Tag

behaviour

influence, methaphors

Influence through metaphors

By All, Behaviour in Organisations, Leiderschap

Metaphors are a powerful way to influence people’s behavior. They play on your subconscious mind by persuading based on something you can easily see in front of you. In short, a metaphor gives persuasion power, but beware: don’t just fall into the power of metaphors. It leads to visual perception, or rather selective perception, which influence your behavior and decisions.


Influence through metaphors

There are many ways in which influencing behaviour takes place. One of the strongest influencing factors that create unconscious influence is metaphors. This has everything to do with how communication and influence work. In this blog post, I will take you through the power of influence through metaphors and what you can do about it.

Persuasive design: the power of the metaphor

A few weeks ago, in our management meeting, we had a heated disagreement about an urgent improvement I thought we needed to make in our processes. Not everyone agreed. One of the participants in the discussion tried to end the discussion with the following metaphor:

“You cannot repair an aircraft in flight.”

For a few minutes, I was blown away by the power of this metaphor. There was a beautiful, powerful logic in it. I could imagine an Airbus 380 at 10 km altitude, flying at 1000 km/hour. Indeed, there was no way to change the aircraft while flying. That would be suicide.

But then I soon realised that I was being cleverly manipulated in my decision-making process. I fell for the oldest trick in the book. The power of a great metaphor forces you to obey the rules of that metaphor. After going along with that metaphor, can’t help but look at your business with the internal logic of a plane flying 1,000 km/hour. I also realised that I must have caused a lot of stress with my demand for process improvement. The metaphor was a friendly hint that I was trying to be reckless.

Metaphors are tools of strategic framing

I decided not to budge, knowing that a frame is an influence booby trap. If you don’t reject a metaphor, you accept its rules. The first thing I tried was to put a perverse spin on the logic of the metaphor by framing it through communication. I asked, “But what if a plane crashes? Wouldn’t you want to try to fix it in flight?” Boom! I thought it was pretty clever myself. But I was defeated by the internal logic of my frame with a simple answer: “Sure, but we’re not a crashing plane, are we? I had to confess that I lost this framing battle and this did not lead to the desired decision-making process. This influencing attempt was ineffective and clearly did not lead to the desired behaviour.

Failed influence attempt: a new frame

Two days later, in another meeting, someone suddenly launched a new metaphor:

“We must constantly jump off cliffs and develop our wings on the way down”.

Everyone agreed. Truth well told. Except: It means the exact opposite of “You can’t fix a plane in flight”. When our brains accepted the cliff metaphor, we could all imagine a brave person jumping off a cliff and using all his imagination to figure out how to fly before he hit the ground. It felt like the kind of hero you would like to be this seemed, in short, a successful frame for influencing. However, the problem with this metaphor is that it conjures up thoughts of radical risks, wild experiments and spectacular failures. Not exactly the behaviours that people in organisations have much appetite for. People loved the metaphor, but it did not provoke any desired behaviour at all so effectiveness failed to materialise.

Influence success with friendly framing

A third attempt was much more successful. I had learnt my lesson. In the next meeting, I introduced the metaphor of the three buttons. In running an organisation, I told the team, we have three buttons we can work with: The first button is for cutting costs. The second is for optimising profits on existing revenues. The third is for increasing revenue.

I visualised turning these buttons in the air. It worked like a charm. The rest of the discussion was about which knobs we could turn and how softly or hard we could turn them. The metaphor felt much friendlier. Instead of an Airbus hurtling through the air at lightning speed, or a guy jumping off a cliff, we could now visualise a dashboard with knobs to calibrate gently and carefully. Everyone was on board.

Recap influencing through metaphors

The moral of this story: beware of metaphors. They take possession of your autopilot brain in ways you can’t imagine. They define the logic of how you can think about a situation. The only way to escape this logic is to introduce new friendly metaphors that influence the decision-making process and lead to desired behaviour.

 

Tom De Bruyne 

How do you do? Our name is SUE!

Discover how we can help you

Do you have a challenge in which people need to change their behaviour? Or do you have an influencing challenge? At SUE, our experienced Behavioural Design Leads daily help national and international organisations apply behavioural science to change behaviour within organisations (transformation), influence customer behaviour (optimisation and innovation: e.g. optimise customer journeys, product development or optimisation, improve marketing/UX) or get citizens on board with policies.

