Hacking the Brain for Behavior Change

Introduction

Nolan: Hello, and welcome to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro Learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan. Joining me today is Matt, CEO and founder of Better Everyday Studios. Matt has an incredible journey, including nine years as an instructor pilot. However, this is not a fighter pilot podcast so that we won’t be getting too deep into that. What we are going to be talking about today is an incredibly popular topic that Matt has packed the halls with, and we’re talking standing room only.

Hacking the brain for behavior change. Now, I understand that sounds a little lofty, but we’re going to make light work of it, I promise. Let’s get started. Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt: Thank you very much, Nolan. I’m excited to be here. I always enjoy discussing this topic, especially since, at the last ATD conference, we had to turn people away from the room due to capacity constraints. I’m always trying to get this out to more people.

From the Cockpit to Corporate L&D

Nolan: Well, what a great way to do that. Before we delve into that topic, though, I’d like to start by asking you to tell us about your journey to where you are today. We briefly discussed the fighter pilot aspect, but could you tell us how you got into it? You have an interesting background that led you from corporate training to your current role.

Matt: It’s funny, a lot of people say that they fell into learning and development, and I, too, say I fell into learning and development in some ways. Was an instructor pilot in the US Air Force? The reason I became an instructor pilot was that, throughout most of my pilot training, I was near the top of my class. As a result, they always select one person to stay behind and become an instructor pilot immediately after graduation. Most people undergo pilot training for a year, and then they fly their major weapon system. Then, maybe, three or four years later, you come back to be an instructor.

But for one person in every class, they choose to stay behind. It can’t be the first-ranked person. The first-ranked person must get their first choice. And it usually winds up being the second-ranked person. And that was me.

I failed one of my check rides, and I did some other stuff, which dropped me down to second. Then, I stayed on as an instructor pilot, which is why I spent a lot of time as an instructor. I attended a four-month course on how to teach people to fly planes, not how to fly them myself. That’s where it started, in terms of formal training. And then, when I went to leave active duty, I had always been obsessed with space, and I wanted to join the number one company in the space industry, and that’s SpaceX, for sure. I networked my way in there.

I had no idea that corporate learning and development was a thing that existed, but they said they needed help with training. And I said, I’ve done training. I’ve trained people how to fly planes. How hard can it be? And then I fell in love with the whole industry and the rest of the industry. I led the training development team at SpaceX for four years. I went to another startup and helped build their team there, and then started Better Every Day Studios about three years ago.

What Better Every Day Studios Is All About

Nolan: And what is Better Every Day Studios’ focus on?

Matt: We focus on leadership development, specifically new leaders. The tagline that I always use is We turn great engineers into great managers. Because I’ve spent much of my career around these intelligent and effective technical minds, they often get promoted to management roles. Then they fall on their face, and they no longer enjoy their job, and their team members also lose interest in being there. Has all these implications.

Nolan: That’s good.

Matt: Fixing that specific challenge of helping these smart people who are great technically, but might be missing some of the people skills —that’s where we come in with programs, facilitated programs, and customized programs for organizations.

Nolan: I always tell people, my favorite use case of promoting the best person to be a manager doesn’t work out. We created this program for UPS years ago, a decade ago, I suppose, and it was because they promoted their best route drivers to managers. And coding, your ability to code a program or develop a rocket has nothing to do with leadership skills, well, maybe tangentially, but one doesn’t beget the next.

These types of programs are important because high performers typically exhibit signs of good leadership, but they also need additional training. Wonderful. A question I have is how many Top Gun references are in your training programs?

Matt: It’s funny, there’s not a lot. I usually use most of my stories, as they are either from my time in the Air Force or at SpaceX. I lean a lot into the space stuff these days. But you can never have too many Top Gun references. It’s great.

Nolan: It’s probably two or three times a day. When I was six years old, I watched Top Gun every single day. My wife and I said, ‘ Can our kids watch it? ‘ I’m it’s rated PG. Of course, our kids can watch it. For the most part, that’s OK. However, there are a couple of scenes with terrible language.

