13: Habit Formation
The author begins with the story of an anonymous new manager who, after graduating college, was put in charge of a team of workers who simply shoveled dirt, He imagined himself to be like a coach of a sports team, and sought to improve their score. Though he knew nothing of the task, he measured the performance of his men with a watch and a clipboard, noted which were most productive, taught others to adopt their habits, and doubled the production of the team. His success was not the result of whipping the men into a frenzy and working them to exhaustion, but instead teaching them motions that were more efficient and required no more effort , and in some cases less - and by so doing won the approval of his superiors and workers alike.
(EN: This smells a bit like Frederick Taylor's approach to management - his "scientific management" seeks to define the best manner in which a task can be done and then to habituate the workers to that manner.)
This narrative underscores the value of habits. A man who adopts the right method of doing something can often be very effective in getting work done, and efficient in his expenditure of energy. But a man who has formed bad habits works very hard to accomplish very little - which is unfortunate for him and his employer alike. A manager of a team may improve both productivity and morale if he is attentive to habits and coaches men in the right direction, and the productivity gains are tremendous because they are multiplied by the number of workers who adopt better habits. And because greater work is done with the same or less effort, these gains are sustainable.
Man's Habits and Characteristics
We generally consider habits to be the equivalent of character traits, which are assumed to be indelible: we say that a man is unproductive, lazy, sloppy, or ought because of his character. We seek to hire productive men, but often observe that those who are highly productive at one task are hopeless with another - particularly when we merely set them upon the task without any training or instruction.
Patterns of behavior are learned. A man does not have a shoveling instinct, but at some point learned to handle a shovel effectively and efficiently. He may just as well have learned to handle the shovel improperly, and if not instructed how to handle it, will do the best he can, and fall into patterns of habit that are not productive.
Aside of differences in their health and physical strength, one man is capable of doing what another man is already doing if he simply learns and adopts the same methodology. And so if the worst man on a crew has the same physical strength and endurance as the best, the difference in their productivity is the technique they use to work, which is learned and habituated.
When we seek to employ a man, we are curious as to his habits. We seek to hire men who are productive at the onset. We fail to do so because we assume, without knowledge, that the habits he has learned elsewhere can be transported. In many instances, this may prove to be true - and this coincidence gives us great faith in our baseless assumption.
A better approach is to employ a man and then teach him habits that will be productive in the specific environment of our workplace. Doing so requires us to accept that management is responsible for the performance of the workers, which we gladly accept when performance is positive - but when the performance is negative, it is the failure of a manager to coach his men in developing productive habits.
The narrative at the onset of this chapter provides the total solution for effective management: to observe work to determine which habits are productive, and then to encourage those habits in all workers.
Convert Italics Into Headers
Scott describes habit formation in terms of the psychology of his time. In particular, it was believed that the brain was plastic - adaptable, but prone to sustain patterns. He gives the example of creasing a sheet of paper. He can then straighten out the paper by the crease will still remain. So while paper does not hold a shape as firmly as metal that has been bent, it remains "creased" even though it is still pliable, and if folded over again it will tend to fold at the pre-existing crease.
The psychology of his time maintained that the brain was similar: every though was like a crease in the mind, and the stronger the stimulus the more definite and permanent the crease would become. The belief was that the nerve cells themselves altered their shape and position, that an infant's brain was smooth and that the furrows and grooves in the surface of the brain were the result of the "creases" formed by experience. And just as paper tends to fold at an existing crease, so does the mind tend to react in the same way to repeated stimuli.
(EN: The specific details here are, of course, the rubbish of primitive psychology - but the basic theory holds. While the neuroscience of the present age recognizes that the furrows in the brain are merely physical and neurons do not move about, it also maintains that patterns in the electrochemical activity in the brain tend to become standardized when stimulus is repeated - which means we develop habitual methods of cognition, from perception through action, that enable us to conserve mental energy by developing patterns to follow rather than deliberating over every instance, provided they are reinforced by positive outcomes. So essentially it's the same process Scott defines, though somewhat refined, and attributed to brain activity rather than brain physiology.)
Habit and Efficiency
The concept of efficiency compares the time and effort necessary to perform an action by one method with that required by another method. The less time an effort, the greater the efficiency - which means more output for less effort and/or less time.
The efficiency of habit can be witnessed in telegraph operators. A novice must put a great deal of concentration into translating each letter into a sequence of long and short taps. When he becomes habituated to typing one short and one long for the letter "a" he no longer has to deliberate and can key that letter quickly and without thought; when he learns that "an" is a short, a long, a pause, a long, and a short he can dash that out (and gains efficiency in any word that contains those letters in that sequence), and then the common word "and" becomes short-long-pause-long-short-pause-long-short-short which is done almost without thinking. A novice at the telegraph can barely manage to send one or two contacts (dot, dash, or pause) per second, whereas an experienced telegrapher can manage to perform twelve to fifteen contacts per second.
