Habit formation takes about twenty-one days of focused repetition of the desired behavior. This is about three consecutive weeks (not just 21 business-days) of thinking about and executing a new behavior so that it can become as automatic as possible. This tends to be within the realm of personal development, but the same three-week requirement is needed for any behavior change – so I’d like to apply that same idea to corporate culture, but there are some questions that need to be addressed first.
If you want to change the culture in your organization, how are you going about effecting those changes? Does one simple memo or email really help embed a culture shift or behavior change? Is one meeting per week during “innovation month” enough? It may be that you pen one of those memos that will live forever in the world of really inspirational memos, but more than likely you’ll need a way to help engage people in the daily activity needed to reinforce that behavior shift. This is not an implied need for more micro-management – but memorization of a few tag lines doesn’t deliver a new culture.
How often can you achieve 21 days of focused repetition to bed in behavioral change for yourself or your teams? We realized we had done nothing like this on a simple new system and process we were struggling to embed. So, this week we started using the 21 day focus to make this new process part of our normal behavior. We are also building this approach into our work with clients so that our system, xpointTM, becomes part of their work habits.
There needs to be a way for those responsible for making the change to effectively communicate, inspire, and follow up on task completion for the initiatives. There should be some kind of system in place to allow for collaboration, for each person’s own unique internalization, for each person to practice the steps required. Our xpointTM platform provides a system to do this, to help individuals, teams and organizations to embed change. It helps leaders more broadly communicate, inspire, and demonstrate through actions. It triggers people’s daily activities through alerts. It helps the little and often building of new habits through delivery of change.