Why Behavior Change Matters

Nolan: Wonderful. Well, Matt, thank you again for kindly lending us your talents today to discuss this wonderful subject of hacking the brain for behavior change. And as I mentioned earlier, quite a lofty title. Let’s begin by defining what we’re discussing here. What is the premise of this?

Matt: And I think, I think we can break it into two parts, the hacking the brain and then the behavior change piece, because I think, what we’re talking about here is one behavior change. I think that’s an important concept that I think more and more of the learning and development industry is becoming what I would almost call behaviorist. If you want to use that as a term, I think the challenge is that when people think of training, they usually default to our common denominator, which is school.

And we think about education, knowledge transfer. A significant part of what I believe is important is that knowledge is valuable and has its rightful place in the world. However, what we want to discuss is behavioral change in the corporate world. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to either encourage behaviors that we want or change behaviors that we don’t. That’s what we can see. That’s what we can measure. And that’s what we need to focus on. And I didn’t.

When I entered the corporate development world, I didn’t realize how different an idea this was, as I’d spent my entire life growing up in the military. Military training is extremely behavior-based. That’s what it is. When you’re in the cockpit with somebody, it’s a Question of whether they can do the thing or not. Are they able to land? Are they able to take off? Can they handle a stall appropriately? It’s all behavior-based.

Nolan: And what’s the difference, sorry, or maybe it’s the same, is behavior and skill synonymous in this case? Since everything is now, let’s create a skills-based organization. Now, in my mind, I view them differently, but then you mentioned, ‘Can this pilot land the plane?’ And I’m thinking, ‘ Well, I don’t know where that would fit. ‘

Matt: I’ll freely admit that, though I believe definitions are very important, I am very flexible in my definitions. And I, because I, you bring up a great point: we’re talking about behaviors? Are we talking about skills? Are we talking about capabilities? Are we talking about competencies? And I’m not necessarily, because I think skills and behaviors can be the same thing, or they can be different depending on an individual organization and how you want to define them. The most important thing is that within a specific organization or program, you define all of these things and do so in a practical and useful manner.

I think one of the reasons I often say ‘behaviors’ instead of ‘skills’ is that skills tend to evoke these lengthy skill matrices, and that’s not useful. It’s not super practical. And rather than, because often you’re trying to come up with a key phrase to describe that skill, such as its Excel usage or whatever it is. And when I say behavior, think behavior. It might not be as catchy a phrase. It might be because what we’re talking about is here. What’s the thing you’re going to see in the workplace? The thing that you’re going to see somebody doing, and that’s what you want to identify.

Nolan: Makes sense. That’s the behavior side of it, you said. Now, let’s look at the other half of that equation.

Hacking the Brain – Where the Idea Came From

Matt: The hacking the brain thing came out of when I started at SpaceX, I was filled with imposter syndrome. Here I am. I have no formal background in learning and development. Still, I lead the learning and development team in one of the world’s most innovative companies, surrounded by some of the brightest people.

To raise my game, I started diving into books, beginning with more big-picture personal development books by Tony Robbins and Tim Ferriss, which led to some of the books on high performance. A notable example is “Peak” by Anders Eriksson, which explores the new science of peak performance and what it takes to achieve these high standards in various aspects of life. And then that led me into a little bit of neuroscience, a little bit of behavior science, that stuff, where it’s figuring out where all these behaviors come from. Why do we behave? If we want to focus on changing behavior, we need to determine why people behave in a certain way. And suppose you read Thinking Fast and Slow. How Amy Feldman Barrett makes Emotions, these kinds of books give you some of the background into the psychology and biology of what’s happening in your brain when a stimulus comes in, your brain does some processing, and behavior results. And it’s understanding some of that material at a basic level that you need to apply to how to change behavior and create effective instructional design to achieve that goal.

