I'm Afraid Debbie from Marketing Has Left for the Day

How to Use Behavioural Design to Create Change in the Real World

Morten Münster

• Publisher: Laurence King Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781529420951
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Verwaltung

How to Use Behavioural Design to Create Change in the Real World In this ground-breaking book, author Morten Münster presents a set of rules that individuals and companies can follow to bring about necessary change.Using behavioural design and an accessible four-step method, he shows how people can be persuaded to do one thing instead of another and thereby achieve success.By examining an array of examples drawn from business, government, various public groups and institutions he demonstrates how the rules can be learned and applied in different contexts.

DESIGN YOUR SOLUTION –
MAKE IT EASY

A newborn child in Denmark automatically becomes a member of the Church of Denmark when they’re baptized. Although only a small minority of people in Denmark believe in God, a majority like to celebrate the new baby’s naming with a formal baptism. The odd consequence is that almost every Danish person is a member of the Church, but few of them believe in the gospel. One of the side effects of this membership is that Danish citizens pay a tax every year to the Church. Even residents without Danish citizenship automatically pay tax to the Church from their wages unless they opt out. The chart below shows the number of people who have chosen to leave the Church over the years.

Each bar in the chart on the previous page represents a six-month period from 2007 to 2016. As you can see, withdrawals from Church membership peaked during 2012, coinciding with the time when same-sex marriage was legalized, making it mandatory for all churches to conduct gay marriages. This increase in withdrawal indicates that a narrow segment of the population rejected inclusivity and marched straight down to their local churches with birth certificate and ID card in hand and demanded to cancel their membership.

For anyone tasked with altering behaviour, a situation like this is a dream come true: a limited target group experiences great emotional motivation to act in response to a specific problem. It could hardly be better. But the important word here is hardly, because the chart isn’t complete. It’s missing this bar:

This bar represents the number of withdrawals from Church membership during the second half of 2016, when the process became much simpler: it became possible for people to opt out online instead of having to take documents to the church office in person. If we add that bar to the chart, it looks like this:

Simplicity Trumps Motivation

This and hundreds of other examples show the top determining factor for behaviour: the path of least resistance. When people are faced with a choice, they will choose the easier option; people naturally gravitate to the least demanding course of action. Not because we are lazy, but because it is an effective strategy, especially when we’re trying to conserve the small amount of System 2 energy in our heads. So when we have a combination of intentions, habits or plans, and have to prioritize, simplicity is the preferred, but often invisible, choice in the decision-making process.

The lesson to be learned from the bar chart reveals a deep truth about everyone living in the real world: a lot of the time we don’t act in accordance with our preferences at all. This newsflash should be making headlines in the parallel universe, where people think that delivering a combination of information and competence is enough. But preferences alone don’t cut it: even when we add maximum motivation on top of knowledge, skills and preferences, we get no higher than the peak period when church ceremonies for gay couples were introduced. What the chart really represents is a showdown between motivation and structural simplicity, and it’s not even a true contest. In the real world, structural simplicity beats motivation every time. Another problem with motivation is that it’s unsteady and fleeting. As the chart shows, motivation flattens out quickly, whereas structural simplicity results in significantly higher numbers. In any process, structural simplicity prevails over motivation, competencies, business cases and good intentions. The Danish Church should be nervous about losing more members because of this policy. Maybe it should pray for a change in the law that would once again make the process of withdrawing membership more difficult.

That tactic is precisely what the Danish People’s Party suggested when they saw the new divorce figures. Since 1 July 2013, couples have been able to log in to an online system with their unique ID numbers and divorce each other without the previously mandatory six-month separation period. “Click to split” divorces were embraced by people in fragile marriages throughout Denmark. From 2012 to 2013, the number of divorces rose by about 3,000 (compared to 1,000 the year before) to over 18,000, and that happened in the space of just six months after the online system was introduced. A cautious estimate is that the new scheme, which makes splitting up simpler, is raising the divorce rate by more than 20% simply because it’s a process with less friction, both in terms of time and psychological discomfort. That is remarkable. Terminating a marriage is a serious matter. People in the real world have the information, ability and motivation to seek a divorce, but apparently the prospect of a complex process and subsequent six-month separation period seems difficult and unclear. Incredibly, the figures show that, for thousands of people, this is the decisive factor that determines whether or not they choose to act. Consider how important divorces are to a person – compared with strategic initiatives devised to reduce silo mindsets, or a campaign to prevent food waste, or a presentation about process improvements. Even something as impactful as getting a divorce, a major life-changing event, is greatly influenced by how easy the process is.

How can we make good use of this insight when designing behavioural changes? We need to do four things:

1. Remove sources of friction that prevent the desired behaviour.

2. Add friction to the unwanted behaviour.

3. Turn “no choice” into “your choice”.

4. Present your changes at the right time.

Let’s look at them one by one.

Remove Any Friction That Prevents the Desired Behaviour

After completing a successful barrier analysis, you’ll have found all the barriers that are keeping your recipients from doing what you want them to do. In other words, you will have found the sources of friction that make the journey from intention to action more difficult. Every attempt to change behaviour should therefore begin with removing as much friction as possible. In the example of how to get people to have their loft spaces insulated (see p. 101), the source of friction was the prospect of clearing the space. When you take a moment to consider behaviour in this way, and diminish the unhealthy focus on logical arguments, PowerPoint presentations and catchy slogans, many things become easier – for you, as well.

