think that's true, but my goal is to turn you into behavior

change genius. I'm going to pick one little slice of it. It'

s different than what Gina will be talking about later. And

they're very complementary approaches. If I can get the

visual up on the screen here? If not, I will just kind of

keep going.

Today I'm going to talk about habit. And what I want us to

do first of all is-you've got your mobile phone, right? Can

everybody pull that out and turn your ringer on? Yeah! First

time anybody's ever told you to do that, right? Get it out

and turn the ringer on. Here's what we're going to do. Every

time you hear somebody's phone ring I want you to do this-

relax, okay? So, it's a very quick relaxation exercise. So,

when you hear a phone ring, ring means relax. So, if it's

your phone going off, yeah let it ring once or twice but

then turn it off. We don't have to hear the whole Lady Gaga

ringtone or what have you.

Okay. We got that? So, habits, habits, habits. The class

that I'm teaching right now here at Stanford is about using

technology to create habits of calming, of stress reduction

and I think habits are very important. If we only have

information and we don't-I missed that one! We'll talk about

that. If we don't change our behavior information frankly

doesn't matter. In fact, rarely does information lead to

behavior change. There are some cases where it does but just

because somebody gives me a stat about I'm out of shape

doesn't mean I'm going to go and start exercising right

away. And we all know that's the case.

So, the challenge is how do you change people's lives by

changing their habits? And that's been an obsession of mine

for about 18 months in the health arena.

I came here in '93 to study this question-how to use

computers to change people's attitudes and behaviors. I

really wasn't a health person although I've always been a

health enthusiast. But in the last two years I've been

sucked into this arena because of the changes we need to

make. A lot of them have to do with health. I don't have the

exact number of how much we can save money by changing

behaviors. Somebody at a previous event said 80%. But I don'

t know what the number is.

I do believe that by using systematic methods to think about

behavior change that we can solve bigger problems. And to

this point-I'm going to offend some people, sorry-people

have been very sloppy thinkers about behavior change, okay?

So, listen to things with a critical ear, look at things

with a critical eye including what I'm going to be showing

you today.

There's a Facebook class I did here. It was on the New York

Times. Somebody asked me to talk just briefly about this. I

won't go into it deeply, but 10 weeks, they got millions of

people involved. The New York Times did do a cover story

three years later. It came out Sunday. The derivative

stories that weren't always accurate. Don't trust everything

you read. But the New York Times story was mostly on target.

But the class was all about how can we systematically have

impact with these apps and how can you do that?

In my lab's work here at Stanford we've been systematically

looking at behavior change. Now, the metaphor breaks down

pretty fast. But imagine if you were a chemist, a

pharmacist, somebody even in construction and you didn't

have the periodic table elements to work with. Imagine what

a problem that would be.

To date we have not had a periodic table of behavior change

types. And I recognized this a while ago. I tried to get

some students in Europe to do it. They didn't really pick it

up and say, "Okay, we're going to do this". And my lab and I

have been through a few iterations of this. We call it the

behavior grid. We passed out a product from my lab. You've

got a little card. Pull that out right now. For some of you

you'll have to get out your microscopes or magnifying

glasses and look at the side of the card that has that grid.

I'm going to give you a brief intro to that in the hopes

that you will then study it further, in the hopes that when

you think about a behavior change type you'll be able to put

it in the right place on the grid.

The big idea here is there's 15 types of behavior. Each one

has a different recipe strategy that works. So, if you're

trying to get a Green Dot behavior done solving with black

path strategies, that's like trying to cook a birthday cake

with chili powder, right? You've got to use the right

ingredients for the right target. You've got green

behaviors. Look at the first column. We decided to call them

green. We could have called them new. These are behaviors

that are new to people.

About a year ago I got an email here from the editor of

Playboy and he said, "Hey B.J., we're putting together a

cool professor's list. We want you to be in it in Playboy.

We're going to come to Stanford, and talk to you, and take

some shots." I was like, "Ugh". I'd never been in Playboy

before. And so, see for me that's a green behavior. It's

characterized by fear, uncertain what would happen if I said

yes. Well, I did end up saying no.

But as you look at the behavior types we're trying to get

people to do, if it's new there may be fear and uncertainty

around it and there may be lack of ability. They'd never

done it before.

Mid.com-good example of how they address this. Notice all

the things they do. I've circled it in orange to address the

issues of fear and security. Now, I'm going to use some

examples from the consumer internet space cause in many ways

they are leading the pack in changing people's behaviors.

And by adopting the techniques they use we can do a lot

better job in the health space.

Let's go to blue behaviors in the next column. Blue is

characterized by things you've done before. Virgin Airlines-

cause I fly on Virgin a lot it's no big deal for me to book

a ticket flying Virgin. There's nothing uncertain about

that. There's no barrier there. And so, when it comes to

blue behaviors it's helping people do what they already know

how to do whether it's buying a book on Amazon, showing up

to class on time, using email, using Google Docs, what have

you.

Now, I'm not going to go through all of this, but then we

have a class called Purple Behaviors. These are all about

doing stuff and then the gray and black behaviors are about

doing less or stop doing stuff. Actually, what I'd like you

to do is if you have a pen where that orange line is draw a

line down through those columns so you see really clearly, "

Here's the 'Do Stuff' side and here's the 'Do Less' or 'Stop

Doing' side of the grid."

Now that you have your pen out also, Blue Path. This is my

favorite cell in the chart. Circle that. This is where

habits live. And Blue Path means doing something you know

how to do for the rest of your life. Need a book? Go to

Amazon. My alarm rings, I wake up or I turn off the alarm. I

walk out to the kitchen, I get some water. What do you do

all the time without making decisions? So, understand some

behaviors require decisions and some don't. In fact, in some

ways that is a measure of the strength of the habit is how

much do you do it without making a decision for better or

for worse.

The Winning Technology Company-and this is a perfect list. I

grabbed it from Tech Crunch last fall. But it's a pretty

good list. They're good at creating habits, so they're very

good at getting people to this spot. Now, you don't just

start here. At least from our perspective there's a path.

There's a route to get people to that Blue Path. Certainly

people have to use your service the first time, then they

have to do it again. Maybe there's a period of time where

they're using it 30 day trial and then eventually you hope

they're always using whatever program service you're

providing and so on.

At least now with the words you can say Green Dot, Blue Dot

and then eventually you want to get people into a Blue Path

or do we want to get people into a Purple Path? That's do

more of something-exercise more, eat more vegetables, and so

on from now on. Do you really want to do a path or do you

want to do a span? A span is for a limited period of time-14

days, 21 days, six weeks, what have you for path. We want

you to buy in for the rest of your life. Spans are easier to

do than paths.

The winners are really good at creating these habits. Watch

how they do it. If you're not using the popular technologies

you should be using them. There's a reason-Twitter,

Facebook, Cora, GroupOn. There's a reason those people are

winning and you can extract the psychological recipe from

those things and use it in your work related to changing

health behaviors. That's a big, big, big part of what we're

doing in my Stanford lab-what are the recipes that work?

Focus on those behaviors. Imitate the winning formulas. Don'

t study the losers. It's a waste of time.

So, deeper on habits. I think there are three steps to new

habits and unless you've read my stuff you've not heard

these before. You have some stuff coming out. There's some

Post-It's coming out right now. So, when you get a Post-It

pass it along. Grab a Post-It and pass it along. We'll use

that in a minute.

The first step is to make it tiny. So, let's say you want

your workforce. You want people to exercise more. They're

not exercising. If you go out and say, "Hey, we're all going

to create a habit of exercising 30 minutes every day" you

all know what will happen. Very, very few people will

actually make that a habit. We've seen that over and over.

These big leaps don't work. What does work is make it really

small such as walk five minutes a day, find a spot where it

lives in somebody's routine-right after you take your coffee

break, right after you come back from lunch-and then you

train the cycle.

In other words, you don't work on getting people to walk 30

minutes a day until they have that automatic reaction, "Oh.

I'm back from my coffee break. I'm going to go walk for five

minutes." So, they're not making a decision about exercise.

They're just automatically doing it and that's it.

I think those are all the steps. I call those tiny habits.

Here are the steps here and here is the assertion we've not

yet shown scientifically, but I think it's true. Plant a

tiny habit in the right spot and it will grow out coaxing.

So, the right little behavior once you get it trained in

cycle-let's say it's walk five minutes-you don't have to

further push people to exercise more. If the context is

right they will naturally expand to the full behavior.

What I want to do is together right now let's work through a

case study. I've never done this before, but let's try this.

Okay. I'm going to have you vote on something and it might

be sensitive. So, I'm going to have you close your eyes and

don't look at how other people are voting. Got it? Okay.

Ready. It'll only be like 12 seconds. Ready? Close your

eyes.

How many people wish you had a better flossing habit? Raise

your hand.

Okay. You can go ahead and put your hands down. Hopefully

nobody peaked, but I will tell you it was at least 60%. A

bit more than I thought actually. Let's take this and apply

it to flossing. Make it tiny. Floss one tooth. Find the

right spot. Find the right spot right after you brush and

then just train the cycle. In other words, don't floss all

your teeth unless you really, really want to. What you're

focusing on is just right after I brush, I floss. You

already know how to floss all your teeth, right? That's not

what you need to drill on. What you need to drill on is the

automatic, "I brush and then I floss".

And that other piece that I didn't put here is once you

floss that one tooth what you need to do somehow-this is the

idea it's like, "Victory! I did it!" Don't floss the rest of

your teeth unless you really want to. As soon as it gets

painful like, "This is a drag" I think your brain says, "No.

I'm not making this a habit". So, it has to be something

like, "Yeah! I get to floss this one tooth. Oh and guess

what? If I do them all? Awesome! I'm even awesomer!"

Okay. So, on the Post-It that I handed to you what I want

you to do on that Post-It is write, "Floss one tooth". Got

it? Okay. We'll come back to that. Here we go. "Floss one

tooth". And again, what happens I believe where we're

showing this scientifically is once you get that little

habit going guess what? Every day I floss one tooth. In

fact, I floss twice a day cause my habit is after I brush I

floss. So, it doesn't matter when I brush I floss. So, it's

twice a day.

You can expand it to a larger behavior. "Walk five minutes-

walk 30". "Eat two vegetables-eat five". "Floss one tooth-

floss all your teeth". That expansion from blue to purple is

much, much easier than going for Green Dot. "For the first

time ever do something". And this is where as you look at

the companies that have won they're very good at this. Get a

tiny habit going. "Use us for research". "Use us for music