Nolan: And I mean, one of my favorite stories from Thinking Fast and Slow was the firefighter who walks into the building and knows it’s going to collapse. He yells, ‘Hey, everybody out!’ Everybody gets out. They interview him, and he knows that God told me the building was going to collapse. And they’re OK, that’s great. However, perhaps there’s a bit more science behind it. And what they realize is that there are too many factors for him even to understand how he made that decision. More than likely, it was the smell of the fire, the heat of the sound, the crackling, the visions. He instinctively knew that his brain was shaped by all the behaviors he had done. Those two things sink together.

Matt: Yes, I think the key, one of the biggest things that was an aha moment for me in, as I started reading about this stuff, is how much of what you perceive as reality is hallucinated. It’s made up. It’s not that 90% of what you are seeing is what you’re perceiving; it’s what you’re seeing in the world. Only 10% of it is based on the actual photons that are hitting your eye, because there’s much data streaming into your eyes that your brain doesn’t have the power to process. It’s not efficient for it to process all of it. It only processes enough of it to extrapolate an accurate picture of the world, then. The key example I always use from my life is one that I vividly remember. It was many years ago when I was driving to work.

And a lot of people, you go into autopilot when you’re driving to work, you’re listening to music, you’re doing your thing, and I’m sitting at a light waiting to turn left and listen to music, I’m rocking out, I’m doing my thing. The light turns green, I start to drive, I get halfway around the corner, and all of a sudden, this high schooler materializes in the crosswalk. He appears in the middle of the crosswalk. And I’m still going slow, I see him, I stop, it’s fine, we go. However, due to my conscious brain, he did materialize. The light coming in, which represented him, wasn’t being processed by my brain. And your brain is always looking for a difference between reality and what it’s predicting. And only when that difference becomes wide enough does it boom and snap you into focus, bringing you back.

Nolan: Absolutely. Let’s get into it then. How do we go about hacking the brain for behavior change?

The Framework – Specificity, Context, and Connection

Matt: The way, and again, this is not, there are plenty of people who are way smarter than I am on the neuroscience of this. Follow other people. I think of this as my instructional design methodology, if you will, to remind me of the things to do. And there are three key steps. There’s Specificity, Context, and Connection. We can start with the specificity piece. Specificity, in turn, relates to the behavior we’re discussing. The way I get specific is that I always ask a subject matter expert, What behavior are you trying to change? And honestly, the more specific you can get, the better. And to give you a concrete example of my flying days, one of my last flights as an instructor pilot, I was flying with a woman who had learned to fly the KC-10; she’d flown the KC-10 for a couple of years.

And then she left the KC-10 and flew something else for about a year. And now she was coming back. And she was on her refresher flights. We went up, flew around, and did some air refueling and other activities. Came back. And then when we come back, we land, but she can’t land. She has forgotten how to land the KC-10. And what would happen is, as we’re coming down for the final, she would be, she’s too high, she’s too low, she’s too fast, she’s too slow. She was all over the place.

And we were planning on practicing landing, and the way you practice landing in a plane is in something called the pattern, where you touch down, immediately after you touch down, you push the throttles back up, you take off again, and then you do a 180 and you enter into this circle. You do this loop, and every loop, which takes a couple of minutes, gives you a chance to practice landing the plane. And as I’m watching her, there was one key moment.

Where everything was going wrong, and it’s called the perch. And the perch happens whereas you’re flying the plane, you’re going straight and level, the runway is going back this way from you and you look down and when you’re about parallel to the end of the runway where you’re going to be landing, what you do is you perch, you pull the throttle back, you lower the nose and you turn. You’re going to start one continuous turn to get lined up with the runway to land.

And she was doing that incorrectly. And when I say specificity and how specific you can be, the behavior that I needed to figure out how to change for her, you say, might say, well, she couldn’t land. It’s something I can see, but it’s still a lot of things that go into landing a plane. And after watching her second attempt to land, I realized that all she was doing was pulling the throttle back one inch, instead of two inches. That’s it. That one-inch difference in throttle movement was the thing that I now need to figure out how to change. And once I identify that, I can then design the instructional intervention that will change that specific behavior. And that can apply to you; you can do the same thing with any skill.

