The Secret Equation to Optimize Behavior and Happiness: Paul Hylenski (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Paul Hylenski’s talk titled “The Secret Equation to Optimize Behavior and Happiness” at TEDxManitouSprings conference.

In this TEDx talk, Paul Hylenski explores the transformative power of mathematics in everyday life and leadership. He reminisces about childhood lessons from his father, emphasizing how baseball and the discipline of mathematics significantly influenced his life. Hylenski discusses how mathematical principles applied in various professions, including his experience in the Marine Corps and as a Six Sigma Black Belt, demonstrate math’s universal relevance.

He introduces psychologist Kurt Lewin’s behavior equation, B = f(P,E), which indicates that behavior is a function of the person and their environment. Hylenski delves into the impact of physical and mental aspects of environments on behavior, highlighting research on influencing choices through environmental adjustments. He emphasizes psychological safety as a crucial element in leadership, detailing its four levels—inclusive, learning, contribution, and challenge safety—and how they foster a positive mental environment.

Finally, Hylenski offers practical leadership strategies, such as goal setting, gamification, and creating a collaborative brainstorming environment, encouraging a 90-day experiment to observe changes in behavior. He concludes by reiterating the profound impact of altering environments to change behavior and ultimately, the world.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Power of Math and Leadership

So, what if the lessons that we learned as children could help us to change the world? As a young boy, my father taught me many lessons. My favorite was the lesson of baseball. Now, my father worked the night shift, so I can remember many mornings going in and trying to wake him up.

Sometimes I wouldn’t succeed, but most of the time, he would get up, drink a large cup of coffee, and then we would go play baseball. Those were some of the best memories of my life. Now, years later, I would find out that he had taught me a lesson far more valuable: the power of math.

Now, my father used to say that math is the most important subject you will ever learn. Math is the only subject that you’ll use in every profession that you have. At the time, I thought, “This is just something dads say to children to get them to be good at math.” But he was right.

Mathematics in Practice

And as I entered into my first job in the Marine Corps, I found myself doing grid coordinates and torque values. And then, in my professional life, I was looking at cost charts and finance charts. I even went on to become a Six Sigma Black Belt, which is all about math. Now, mathematics has been used to solve the world’s most complex issues.

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From the law of gravity to the theory of relativity, E equals MC squared is one of the world’s most widely known equations. So, what if mathematics wasn’t just reserved for science and technology? What if mathematics could be used for relationships or work culture? I have a vision for leadership, and it’s to make leadership more human.

Leadership and Behavior

So, what if there was a secret equation that could rewire behavior? Well, in fact, there is. Now, Kurt Lewin was one of the fathers of psychology, and he did the bulk of his studies in the 1930s on behavior. But in 1936, he penned an equation, B equals the function of P and E.

Behavior equals the function of person and the environment. Now, the two variables in this equation are person and the environment. And for those of us who might not have been in a math class since high school, the variables in an equation are the things that you can change to change the output of the equation. Now, when I first saw this, I thought, “This equation’s been around forever. It can’t be real.”

But then I started to look at myself. Now, I was a different person at work than I was at home. And if I went to a library, nobody told me to be quiet; I just did. The people and the environment changed, so so did my behavior. So, I thought, “OK, there’s got to be factors into the environment,” and there are. There are two factors in an environment.

Environmental Factors and Their Impact

There’s the physical, and there’s the mental. Now, the physical environment is everything around us. That is how an environment is designed. That is how organized and clean an environment is.

It is even the color of an environment. You may know that the colors blue and green can elicit calm in humans, and the colors red and orange signify urgency. So, again, I thought, “This can’t be real. This has to just be a thing.”

But I started looking at research, and what I found was research on schoolchildren. Now, in this study, they wanted the schoolchildren to drink less sugary drinks and soft drinks and more water. At first look, I thought, “Good luck.” But what I saw was how they changed the environment.

And what they did was they took the sugary soft drinks, put them at the end of the cafeteria line, making them not readily accessible. And they took the water and put it in the front of the cafeteria line, making it readily accessible. And what they noticed was a dramatic shift in water consumption, proving that the slightest tweak to an environment can change people’s behavior. So the mental environment is just a far touch harder to change.

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Psychological Safety in Leadership

But the greatest tool you can use to change the mental environment is psychological safety. Now, psychological safety is how safe do I feel in the environment I’m in. Now, it has four levels, and they have to be built on top of each other. So the first level is inclusive safety.

How safe do I feel with my team, or my group, or my family? Now, in the cavemen and cavewomen days, you couldn’t feel safe enough to go to sleep knowing that the person next to you would wake you up if the saber-toothed tiger came.

You were in for a rough go. So as leaders, we have to drive teams.

We have to drive making a family. Now, the next level is learning safety. How safe do I feel to learn with my group? Now, that is critical. And as leaders, we need to normalize mistakes. Because if we normalize mistakes, we create a growth mindset. And what we show people is it is okay to fail as long as you’re growing. Now, the third level is contribution safety.

Now, that is, do I feel safe to contribute my ideas and efforts to this group? And this is critical for innovation. As a leader, it is so important that you listen to your teams because that is where the innovation will happen. Now, the fourth level is challenge safety.

Do I feel safe to challenge existing processes or even challenge my leader? Now, as leaders, sometimes we feel infallible, but we are not. We’re human beings and we make mistakes. So when your teams feel like they can challenge your ideas and decisions, you become a better leader because you have less blind spots.

And it’s amazing what that will do. Now, I want to give you a couple of actual strategies that you can leave and do. Now, the first one is creating goals. I create goals for everything.

Strategies for Effective Leadership

There, I said it. I am weird. Everything I do, I create goals. I wrote books, and I wrote them at 10 pages at a time because goals are critical. We want to achieve goals. So set micro goals in your teams, and you will find that you achieve them the majority of the time.

The next strategy is gamification of the workplace. Turn work into a game. And we love games. Games make us less stressful. They also enact our intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is inside.

The game propels me to win. Extrinsic is outside. I get something when I win. So the greatest way that I’ve used this and that I think you can is through the use of punch cards. Now, we all love them. We go to our local coffee shop or our local ice cream shop, and it feels good when they punch our card. We want to go back and buy something else. And as a leader, this is the way to incentivize positive performance and keep your team coming back over and over.

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The third strategy is creating a horizontal hierarchy when you are brainstorming. So it is critical to entice people for their contributions and allow them to challenge each other. And again, what you’re doing is reinforcing the contribution and challenge safety and the environment.

Now, the greatest way that I’ve seen this done is actually Pixar. And they have a brain trust where every opinion matters and that’s how they brainstorm their movies. So turn your environment into a brain trust where you can entice people to give their ideas, where you can entice people to challenge others’ ideas and you will find innovation behind that door.

The last strategy is leveraging off of the broken windows theory. Now, the broken windows theory was surmised in the 1980s and it basically said the more visible disorder in an environment, the more disorderly behavior.

So as leaders, we can actually engineer our environments through organization and cleanliness and cleanliness standards. So this will change the behavior in the environment. So with mathematics and science comes experimentation. So I want to challenge everybody to a 90-day experiment.

I want you to put one or more of these strategies into play and I want you to watch the change in behavior. Now, most leaders, they focus solely, solely on the people in the environment. But what we lose is the fact that we have the ability to engineer the environment.

And my dad was right. Math is the most important thing. And remember the equation. B equals the function of P and E. Behavior equals the function of person and the environment. And if you can change the environment, you can change the world.

Thank you.

SUGGESTED BOOK FOR READING:

Culture Change through Environment Change