Here are some more examples. First, let’s imagine you’ve been hired to get more people to vote in the next local election. You can analyse the situation in two ways. From a parallel-universe perspective, you might conclude that people don’t know how much the local council actually decides. The topic is not terribly interesting, is it? So what do you do? You launch an informational campaign that attempts to explain just how much the local council decides, with a new slogan and a well-known comedian to make it fun and sexy. The result of this misguided and expensive approach is a big fat nothing (it has been tried time after time). Or maybe you choose a solution based on a real-world perspective, because this is where you live. You understand that the problem is a matter of difficulty versus simplicity. At the end of a long and busy work day, all potential voters are hearing the call of the couch. You know that people are already pretty well informed about the power of the local council, and even if they aren’t, it’s too late to do much about that now. And you also know that the local election will never, ever be fun or sexy, so you don’t call in a comedian or get a slogan. Instead, you hire mobile polling stations (buses) to drive to the neighbourhoods of the target groups with low voter turnout, such as teens or people of minority ethnic backgrounds. If you think that the need to get horizontal on the couch is the source of friction, you need to drive the bus closer to the couch. Suddenly, it’s much easier to vote. The result? A measurable increase in voter turnout. This has been done both in the United States and in several places in Europe with remarkable results.

What if you want to sell more groceries? How can you compete with major supermarket chains when you don’t have a popular brand name or physical shops? You base your behavioural design on the path of least resistance. You remove the greatest source of friction, which is the time and energy needed to go shopping. You make it more convenient by delivering the goods to the customers so they don’t have to visit the shop. They spend more time relaxing on the sofa but still buy their groceries from you. Before you start thanking me for a brilliant business concept, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you and explain that several online shops have beaten you to it and already reached a turnover worth billions of dollars.

Do you want to sell more goods online? Your barrier analysis will probably show you that after deciding to buy a product, many customers drop out during the long check-out process. Studies of check-out processes show that somewhere between 50% and a staggering 80% of buyers leave a site after putting products into their shopping basket – so-called abandoned-basket behaviour. This is mostly due to friction in the check-out process. You know what it’s like: Where’s my credit card? Why can’t I fill in this data field? Now what? I have to verify my purchase with a code on my phone? Where is my phone? Often “self-service” feels more like self-torture. That’s why Amazon developed 1-Click ordering. If you’re already logged in, you can buy a product with just a single click and skip the entire irritating check-out process. The reason you don’t see it everywhere else is that Amazon has been cheeky enough to patent this “technology”. Experts have estimated that this patent and the idea behind it is one of the key factors behind Amazon’s world domination; it gets people to buy what’s in their basket and it keeps them coming back for more.

Simplicity Cracks a Tough Business Nut

Recently, I had a peak professional moment in my career as a behavioural designer. My team had devised a solution for a complex compliance problem in a global pharmaceutical company. The company had struggled with recurring non-compliant behaviour, and my team’s solution was to be rolled out through the entire factory and later worldwide. The company clearly had high hopes for our concept. The client, who was a very nice guy, took one look at the core idea behind the concept and said with a twinkle in his eyes:

“I find it depressing that we’ve paid you so much to find such an obvious solution. Why didn’t we think of that ourselves?”

You’ll need some background information to better appreciate the value of our common-sense solution. The details of the case are confidential, but essentially the company wanted to improve its waste sorting, because if the surplus packaging from their pharmaceutical product line was stolen, it would be possible to sell counterfeit copies of the product. The risk is theoretical, but in a strictly regulated industry, processes must take such threats into account; a black swan event could shut down an entire company. Specifically, this meant that the people packing the products at the conveyor belts had to make fewer mistakes when sorting packets, paper, labels and other items left over from the packaging process. The company had launched many initiatives to refine this sorting process, but most important were the written procedures describing which kinds of waste should go in which containers. In such a setting, these are referred to as standard operating procedures. They were now up to version 18 of the instructions, but still dissatisfied with the results.

As you may have noticed, this strategy was based on a framework from the parallel universe:

“Read this message and remember what it says. If you make a mistake, read it again. If things get very intense, or there is a serious mistake, we will bring in the big guns. We will hold a meeting where we repeat the instructions, and you might even have to take an online course and tick the box that says you’ve read the modules. After that, nothing can go wrong.”

Sure. At this point, it’s important to say that all these initiatives have had a major effect in compliance environments. Learning, reading and training have a measurable effect. The problem is that strategies that boost your performance from poor to good are not the same as strategies that help you achieve the goal of being perfect. When our ethnologists and sociologists were observing and interviewing the people sorting the packaging waste, they noticed that the procedure that had been written down 18 times didn’t correspond with reality. The agenda at a production line like this includes hundreds of other parameters besides sorting things correctly 100% of the time: for instance, the line must never come to a standstill. The observers noted no sign of the message having an effect in the local context, which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 00 Introduction
• 01 Five Misconceptions About the Real World
• 02 Define the Desired Behaviour
• 03 Conducting a Barrier Analysis
• 04 Design Your Solution – Make It Easy
• 05 Test Your Solution
• 06 Case Studies
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements