Unpredictable Patterns #19: Habits, character and practice
Why discovering your organizational and individual habits and forming new ones is the key to growth and real, lasting change - and why habits are more like aikido throws than routines
Dear reader,
We just had a small snowstorm in the mountains, but today the sun has been wiping the snow away with frightful force — winter is beating a fast retreat even here, far up on the mountain side. I must say that I am looking forward to full summer up here - the hikes, fishing and hunting — it really is wonderful. Hopefully we will be there soon.
This week’s note is about a subject that I have been interested in a long time, and where I think there is a lot to learn, it is about habits. I hope you enjoy it and as always let me know any ideas or thoughts you have!
Why study habits?
We all have habits, but when we are asked to define exactly what habits are, we may find it curiously difficult. Is a habit something we regularly do, like a routine? Is it something we do without conscious thought or reflection? Are habits automatic and something that we get stuck in? Good habits, bad habits - are they patterns of behavior that recur often enough to generate some predictive value? And here is another question - we know individuals have habits, but what about organizations?
There is an understanding of habits as unreflected, ”system 1” actions (in Kahneman’s sense) that we engage in only on the basis that this is how we have done things before. Such habits are mindless, and rarely admired - having a habit might even be taken to mean doing drugs and being stuck in drug abuse! But then there is the sense of habits as consistent behaviors that we engage actively in - and that help us be our best selves. This is the sense in which the word is used in the best selling self-help book Seven habits of highly successful people, for example - as a set of behaviors that can be made to serve us in changing and developing.
This second definition of habits - as consciously acquired patterns of behavior - is what we will be exploring more closely here. The idea that we can acquire habit presents a very optimistic view of human nature - or more exactly: of our second nature, of the kind of pattern that underlies what we do every day. It can, according to this idea, be changed and improved upon in a multitude of different ways. Will Durant put this beautifully in his study on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (so much comes back to this book, it is like an intellectual center of gravity in at least Western culture), when he wrote:
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”;50 we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: “the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life; . . . for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”
Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy (p. 98). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
This idea - that we are what we repeatedly do - is one of the most powerful ideas available to us if we want to analyze not just our own behavior, but also the behavior of organizations, states and other complex systems. It allows us to chart and describe habits - regular actions - that people engage in and edit them or use them to our advantage.
This latter part is not unimportant. If we observe carefully and deduce the habits someone exhibits, we actually are charting this person’s second nature and that will help us predict and understand them in much more detail. And we do not need to do this for malicious purposes either - understanding someone’s habits is a great way to understand how we should communicate with them and what arguments or ideas will carry weight with them as they make decisions that may affect us.
Charting habits is really important in communication, not least since the sum of our habits can be described not just as our second nature (and be used to predict us) - no the second nature as it stabilizes and gets known is actually our character - and character matters enormously in rhetoric and communication.
Aristotle again, from the rhetoric this time:
Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided. This kind of persuasion, like the others, should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of his character before he begins to speak. It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.
Aristotle. Rhetoric: Art of Rhetoric (Start Publishing) (Kindle Locations 86-93). Start Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.
Character is the first rule of rhetoric in Aristotle, and if character is indeed made up by habits - well, then both our own habits, our organization’s habits and the habits of our opponents will determine a lot of what the board looks like before the game begins. There is a simple corollary to this - your habits in one domain matter in all domains. You cannot be rough with customers as a habit, and then expect that your treating politicians well will work; you are always judged on the sum of your habits, on your character. Examining an organizations habits requires finding habits across a multitude of domains, in order to see the contours of character.
The study of habits and the conscious adoption of new habits is a key component in any conscious attempt at living our lives, managing an organization or building something — so habits can be used as a surprisingly generative mental model.
Practice!
Let’s dig in more to the habit model. We have said that habits are what we regularly do, but that seems shallow. Is there a better way to think about habits?
The original word sometimes used for habits in Greek was hexis - and hexis can be translated as a disposition of a certain active kind, a readiness to act in a certain way in the face of unfolding events. Hexis is not the routine drinking of coffee in the morning, but much more the tennis player’s readiness to receive the smash from his opponent. Hexis is actually closely related to the kind of disposition you practice in many sports and certainly in martial arts.
Martial arts are, in a sense, a set of habits practiced over a long period of time as to become second nature. The philosophy of martial arts is essentially the second nature developed by those habits over time - and a good martial artist will see significant changes to their character as well. When we say that martial arts develop character, we are skipping over that middle step - the development of habits - but that is really what is happening. You acquire habits that allow you to meet aggression and resolve conflict and those habits sink into your second nature and develop into character over time.
This also suggests that habits are closely related to practice.
This is enormously important. We are what we repeatedly do - but not just do, but we are what we repeatedly practice. What this means is that you will not be able to develop habits if there is no way for you to practice. It is the practice of what you do that congeals into habit over time — and so that is why you can acquire habits in a craft, but not habits of art. (Art may be - much as character - an expression of the sum of your habits, and perhaps of breaking these habits or actively resisting them in different ways. )
Martial arts, again, show this very clearly: every martial art contains a library of techniques that are practice over and over again into habits. In aikido you practice five basic holds and then move on to throws - every hold contains a wealth of interesting insights and ideas and can be developed into curricula for an entire term, but at the end of the day you want those techniques to sink into you and become second nature.
Or, take chess — the openings, the end games, the gambits. There is a reason that chess players who want to improve are advised to really take notes on their games, and the reason is that when you do that you can spot recurring patterns and practice - you can acquire better habits! The habits we are speaking of here are habits of mind and craft, dispositions to act in a way that has proven useful in the past, but also proven to be malleable and versatile enough to meet new cases.