Want to know more? Then book a free consultation hour with SUE here. We will gladly discuss how Behavioural Design can help solve your challenge. This is completely non-binding and free, so don’t hesitate. You don’t buy a car without a test drive, either! Of course you can also call: +31-20 223 46 26. Would you like to see who we have worked for and which behavioural challenges we have solved? You can check it out here.

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works yourself. In that case, consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that has already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. Our training courses teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to achieve behavioural change in practice.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure here, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in organisations, our lives and society.

Or maybe you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design? You can read more about us here.

sue behavioural design
28/04/2023
Amsterdam

The Behavioural Design of Cities

By All, Citizen Behaviour

I have been thinking a lot lately about how spaces shape our behaviour. I believe that the COVID-19 crisis might change something profoundly about how we feel about living and working, and this could have a dramatic impact on how we think about living spaces, office spaces, public spaces and retail spaces. 

 

The lockdown uncovered a disturbing truth

Until the COVID-19 crisis hit us, we were collectively trapped in a narrative about living and working: Cities are the places where the opportunities are, so you need to live near or in a city to find a job. Commuting from the countryside became more and more insane. The psychological price you had to pay for living in an affordable house away from the city was having to spend 3 hours in traffic jams or being crammed in public transport during rush hours. So we ended up collectively fighting for the scarce spaces in the big cities. To give you an idea of the consequence: the value of our apartment in Amsterdam has doubled in 5 years. Completely unsustainable.

The same thing has happened with office spaces. The more a city attracts talent and entrepreneurs, the more office space they need, and prices are soaring. The same thing happened with retail spaces. As long as a city is growing in popularity, landlords could increase their rents to ridiculous levels (and a lot of them did) because if the current tenants couldn’t pay the rent, then there were ten others desperately waiting to give it a shot. I think this bubble is bursting.

Here’s why.

It became more and more apparent that all the young people I know are leaving the city in large numbers for two years. They loved Amsterdam, but they felt that the cost of living had reached a tipping point where they couldn’t afford it anymore. With pain in their heart, they had to give up their dream.

And then came the lockdown. And suddenly, people living in cities are starting to realise that they were sitting in overpriced tiny apartments and expensive office space because they are collectively trapped into thinking that they needed to be in the office from 9 to 5. However, a big hole was blown into this illusion within less than four weeks into the lockdown. We all discovered that we could be productive and creative and get high-performance team output using laptops, video conferencing, and collaboration software. This changes everything.

 

The importance of being thrown of a cliff

I cannot stress enough how significant this forced experiment is from a behavioural point of view.

Despite all efforts in the last decade to introduce “the new way of working, in reality, we all kept each other locked in the old way. Managers felt it was more convenient to manage and control teams on an office floor. Employers invested heavily in office space, so they thought it should be used properly. Employees felt that they were better able to manage their reputation while in the office (hence all the meetings). It was a stalemate, and the lockdown made us overcome this stalemate.

 

Implications for living

Why would you buy a 65m@ Appartement for € 450.000 in a big city, if you could buy a much bigger house with a garden within 30-60 minutes commuting distance? It makes more sense since you can work from home for most of the week and only show up at the office for creative sessions with your team. You and your team can carefully plan these sessions after rush hour.

I had a lunch meeting with a fellow entrepreneur yesterday. We met at about 30 minutes driving from Amsterdam, where – to my surprise – he picked me up with his boat to take me to his summer house on an island in the middle of a lake. He was running his company of 25+ staffers from his summer house and only went to the office once or twice a week. Later, when I grow up, I want to be him 🙂

Could it be that we will massively start to re-appreciate living in the countryside? If we can do our work from home, why wouldn’t we live close to nature or close to outdoor recreation? This could be the beginning of new ways of thinking about real estate development. If the home office is the centrepiece of people’s daily activity, how would you design new houses or new neighbourhoods? It would make much sense to work from your garden and have leisure opportunities nearby: boating, fishing, biking, walking, boot-camping, playing golf.
If I had to design a new village from scratch, I would start with home-working professionals as my first design principle.

Want to learn how to design behaviour when working from home or the office?

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Implications for working

Why would you pay an exorbitant price for office space if you could flip the default: What if the new default way of working is that you work from wherever you like to work and that you visit the office only for creative workshops with your team? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have smaller offices and offer your employees subscriptions to make use of co-working spaces all over the country (if they don’t like working from home)? Instead of investing in employee mobility, why wouldn’t we incentivise companies to include perks for people working from home, like comfy chairs, big screens, (virtual) gym subscriptions, etc.

