Heads-Hearts-Habits: A New Model for Performance & Engagement Design

What makes people tick?

Mostly, we avoid life’s big questions. A couple of weeks ago, in Copenhagen, I enjoyed one of those dinner conversations where no-one feels embarrassed to talk about the things that really matter.

There was a time when I thought Kahneman had it covered: people, he says, can be thought of as having two systems: ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’. System 1 is where the decision-making really happens – a vast, unconscious (and I argue affective) processing system. And then there is system 2: largely ineffectual, almost epiphenomenological – system 1’s apologist. The bit that comes up with the rational-sounding explanations for the affective decisions we take unconsciously.

 But it was only later that I realized that to really understand why people do what they do you have to think about three, not two, things. I was working on our leadership app and (thanks to Shane) reading Dan & Chip Heath’s book ‘Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard’ . They use a threefold metaphor: the elephant (much like system 1), the rider (an idealized version of system 2) and – the path.

The ‘path’ describes all that is habitual, conventional. In effect, much of the time neithersystem 1 or 2 are in control – we are just running on rails, doing what we are expected to do. Students sit in class, dutifully taking notes, neither because they have considered their future nor because they care deeply about the topic (for the most part) - but because that is what they are expected to do. In general, people do what they are expected to do.

This ‘rider-elephant-path’ metaphor forms the basis of our ‘heads-hearts-habits’ model. It's a way to think about performance, engagement and learning, that goes beyond obsessing over topics and memorization. We start with the audience – finding out what they care about and what they don’t, as well as they challenges they face – then we build the missing parts of the picture.

 By way of example, Atul Gawande found that setting out a new path – in the form of a simple checklist – could be far more effective at changing performance than training. But others attempting to replicate his results found that if people were not sufficiently motivated to use the checklist, then outcomes were less impressive. A checklist won’t help if people don’t care enough to use it, nor if it is hard to find.

 In designing learning and performance support, it helps to tackle these components separately:

1)  Head: what resources of guidance do people need?

2)  Heart: do people care enough to follow the guidance?

3)  Habits: how do we make the guidance accessible, and reinforce usage?

 Is this approach really so different from conventional training? Yes it is. As designers we stop fretting over topics and content, and instead build experiences that make people care, resources that help people perform, and habits that help sustain the change.