How Long Until Things Change? The Relation of Habits & Forecasts

"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” - Bertrand Russell

There’s a saying that investing is predicting the future through seeing the present clearly. Simply, investing is an act of forecasting. Anything one puts resource into (time, money, effort) is investing. So, everyone is an investor by default. They just don’t realize it until it’s too late. 

Much has been researched in forecasting…to basically conclude most of us suck at it. I think Phil Tetlock’s Superforecaster is one such book that clearly shows how bad we are at forecasting. 

But I’m also willing to bet with high certainty that my smoker friend who failed to quit 2-3x will continue to smoke until his death. I could be wrong. Maybe a birth of a child or a grandchild asking him to stop might make him stop. I think Fran Leibowitz brought up an interesting point that of course smokers know it’s bad for you. People all know alcohol is bad for them too. Yet they drink copious amounts of it. Are they stupid? Or do they just not care? It could be that they aren’t stupid, they do care and what they care about is enjoying their time alive by handpicking the vices they want to live with. Such decisions are reinforced in the mind over time and that becomes a habit that one ceases to break. 

An individual though has the ability to change his mind rather quickly. A solopreneur can make quick changes to her business strategy much faster than a 50 person company, which will be able to pivot faster than a 150 person company, etc… Each additional person in a system makes it harder to turn the entire ship around. At least companies have a dictator they call CEO who can force the shift. A community of 150 people might have a much harder time shifting than a company. 

If an individual’s habits can become too heavy to break, I imagine a habit formed by a community will have a compounding effect on the thickness of the chain. A habit formed by 100 people over time will be much stronger than 10 people, and one that is done for longer will stick ever longer. Look at how companies enforce a 9 am start time that lasts from Monday to Friday. I am inclined to believe people will continue to consider Monday to Friday as the days of work for decades to come. One person might think it silly to have 9 am be the arbitrary time to start work….but if everyone does it, she will likely give into it. Even if 50 people think it’s stupid, if each individual sees others do it, they will oblige and just complain on message channels about the silliness. 

This very much may be the argument with software too. The longer a group uses it the more it reinforces the habit of using said software. Rational arguments like cost and effectiveness most likely won’t be enough to break these chains. Unless the benefits are so astronomical or a constraint forces a change. I think the latter is more likely to break such chains, look at what COVID did for remote work and e-commerce. When I was pitching remote working in 2018 and 2019,  dozens of people (particularly in tech companies) told me I was unrealistic. 

So, the larger the unit, the longer it may take for any change to take place. Given that past habits were enforced by a collective compound, any step change must undo a previous behaviour while reinforcing the new one. I think this makes it more likely that the collective will revert any movement of change unless there is strong momentum for it. A momentum that is driven by a constraint or some astronomical imperative. This is why I think company culture is one that may persist for a long time. But they too can change and extreme patience may be needed to see any change (similar to the adoption of services/products) that go against an existing mass behaviour. 

It’s made me wonder if a case could be made for predicting the persistence of a cultural viewpoint rather than a rational adoption of a product or behaviour. Conversely, if I do see evidence of a new behaviour being adopted, immense patience may be required on my part to see it actually come to fruition.