 

Implications for retail 

What will happen to retail space if the number of people who live and work in cities stops rising? Retailers are already suffering from the e-commerce boom. At a certain point, there’s simply no way to make a profit if:

  1. Their rent is sky-high.
  2. They’re getting out-competed by Amazon.
  3. The number of people coming into town is decreasing.

How can we re-think the way we design retail spaces?

The problem with shopping streets is that they have become so expensive that only international retailers can afford the rent. The effect is that these places have transformed into mono-cultures. If you want to excite people for retail spaces, you need to think outside-in. They are not there only to buy stuff. They want to have a great time with their partner, mum or friends. They want to have a great afternoon together and feel great about themselves. That’s their deeper motivation. So it would be best if you thought about how you can help them fulfil this more profound need by offering them things to discover or explore, opportunities to be indulged and spoiled, spaces to connect and be playful, etc. 

There’s an exciting story about the city of Mulhouse, on the border between France and Germany. They were able to bring their high street back from the deaths. One of the interventions that blew back life into the retail streets was that 75% of new shops were independent. Their presence transformed the place into a place for excitement and discovery. Within three years, the commercial heart of the city was thriving again. 

 

Conclusion

Both inhabitants, retailers and entrepreneurs have reached the limits of their capacity to keep up with inflating prices. I argued that the psychological conditions are ripe for the bubble to burst. This will force us to fundamentally re-think the way we design our spaces for living, working, and leisure, with the working-from-home professionals and their needs and desires at the core of how we create. 

 

Tom De Bruyne

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How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
28/06/2020

Training and sprints during Covid-19

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

Behavioural Design and Covid-19

Training and sprints will continue

It would be the worst Behavioural Design if we as SUE wouldn’t come up with interventions to help contain the Covid-19 outbreak. Starting with how we manage things at SUE for all our clients and participants. And not to mention for our team. At our offices we have already taken all the measures that are advised:

  • We wash our hands regularly
  • Most of us are working virtually right now
  • We have special hygiene soaps in the offices
  • We have stopped shaking and hugging (and we are big on hugs)

But we are taking things a step further.

Make Behavioural Design work for you

Join our virtual Behavioural Design Academy and see how you can effectively change behaviour and habits to cope with this crisis.

Behavioural Design as part of a solution

Behavioural Design might be needed more than ever right now. In these times of uncertainty, we believe our clients and participants need all the help they can get not to come to a standstill. How can you make sure your clients are still coming to you? How can you make sure you and your team can still be a high-performance team when forced to work virtually? How can you install team habits? How can you better understand the psychology from clients, citizens and employees so you can help them make better decisions? How can we design behaviour to help slow the spreading of the virus down?

You might have been forced to stop travelling, but that doesn’t mean you want progress to stop or even worse to come to a standstill.

More know-how on Behavioural Design can help prevent a standstill or even help you acquire know-how to outsmart the competition (and virus). That’s why we will continue sprinting and training. SUE is going virtual as long as the outbreak isn’t contained. And SUE will start making free content and training to help organisations and people to install the new behaviours needed in these times. Just keep an eye on our newsletter that you can join on our homepage and this blog.

The reason for going virtual

After reading up on trustworthy sources on the Covid-19 outbreak, one of the most important conclusions is that we can help slow-down and contain the outbreak if we make sure a little people as possible come into contact with each other. We found this interesting graph that shows it in one clear picture:

That’s why we have decided to go fully digital at SUE. We feel it is our responsibility to our clients, participants and employees to protect them as much as we possibly can. By not bringing them together in one room. We have set-up a virtual training and sprint room, and we have all technology in place to visually collaborate from a distance.

Book a virtual Behavioural Design Sprint

Book a Behavioural Design sprint to prevent a standstill and have Behavioural Design help you turn this crisis into progress.

An interesting pilot

Maybe we can make the saying ‘never waste a good crisis’ true for every one of us. We will develop, prototype and improve new working habits.

Let’s turn this forced virtual working into a blessing. If we can make this work, we can also keep it up when this Corona crisis is over.

It could open possibilities for employees to have more flexibility as working from home reduces their travel time. It can open up new ways of wokring that helps parents spend more time with their kids. It can make teams surge as this time can help them experiment with high-performance team habits. It can maybe help this planet as breaking the habits to jump on planes, to commute to work by car or shop ’till we drop is replaced by more positive habits. It will be an interesting journey, and yes, we will experience setbacks. But this crisis will force us to learn super quickly to build better behaviours. Necessity is the mother of all progress. In the meantime,

We will take you along on our journey to help create better habits.

