4: Keystone Habits
The chapter opens with an anecdote about Alcoa's new CEO, who took control during a troubled time. Rather than speaking of profitability, he focused on improving safety - which panicked investors, but turned out to be an ingenious plan. By speaking about safety, he got more buy-in from the workforce than he would if he had spoken about profits, which are not personal to them. And he also knew that changing procedures for the ostensible sake of safety would also improve the efficiency and profitability of the firm.
Switch to government: there is likely no better example of an organization that is damned by its own habits - because policies and procedures are merely formalized and documented habits that indicate what to do when something happens. And these policies and procedures are rigidly followed, even when they are unproductive or even harmful.
Then, he mentions keystone habits - that behavior as a whole is a complex system of individual actions, habits triggered by cues. Because you do one thing, it requires or excludes doing other things, and if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, you can find certain behaviors that are linked to many others. These are the keystone habits, and changing them has a domino effect on behavior in general.
There are a number of studies that statistically correlate a given behavior to results that seem entirely unrelated - families who eat dinner together have better educated children, people who make their beds every morning are better at financial budgeting, etc. These studies seem amusing because there is no direct connection between one thing and the other - but the author suggests that they are connected in the web of human behavior. Changing one behavior changes others, and the result may be several links in a chair away from the one that was observed or altered.
Switch to athletics: the author follows an Olympic medalist through his daily routine - on race day he gets up at a specific time, eats a specific breakfast, does a specific warm-up routine, and so on. His performance in the race itself is simply one link in a chain of habitual behaviors that begins the moment he gets out of bed. This is common among high-performing athletes. They have a "capacity for obsessiveness."
Then, there's some talk of "small wins," that instill people with the confidence they need to take on more ambitious goals. The example used is the gay rights movement, which experienced several false starts as early efforts to achieve things on a grand scale disheartened supporters. To regain its footing, the movement seemed to disappear for a few decades, working on smaller things on the local level, slowly building steam before reemerging on the national scene, fueled by the small-scale successes.
Next, a consideration of root-cause analysis. Very often a problem is attributed to something that takes place immediately before the problem occurs - but that thing is generally caused by something else, which is caused by something else, and so on. The root cause may be several links down the chain from the even that immediately preceded the problem.
Again, there's talk about observation and awareness: how dieters who were asked to keep "food journals" documenting everything they ate began to lose weight during the exploratory study. The researchers had not suggested any life changes, but simply be being aware of their eating habits, the participants in the study noticed patterns and began to make changes in their diet.