Mental habits improve speed even further. To figure out how many eggs are in twenty-seven dozen requires most people to break out pen and paper. But a shipping clerk who daily manages cases of twelve items has multiplied those two numbers many times and can instantly say that twelve times twenty-seven is 324 without having to work the math at all. He simply remembers that product.
Of importance: do not confuse speed with hurry. A person who is unaccustomed to doing something at attempts to hurry will likewise create many mistakes because he is cutting corners and not doing things accurately or appropriately for the sake of doing them fast. A person who is habituated can do things quickly and correctly without cutting corners - he knows precisely what to do and wastes no effort in doing it, and so he gains speed by habituation rather than rushing.
Habit and Accuracy
One of the benefits of developing a machine to do a job is that it does the same task in a uniform manner repeatedly - provide the machine is calibrated correctly and suffers no mechanical malfunction. Even simple tools such lend accuracy to work - such as the carpenter's plane, which shaves off a layer of wood in a manner that is more consistent than any man might accomplish with a hatchet or a knife.
Habituation mechanizes work, inasmuch as it is organically possible to do so. A man who swings a hammer in the same way each time delivers a consistent amount of force in a consistent direction and in a consistent location. Barring physical or mental malfunction, he performs the task with a given level of accuracy - and this means he can rely on a specific action having a specific effect.
This can also be observed in our leisure activity. Consider that the hunter must predict where he will place a bullet in order to take down prey - and he is able to predict the placement because he follows a habitual procedure, holding the rifle in a specific manner, lining up his sights in a specific manner, squeezing the trigger in a specific way. If he deviates from habit, his bullet will likely miss the spot he intended to place it. In that sense, the expert marksman is the most perfectly habituated to the actions involved in shooting.
The accuracy of habit is of course dependent on not only the consistency of a man's actions, but the consistency of things and the environment. The marksman must adjust his habits when he is handed an unfamiliar rifle. He must adjust his aim when his target is at a greater distance. Failure to account for differences in conditions will render a habit imprecise.
Habit and Attention
Habit enables an individual to pay attention to certain things while ignoring other. In the example of the hunter, his reliance on habit for the way in which he holds, aims, and fires his rifle means he does not need to think of those things, and focus instead on other factors such as the distance and movement of his target.
Human attention is limited, such that a person may only be attentive to one thing at a time - to pay attention to two things at once is a misconception, as man shifts his attention between those things, with a potential for error in the gaps in between and the time it takes to refocus his attention. An action that has become a habit requires no attention at all, or at the most a fraction of a second, enabling a man to give greater attention to those things that are not customary.
Consider the example of the student of piano. His attention is divided between the sheet music and the position of his hands on the keys. An intermediate student's hands become habituated to striking certain keys to produce certain tones, in the same way a typist learns to strike certain keys to produce certain letters. Neither need to focus their gaze or attention on their hands.
This also calls to mind the increasing sophistication of habit. A typist can learn patterns to type common words, which he has typed frequently. He may type "and" or "the" as a single effort, and even "accounting" if he has typed that word often. The pianist may similarly play a series of four or eight notes as if the combination of keys was a single unit, or read an entire measure at a glance.
He cites William James (EN: an early American psychologists): "The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work."
Habit Reduces Exhaustion
Scott mentions his morning routine and goes through the list of tasks that are done between rising from bed and leaving his home. Bathing, grooming, and dressing involve quite a number of tasks, but they don't seem onerous because they are everyday things done with little attentiveness. A lot is done, but it is not tiresome.
The same can be said of repetitive work: an experienced worker who is habituated to the routines of the office will often remark how quickly his day seems to pass, and feels no great exhaustion after eight or ten hours of constant work, as it does seem to him to have required any special effort. Furthermore, the complaints a worker has at the end of the day often do not pertain to the routine of work, but incidents and conditions that have interrupted that routine.
While men do enjoy mindful work - creative thinking and problem solving - as well as doing something new, those tasks require intense concentration and can only be done for short periods of time ("a few hours or a few minutes") before frustration and weariness set in. Simply stated, novelty is exhausting and disheartening because it requires an effort necessary to discover and the increased risk of failure.
He also suggests that creative workers and inventors work in short bursts rather than long hours, but cites only one example (Darwin, who worked about three hours a day in fifteen-minute sprints). (EN: Even so, I do expect this is the case, as creative "inspiration" tends to come in short bursts - and it's very common to hear that a creative idea occurs at an odd time. Hours of grinding failed to produce a solution, but then the individual took a break and did something different for a while, and that's when inspiration struck.)
Personal Habits
We recognize a person by their personal habits: their manner of dress and grooming, their way of speaking, their posture and gait, and other qualities they possess - each of which is the result of a choice that they habitually make. The fact that we recognize a man who always wears a red necktie means that donning a red necktie is his habit.
