Existing Ways to Trigger a Change
Environmental, Static and Lean methods overview
In the article about types of problems is Self-Development I mentioned that people’s problems can be solved using different methods. I didn’t provide any explanation on how exactly these methods work. Now it’s time to go deeper into it.
I am going to describe these methods and then evaluate their impact. For the evaluation I need to have some methodology. I described it in the article about Best Self-Development Method. To recapitulate, great method should satisfy the following requirements:
It has Prompts to remind person to do desired actions
It has an ability to boost motivation of the person to do desired actions
It should be be able to introduce and keep alive a new process
It should be able to transform or grow existing processes
It should provide help with dealing with conflicts between different processes in life
It should help in quitting undesired process
I will review basic types of self-development methods and analyze how these criteria are met.
No Method at All
First case is the default way of change that people select. This is actually not a method but rather a lack of any method.
People who are using this “method” try to change everything at once and they miserably fail.
In the first few days they still have a lot of will power and the emotional handicap but this inevitably has to dissipate. And the collapse of activity then happens.
Rules
Decide what you want to change
Just do it
Prompts
Prompts are only in a person’s mind. They keep existing only for a short time when the person is still emotionally driven by the decision of changing something. Once this emotion dissipates - there is no prompt and the person forgets doing things.
Motivation Generation
Motivation is driven by strong emotions in the first days. Once they dissipate, the motivation is gone.
Managing processes
Because of the lack of motivation and prompts, new processes can survive only a few days. Same can be said about quitting undesired processes. I don’t even mention more complex operations like transforming, scaling and dealing with conflicts between processes.
Advantages
This “method” doesn’t have any advantages. It just almost always fails.
Disadvantages
Low success rate of introducing long-lasting change
High probability of burn-out and even degrading existing behavior
Environmental Methods (help from other people)
By Environmental Method I mean a single decision and action that moves the person into an environment where not doing desired actions is much more difficult and doing it is much easier.
In most cases this method can be considered as getting help from other people. However sometimes this can be some change that doesn’t involve humans (for example moving to new a house can destroy some habits and create new ones).
Help from other people can be very effective. Getting help from a mentor, coach, specialist, community or even competitors/rivals can really leverage life, if possible. This is because social impact has a strong psychical influence that motivates people to make improvements.
Rules
Decide what you want to change
Made one action that moves you to new environment
Just do actions that environment pushes you to do
Prompts
The method depends on actions of other people (or environment). If they will be kind enough to remind person to do something then there are prompts. If not then there is still an “internal” prompt where the mind tries to remind a person to do something in order to avoid unpleasurable feelings caused by not meeting expectations of other people.
Motivation Generation
It depends how society influences the person. Sometimes the motivation from other people can be strong (e.g. competition), sometimes can be much smaller (stop meeting with group before the social bonding started to be strong enough). Thus the motivation can vary from very small to very high.
Managing processes
This really depends on the situaltion. If somebody is lucky to find a great mentor then he/she is in a position to a steady grow within the mentor’s domain. Another well known example is about quitting addiction (e.g. Alcoholics Anonymous groups) where social gatherings can help to quit undesired actions and stay away from them for years.
That being written it is not always the case that society or environment will guarantee life processes initiation/transformation/growth/shrink.
Advantages
If you manage to do the initial action, the external context pushes you do do desired actions. After doing this “one-time” action there no need to do preparations/planning/thinking.
Disadvantages
Knowledge Limitations: you don’t know what action to do to have this kind of “environmental effect”
Time & Place Limitations: maybe you know where are people that can help but they are far away or it’s not possible to meet them in the time that fits both sides
Psychical Limitations: people can be just afraid to reach out for help (they feel not good enough, they are afraid to be rejected, they are just shy)
Financial Limitations: sometimes people don’t have money to pay person/group that could improve their life/skill
Static Methods
Static Methods are about defining and obeying rigid rules. You can think of it as an internal law that the person decided to comply.
By static I mean that the person needs to upfront design how to lead through the change and then just stick to the plan.
Rules
Define what you want to change
Plan actions to be done every given interval (e.g. daily)
Execute the plan every time
Finish when some goal was met or there is some significant change that cancels the plan
Prompts
Because of that method’s rigidness, the person is able to learn quickly rules of the plan. Repeating them frequently quickly develops a habit that is just an automated prompt mechanism. However before this happens the person needs to somehow make sure to remember to execute the plan.
Motivation Generation
These methods don’t generate much motivation. It requires will power to execute the plan in the first days; later the habit is created so it’s easier to do desired actions.
Managing processes
These types of methods, if instantiated, can keep the process alive for long.
This method doesn’t work well for transforming processes or growing them because it’s just about repeating same actions every time. Same can be said about quitting undesired processes.
Advantages
Static rules are easy to learn after several repetitions. After initial stage applying rules become habitual and therefore easy
Static Method is great when rules imposes keeping alive actions that have beneficial effects and there is actually not much to be improved.
Disadvantages
Fragile in the beginning where people still tend to forget about the plan
It doesn’t generate motivation
Not allow to grow if repeating same actions won’t lead to grow
It doesn’t have update logic and old rules tends to degenerate over time
It doesn’t work for quitting processes
Lean Methods
Lean Methods are improvements of Static Methods. They not only define rules but also meta-rules that defines rules how to modify rules. This provides a framework to adapt actions instead of staying in the inertia. You can treat is as a law that has encoded rules of amendment of it in a cyclic manner.
Lean Methodology is a popular concept in companies, especially IT companies. They are generally not recognized as a framework for self-development.
Rules
Define what you want to change
Plan actions to be done every given interval
Execute the plan every time
After several iterations review and modify the plan
Repeat define-execute-review cycles until the goal is met or there is some significant change that cancels the need of a change
Prompts
It’s a similar situation to Static Methods. Here the main point is to make update ceremonies a habutal activity (e.g. planning, review events).
Motivation Generation
It’s very similar to Static Methods - this method also doesn’t generate motivation. They require a will power to execute a plan.
Managing processes
Since the update logic is present in lean methods the process management is possible. Starting and keeping new processes alive can be inspected with every planning/review cycle. New actions or strategies can be applied when it’s visible that the progress doesn’t go fast. Same can be said about quitting processes.
In Lean Methods there is a huge need for metrics that allow to evaluate if the process is going forward or not. Sometimes these metrics are easy to measure (e.g. weight), sometimes they are more difficult (e.g. progress of learning language - requires to take some test and this requires time) and sometimes metrics are super difficult to define (e.g. measuring happiness).
If one can’t find good metric or the time of measuring is very high then review/retro cycle can’t be very effective and the whole method loses its effectiveness.
Advantages
Lean rules are easy to learn after several repetitions. After initial stage applying rules become habitual and therefore easy
Lean Method allowa to adapt rules into ones that moves into better results, especially with good metrics defined
Disadvantages
Fragile in the beginning where people still tend to forget about the plan
It doesn’t generate motivation
Can also lead to inertia just like in Static Methods, especially when no good metrics are defined
Requires a lot of rigour: planning/review ceremonies aren’t pleasurable
Summary
I reviewed No Method, Environmental Methods, Static Methods and Lean Methods.
Just Do It approach doesn’t require implementation, it fails in extreme majority of cases.
Environmental Methods can be powerful but frequently are difficult to implement.
Static Methods are easy to implement but they can offer only quite small impact.
Lean Methods are complicated to implement but they offer greater impact.
Dynamic Methods, that will be described in a separate article, are super complicated to implement but they offer greatest impact.