In the workplace and our workshops, we have people do this in real time. I’m saying, what’s the outcome that you’re not achieving? What’s the behavior that you’re trying to change? Often, it ends up being many behaviors that you’re trying to change, but you have to isolate and address them one at a time.

Nolan: It’s the Honda, which famously had the five whys. You ask why five times. They call it ‘couldn’t,’ meaning the person failed. Well, why? Because they couldn’t land the plane. Well, why? Because they couldn’t hit the runway at the angle. Well, why? Oh, well, they didn’t do the throttle maneuver. Oh, ok, now we got it. Now let’s move forward with it. The same thing happens in the corporate world. Of course, it does. Why isn’t the person selling?

The person isn’t selling. Well, why? Because they can’t close deals. Well, why can’t they close deals? When it comes to pricing, they seem to lack negotiation skills. Negotiation, then, is the problem. Agree. And if you don’t know what that issue is, don’t, and we see this all the time.

When we’re talking about building personalized learning journeys, what we’re trying to avoid is having everybody go through 10 hours of a program if they can test out of eight of them. Because what they’re going to do is then they’re going to, sorry about half-assing the first eight hours, the first 10 hours, and the two hours that they could have used to help; they’re going to skim it. They’re going to ignore it. They’re going to do whatever. You’ve lost the end. You’ve disengaged them.

Matt: That’s, that’s a hundred percent. It’s funny that you bring up sales, because the last company I worked for, we built a sales boot camp for them, and that was one hunt. The first behavior was these new ones; it was a relatively complex product. And these new SDRs, these sales development representatives, they weren’t sounding confident enough. They were hemming and hawing, and they couldn’t confidently and quickly explain the product. That’s boom, that’s it. Now we can create a program to handle that. I don’t know how to make somebody a better SDR. That’s way too big. I can, knowing nothing about sales, figure out how to make someone more confident when they explain the product.

Nolan: Well, we can sell that. That’s specificity. I think the next one is the context.

Matt: The next one is context. And what context means, and this could be a couple of different things, but this is where I think understanding how the brain reaches conclusions matters, because you remember things and make decisions in a certain context. These environmental cues are telling you, they’re going to dictate whether or not you remember something, and they’re going to dictate how you process that information, the conclusions that you draw from it. Again, Lisa Feldman Barrett is a great author on this in ‘How Emotions Are Made.’

In her book, she provides numerous examples of how important context is. And it’s this behavior, now that you’ve identified it, that the next step is to figure out what the context is in which this behavior is occurring. In the example of the plane, flying is exciting because you are in that context. The training is happening in the context. However, the key thing here that I think helped unlock it for her was the context of why she was getting it wrong as well. In her case, I mentioned that she had come from a different plane and was returning to the KC-10. The plane she had been flying was a much smaller propeller-driven plane.

And the thing about everything is that mass has momentum, and big planes have a lot of momentum. You pull the throttle back, and they want to keep going. With small planes, you pull the throttle back, and they stop. They stop quickly. And the reason she was pulling the throttle back one inch instead of two inches was because she was recalling the old plane, the old context.

And by reminding her, by taking a minute to remind her of the new context that she was in, it helped her brain this, this is why I need to make this change because, know, I think what we’re often doing, you mentioned thinking fast and slow, it’s the system one or the system to thinking what we’re trying to do with training is help the system to know when to intervene, first and foremost, and then, and then, and then hopefully after that change the system one, it’s first get the, get the, front of the brain more involved in these new things, but then eventually get to the point where the front of the brain doesn’t have to get involved.