It's also mentioned that our habits determine the quality of our lives. A man who is in the habit of eating a hearty breakfast and exercising daily has as a consequence energy and vitality, whereas a man who is in the habit of drinking heavily is as a consequence often quite sluggish and debilitated as a matter of course. By these examples, it is clear that there are good habits and bad ones.
As an aside, habituation is a part of training. The proverb that suggests "train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" reflects that habits are perpetuated as a matter of course - and it takes some effort to discontinue a habit and form a new one. As such, it is important to foster in oneself and in others good habits - a notion that would be well applied to the workplace as well as to personal life.
Social Habits
Our manner of interacting with other people is also largely a matter of habit. We have a habitual demeanor upon meeting any person, and more specific habits that are evoked in reaction to some aspect of their person, be it appearance or behavior.
What are often referred to as virtues or vices are really assessments of a person's habit: a man is called "honest" if he has the habit of being honest with others as a matter of course. This does not mean that he cannot deviate from this habit, but he is generally inclined to follow the pattern of behavior to which he is habituated. We will also distinguish between an honest man who has been dishonest and a man who is dishonest in that dishonesty is unusual of the former while habitual of the latter.
Our success in interacting with other people, in any context, is largely dependent on our social habits. And like any other habit, social virtues can be formed with conscious efforts: all that is required for a dishonest man to become an honest one, or vice versa, is a change in habits.
Occupational Habits
Our habits in the workplace are a combination of personal habits (the way we are accustomed to doing tasks) and social habits (the way we are accustomed to acting and reacting in encounters with other people). The primary difference is that in our workplace, there is a definite objective that helps us to determine what habits should be adopted - they cause us to be more precise or more productive in the achievement of a well-defined goal.
Outside the workplace, it may be difficult to justify habits because of the lack of a goal. Why does a man choose to be cheerful? Why does he choose to eat a certain food? Why does he choose to wear a certain color of necktie? With some effort we can justify our personal and social habits, but it is generally justification after the fact.
Within the workplace, we can justify habits more objectively: a mason ought to form the habit of making one motion with his trowel rather than two because it enables him to work faster, a salesman ought to form the habit of being cheerful because clients are more inclined to purchase from him, and so on.
When we can observe the results of habits and measure them against a goal, it provides motivation to discover and practice better habits. This is also true in our private lives, thought the "results" are subjective and harder to observe.
And to reflect on the opening of this chapter, recognizing habits and finding more effective habits is the basis of scientific management, which has achieved tremendous success in many fields of endeavor. Changing the habits of a man can improve his output, and changing the habits of a crew multiplies the improvement by the number of men who adopt the habit.
He mentions Frank Gilbreth's work in the construction industry, particularly with masonry: by reducing the number of motions made from eighteen to five, he tripled the productivity of labor. An expert mason previously would lay around 40 bricks per hour, but one trained by Gilbreth's methods can lay 120, without feeling rushed or becoming exhausted. The efficiency of motions makes the work easier to perform for the worker, and the result to the business is a faster production schedule at a cheaper cost.
In effect, Gilbreth has defined a highly efficient pattern of behavior - and those men who make this pattern their habit can be astoundingly productive. It requires no special feat of strength, endurance, or dexterity and can be learned quickly even by a man who has no previous experience in masonry.
Similar advances are being made by scientific managers in an array of industries, and there is much opportunity for improvement by being attentive to the habits of workers. And further, there is always the potential for innovation: while no-one has come up with more productive habits than Gilbreth's pattern, there remains the possibility in future that an observant analyst may find a method of laying bricks that requires three motions instead of five, which will even further advance the productivity of masons.
Scott briefly mentions technology as a facilitator of new methods, though this is nothing particularly new. The use of hand-tools improves efficiency (the mason who uses a trowel is more efficient than one who attempts to handle mortar with bare hands), and the use of machines will do so as well (a machine that lays bricks may allow one man to do the work of ten) - though we can witness the great efficiencies gained by automation in past, we cannot begin to imagine the efficiencies that will be discovered in future.
But technology is often over-emphasized in the pursuit of efficiency. It can provide astounding increases in efficiency, but the notion that it replaces men is rather distorted. Technology provides tools that are used by men: the trowel did not replace the need for the mason, and any mechanical device that lays bricks will still be operated by a man.
(EN: This becomes a matter of perspective, because if one man can do the work of three, then two men are no longer needed to accomplish the job. So while there is still the need for humans to direct the work of machines, far fewer are needed to do the amount of work that is demanded. And given that there is a finite amount of work that needs to be done before demand is fully satisfied, machinery does indeed replace men - not all men, but many of them.)
For this reason, Scott remains focused on psychology as the means to improving efficiency - the habits of men, which include using technology, will always be the manner in which efficiency is increased.