Behaviour change… that old chesnut

Elon Musk is a master of behaviour change. His ability to set goals and reassess them towards a final solution to a wicked problem is pretty awesome. I’m sure he hires some brilliant folks too, it’s what smart people do 😉 I’d like to invite you take your time and go read the article which so evocatively and succinctly captures the magic of decision making by a master such a Musk. It is so craftily captured by waitbutwhy in this awesome drawing of how Elon makes things transform from wants, to goals, to strategies.

 

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

Goals and strategies, its always been about the motivations and the moves needed to execute on them. The path of behaviour change is a strategy that many of us apply to ourselves, our tribes, and into the world. Always striving to have a growth mindset we often pursue a series of behaviour changing paths. In obtaining external goals we also see individuals and organisations seeking to change and influence behaviour for the greater good or for their own gains.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. – Sun Tzu

How might we subdue our own change challenges by applying Tzu’s principle of not fighting?

We might do so by understanding the motivations for behaviour change on individual and group scales. I’ll be focusing on the individual this week and in preparation I wrote a bit about how motivations tie into the structure of behaviour change success. I learned that insight is drawn from the source of desires. The ‘why’ behind a motivation can make our brain prioritise burning the requisite calories in order to sustain it. Today, on the plane on the way to lovely Portland I hand wrote this wee piece about behaviour change from another frame.

Aproveche!

 

 

 

Human 2.0 publishes commentary on our research

Click for the Human 2.0 Blogpost about our Patterns of Play research

Human 2.0 is a blog that focuses on how our interactions with technology change us. Interestingly their mission is very much in line with my recently completed Masters thesis, the Patterns of Play project which Rachel Shadoan and I conducted this last summer. One of the major driving factors in our work was our conviction to uniting quantitative and qualitative research methods. Along the way we were hit by the huge impact data and stats have changed how we self assess and monitor progress. We were astounded by how the data and stories correlated and woven back and forth along a narrative told in personal accounts and serious game play data. We were delighted to be on the cutting edge and looking into the abyss of human behavior metrics and building a ladder bridge down into it with player’s stories.  What we have conducted so far is only the first inklings of a proof of concept study, we have a lot of work awaiting us in the future and are so excited to be able to think radically and work in such an innovating fashion. This is what happens when you put two minds with very different skillsets onto an expansive problem and see trust and collaboration bloom and bear fruit. This fruit will be planted in order to grow the next stage of our novel work. All of this we do in order to better understand ourselves, those around us, and to help create more responsive and efficient technology. A tall order, but with a little help from our friends we can surely do it.

HCI2010 – EURO-CAT Software evaluation and Live Blogging Wrap-up

Check out all the brains around this table. Today's workshop - HCI2010 - Group Awareness in Online Work, Learning, and Games (see if you can spot me in the bright blue shirt!)

Today’s workshop on Group Awareness in Online Work, Learning, and Games finishes up with the debut of the EURO-CAT collaborative working software prototype. The participants sit around me eagerly clicking a forging ahead through the many profile setup screens designed to create harmonious working environments online, I suppose by presenting ourselves as well as possible. the software looks alright, the color palettes and screens look alright, but EURO-CAT just make me feel like I am working quite hard to get through it.  I believe you will quickly put people off their desire to work as a team the more demanding the experience is upfront. Looks like they have a lot of streamlining work to do to make it run smoothly,but hey that is what research is all about.  The first run of testers are getting a little frustrated with the error messages and demands to complete every box on a page before proceeding. Overall the tool has a lot of possibilities and could grow into something amazing, in my opinion especially if they take a more design ethnography approach to refinements 😉

I bet its hard debuting a piece of software only to receive a laundry list of improvements, but that is how iteration works. All I know is that the iterations and edits I constantly subject myself to, though they maybe painful, only forge me into a stronger person with more methods of communicating clearly. Next the whole group moved into skype to do the actual collaborative work, because EURO-CAT is only really a group collaborative working profile management system. Lame, I had thought the whole group met and was run through the EURO-CAT, but it looks like that is a little down the road.

After this prototype trial run a little rest and some dinner let’s call it a day.

I am defending my Masters in design ethnography project tomorrow and have to be bright and shiny.

*If you are just jumping in on this post, look at the first 5 post back in time (below on the page) for my live blogging feed from today.

HCI2010 – Play is a Serious Business – Bill Kapralos and mSTREET

Good morning! My activity for the day is taking taking part in the Group Awareness Workshop, subtitled  Group Awareness in Online Work, Learning and Games.  Here we have my impression of the first speaker.

Bill Kapralos, from lovely Toronto Canada, has had a long journey to arrive in the realm of researching serious games. His current work aims to improve learning for medical and health care professionals. He opens with some interesting ethnographic / organizational behavior observations. He points out the deficits nurses and doctors perceive in each others’ skill sets, and how this leads to workplace friction. Then he throws out the heavy term, “interprofessional education.”  One of the constraints on his work he mentions is how difficult and expensive it can be to bring together an entire medical staff to have group education or “interprofessional education.”  Bill goes on to present the second constraint, “The millennial student, traditional teaching doesn’t address their learning needs,” and now he enters the space I prefer… VIDEO GAMES! The games are killing our attention spans, but at the same time we are learning, just a little differently. Oh now he is just preaching to the choir, awesome. “Video games are learner centered approach…” says Bill, and he goes on “we are putting the student in charge of their own learning, we are letting them pick control.” His next point focuses on how these teaching games can allow users to experience dangerous, risky, or difficult work situations at a fraction of the cost or risk or real world training. One of Bill’s projects is called mSTREET? Modular Synthetic Training Research Evaluation and Extrapolation Tool, oh what a mouthful. Then the audience mentions the lack of “education” in the full title, HA! Then is could have been meSTREET, brilliant! How cool does a Virtual 3D Critical Care Unit game sound? We’ll call the first level “The deteriorating patient scenario,” enter Dr. House.

Bill is telling us about how adding bits of humor into the game has gotten positive reactions from the medical professionals. When you pick the wrong tool during the operation you get a message from the other staff in the game saying: “This is not the right tool for this stage of the operation,” that’s not that special  right? But the player’s retort on screen says, “I knew that.”

Bill Kapralos speaking at HCI2010