What makes a vital behavior “vital”?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:43:00 GMT

The key insight is that big problems can be solved by changing just a few behaviors. If you put all your effort on those two or three vital behaviors, you’ll be rewarded with dramatic improvements. I’ll draw information from our book, Influencer, chapter 2.

Focusing on vital behaviors helps avoid two common mistakes.

Mistake #1: Focusing on results, but not on the behaviors that drive the results. An example of this mistake is the coach who tells her player, “You need to score more.” Instead of “You need to drive to the basket more.”
Mistake #2: Pursuing a laundry list of behaviors instead of the vital few. Focus on two or three, not 10 or 12. Otherwise, you’ll spread yourself too thin. It’s not that there aren’t more behaviors that are important. It’s that your vital behaviors will help to drive the rest.

How does a behavior become a vital behavior? There are three characteristics, any one of which could turn a behavior into a vital behavior.

It leads directly to the desired results. An executive told me his firm sponsors a Dragon Boat, and that the vital behavior for winning races is…drum roll please…PADDLING. Whenever squabbles break out during a race, someone shouts, “Shut up and paddle!” and their boat moves into the lead.
It breaks a self-defeating cycle. The Guinea Worm has persisted for thousands of years in Sub-Saharan Africa because communities get caught in a self-defeating pattern. Embryonic worms are consumed when people drink contaminated water; the worms grow to maturity inside their human hosts; then release their eggs when people soak their infected limbs in the water source to relieve their pain. This self-defeating pattern of re-contamination can be broken by either filtering the water before drinking it or keeping infected limbs out of the water source. These two behaviors become vital because they break the self-defeating cycle.
It brings a bundle of other behaviors along with it. If you can get people to do the very toughest and most obnoxious parts of a task, then many of the easier parts will come along as a part of the bundle. For example, when Mike Miller was working to improve accountability within Sprint he focused on two behaviors: #1 Holding their bosses accountable, and #2 Holding their peers accountable. He didn’t have to focus on “Holding their direct reports accountable,” because, it came along with #1 & #2.

Steps you can take to find vital behaviors. Here are a couple of approaches.

Look for crucial moments. Consider the results you want to achieve, then create a process-flow chart that maps the behaviors that lead to the results. Look for behaviors that lead directly to the results; look for self-defeating patterns; and look for the toughest parts of the process that might create positive tipping points.

Look for positive deviants. Find the people who are succeeding against the odds. Find the times when you’ve succeeded against the odds. Then ask, “What was different about the successes?” What behaviors were different, and do these differences point to the vital behaviors.

The Influencer Blog - behaviorchange tag

What makes a vital behavior “vital”?