced? Or is it going to be derided [00:28:00] if I do this? Well, that's going to play into the motivation piece as well.

Or what do I see when other people do it? Or what's the overarching belief around it? Do I see safety as part of my job? Or is that like the safety manager's responsibility? Do I see it as something that I can get better at? Or is it just I just need to follow the rules. It's just a compliance, base thing.

Those, all of those issues play into whether or not this behavior happens. And if you're Like just yelling at people about it which it does seem to be the way that a lot of that goes if you're just compliance focused then, that messes with some of these other domains and can cause its own set of problems around the behaviors actually happening.

Tom Griffiths: So it's quite a wide. Ranging framework that allows you to think through I think it was capabilities, opportunities, motivation in the environment to do some task. And then as a leader manager or learning designer, you can reconcile what conditions need to be met to give the highest chance of success using that as a model.

[00:29:00] It's so wonderful to hear you list off. The research and researchers in the space and some of these models that are immediately actionable and no doubt in the book, you make them very practically useful to a learning experienced designer, but I'd be curious why you think, this behavior change approach isn't more universally adopted already in people's learning design strategies.

What is it about, where we are as a field that perhaps means that. This hasn't caught on so much and made the book so necessary.

Julie Dirksen: It's an interesting one because I first got interested in this back in kind of the mid 2000s. I was working on a project. It was an AIDS and HIV prevention project.

So they were specifically, and they were looking at the online presence to serve an audience to hopefully help lower AIDS and HIV infection rates. And 1 of the things is by 2005, 2007 everybody knew that safe sex practices were going to lower AIDS and HIV rates.

It wasn't a knowledge problem [00:30:00] anymore around things like condom usage or whatever it was. And so given that was not knowledge that everybody had, then the question is, well, what are we doing here to help people with this? And that particular project, which was out of the university of Minnesota school of epidemiology looked at a number of factors like people's mental health had an impact on those choices.

People's physical health had an impact on those choices. People's social health. Did they have strong social relationships had an impact on those choices? People's level of sexual maturity had an impact on those practices. If they were comfortable talking about things, they were going to be more comfortable negotiating condom usage with a partner or something like that.

And so there were a whole slew of things that were beyond just, hey, condom usage, good. That Had an impact on that project, and I was really like looking at that one kind of feeling like, oh, my tool set is an instructional designer is very information driven. It's very much. How do I convey this information?

And it didn't have nearly as much of the stuff as I wanted to see around. [00:31:00] Well, if it's not that information problem, what are we doing with this? And so that's why I was looking for other things. As I mentioned, the behavioral economics stuff had an influence, but then the COM-B stuff had an influence.

And one of the things, one of the other pieces of the COM-B model that I do is that they have followed this across into a library of different interventions. They have a library of. The behavior change technique taxonomy has 93 different interventions that they've seen in the research literature.

And some of what they're doing with that is a coding mechanism for looking at research so that you can do a little bit more apples to apples comparison across different domains. And they're also working on some. ontologies around it so that they can do this because stuff was coming up in safety or finance or public health or psychology or behavioral economics.

And so you want to be able to look across to start to identify some strategies that are going to be more or less effective, but it really is going to be this accumulation of things. It's rarely like there's no magic bullet. You're never going to fix these. And [00:32:00] honestly one of the biggest challenges for most of these behaviors is competing priorities.

We all have 37 different things that we're supposed to do with any minute of any day. And we have to pick which ones are more important. And so a lot of times we're not just convincing people that the behavior is important. We have to convince people that it should be at least in the top five of most important things.

And that's a lot harder than just getting them to put it on the bottom of the list where it's going to sit there for a really long time and never happen. And so, that's a real challenge. Of not only do I need you to believe this is useful, I need you to believe it's useful and, a top priority.

And a lot of stuff. Most people are not convinced of that at this point.

Tom Griffiths: And as we all know, our work environments have got more and more distractions every day. So making it onto that top five is a challenge. And perhaps, yeah, phase one was getting it on the list at all. And now phase two with behavior change, actually, you're getting it to the top three to five.

So people do it.[00:33:00] One last question before we wrap this first part of the conversation on the big picture and the new book, as you were reflecting through your career and looking back, what were some of the behavior change design projects that really stood out to you and why?

