Habits are like shortcuts for your brain, and they can work either to your benefit or your detriment. Habits allow you to function on autopilot to perform tasks while thinking about something more substantial. Usually, this is a good thing. You don’t have to concentrate on your order of operations in the shower, setting your mind free to wander, plan your day, or problem-solve. Automatically putting your seat belt on when you enter a car means you never forget to buckle up, even when thinking about something else. Adopting positive habits empowers youto shape your environment and enhance your team’s performance.
For the hard to become a habit, we need social reinforcement. For the habit to become easy, we need to shape our habitats accordingly, places to practice, and people to teach us or work with. For the easy to become beautiful, we need social rewards such that the newfound habit is socially endorsed. This social reinforcement is crucial in making you feel supported and encouraged in your habit formation journey.
We cannot change ourselves without changing each other. If we want new habits, we should work with the environment around us, starting with the teams we’re in. How could you do this? By developing team rituals, you foster a sense of belonging and value within your team, strengthening your collective identity and purpose.
1. Start by adopting habits that embody different values
Empathy
You put yourself in other people’s shoes to see things from their perspective. Services and projects start with understanding others before developing ideas.
Curiosity
You’re curious about how people from other walks of life are working
Services and projects are designed with different people using different methods, which may take time to get to grips with
Collaboration
You like to see how you can work with others to create something better than you could alone.
Services and projects will be developed based on each collaborator’s resources, needs, and personal constraints, and the impact will be distributed.
Openness
You help people make sense of your lessons while making sense of their insights.
Your actions and insights may be challenged but be improved through peer review.
Conviviality
You ensure that every experience you create makes people feel at home, whether on a website or in a workshop.
The activities and experiences you create may require a better understanding of what makes different people feel at home but may mean they commit more to them.
Creativity
You love discovering and experimenting with new ways of using digital
More diverse ways of doing and solving problems may require a more selection of ideas to test trust but will open up to approaches that could solve problems that you found difficult to solve before
Passion
You enjoy getting people excited about the opportunities technology can bring to helping people.
Activities may need more time to get people excited about an idea before it’s developed, but they are more likely to result in people wanting to get involved.
Challenge
You’re comfortable with challenging people about how digital could be used to improve people’s lives and tackling society’s significant challenges.
Your criticism may disrupt projects and relationships but can help clarify the “elephants in the room.”
2. Develop rhythms and rituals in your team
Decide what you can do now versus later and then agree:
- What you can do as a team
- What can people doindividually?
- What you can do to support the broader organisation
Develop sessions to get people to come up with ideas on how to work together better to support the organisation.
- Use creative ways to get staff to come up with ideas, like getting them to choose 2–3 of these change cards to think differently about your work as a team.
- Create a “Pecha Kucha” team, celebrating each person through their work.
- Thematise your team sessions could include a well-being fortnight, a demystifying design fortnight, an in-the-shoes-of-the-frontline fortnight, a development fortnight, etc.
- Use weekly notes to share what you’re doing on the change (with different guest writers) & 2–3 different projects each week.
- Run monthly shows & tells open to the organisation on issues your team is trying to tackle with calls to action.