Both in staying on top of our game in work performance, but also in finding out how to make sure you still feel genuinely connected when not being in the same space. We will share this in our newsletter and on this blog. Interesting times and we hope you will join us on this ride. That is both necessary, but also extremely intriguing.

Our clients and participants

If you have booked a sprint with us, we will contact you personally to give you all instructions how to participate in the virtual sprint to help you come up with solutions to make Behavioural Design work for you. Do you want to book a new virtual sprint, as you also might feel Behavioural Design is the missing layer to dealing with this crisis? Please contact us; we can help you out with everything.

If you have enrolled in our Academy, we have sent you an email with the latest update on how you can access the virtual training will take place. Please also check your spam folder to find it. Do you want to join the Academy? Just enrol on the Academy page, and you’ll get all the information on how to join the virtual training room. The dates mentioned on the website are still the dates of the training.

Contact

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions: hello@suebehaviouraldesign.com
By phone: +31 20 2234626

Watch the complete overview of our blogs on behavioural design.

sue behavioural design
14/03/2020

How to influence the perception of value?

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

In this blog post I want to explore the concept of value. I want to argue that Behavioural Design is as much about influencing how people perceive and experience things, as it is about changing actual behaviour. The design of psychological value is in my opinion a great concept to think about how to change perception and experience.

 

Value is a critical concept in economics. Peter Drucker famously said: “The purpose of a business to create a customer”. And the only way to create a customer, is to make him appreciate the value of what the company is offering for a reasonable price. But what is value really? And are we good at calculating the value or something?

We are price clueless

Well, it turns out we’re terrible at understanding value. In the book Priceless, William Poundstone explains the concept of “Price Cluelessness”. Because we have no idea of what something should cost, our System 1 – or automatic brain – is always relying on shortcuts to figure out the value of something. If we see a nice pair of sunglasses in a Chanel store, we expect them to cost € 200. But in an H&M store, these € 200 sunglasses would never sell. Even worse: people would be outraged. The context determines how to decode the value.

We even take price as a clue

Our incompetence for understanding value gets even worse: We tend to look for the price itself to find a clue whether something must be valuable. Something is priced high; therefore it must be excellent, otherwise, they would never price it this high. Also, when we really want the high-priced item, we tend to look for explanations, to trick ourselves into believing it’s actually a bargain. Stella Artois once campaigned around this idea. You could buy a coupon to pay even more for your Stella, thereby underscoring its brand promise “reassuringly expensive”. What most people in Britain don’t know is that in Belgium, Stella Artois’ home country, Stella is just an ordinary beer.

Popularity as a shortcut for value

The fact that something is popular is also a classic “System 1”-shortcut for determining the value of something: Many people want this item, therefore it must be good. Popularity helps you to decide without having to think about that decision. This is probably one of the most critical roles of branding: You know you can’t miss with buying a Jack Daniels, because you know everybody knows Jack Daniels.

Psychological value

The examples above are classic behavioural psychology tricks on how to influence the perception of value. But that’s the easy part. It gets much more interesting when you approach value from a human-centred point of view. Human-centred designers take irrational humans as their point of departure, for which they design answers and solutions. And when you depart from humans, you ask yourself questions like ‘How might we help people to…’:

  • Achieve their goals and realize their dreams?
  • Build positive long-term habits?
  • Resist their impulses and temptation?
  • Look at reality in new ways to trigger positive action?
  • Feel appreciated and respected?
  • Take away pain or frustration in their current experience?

Behavioural Design is fascinated with humans, their dreams, their fears, their bad habits, frustrations and their desire for happiness. And if we can understand them and design solutions form them, we will create psychological value.

