It's the beginning of the new year, and in the same way, as many people do, I thought about setting up some goals for 2021. First, I will try not to use the stored contacts on my phone. Instead, I will try to memorize as many numbers as I can. I could make the same promise about not using the navigation system in my car, but luckily, my car doesn't have one. We have become hostages of our friendly little gadgets, and when suddenly you need to call someone, and you don't have your smartphone with you, it becomes a problem. Little things, one by one, take away skills that used to be natural and normal. Spacial awareness, understanding the city’s layout, memorizing, sketching and many more. It sounds straightforward. However, there is more to appreciate about how things work inside our brains.

To begin with, our "command center" will do everything to save energy. Although the brain weighs only around 1.5 kg—a mere 2% of the human body—it takes about 20% of the total power, and this number represents a resting state! Thinking is costly from the energy management perspective. No surprise that no matter what we do, the default state is "a low energy mode." If you are interested in how it works, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a superb book.

One of the methods that we deploy to save energy is the ability to form habits. Once learned, a habit is stored for future references. Brain scans confirm that when we learn a pattern, there is massive brain activity. When a habit is understood, there is only a medium spike at the beginning of the routine and the end. There is an excellent book by Charles Duhigg - The Power of Habit, in which the author looks at why we do things in a certain way in life and business. According to Duhigg, only one behavioural change is needed to start a new habit. All we need is a trigger point. From it, we begin to form a routine, and if there is a reward at the end, a habit is formed - it emerges from the loop: cue (the trigger), routine, and reward. It is important to note that anything can be a cue: a smell, a sound, a light - anything. The routine can be simple or very complex. It doesn't matter. Same with the rewards - they can range from physical objects to emotions, with the latter being most potent.

Essentially, habits control our daily activities—almost everything. We learn we form a habit, and later, spend as much as we can on auto-pilot without thinking. The problem is that good and bad habits are equally stored in our memory. The good thing is that we can "overwrite" bad habits, or rather, create a new neural pathway over the old one. So there is hope, and advertising is one of the areas where we see how powerful habits are. Claude Hopkins is one of the advertising pioneers. His work on Pepsodent or Febreze shows how small changes in product positioning changes everything. Hopkins insisted that to form a habit, first you need to "find a simple and obvious cue" and second, "clearly define rewards." Leave the rest to human nature. There is one more element that needs attention: craving. Without craving, cues and rewards will not work. It seems that craving powers the habit-forming loop. How do you form a habit when there is no cue or if the reward is not appreciated or wanted? Craving is the answer.

You may wonder why I am bringing this into the Ibbaka Talent blog. The reason is that we are in the process of re-organizing some of the critical interactions on the platform. Accepting and suggesting skills and adding or claiming skills - in the Skill Profile or a Team context. Of course, as on any platform, we wish to nudge the user gently towards frequent visits to the Skill Profile and subsequently to a higher activity, especially around "suggesting, accepting and claiming skills." If this becomes a habit, that would be a great win for us and we hope for the user. Charles Duhigg writes that once a habit is formed, the brain activity is lowered, and whatever the action is, it is completed "without too much thinking." Here is the question:

do we want suggesting, accepting, self-assessing, or peer-assessing skills to be done automatically?

The answer is no - we don't want this. Skills are the new currency in the work marketplace. Everyone knows how important they are. At the same time, we will be delighted when Ibbaka Talent users form a habit of visiting their Skill Profiles and frequently - but not automatically. It is a challenge. We need a cue that turns on the craving. We need a routine, and we need a reward. Sounds simple, right? Perhaps. For sure, we can streamline and delight the user with the actual process of self-assessing or accepting suggested skills, but that is not enough to form a habit. I think the craving is the area which we should be focusing on. The reward, on the other hand, could be simpler to figure out. For instance, explicit support for the career path is a good reward. Or the satisfaction from a comprehensive skill map that can be shared. This leaves me with the craving - what do I really want that will satisfy my career plans, skills to learn, behaviours to change, and talents to find? All the right questions for 2021. I should add solving them to my 2021 goals.

If you have suggestions, please let us know through info@ibbaka.com. And Happy New Year, it will be a good one!