Changing Habits: A Problem of Transitions
Paradoxically, habit is both the product of learning and the escape from learning. We learn in order not to learn. Habit is efficient; learning is messy and wasteful. Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency. Buildings keep being changed until they get to a point where they don’t have to be changed so much.
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
, pp. 167.
Although Brand is talking about buildings, the lesson generalizes. We can even apply it to the working life. If you think about it, the problem of levels transitions is that the habits that you have formed to effectively work at one level have to be jettisoned and new ones learned, whenever you transition to a new level. Since most people only make one or two transitions over the their working life, these can be handled fairly
Most of what you learn about working, you try to encapsulate into habit. You need this so that you can stop worrying about certain things. Even “simple” elements of worklife like expense reports or timesheets need to be habitual, so that you can stop learning them and simply integrate them into the habit of the day, like getting a coffee in the morning.
Which is why changes to expense systems (or the office coffee machine) can be so jolting: you didn’t know what you already knew, nor remembered how long it took to learn how to use them effectively.
As a long-time external (I started while in college), I know the inefficiencies of having to learn a new system because I had to do it every couple of years. (I worked longer projects than most externals.) It takes a long time, you waste time trying to get something done right — it always come back a few times — and you wonder how much money got wasted paying you to fill out paperwork.
All of which made me wonder today: how often do Hidden High Potentials (HHPs) have to adopt new habits? Since this affects you more than it does normal people, it’s worth touching on.
June 8, 2009 No Comments
