another thing I really loved about the book was having been a senior executive at Dell,
your experience of going to Google, and how it was eye opening for you for
a number of different ways. I was hoping you could tell the audience what that experience
was like through the lens of the Fresh Start effect that you write about in the book.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, one very fun experience I had as an assistant professor
at the Wharton School was getting invited out to Google's Mountain View headquarters to talk with
some of their HR leaders about challenges the company was facing. And to try to bring science
to bear on those challenges was exciting because Google's the fast growing meat company, and I was
really interested in applying the insights I was generating in the ivory tower to real
day to day problems. I started couldn't believe honestly, that I was going to have much to offer
when I flew out and was wandering around this amazing corporate campus. But in the end, I was
fascinated to learn that even this dream company, if you will, at the time, it was 2012, roughly,
and things couldn't have been going much better for Google, they were struggling with challenges
related to human behavior, just like every other organization. And just like every individual,
they were offering lots of training programs for their employees that were state of the art,
so they could buff up on new skills and seeing that not everyone was taking advantage of them.
They were offering all sorts of great wellness benefits, all sorts of financial benefits,
retirement, matching programs that were not being adopted by all of their employees. And
they were wondering, how can we get one of our employees to take advantage of these fantastic
benefits we're putting in front of them to be as good as they could be? And I thought,
you know, it's so fascinating that Google was struggling with this, it was super interesting to
have the conversations I did. But probably the most exciting moment in my visit came after I
gave a presentation about some of the research I'd done that offered tools and tactics that actually
could nudge people towards taking more advantage of these opportunities. And a senior leader asked
a question that ended up pivoting the direction of my research for the next several years.
And that question was okay, Katie, we were completely convinced that there are lots of tools
that you and your collaborators have developed that could help us nudge employees towards
taking better advantage of our programming. But is there some ideal time when we could
be offering these benefits and pushing out these nudges towards behavior change?
And I just thought that was such a fantastic question. Because to my knowledge, there really
hadn't been any attention paid to the fact that we know people's motivation to make a change,
to pursue a goal observationally waxes and wanes over the course of our lifetime. And
we didn't know much about whether there were systematic conditions that predict
good timing for making those kinds of changes. So I took the question back to my research team, and
we put our heads together and started thinking, what do we know about this? And what can we learn?
And I worked with Hank Gendai, who's a professor now at UCLA Anderson School, and Jason Reese,
who's a senior fellow at Wharton. And our first instinct was to think about
New Year's resolutions, and what that might teach us about timing and behavior change,
because we know that about 40% of Americans leap on this phenomenon this pattern every year,
around New Year's, they say, here are the ways I want to be better gyms fill up,
etc. So what can we learn from that that's more generalizable. What we learned in digging into
the literature on timing, and the way people think about their lives is actually that we don't think
about our lives linearly, we think about our lives like we are characters in a book. And
like there are chapters and those chapter breaks New Year's being a big one. Give us a sense,
what we've discovered since of a new beginning, we have the sense that when we you know,
move to a new community, take a new job, get a promotion, change our identity in some way
graduate from college, even on Mondays, when we start a new weekly cycle, it feels like
a miniature chapter break all these moments, they sort of break up our mundane lives into
these more concrete, smaller scale opportunities. And we think at those chapter break moments,
okay, this is a moment that causes us to step back and think big picture about our lives,
and to give us a sense that we're new and fresh, and we can say on January one, okay,
last year, I meant to quit smoking last year, I meant to build up all my productivity at work,
and I didn't get around to it. But that was the old me who failed and this is the new me and the
new me is going to be different. So that ability to set past failures aside, and that tendency to
reflect at these moments we've studied and it's it turns out that it creates eats big opportunities
for change. And people are more likely to set goals on popular goal setting websites to show
up at the gym to search for the term diet on Google, at moments that feel like fresh
starts from the start of a new week or a new month, to the start of a new year, of course,
the celebration of holidays that we associate with fresh starts, birthdays, all of these moments,
their opportunities. And not only does it happen naturally, when we just look at data on when
people take action to make a change, but we can actually harness the power of those moments to
nudge change. So we've shown in experiments that if you point out a date on the calendar to people
that they associate with a fresh start, but might not already be thinking they could leap on like an
upcoming birthday or the start of spring, those are moments that resonate is fresh starts and we
say do you want to start saving for retirement at that moment? For instance, that's much more
attractive than just saying Do you want to start saving next month, and we can increase retirement
savings, we can increase the rate at which people raise their hand and say, Yeah, I want to start
pursuing a new goal. I was so excited to have the chance to go visit Google, it was really
interesting opportunity. But also it propelled this research dream because hearing the question
about when when can we time change helped me realize there was this huge opportunity and
instead of research that I could work on, and I love that about interacting with people who
are thinking and practice about how to create change, often they have questions I haven't
thought of as a scientist that are really important to understand and to make progress.