It’s automatic again. The context in this case was, ‘Hey, we need to remember to remind her that her brain knows it needs to engage in this new behavior.’ It knows why to engage. But then I think that context can also be making sure you’re in the right context. And then, to revisit the sales example, because these SDRs were delivering this over the phone. This was during COVID. Everything was done over the phone. One of the things we did was set up a Google Voice number for them to call and practice giving their pitch on the phone. This is because writing it down, speaking it to another person, and saying it on the phone are all slightly different. And if we want to engage the context piece to make this as realistic as possible, then we need to have them practice holding their phone.

Nolan: There’s something to the setting of it all. It’s similar to Starbucks; this was a long time ago. They had in their onboarding that you had to write down what would happen if somebody came in and was irate. There’s absolutely no doubt about it, I wanted coconut milk or whatever it was. And they said that by, and then they had to practice it, and they said that by, and they let them choose what was the craziest situation and how they would respond. By writing it out, it freed them from the idea of what the worst thing that could happen is. What do I mean? You think in the abstract, in sales, you’re oh, I know what I’m going to say, I know.

But the moment the person gets a phone call, it’s Matt. How’s your day going? And you’re what the heck is this? And if I said, ‘All right, Matt, what do you want?’ Shoot, now my brain’s wired differently. I don’t remember my training. By putting them in context and reframing them as much as possible, I can see how it helps retrain the brain to change one’s behavior.

Matt: Yes. And I think, the key thing that you mentioned there is, you’re slowly raising the stakes with that Starbucks example. Initially, in learning, you want the lowest stakes possible. You want as little stress as possible. And you start that journey by having them write it down. And that, by the way, that’s exactly what we did in the training, where we started with, I think, the process of describing our product in 500 words, write it down. Now, describe our product in 250 words. Now, describe our product in 100 words. They have to keep distilling it down, and they’re doing it in their language, but with low stress because they’re writing it. Now speak that to me. Now say it over the phone. Know, it’s, think, it’s how you start. There are many variables to consider, but ultimately, you need to get to the point where we can practice this in the relevant context we’re in, if you want any hope of people remembering it.

Nolan: I’m supposed to lead a product training in a couple of weeks. I’m going to steal that $ 1,500 thing; I think I stole it. I think I stole that from Adam Grant. I think he said he used to do that in one of his courses. I think it was him, because succinct, clear writing is such an important skill. And that’s always what they would do, except he took it to the extreme of, now you have one word? If you have one word to describe this product, what’s the word? We have good. We have the specificity and the context; the connection comes last.

Matt: And connection is the realization that, what, the most basic level, what is learning? No, it is changing neural connections in the brain. You’re changing synapses. That is what you were doing when you were learning. As you consider learning, ensure that you’re building your intervention in a way that provides opportunities for those connections to be transformed. Everything we’re saying about the sales, we’re writing it down. Those are all examples. When I was on the plane, what we did was break it down, and we identified, ‘Okay, hey, you’re moving the throttle incorrectly.’ That’s the problem. That’s the mistake that you have. We understand the context of why. Now we need to try to retrain your brain to rewire these neural connections. What we’re going to do is the next pattern I’m going to take it. I’m going to fly the plane.

And I want you to follow my hand movements. You’re also going to have your hand on the throttle. You’re going to have your hand on the yoke, but I’m going to be doing the flying. And that allows her to remember again, ok, this is how it feels. That’s repetition one. And then, ok, this next pattern, we are not going to try to land the plane. Let’s work on this next pattern. We know we’re not going to land. We’re going to do a go-around, but you’re going to fly it knowing that.

And we mentioned earlier that this lowers the stress level a little bit. We take away the stress of needing to get to the spot; we’re going to make this easy for you. We’re going to do a go-around, but you can focus on this. I think of that one also when we were flying downwind, which is normally a straight and level flight. I had her move the throttle back and forth to establish that muscle memory. And then, finally, the next time, she landed successfully. It’s thinking, and that could be spaced repetition. It could be that we need to decide how we’re going to approach this, what we’re going to have people do, such as writing exercises, and then have them watch other people do it. Are we going to have a quiz? But it’s about thinking through and remembering the methods I’m going to use to change those connections in the brain.