Psychological Innovation

Once you start looking at reality through the lens of psychological value, you can see it everywhere:

  • Mom in Balance makes it much easier to stick to your workout habit because you meet up every time with the same group of mums like you.
  • The value of your restaurant experience goes through the roof if the chef decides to have a drink at your table
  • The € 10 you pay extra to sit in one of the front rows in an Easyjet-flight is the cheapest possible way to feel subjectively richer than the majority of people.
  • Airbnb is selling you the feeling that you are experiencing the city like someone who lives there. That’s priceless.
  • Uber makes a taxi experience 100x less frustrating because you know exactly when your car will show up, you know how much the ride will cost and you don’t need to have a transaction with the driver.
  • Would you prefer to work at the helpdesk or at the customer success team? Both jobs are exactly the same, but the second one feels so much better

Once you start thinking about creating psychological value for humans, you try to come up with ideas to help them to overcome stress, anxiety, insecurity, bad habits. Or to help them to achieve their goals, dreams and aspirations and to experience joy, fun and surprise. The number of things you can do to innovate are endless.

When it comes to innovation, we’re too often looking in the wrong direction. We think it’s about technology, but it’s really about creating psychological value.

—

PS: Our Behavioral Design Method is a method to spot opportunities for psychological value. It’s a fast-paced highly-structured process to turn hypothesis into ideas and to prototype and test what works and why it works. You can learn the method in our Behavioural Design Academy or apply the method to solve a business challenge in a Behavioural Design Sprint.

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
20/05/2019

3 techniques that will supercharge your team’s creativity

By All, Employee behaviour

This blog post shows you three super-effective techniques rooted in behavioural science to supercharge the creativity of your team. It does require to kill off one creativity habit we all use: the brainstorm. But trust us, the techniques we propose instead are much more effective and fun!

One habit we need to shake: brainstorming

Before we get to the goods of supercharging your team’s creativity, there’s one thing that needs to be taken care of first: we need to say goodbye to the good old brainstorm. For good. Maybe it sounds a bit harsh, but sorry, there’s no pardoning act. Brainstorms should die. The ‘inventor’ of the brainstorm Alex F. Osborn gave birth to brainstorms in 1939. So, it’s about time for a makeover. But let’s not question his intentions. According to Wikipedia Mr. Osborn “Was frustrated by employees’ inability to develop creative ideas individually for ad campaigns, in response, he began hosting group-thinking sessions.” And it still holds true: Solitary creative processes have an entirely different dynamic and output than a process in which great minds collide.

But why, oh why, are we then all still trapped in those everlasting flip-over led sessions that feel like such a waste of time and resources and where great minds tend to collapse instead of connecting?

Looking at brainstorms from a human psychology perspective, there’s a quite simple explanation. When a group engages in a group think process, the leader of the pack prevails. It is just nature. The one who is the loudest is heard the most. And the highest in rank at the table is often followed. The real problem with this is that a group only delivers a fraction of the possible number of ideas in a brainstorm.

 

How to supercharge the creative capital of a group

But there’s an upside to this: Research shows that teams are terrible in coming up with ideas but great in selecting ideas. So, if we fix the ideation part of the process, we can create magic. In fact, three simple behavioural design techniques can have a massive impact on the creative output of a group. They will help you to unlock the creative potential of a group, even of presumed non-creatives.

Research shows that teams are terrible in coming up with ideas but great in selecting ideas.

 

Boosting creativity: How Might We Questions

The first technique has to do with a human psychology principle that’s called the Framing Effect: How information is presented shapes our opinions about it. In this case, it is the question from which you jump-start your creative thinking. You can drive creative output by designing the problem using these three magic words: “How Might We?” Feel how the “Might” instantly liberates you: It urges you to go ahead and explore, to free your mind, be boundary-less, an explorer or pioneer even. Compared to its tight ass brother ‘Can’ it makes a world of difference. Just feel what it does to you when you frame the question as ‘How Can We?”. The ‘Can’ immediately forces you to think about the possibilities and even worse the impossibilities; practicalities also, harshly limiting the number of ideas already at the start of the process.

Want to learn how to apply behavioural science in practice?

Then the Fundamentals Course is perfect for you! You'll catch up on the latest behavioural science insights and will be handed tools and templates to translate these to your daily work right away. Learning by doing. We have created a brochure that explains all the ins and outs of the Fundamentals Course; feel free to download it here.

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Boosting creativity: brainwriting

When getting to the ideation part of the creative process we’ve to keep a few human psychology principles in mind. The first is social proof: People tend to follow the lead of others. Sometimes this manifest itself in the social bias of Authority: We have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Or we adjust our behaviour to reflect positively on how peers see us: The Reputation bias. The job to be done in the ideation phase is to reduce the biases that could potentially reduce the creative output and install a free-flowing non-judgmental exchange and ideation process that sparks everyone’s creative fire.

