How to Change
The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
In these uncertain times, the only thing we can rely on is change: the way we learn, work, consume, parent, live, all of it disrupted indefinitely. Thankfully award-winning behavioral scientist and Wharton professor Katy Milkman has devoted her entire career to understanding change. In funny, fast-paced, practical talks based on her upcoming book How to Change (May 2021) she shares her science-based blueprint for going from where you are to where you want to be—conquering goals, dissolving roadblocks, and adapting your behaviour to the demands of the post-pandemic world.
Real change happens when you can make good habits stick. And Katy Milkman, a tenured professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania can show you how. Whether we want to eat better or save money; excercise more or learn new skills, Milkman can show you how restructuring the little things can launch you towards the big things—an especially valuable lesson now, when the demands of work and life have changed so drastically, and seemingly overnight.
To Milkman—one of the world’s top 40 business school professors under 40 (Poets and Quants)—we’re beset by failures of self-control, at the individual and group level. This explains why “forty percent of premature deaths are linked to habits,” she says. But through choice architecture and innovative nudge initiatives, she’s helping individuals, customers, and employees make better decisions. In other words, her data-driven research focuses on what produces self-control failures, and how we can reduce them, with particular emphasis on “temptation bundling,” or grouping positive choices with rewards. “If you repeatedly reward good behavior and pair it with memorable cues,” she says, “positive routines become instinctual.”
Today, Milkman is transforming behavioral change with a specific, revolutionary project. In collaboration with fellow U Penn faculty member (and Lavin speaker) Angela Duckworth, she’s spearheading the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good initiative—a research center with the mission of advancing the science of lasting behavior change, chronicled by Freakonomics Radio. Milkman is also host of the fascinating podcast Choiceology, in which she explores the human lessons of behavioral economics, exposing the psychological traps that lead to expensive mistakes.
Milkman holds the Evan C Thompson Endowed Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching, as well as a secondary appointment at UPenn’s Perelman School of Medicine. She is the recipient of an early career award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, and has published dozens of articles in social science journals that have reached a wide audience through op-eds in The New York Times and regular coverage in and contributions to such outlets as NPR, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. Over the course of her career, she’s advised dozens of organizations on how to spur positive change, including Google, the U.S. Department of Defense, the American Red Cross, 24 Hour Fitness, Walmart and Morningstar.
She holds a B.S.E. in Operations Research & Financial Engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Information, Technology & Management from Harvard University’s Business School.