There are many options available, but I need to ensure that this doesn’t become the typical sage on the stage, one-and-done approach. I’m going to share some information with you and assume that it’s current because they don’t have it, but 10,000 hours, I feel we’re a library over here, but you have to, you have to do it and do it. And yes. Even the best training in the world? It’s very specific. I’ve planted them in the context, but if that’s the case, if you teach somebody to land a plane once, they’re not a pilot. You got it. I’m not sure how many hours are required to obtain a pilot’s license these days, but it’s a lot.

Matt: And they do that for a reason. Yes, thinking of it more from the perspective of making a behavior change, it’s going to have to be more than this, because this is not going to change that. Maybe for two months, they’ll be more confident when they sell, but three months later, when they start getting into chaos and stress, and then maybe between now and then, they had a different training program.

And they’re now trying to remember that. Well, they’ve forgotten this old habit, and I agree. Where does the, and maybe it’s weaved within there, at what step do you, and maybe this comes even before then or at the end, where does it come into, if at all, the connection to, what is it, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with the what’s in it for me? At what point do you connect the pilot, and if you don’t, we will die. I assumed that there was a connection to a failure in your life, but understandably, it’s not. Where does that tie into, or if at all, into this particular thing?

Matt: I think that fits into the context piece for me. That’s where I would place it, considering the broader context of where this fits. But you bring up a good point in that you have to think about it the whole time to ensure that this is a relevant behavior. I think that’s one of the reasons why I behave the way I do, because you can make sure it’s a relevant behavior. Because very often there’s a lot of safety training or regulatory training that is notorious for teaching things that nobody’s going to need to do.

Very often, when you have an hour-long course with all these different topics, the behavior that is relevant to anyone is when something goes wrong; in that case, call this phone number. That’s, that’s all you want people to do, funny you say that we worked with a company who spent a lot of money, a lot of money on a compliance course. And I was a man, and I looked through it, and the content was very basic, because it had to be. However, the program was very elaborate, featuring numerous videos. And I asked the lady, the CLO, whom I was interviewing. What was I?

No offense, but most people take this training and pay the least they possibly can. And she said, for us, safety is our culture. It did create the conflict. In this case, you said, why spend an hour on something if all you’re trying to do is check the box? I think what she did was say, ‘I’m going to use this entire hour to explain how important safety is to our company.’

Nolan: The afterthought is its compliance. It was one of the most fascinating conversations I had because I realized that for her, the actual movie was Inception, not the book. I’m telling you, you’re taking compliance training, but what I hope you’ll get out of it is that we genuinely care about our people, and that’s our culture.

Matt: Interesting, interesting, I think, that’s fantastic. I love it. And it highlights the importance of context in determining the direction you’re going.

Nolan: Then, let’s look at roadblocks. Where in this journey, the specificity, the context, the connection, which is the hardest you think to get and what are some common stumbling blocks people have when they’re trying to create these programs to hack the brain?

Matt: I think specificity is the hardest, I think, especially when you’re dealing with subject matter experts. They went to school for a very long time. They have a lot of information in their brain, and it’s critical how much they know. And they’re great people to talk to, and I’ve worked with many great subject matter experts. I agree that it is good to know everything they know. But I think that’s why I love the question of what behavior you’re trying to change. Very often, I’ll sit down with a subject matter expert, and they spend 20 minutes walking through a whole whiteboard of

We want to discuss this and that, and it’s all the information they want people to know. And then, if you reframe the question of what you want them to do, I’ll bring this up because I do think that a lot of times when people talk about learning, they focus on what’s the ROI, what’s the business impact you’re trying to achieve. And I 100 percent agree that that is important. However, in my experience, the average subject matter expert is the average POC that you’ll be working with to create a course.

