It [choosing] requires knowing how what happened to us influences the choices we made and continue to make. Again and again I ask my clients, ‘How are you complicit in creating the conditions of your lives that you say you don’t want?

The first thing to remember is that there is no one solution for every behavior challenge. Our job is to adjust the components - Motivation, Ability, and Prompt - and find out what combination works best in each circumstance to get the behavior we want.

Why it works at IDEO — and what allows the company to churn out excellence at a regular clip — are what Schein calls the "shared basic assumptions" that drive all of these seemingly odd choices. If you want to change culture, then you have to start there, by influencing the thought patterns that drive your employees to act.

In most organizations, it's behaviors we want to change, and so the questions that matter are these:

• What's the problematic behavior?

• What are the shared basic assumptions driving that behavior?

• What can we do to change those assumptions?

Why it works at IDEO — and what allows the company to churn out excellence at a regular clip — are what Schein calls the "shared basic assumptions" that drive all of these seemingly odd choices. If you want to change culture, then you have to start there, by influencing the thought patterns that drive your employees to act.