You’ll be amazed by the number and diversity of ideas you as a group will come up with in such limited time. From everyone. The bold and the timid. The upper rankers and the climbing uppers. The creatives and the presumed non-creatives.

A technique to do so is Brainwriting. Instead of coming up with ideas as a group, you start by thinking about ideas as an individual. The method is simple. Determine a ‘How Might We Question’. Give every person a stack of post-its. Set a timer for a brief period, somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, and then as an individual write down as many ideas as possible, no talking, just go wild by yourself. Write down every idea that pops into your mind on a separate post-it. After time’s up, everyone shares his/her ideas with the group. Stick them on a large piece of paper. Describe them if necessary. But don’t comment on each other’s ideas just yet. All you do is grouping the ideas that seem similar. You’ll be amazed by the number and diversity of ideas you as a group will come up with in such limited time. From everyone. The bold and the timid. The upper rankers and the climbing uppers. The creatives and the presumed non-creatives. Then use the third technique to select the ideas.

 

Boosting creativity: dotmocracy

A fundamental concept in behavioural psychology is making target behaviour easier to do. A well-known psychological phenomenon in groups is social compliance. It’s very challenging for an individual to go against the norm, breaking the rules, to think differently. Social deviance is a hard behaviour to show, as it triggers another psychological principle: Loss Aversion. Humans prefer eliminating the risks of loss over increasing the odds of winning. And the most significant loss in a group process is rubbing against the hairs of the highest ranked person in the group and dealing with the personal retributions. But it’s precisely that kind of social deviance of going up against the top-ranked person in the group that helps to select the best ideas. A simple technique to eliminate this pressure and to fight compliance is called dotmocracy.

Loss aversion: Humans prefer eliminating the risks of loss over increasing the odds of winning.

 

The technique is simple: Everyone gets two same colored dots. Everyone groups around the paper with all ideas and at the same moment, you stick a dot on your two favorite ideas. Could be two dots at the same idea, could be dots on your ideas, could be dots on two different ideas. Just pick the ideas that you think have the most potential. Nobody can follow the lead of others, and you instantly get a clear overview of the best ideas. Usually, as a group, you discuss the selected ideas with two dots or more where people are asked to elaborate on the reason for picking the idea. After the explanation, the second round of dotmocracy should be done, placing dots on the ideas that came out as best in the first round. Although sometimes sticking dots at the same time is sometimes impossible (the best group size is therefore 5/6 people), the process shows people authority is not an issue. Everyone’s vote has the same weight. There are no larger dots. No different colored dots. No order of placing the dots.

 

If you only have 30 seconds, read this:

  • Three techniques rooted in behaviorual science can help you to boost the quality and diversity of your creative output;
  • It can help you make your creative output more qualitative as you can involve stakeholders from very different backgrounds, making your ideas more multi-layered and distinct;
  • It offers you a method to come up with ideas on your own without being distracted or disturbed, but at the same time the process involves interaction with others to make ideas better;
  • Instead of working for days on ideas, you come up with ideas fast, and you already get feedback after 15 minutes. Enabling you to make your ideas better or to kill the ideas that appeared not to be as good as you thought at first;
  • It offers new established multidisciplinary teams, such as scrum teams, easy to apply techniques to come up with creative output.

Cover image by BntOman ♥ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ✿ under Creative Commons license.

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How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
14/08/2017

How To Make an Agile Team Customer-Centric?

By All, Employee behaviour

Digital Transformation, Agile Transformation, and Customer Centricity are the three major challenges that are causing sleep deprivation of managers nowadays.

You could summarise that Digital Transformation is meant to be the driving force to be able to help a client faster, smarter and cheaper. Agile Transformation should give teams the speed and agility to catch up with this ever rapidly changing the client. And Customer-Centric Transformation should enable you to develop better product and services based on better client insights.

Recent research of FD (Financial Daily) and Vlerick Business school exposes all pains of digital and agile transformation projects. And basically, it all comes down to one thing: Where agile, digital and customer-centric transformation are initially started to gain a competitive advantage by becoming truly customer-centered, they turned out to be organizational oriented pitfalls.

Where agile, digital and customer-centric transformation are initially started to gain a competitive advantage by becoming truly customer-centered, they turned out to be organizational oriented pitfalls.

Chief Digital Officers complain they feel sabotaged by the traditional oriented management; managers complain that after investing in expensive SCRUM training, their teams keep doing what that have done before, but mask this by performing some SCRUM rituals; and teams complain that the bi-weekly SCRUM sprints deprive them of time to talk to consumers.

