Nudging people's perception to embrace change

Image courtesy of the Institute of Public Health, Netherlands (cf. end of article)

Change, as an initiative from within an organization or from external market or social pressures, is usually difficult to promote due to individuals' innate resistance to it. How can one organization win over stakeholders?... What if you want to redress teams that aren't working hard enough?

How about addressing this challenge through four aspects - easiness, attractiveness, sociability and timeliness?

Easiness

• When introducing changes to an organization, aim to simplify stakeholders' experience, by removing irritation and frustrations.
• Aim to introducing changes that benefit most cases - and set default startup conditions that match your 80% business case. Process participants, whether hospital patients or insurance claims adjusters should not have to repeat themselves, over and over, to different stakeholders.
• Limit contents access to what people should focus on, as part of their functions: consider an option to access further information, as needed. This can also be addressed as part of the Sociability aspect, exposed further down.

Attractiveness

• Make the experience of the new or updated business process enjoyable. Whether it is filling a mortgage, getting an insurance quote or creating a non-conformance report for a medical device, consider reasons why stakeholders are avoiding the activity, and make it more attractive.
• Review the hurdles to the process adoption: it could be a convoluted set of forms that have not been updated to reflect the changes in the industry or the society.
• Think of the interface points where you capture information useful for future consumption, while considering a well-designed interface, and remove "fluff" where it is not needed.

Sociability

• Promote your change process across as many functions, which are significant to your business, as possible.
• Market your change by showcasing its benefits to individual groups of interests.
• Process visibility within an organization opens it up to criticism, but this is also a form of collaboration: make the enterprise platform open to comments from more functions - you'd be surprised about the volume and variety of the information you can gather from a wider audience, without having to invest in third-party consultants.

Timeliness

• Accommodate stakeholders' concerns of avoiding managing stale information, which can cause losses due to mistakes and rework.
• Ensure you implement notification mechanisms to warn participants when tasks which are close to their due date actually get done; when a task is past its due date, plan for an escalation protocol to ensure open tasks get closed, or enable a mitigation path to manage delays.
• Changes that introduce visibility through Task tracking, Notifications, and Dashboards give stakeholders, whether a patient in a hospital or a product development manager, a better view of where business items are, in your organization. This also reveals where bottlenecks can exist, so actions can be taken. All these are aspects of the timeliness portion of the benefits of your initiative.

If you think you might have read about such approach before, it is because the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a British outfit, has come up with such a model in order to have people embrace changes, nudging them toward your idea by making the adoption Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely.

(All views expressed in this blog are my personal views and do not belong to any group/organization I belong to. The blogger is not to be held responsible for any misrepresentation of facts, or data inconsistency. Abbreviations are used to lighten the reading - I don't intend to invent TLAs. Finally, all trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Image courtesy of the Institute of Public Health, Netherlands)