Julie Dirksen: The one, obviously I've mentioned through the university of Minnesota was really foundational for me. And then also in 2008, I was working, with an organization that was looking at, helping people with all of those kinds of health behaviors. Right. So it might be quitting smoking or, better dietary choices or exercise or sleep or managing stress or any of those kinds of things.

And it was, like I said, it was 2008. So it was a little early for smartphones. Because that's really where it would have naturally lined up is to be a smartphone app, but it was a little too early at that point, but it was a really interesting project. And I got to learn a lot from the different people that were associated with that one, because, we know what all these behaviors are, right?

We know all the things that we're supposed to [00:34:00] be doing that we still struggle with. Because, health care is amazing. The innovation that's happened in health care and we're getting really good at fixing some of the surgical techniques are amazing. And the medications that are available are amazing.

And, granted, there's still a lot to be done there but really, things like the genetic testing to identify different kinds of diseases is amazing, and that's just more a matter of getting the cost down on that and having it be more ubiquitous, but there's all sorts of problems that we can solve in healthcare now that we couldn't solve five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, all these kinds of things, but, a huge amount of our healthcare costs go to behavioral things, right?

Okay. We can give you a good blood pressure medication, but do you take it regularly? Or we can give you medications to help you manage your diabetes. But there's also a bunch of behavioral stuff that you really need to be doing. If you want to get this under control or, any of these kinds of things where there's an enormous behavioral component.

That's still a big part of the cost that we're seeing. And [00:35:00] so, you If we fix all the mechanical stuff, we still have the human behaviors that are going to be persistent. So trying to figure out better and more useful methods of doing that. I'm doing a little bit of work right now with, michelle Segar, who's out of the University of Michigan and looks at exercise motivation quite a lot. She's a researcher there and she specifically looks at helping people with the issue of people who feel like exercise is a chore and that they should do it and transforming that attitude from making it from a chore and kind of turning it into a gift.

And one of the findings that she's seen with a lot of stuff is if you keep thinking exercise is horrible and unpleasant and painful and whatever strangely enough, that's going to impact your ability to maintain, maintain and do to do exercise and that if you can figure out we've all heard the no pain, no gain and all of these kinds of things.

Well, if you're somebody who's coming from. Somebody who struggled with exercise, if you're trying to make yourself do an exercise that's painful and unpleasant. [00:36:00] Hey, guess what? You're not going to do it all that much. And so it's far better for you to say no, this isn't the right exercise for me.

I'm going to find something that is more enjoyable or isn't painful or isn't unpleasant. And I'm going to do that. That's a way better answer than I'm going to muster up all my willpower and continue to force myself to do something that's painful and unpleasant. But we don't. I think we believe there's some kind of virtue there.

If you can force yourself to do the painful and unpleasant thing, that somehow better turns out probably not. It's probably not better. A, it's not that much more beneficial as an exercise than many other things that aren't painful and unpleasant and B nobody's got that much willpower.

Generally speaking, you need, you really do need to find something if you're going to do it. Yeah. On a long term regular basis, you need to find things that are not awful, which shouldn't be that revolutionary an idea. And yet here it is. So proven by

Tom Griffiths: science. I like it.

Contemplating going for a run in the cold and the rain this morning was something I needed some help overcoming. I love [00:37:00] the analogy to progress in medical science, right? Where we can solve the practical, physical, biological parts of the condition. But we need to innovate and progress ourselves in our understanding of the human part of the motivation.

So I think it's fantastic to have the book out there. That will really help to move the field forwards and have more people versed in how to solve that part of the equation. So, thanks for taking us through the high level there. Let's wrap it there for part one. And when we come back, we'll talk part two, which is how you actually put behavior change design into action in your organization.

Thanks for listening to Learning Works. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast for our exciting lineup of future episodes. Learning Works is presented by Hone. Hone helps busy L& D leaders easily scale power skills training through tech powered live learning experiences that drive real ROI and lasting behavior change.[00:38:00]

If you want even more resources, you can head to our website, honehq. com. That's H O N E H Q dot com for upcoming workshops, articles, and to learn more about Hone.

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* Updated 2/22/2022