How to Design for Long-Term Behavior Change—Part 1: New Habit Formation

Hello franklu 

Thank you for taking the time to comment and your thoughtfulness.

First, our conventional wisdom often tells us that habits are something that requires a lot of time and effort, and that is why creating habits is challenging. However, the point of the baby-step design strategy is to make it so simple that it's almost effortless. It might still take you time, because it may take many baby steps to get to the desired habit. If it still require a lot of effort so that we have to think about it when we act, then we didn't design the baby step right--the steps are not small enough. The baby steps has to start with very tiny habit (see my reply to RomanRackwitz above).

I totally agree with your second point. I don't believe I've ever said that short-term change is bad or not valuable to business. It is just that business already know how to drive these short-term behavior changes. They are just not very good at driving the long-term behavior yet. The real danger is that businesses often think that they can drive long-term behavior change the same way they drive the short-term changes. That's the point of this post. Certainly there are value to both short-term and long-term changes, and this applies to business as well as pretty much everything else in our lives.

Thanks again for the comment, and I hope to see you again next time.