Habits and culture

Stephen Covey, in his 7 habits of Highly Effective People, was one of the first to put forward the idea that being effective in today's and tomorrow's workplace requires intentionally creating new habits of thinking, communicating and acting. Covey defines a habit as "an acquired pattern of behavior that often occurs automatically."

Habits are unconscious ways of being -- we use the phrase "get into the habit of..." going to the gym regularly, for example. Or we talk about "breaking the habit of..." -- for example eating all the potato chips that come with your sandwich at lunch.

Personal habits -- what we do with our bodies for example, are only one kind. Alexis De Toqueville talked about "habits of the heart" to refer to the particular norms of American culture that make Americans different from Europeans and American civic culture so robust.

Widely shared habits -- how we think, talk and communicate -- can add up to shared culture. Once these habits are shared, largely unseen and made more stubborn and enduring through their use in schools, businesses and politics, cultural change becomes difficult. Some would even say it is impossible.


The emerging conventional wisdom in neuroscience would suggest othewise. The idea that brains are more changeable than was originally understood -- what's called brain plasticity -- may well make a big difference for what kind of culture change is possible. While there are grooves of thinking -- literally ruts along with nueral signals travel -- that are unlikely to change, it is possible to create new neural pathways, that can run along side the old, and become habitual themselves. Kind of like the super highway built alongside the old and slow country road.

Janet Rae-Depree had an interesting article in the New York Times business section two Sundays ago (May 4). While we tend to see creativity and innovation as coming from habit breaking, increasing numbers of brain scientists, coaches and others who work with people and organizations to develop innovation and creativity are saying the opposite. Innovation comes from habit-making. We can, writes Rae-Dupree "create parallel synaptic paths and even entirely new brain cells that can jump our trains of thought onto new innovative tracks."

All of this has great implications for how we as a society go about solving our most pressing social problems. What kind of habit making and habit breaking do we need when it comes to addressing climate change? Or fixing our educational system?

More on that in later posts.