Using the Factors Affecting Change to End Procrastination

Recently I wrote a post on the Getting Things Done-methodology by David Allen, a surefire way of ending procrastination. Someone commented to me since that they would have preferred reading more about procrastination itself than how to get things done - which, in itself is an interesting spin on the subject and reminded me of this most excellent article by Alan Deutschman of the FastCompany. His article delves into details on recent neuroscience studies, highlighting how people change and what makes people change. Interestingly, he also indirectly points to things that lead to people failing to change, which in other words could be seen as procrastination. Let me give you and example:

Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University, delivered a speech at IBM's Global Innovation Outlook Conference last November - where he turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. The procedures temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives. Around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this so-called restenosis are complex. It's sometimes a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself. But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery -- not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them -- by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller said. "And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Why could that be? My argument is that they procrastinate about changing - they know they should, but for some reason they just don't get around to it. Why could it be - or is it that in the absence of certain key factors, we all fail to change our behaviour or do certain things, even when we know we should? Let's recap on the points Deutschman mentions as being key to change:

1. Emotion
2. Framing
3. Radical change
4. Support
5. Practise

1. Appeal to people's emotions, not just logic
The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?

John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied dozens of organizations in the midst of upheaval, has hit on a crucial insight. "Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings," he says. "This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."

Look again at the case of heart patients. Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, realised the importance of going beyond the facts. "Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored." Ornish published studies in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, showing that his holistic program, focused around a vegetarian diet with less than 10% of the calories from fat, can actually reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. Still, the medical establishment remained skeptical that people could sustain the lifestyle changes. In 1993, Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial. Researchers took 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. They helped them quit smoking and go on Ornish's diet. The patients attended twice-weekly group support sessions led by a psychologist and took instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. The program lasted for only a year. But after three years, the study found, 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes -- and safely avoided the bypass or angioplasty surgeries that they were eligible for under their insurance coverage. And Mutual of Omaha saved around $30,000 per patient.

2. Framing the Change
Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed? For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways.

So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts.

"Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid." Lakoff says that's one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don't understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.

3. Radical Change is Better Than Incremental Change
Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.' "

While it's astonishing that most patients in Ornish's demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn't actually make them feel any better. It doesn't deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones.

4. Support Makes All the Difference
Even when leaders have reframed the issues brilliantly, it's still vital to give people the multifaceted support they need. That's a big reason why 90% of heart patients can't change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish's patients could -- because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.

5. Practise Makes Perfect
Neuroscience, a field that has exploded with insight, has a lot more to say about changing people's behavior -- and its findings are guardedly optimistic. Scientists used to believe that the brain became "hardwired" early in life and couldn't change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain's ability to change -- its "plasticity" -- is lifelong. If we can change, then why don't we?

Merzenich starts by talking about rats. You can train a rat to have a new skill. The rat solves a puzzle, and you give it a food reward. After 100 times, the rat can solve the puzzle flawlessly. After 200 times, it can remember how to solve it for nearly its lifetime. The rat has developed a habit. It can perform the task automatically because its brain has changed. Similarly, a person has thousands of habits -- such as how to use a pen -- that drive lasting changes in the brain. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes actually show up on MRI scans. Flute players, for instance, have especially large representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips, Merzenich says. "They've distorted their brains."

How, then, to overcome these factors? Merzenich says the key is keeping up the brain's machinery for learning. "When you're young, almost everything you do is behavior-based learning -- it's an incredibly powerful, plastic period," he says. "What happens that becomes stultifying is you stop learning and you stop the machinery, so it starts dying." Unless you work on it, brain fitness often begins declining at around age 30 for men, a bit later for women. "People mistake being active for continuous learning," Merzenich says. "The machinery is only activated by learning. People think they're leading an interesting life when they haven't learned anything in 20 or 30 years. My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe."

Using the Factors Affecting Change to End Procrastination

These issues of emotion, framing, radical upheaval, support and practise seem to lie at the heart of our ability to change and to manage change in an organisation. Is it then too far-fetched to claim that maybe the lack of presence of these factors are also what leads us to procrastinate? In fact, is it not possible to take these factors and try to frame them in order to put the necessary components in place for us to stop procrastinating;

1. Turn on Your Passion
A famous Finnish novel talks about the fact that in the beginning there was merely the swamp, the pick-axe and Joe... Joe's seemingly insurmountable task was converting a swamp laden with stones into a fertile field to grow wheat on - a gargantuan task that could only be accomplished with tenacity, persistence, strength and what the Finns proudly refer to as 'sisu', which roughly translated to English means something like 'guts' or 'balls' or courage in the face of the seemingly impossible.
Allow yourself to get passionate about what you do - you are the best at solving something, you don't give up, you never let people down, nobody gets left behind - whatever chutzpah statement that gets you passionate about doing something, well - dare think it and be proud of it rather than retreat into an ocean of rational thought.

2. Frame the task
If it's about doing a task, think up emotional 'highs' - the elements of joy which can be derived from doing to task or completing it. Also whoever's day you end up cheering up by doing it. Put it in a framework, incorporating the passion as well as the rational benefits of the task.

3. Go Radical!
If the task is something you have procrastinated a long time about, maybe it is less about trying to break the task down into manageable 'bite-size' chunks that allows you to fool yourself into thinking you are achieving lasting change - maybe it is instead about delving into the task heart and soul and deliberately devoting a lot of your waking hours to it, simply to consciously generate a shift in your mindset and achieve visible change.

4. Find Support
Find people you can share your passion with and who are into similar things, getting support is often something we think about only when it's too late and we are already slipping back into our old habits. Finding people when you are still on the high of radical change is easier too.

5. Create Deliberate Habits
So if it is indeed true that our brains remain 'plastic' and we can keep reshaping them throughout our lives, the point then becomes how to deliberately create habits. Someone once told me that I had to do something 28 times or 28 days in a row for something to become a habit. Habits are good in the sense that once something is so familiar to us, it does became a habit - which is short for something we do without thinking about it. So if we can make things we procrastinate about slowly become habits we do without even thinking about them, then surely we won't procrastinate about them either?

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