Improve how you work, one habit at a time
Every company and organization is unique, but they all have something in common: they tend to do the same thing today as they did yesterday. We help teams, organizations and leaders identify bad individual and group habits and replace them with good ones – habits that increase employee engagement, reduce burnout, and increase efficiency.
Find out more about how habits hit your bottom line...
Hey! I need that!
Habits drive your culture
Many organizations are interested in transforming their cultures, living their values, and creating workplaces that attract new talent and retain great people. But how do you change culture? We draw on lessons from one of the masters of culture change: Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi’s focus on his own day to day habits and the habits of his organization and society gave him a lever to create deep and lasting cultural change. Over and over, Gandhi drew on the power of replacing a single daily habit to create a large cultural shift. We help leaders, teams and organizations apply these lessons to their work to build the culture they want, email by email, meeting by meeting, habit by habit.
Find out more about how habits drive your culture...
Services
The Action Mill offers a range of services for improving work and culture, including workplace assessments, trainings, leadership coaching, and habit change engagements. Our Co-Design method creates customized habits and processes for your team, company or organization.
We work with teams that are tackling new problems and groups that need to work effectively across silos. We help organizations become more agile and take advantages of opportunities, and we work with leaders and groups in transition. If that sounds like something you need, get in touch with us today.
Workplace Lab
We don’t just design habits for others, we apply our methods internally to make our own business more resilient, creative and efficient. We’ve developed dozens of habits for ourselves that tame email, make meetings shorter and more useful and keep us from getting stuck in our day to day work. Our internal experiments feed our work with our clients, giving us insights into how to make new habits stick and which habits make a team produce better work without burning out.
Take a peek inside our Workplace Lab...
Death & Design
We spend most of our lives avoiding thoughts of mortality, which means that when we have to talk about illness and death, we’re unprepared. Death & Design is our contribution to the growing movement to unhide death. We develop new group habits and rituals that improve our everyday lives and facilitate meaningful conversations about the death, dying and mortality.
Find out more about our Death & Design project...
Recent blog posts
My first job after graduating college was as a community organizer in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston. At that job, I learned how to connect with people in meaningful ways and how to envision and create an alternative future. It is also where I learned how to build collective power.
10 years after leaving the Fenway and relocating in Philadelphia I'm a partner at The Action Mill, a small design firm. Every time I use the word "design" to talk about what we do, I know that I leave some people scratching their heads. When many people hear design they think about graphic design, or architecture, or even industrial design. They think about things that are pretty, and often luxuries. But looking back, I now view the past 20 years of my work – as a community organizer and a consultant – through the lens of design. By design I mean a method of understanding and solving problems, recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities, and engaging with people and communities.
I know the adrenaline rush that comes with a new idea. In that moment, the possibilities are endless. But innovation should be more than just the creation of something new; it should be the creation of something lasting and meaningful. Truly innovative ideas often take time to emerge, and they are usually more about taking away rather than adding to. Like any good journey, they lead to unexpected outcomes that seem obvious only in retrospect.
When I designed a six-month diet and exercise program for myself last fall, I never expected that learning to feel full would turn out to be the most important outcome. I tried out seven different iPhone apps and started wearing a Fitbit 24 hours a day, and I generally dove into the Quantified Self movement. But in the end I discovered the feedback I needed to lose weight was built into the very enzymes and systems of my body. That doesn’t mean those apps and a little electronic pedometer weren’t useful; they were valuable steps along the path to finding the best solution for myself: becoming aware of my own body.
It’s the difference between layering on more complexity and peeling the layers away to find a simple solution already embedded in the system. We tend to throw both of these approaches together under the name “innovation,” but they lead to vastly different outcomes. We’ve started using “novation” around our office to distinguish the two. The emphasis on the “no” is our shorthand for editing down, getting smaller, making simpler.
A week before Roger Ebert died, my colleagues and I gathered for a meeting withDr. Karl Ahlswede, a former cardiac surgeon who stepped away from his practice 2 years ago to start something new. Dr. Karl’s practice is now dedicated to advance care planning, or preparing for the end of life. We hired Dr. Ahlswede to offer his program to our entire staff; to help us each be better prepared for dealing with our own health issues, and for issues facing our families and friends.
Advance care planning might seem like an unusual service for a business to offer it’s employees, but we’re finding that thinking about our own mortality (and the mortality of our families and loved ones) gave us unexpected benefits.
Roger Ebert’s cancer diagnosis in 2002 changed much about his life, but some things didn’t change. He lived publicly, choosing to continue his career as a film reviewer even after he lost his ability to speak in 2006. As he told Chris Jones of Esquire in 2010 (via a blue Post-It note): “There is no need to pity me. Look how happy I am. This has lead to an [explosion] of writing.”
UPDATE: We'll be holding Guilt Hour on Twitter on Wednesdays from 11am-noon EST. Post your One Guilty Task with the hashtag #GuiltHour.
We’ve had three great articles on Guilt Hour in the last few days. We’re glad to see the
idea taking off, especially since we find this method so useful in our own workplace.
The social aspect of Guilt Hour is important: declaring your One Guilty Task to other people is usually a big relief, and it helps us move past our guilt and get things done.
But what if you don’t have a team to support your Guilt Hour? We humbly offer this experiment: join us for ours! For the next few weeks, we’ll be tweeting our tasks at the start of our Guilt Hour with the hashtag #GuiltHour, and then we’ll check in on twitter again at the end of the hour.
Recent Tweets
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"How do you want to die" - great post from Seth Godin this morning http://t.co/1ngs2rmu54 (plus a nice link to our A Gift of Grace project)
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#GuiltHour Nick: That was messy, but it is done. Much better than perfect and not done.
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#GuiltHour Rob Warnt't pretty. But done! Thanks Nick.