An opening or an aikido throw represents a very peculiar type of technique - a variable and flexible technique that can be adapted to what is happening and respond to what the other party is doing.
This is an important point - acquiring mindless and rigid habits that fail when there is the slightest variation is a sure way to fail miserably, and the way you do that is if you practice without conscious reflection. Habits become supple and malleable if you practice them reflectively, but brittle and rigid if you engage in rote practice without reflection.
Most of us will know this research from Anders Ericsson’s work, work that is often bastardized as the ”10 000 hours” it takes to become an expert. Ericsson himself puts much more weight on the nature of practice, he calls it purposeful or deliberate practice, and suggests that its components are easy to understand:
So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
Ericsson, Anders; Pool, Robert. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (p. 22). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
Habits developed through deliberate practice are tools for accomplishing different things, and as they sink into your second nature and form your character, they also will allow you to learn differently and develop. Habits are - in this sense - a prerequisite for learning (learning is stored in habits!) rather than a challenge or hurdle to overcome.
Maps of habits in time
So how do we map habits? One thing is too look at behaviors - organizational or individual - and just document them for a period of time. How does, for example, your organization react to bad press? What happens? How does your organization habitually spend its time?
Our calendars are secretly charting our formation of habits. All the recurring meetings you have are habits in formation, slowly growing on you, so what do they reflect? How do they shape your character? If you find it vaguely disconcerting that your calendar is tinkering with your character (I know I do) you should find it even more disconcerting that it has done that for all of your life without you reading it as a map of the character you are building.
Habits require practice, and practice is made of time — and in reverse, the way you spend your time actually can be seen as a kind of practice! A crappy and haphazard practice perhaps, but still! So - look at your calendar and ask yourself what it is you are practicing! It is right there, after all.
Another way of mapping habits, especially in organizations, is to look at what you think you can predict about your organization and about yourself. Look especially at the invariances that you think are not really good for you - are you eating too much or exercising too little? The reason may well be not so much that you have not built good habits, as much as the fact that you may be stuck in some counter-productive habits.
Note that I do not say bad habits, and that is because I think that most habits survive and evolve for a rational reason, and the key to changing habits is not classifying some as bad and some as good - but rather understanding what it is that has led to your having these habits in the first place.
If your organization always reacts in the same way to criticism and dismisses the critic as well as the criticism, then that may well be because you are doing something really complex that not many people understand and that requires both smarts and deep knowledge in specialized fields. Most of the criticism may have been factually wrong, and if you were to pay attention to it you would lose focus and also just generally waste time on bad advice or bad ideas. The habit of dismissing critics may have evolved from a completely rational set of assumptions.
But that does not mean that this habit is helpful, and if you realize why you are in the habit of dismissing critics, you may want to think not so much about how you develop a habit to internalize their criticism, but instead of how you can explain what you do so that you can grow better critics! That would seem to be the better approach, and one the becomes available if you see that habit you acquired had rational grounds, but irrational outcomes (i.e. reputational harm to your organization and alienation of important stakeholders).
Habits evolve as responses to things in your environment, and the evolution of habits also suggests that changing them is not just about deciding to adopt new habits - but rather re-designing the selection pressure that works on all of our actions and ideas.
This idea of selection pressure can be simplified as all of the forces acting on the evolution of an organism, or, in this case, a habit. It can be simple things - like ensuring your running gear and shoes are laid out in the evening to reduce the threshold for getting up early to run, or not buying sweets if you want to eat less sweets - the resulting environment you are in generates your behavior.
This idea, that you design your environment to foster the habits you want, is not that surprising or new - but how many people design their organizations this way? To foster good habits and evolve them? Look at your own organization - what are the key designed mechanisms in the environment that reinforce culture and habits? And are there any other mechanisms that seem to evolve less helpful habits?
Habits are designed partly through the conscious shaping of selection pressure and the careful design of your environment - allowing you to deliberately practice what you want to become.
So what?
The main point of this note has been to try to put forward a theory of habits that highlights the power of well-formed and evolving habits, as opposed to the idea that habits are behavioristic patterns imprinted on the brain leading to routine actions and a sort of cognitive blindness for optionality and change. This latter view is not rare, and it builds on the degradation of habits from the Aristotelian hexis to the behavioristic experiments with mice in labyrinths. Habits need to be rehabilitated, and their connection with character as well as practice is a key component in what I think is a uniquely helpful mental model for understanding both ourselves and the organizations we work in.
Now, in order to put this to work I would recommend that you do the following.
Calendar review. What is your calendar telling you that you individually and you organization is practicing and what habits ensue?
Chart habits from historical regularities. What would you argue are some clear organizational habits that you have? Is it the dreaded editing by committee of docs that would benefit from a strong single voice? Is it a relentless focus on where your competitors are rather than the exploitation of niches way beyond them? Is it the dismissal of external critics? The spiky engagement that celebrates a meeting as a result? The tendency to always make the smallest possible decision based on the past (muddling through?). Examine decision making habits closely - what are the last ten important decisions made by the organisation and how were they made?
Build a library of techniques for your work and craft. What are the things your are practicing? What are the equivalents to chess openings or martial art techniques in your daily work?
These are just a few ideas, but they can help at least figure out some interesting ways in which you can understand the world through the mental model of habits.
Thank you for reading, and do let me know if you think you know anyone else who might want these notes.
Take care,
Nicklas