This may become one of my favorite, go-to, oft-quoted books, like “Invisible Gorilla,” “Tipping Point,” “Black Swan,” “Abolishing Performance Appraisals,” “Progress Principle” and others of this sort that challenge our paradigms. Sharot and Sunstein alert to how easy it is to become habituated to our routines, our beliefs, our ingestion of news and friends’ stories. The “Power of Habits” taught us that 40-60% of our routines are habits: decisions we made once and don’t re-evaluate unless there’s a disruption. These authors encourage the disruption so we can avoid becoming tolerant of lying, misinformation/disinformation, risky behavior and slow adjustments to the political enterprises…and more. They also provide ways to break “the trance” that don’t provoke defensiveness, fear, flight/fight when our own ‘habits’ of thinking, deciding, acting are challenged. The book is easy to read, digest and act on, if you’re willing to “look again.” (I appreciate the opportunity to get an advance copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley.)
In business, we have a lot of habits—SOPs, policies we’ve adopted from other organizations, and other behaviors because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”—and most of us who have explored and implemented world-class, best practices know that it’s good to review, re-evaluate and revise those ways we do business. I’ve written about how we did away with work shifts in a manufacturing company. I’ve challenged the promise of social media marketing for every industry—in construction, you have to be in the project manager’s top 3 list for those rush-jobs.
Therefore, it’s wise to avoid the trap of taking for granted that what we’ve done is always the best.
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