Common Roadblocks

Matt: It’s all that’s too big a term that that’s not within their wheelhouse? And by the behavior piece, it helps narrow it down. And I think there can be a pushback sometimes on streamlining that much. If we identify that we don’t want people to call a phone number, we want them to call a different number. We can’t have a course that says, call this phone number? We need all this other stuff. I think that’s probably one of the most common roadblocks that happen.

And then, related, but a little bit bigger picture is with all of this, if you identify the behavior that you’re trying to change, realize the context, realize the amount of work that it takes to secure this connection, is it what we’re doing too much for the time and resources we have allowed. And that’s one of the most important conversations I have with people now.

When the first thing they ask me is How long is your program? And I say, well, what are you trying to do? We can make the program as long or as short as you want, as long as it matches the change you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to do something big and grand, transforming the way people lead their teams, then it’s going to take a significant amount of time and resources, because that’s the way it works.

And I would, but in reality, if you want people to improve at one-on-ones, then we should spend a quarter doing nothing but discussing one-on-ones. We should have three or four workshops, send half a dozen emails, but focus primarily on one-on-ones for the next three months.

Nolan: smart guy. He used to run a learning conference in Seattle with Amazon. My Name is Darren. I was chatting with him about some skill development and

He was saying, Know, for me, I don’t think people can learn more than three skills a year. He’s thinking of it. We’re doing all these skills mapping. He mentioned the 15 million skills taxonomies that we build. And he’s, how much can a human change in a short amount of time? We also need to be realistic with ourselves. It has nothing to do with their undesirable,

They want to change, but numerous factors are working against them. Again, even if you didn’t have enough time to train, or even if you did whatever, it still takes a long time to get people to change their behavior. If you’re digging a hole for a post? If you don’t dig it far enough, it’s going to fall. There is a point where digging a hole doesn’t mean you’ve dug the hole. It’s going to stand, but it will stand for the night. And then tomorrow morning, when a squirrel hops on it, it’s going to fall. You have to dig below the frost line. You have to put the concrete down to get deep enough to stand. And many companies don’t have the resources to do so.

Matt: Deep enough.

Nolan: dig the post deep enough or whatever. In my mind, I thought that the connection would be challenging, given the sustainability of this program.

Matt: The top reason why many learning programs seem not to have any impact is that they’re not reaching a critical mass to create the impact that you’re trying to have. And the bigger the impact, the bigger that critical mass. And that’s why the specificity piece can help, because if you can narrow it down to this, then you can approach it realistically.

Nolan: Yep. I’m not going to try to sum it up. Normally, I would, but I’m not smart enough to do that. Sum this up for us again. We’re hacking the brain for behavior change. Give us the 10,000, give us the, know, Adam Grant, the, many words should I give you here? Let’s see, a hundred words – give me the hundred-word version.

Matt: Exactly. I think, and I know, that in the big picture of the corporate world, the thing we care about is behavior, and the way behavior happens is through the brain. We need to understand how the brain processes information, which leads to a conclusion that results in a specific behavior. And if we want to adjust that system, we need first to get incredibly specific about the behavior we are trying to change.

We then need to ask the question, What is the context in which this behavior occurs? We know what else to include and what information is necessary for that training. And then we need to figure out what activities I’m going to include in the training to change the connections in the brain that will reinforce that behavior. That’s the broad sweep of the arc of what I ask myself every time I design learning with this philosophy.

Closing Thoughts

Nolan: Wonderful. I don’t know how many words that was, but that was incredibly concise. Wonderful. Thanks, Matt, for joining us. Appreciate it. I can understand why; you were packed in the halls at ATD. And hopefully for those that were prevented from getting in, they can listen to this and get a bit of a version of that. Thank you very much for joining us, Matt. I appreciate it.

Matt: Absolutely, Nolan. This has been fantastic. I always enjoy discussing this topic; I’m happy to come back later, too.

Nolan: I’ll hold you to that. Thanks, Matt. See you later.