The only way out of this impasse is when you rigorously put the customer first in your Digital, Agile or Customer-Centric transformation.

The only way out of this impasse is when you rigorously put the customer first in your Digital, Agile or Customer-Centric transformation. If you make quantitative and qualitative insights into customer behaviour the starting point of the SCRUM team projects, of the digital innovations and the management team decisions, you’ll put the focus back on the actual purpose of the transformations: Gaining a competitive advantage by becoming customer-centric.

But unfortunately, that’s where things again tend to go sour, as organizations have outsourced this pivotal competence of gaining deep human insights to research agencies and marketing consultancies. The result being nobody in the team is still – literally – in touch with the client. It’s all secondhand information.

Adding a Customer Insight Lead to teams shifts the pain of organizational transformation to getting to knowing the pains of the consumer.

But one intervention could be the solution to all problems. Every SCRUM team, every Digital Transformation team, every Management Team or Board of Directors should get a Customer Insight Lead. Someone who’s responsible for delivering insights into customer behaviour on a continuous basis. This single intervention would shift the pain of organizational transformation to a focus on getting to know the pains of the consumer. Something people can comply with much easier.

Tom

 

 

You might also like to read:

How to create change by design

Lose weight using behavioural design

 

 

Tom is the founder of SUE Amsterdam and The Behavioural Design Academy. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to nudge people into making positive choices in work, life, and play.

In two days of high-end master classes, we train people in unlocking the powerful principles of behavioural psychology and teach them our Behavioural Design Method™ that translates this knowledge into actionable skills to influence personal behaviour or the behaviour of customers, employees, family members or the general public.

Cover image by Birger Kühnel under Creative Commons license.

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31/07/2017

How to change behaviour by design

By All, Citizen Behaviour

This blog post shows how we can change behaviour by design. It’s hard denying we as humankind are facing serious problems today, and things need to change. Global warming is happening as we speak, obesity is overtaking smoking as the number one cause of death. And for most of us, it isn’t that we don’t care about these problems. Sometimes we care a great deal. Who wasn’t shocked after seeing Before the Flood, the stunning climate change documentary starring Leonardo DiCaprio? Who wasn’t moved by Jamie Oliver’s quest to start a Food Revolution knowing children didn’t even recognize real food like an ordinary tomato? And even if you weren’t aware of these two specific examples: We all know some serious issues are going on.

 

Behaviour change: It’s a framing game

We are all facing a serious challenge when it comes to the planet we all live on. But the interesting question is why don’t we act? Is it because the issues are too big to comprehend? Or do we feel too powerless to make a change? Might very well be, because they are, at least if you frame them as a problem for humankind or the world.

But if you look at global warming or obesity from a different frame, you come to realize they have one thing in common.

People.

You and me.

We eat sugar. We don’t go to the gym. We save time by buying processed foods in the supermarket. We drive cars. We take flights. We buy loads of packaging and forget to recycle. We love taking long showers and binge watch Netflix on the couch while eating crisps.

This way, you realize that the significant issues we’re facing in the world right now can be brought back to simple daily human behaviour. Things we can comprehend. Things which we could change.

So, why don’t we do it? Why don’t we cook with fresh fruit and vegetables? Why don’t we work out? Why don’t we go out and walk more often, for instance to the recycle container? The answer is simple: Because we don’t. It’s that plain simple. We can play the guilt trip or blame game for a much more extended period, but it isn’t relevant, and it surely doesn’t do us any good. Not us as people. Or us as humankind.

Behaviour change: We’re all just irrational.

The only relevant question to ask ourselves is: How can we help people adjust this daily behaviour? How can we nudge people into making better choices on an everyday basis?

I believe the answer is behavioural design. If you want to change behaviour, you need to understand behaviour. You need to know how people make decisions. Why they do things and why they don’t. You need to understand human psychology.

Recent years the understanding of behavioural psychology has skyrocketed. We now know more about the human brain than ever before. To me, the biggest eye-opener was that we all are entirely irrational. Not just a little bit, but for the most part.

We all think we consciously make decisions, we all believe that we control our thinking. But in fact, most of our decisions are made through shortcuts – such as heuristics and biases – and have nothing to do with a rational or controlled thinking process. As one of the groundbreaking researchers in behavioural psychology Daniel Kahneman has put it:

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it.

