By Stavros Stavru, Ph.D.
This is my personal reading of Kat Thorne’s work through an alignment lens. It may not fully represent her views.
“Agreed. Let’s start with a small positive habit.”
“Absolutely.”
There is nothing hesitant about this exchange. Both people seem to know what comes next.
Then the habit becomes concrete: ten kilometres every morning.
What interests me is not the distance. It is how certain they were that they had agreed.
During my years in training and consulting, I often met people who used the same vocabulary but brought different interpretations to it. A concept could make sense to each person without becoming a shared way of working. Good individual learning did not necessarily mean the team would act coherently afterwards.
That is the pattern behind this comic. Nobody objects to a small positive habit. The question is what each person believes those words ask of them.
It is also what draws me to Kat Thorne’s work. Her approach gives us something more useful to explore than whether people should simply try harder to keep their promises.
A habit that fits the life around it
Kat’s O.N.E. framework moves through three stages: Own It, Nail It and Expand It. Its emphasis is on making one manageable change within real life, including busy schedules, low-energy days and setbacks.
Own It begins with awareness. Before choosing what to change, notice the patterns already shaping your day. Which habits give you energy? Which drain it? What assumptions are influencing what you believe is possible? The starting point is understanding your current reality, not adding another demand to it.
Nail It turns that awareness into one specific habit. The framework emphasises a manageable starting point, often ten minutes, supported by practical cues and changes to the environment. It also makes room for returning after disruption, rather than treating an interruption as a reason to abandon the habit.
Expand It looks beyond completing the action. It explores how the habit becomes part of how someone sees themselves, and how its effects can reach their relationships, their team and the culture around them. The intention is not simply to keep adding more habits or pressure. It is to recognise what that first change makes possible.
What I find valuable in this sequence is that the commitment is not left for willpower alone to carry. It begins with noticing reality and has to remain workable inside that reality.
That gives “small” a purpose. I read it less as an instruction to be unambitious and more as an invitation to choose something you can return to.
But once other people become involved in encouraging or supporting that choice, another question appears.
What do they understand the commitment to be?
The same purpose does not require the same habit
In the comic, the man eventually explains his standard: easy enough to keep doing.
That explanation would have been useful before they agreed.
“Small” might refer to time, effort or the number of things being changed. “Consistent” might mean never missing a day, or returning after an interruption. Even “supportive” can conceal different expectations. One person might welcome a reminder. Another might experience the same reminder as checking up on them.
These are possibilities worth exploring, not reasons to turn every personal choice into a group decision.
A personal habit does not require everyone else’s agreement. Alignment matters where our expectations and responsibilities meet.
We can share a purpose while choosing different actions. We can also choose the same action for different reasons.
The problem begins when I assume that my interpretation is the one you accepted, then judge your behaviour against it.
Before deciding that someone has failed to follow through, I would rather ask what they understood they were committing to.
That is not an excuse for avoiding responsibility. It is a way to make the responsibility clear.
When support meets the calendar
Imagine a team agrees to support a small daily habit: ten minutes at the beginning of the working day to plan priorities before responding to messages.
One colleague starts doing exactly that.
A few days later, a teammate sends a request during those ten minutes and follows up almost immediately. The first colleague feels their planning time is not being respected. The second thinks they are simply trying to keep work moving.
They both supported the idea. They had not discussed what supporting it would change.
Does the ten-minute period mean messages can wait? What counts as urgent? Is someone available for requests that genuinely cannot wait? Can the planning time move when circumstances require it?
Without those answers, the habit is personal but the conditions around it remain unsettled.
This is the organisational alignment question I would ask: have we agreed only that the habit is worthwhile, or also how we will make room for it?
That distinction matters beyond this example. Encouraging people to protect their focus does not settle an expectation of constant availability. Encouraging recovery does not resolve an unreasonable workload.
Personal agency matters. So does the organisation’s willingness to examine the conditions in which people are being asked to exercise it.
The influence runs both ways
Kat’s framework already looks beyond personal self-improvement. Its Expand It stage connects individual habits with relationships, leadership modelling and team culture. Repeated behaviour becomes part of what others see and respond to.
Through alignment, I find it useful to look in both directions.
A personal habit can affect the people around us. The people around us can also make that habit easier or harder to sustain.
In the planning example, the person creates space to think before responding. The team’s response helps determine whether that space remains available.
That is why I would not judge the initiative only by whether individuals maintained a streak. I would also ask whether the team changed anything that made the commitment more workable.
Sometimes the next step belongs to the person practising the habit. Sometimes it belongs to a manager, a colleague or a shared process.
The individual commitment and the surrounding expectations need to make sense together.
From agreement to readiness to act
This is what execution readiness means to me in this situation.
The person understands why they are choosing the habit and what they intend to do. They have considered how it fits their circumstances. Where support from others matters, everyone understands what that support involves.
They also know when to revisit the arrangement.
An agreement that works this week may need adjusting next month. Work changes. Responsibilities change. The original action might become impractical, or it might no longer serve its purpose.
For me, staying aligned includes being able to discuss that openly. Adaptation should not automatically be treated as a lack of commitment. Equally, quietly changing the arrangement can leave other people working from expectations that no longer apply.
We do not need an elaborate process for every small habit. Often, we need a few questions that make the agreement concrete:
What does “small” mean in your circumstances?
What are we agreeing to do to support it?
When should we check whether it still works?
In the comic, that conversation begins with surprise in a changing room.
It could have begun at the table.
We did not need to choose the same habit. We needed to understand what we were agreeing to.
