Continuing my reading today of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, I came across The Power of Habit's concept of "Keystone Habits." He presents this, in particular, in the context of organizational change - changing one key habit can spiral into other changes that blossom into large-scale shifts in the organization in question, but suggests that it can be applied on the individual level as well.
The man The Power of Habit uses to present this idea is Paul O'Niell. O'Niell was the CEO of the aluminium manufacturing company Alcoa, and when he came in, Alcoa wasn't doing very well. There was a great deal of friction between management and unions, competitors were stealing business, and morale was low amongst employees.
O'Niell, The Power of Habit says, understood the power of keystone habits (it's funny how often these self-help books explain successful person X as understanding attribute Y of the framework they're presenting). He decided to focus on the keystone habit of "safety" and focusing on this habit improved operations all over Alcoa, and helped make the company ridiculously successful over O'Niell's tenure.
This in itself made me pause for a bit. While O'Niell's success in undeniable, is safety something you can call a habit? I would call it more of a priority, or a value, as opposed to a habit. Additionally, The Power of Habit fails to recognize what focusing on safety truly was for O'Niell - it was a political master-stroke. Faced with an environment fraught with labour-management tensions, safety was the banner everyone would have to rally behind, or else they would be painted as black sheep. What union leader, or manager would dare oppose an action justified in the name of safety?
The icing on the cake for this portion of the book though, was a passage in which The Power of Habit describes how, during his tenure on some government job, The Power of Habit was trying to solve the problem of child mortality, and he traces the root cause of the problem from child mortality to child malnutrition to the child's mother's malnutrition during pregnancy to the mother's education to the mother's teachers to those teachers' college education in nutrition and biology. This is where, The Power of Habit says, O'Niell attacked the problem. And then right at the end of the passage, he tacks on, “Today, the U.S. infant mortality rate is 68 percent lower than when O’Neill started the job.”
Like, really? You're going to tell me (or at least heavily imply) that just because O'Niell recommended changing a few curricula, the US has less infant mortality today? There's absolutely no support of this claim, and it's a basic correlation-causation error any Psych 101 student can spot. The Power of Habit lost a lot of credibility in my eyes with that claim, and this Daily Beast article suggests O'Niell himself disavowed himself from that statement.
That said, I do find the idea of keystone habits on an individual level interesting. It related with a concept I read in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
about how, when attempting to change, we should take a single, actionable item, and focus on that. Once that change is achieved, it provides the momentum to create a ripple effect that causes other, hopefully positive changes.
To this effect, I'm personally trying to cultivate in myself the habit of writing more often. I'm hoping that developing this will be a keystone habit will have a spillover effect by improving my communication skills, comprehension and whatnot. I don't think it will reduce the infant mortality rate of the US by two-thirds, but then again, not all of us can be Paul O'Niell.
Here's the an affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)
The man The Power of Habit uses to present this idea is Paul O'Niell. O'Niell was the CEO of the aluminium manufacturing company Alcoa, and when he came in, Alcoa wasn't doing very well. There was a great deal of friction between management and unions, competitors were stealing business, and morale was low amongst employees.
O'Niell, The Power of Habit says, understood the power of keystone habits (it's funny how often these self-help books explain successful person X as understanding attribute Y of the framework they're presenting). He decided to focus on the keystone habit of "safety" and focusing on this habit improved operations all over Alcoa, and helped make the company ridiculously successful over O'Niell's tenure.
This in itself made me pause for a bit. While O'Niell's success in undeniable, is safety something you can call a habit? I would call it more of a priority, or a value, as opposed to a habit. Additionally, The Power of Habit fails to recognize what focusing on safety truly was for O'Niell - it was a political master-stroke. Faced with an environment fraught with labour-management tensions, safety was the banner everyone would have to rally behind, or else they would be painted as black sheep. What union leader, or manager would dare oppose an action justified in the name of safety?
The icing on the cake for this portion of the book though, was a passage in which The Power of Habit describes how, during his tenure on some government job, The Power of Habit was trying to solve the problem of child mortality, and he traces the root cause of the problem from child mortality to child malnutrition to the child's mother's malnutrition during pregnancy to the mother's education to the mother's teachers to those teachers' college education in nutrition and biology. This is where, The Power of Habit says, O'Niell attacked the problem. And then right at the end of the passage, he tacks on, “Today, the U.S. infant mortality rate is 68 percent lower than when O’Neill started the job.”
Like, really? You're going to tell me (or at least heavily imply) that just because O'Niell recommended changing a few curricula, the US has less infant mortality today? There's absolutely no support of this claim, and it's a basic correlation-causation error any Psych 101 student can spot. The Power of Habit lost a lot of credibility in my eyes with that claim, and this Daily Beast article suggests O'Niell himself disavowed himself from that statement.
That said, I do find the idea of keystone habits on an individual level interesting. It related with a concept I read in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
about how, when attempting to change, we should take a single, actionable item, and focus on that. Once that change is achieved, it provides the momentum to create a ripple effect that causes other, hopefully positive changes.To this effect, I'm personally trying to cultivate in myself the habit of writing more often. I'm hoping that developing this will be a keystone habit will have a spillover effect by improving my communication skills, comprehension and whatnot. I don't think it will reduce the infant mortality rate of the US by two-thirds, but then again, not all of us can be Paul O'Niell.
Here's the an affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)
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| The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg |
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