That explains why the blame and guilt trip game isn’t beneficial. How can you be blamed or feel guilty if most of the time we’re just doing things automatically without even knowing we’re doing it? Dr. Kahneman says it even more prosaic:

We are blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.

To conclude behavioural psychology has given us powerful insights into the human mind.

Behaviour change: Challenging a commonly accepted assumption

To me, a crucial part of solving the puzzle of making this world a better, healthier, happier place is the realization that behavioural psychology challenges a commonly accepted assumption that people who make poor decisions, made the conscious decision to do so. But science has shown us that’s not true.

Still, millions of euros are invested in campaigns to convince people to act differently, targeting their thinking capacity. That’s just money down the drain.

But what is the answer then? Understanding how the mind works is just one thing. But how do you translate scientific research into practice? How can it stop me from eating pizza? From buying sneakers for comfort instead of running? From buying plastic bottles instead of refilling my own? How can we apply science to daily life?

Want to learn how to use behavioural science to tackle societal challenges?

The Fundamentals Course is perfect for you. You will master a hands-on method to tackle even wicked challenges using applied behavioural science. Mind-shifting know-how that is made 100% practical.

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Changing behaviour: Behavioural design is the answer

I think a behavioural design is the only answer. I do realize design instantly opens up associations about the visual, about aesthetics. But if you look at design in a broader sense and if you take a closer look at what designers do, you see their job is to find new solutions to problems using creativity. And there are some fascinating things to learn from the way they work:

1. Just as behavioural psychologists, designers have always taken humans as a starting point. When designing a new chair, they want people to be able to sit on it. When designing a new fountain pen, they want people to be able to write correctly.

2. Just as a behavioural psychologist, designers do empirical testing. Designers have always used early testing with prototypes. They build scale models; they make paper cut dresses, they make beta releases. They watch how people interact, react or behave. And then measure, learn and adapt.

A lot is written about design thinking. Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO – one of the leading innovation companies – has written a great book on the subject: Change by Design, if you want to get some more in-depth information.

Behavioural design is the symbioses between two things: behavioural psychology and design thinking.

To me, Behavioural Design is the symbioses between two things: behavioural psychology and design thinking. If you combine those two worlds, you’ll be able to come up with better products, with better ideas and better interventions that will help people make better decisions, as you take people and their irrational decision making into account when developing an idea.

Behaviour change: Change will come!

But to get back to us as humankind tackling the world’s problems, my belief is design thinking is indeed an answer. It will help you:

  • See that obesity, and global warming are both behavioural problems on an individual level, making them comprehensive and tangible;
  • Understand people most of the times aren’t unwilling, but unable to change their behaviour, making you realize you need ideas that enable them to make better decisions;
  • Use design thinking to come up with ideas that influence people’s daily behaviour and get evidence-based results by testing them at an early stage;
  • Experience that change will come;
  • The first step in finding wicked answers to wicked problems is reframing a question to a behavioural challenge.

 

Behavioural design teaches us that the first step in finding a great answer is reframing the question to a behavioural challenge. By doing this, you’ll automatically end up with people. You’ll end up with us. At you. And if all of us make a change on a daily basis, we make an impact. We can change the world. I am convinced.

Astrid Groenewegen

 

 

BONUS: free ebook 'Six rules for Designing your Happiness.'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'Six rules for Designing your Happiness.?' For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from Behavioural Design whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

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Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
24/07/2017

Chief Behavioural Officer: It’s the new ‘must-have’ role

By All, Customer Behaviour

Step by step, behavioural economics, and psychological science have expanded their reach to become an established part of the business, policymaking, and regulation – for anyone seriously interested in both understanding and changing behaviour. And within marketing and market research, behavioural economics has become a required area of expertise and competency. We are now witnessing the next big step – the creation of the role of the Chief Behavioural Officer (CBO). This move will ensure that behavioural science has a voice at the highest level inside companies and institutions, a clear demonstration of the impact and value it is generating.

In this article, we look at how, within the last decade, this has become the new reality. We identify two main drivers and examine how behavioural science is increasingly being factored into everyday business, policy decisions, and common practice. First, though, we take a closer look at the trend of the CBO role and in-house behavioural insight teams.

Read the whole article

Author: Crawford Hollingworth
Published by: The Marketing Society UK
Date: 1 December 2014

 

Cover image by Thomas Angermann under Creative Commons License.

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01/12/2014