Today’s novel, complicated challenges are rarely nails in need of hammers. Instead, individuals and organizations require innovative solutions that reach across traditional disciplines. This means that, the more approaches you have at your disposal, the more challenges you are equipped to tackle. For each problem you face, you bring more perspectives to the challenge, it’s easier to understand the problem, it’s clearer how to tailor the solution to the problem, and you’re better equipped to evaluate the impact your solution has on the problem.

When thinking about disciplines to pair together, one dynamic duo that packs a lot of punch is change management and applied behavioural science. With their shared roots in helping people change their behaviour, change management and behavioural science are complementary approaches that strengthen each other.

Defining Change Management and Applied Behavioural Science

Change Management (CM) acknowledges that for organizations to get the full value out of projects, initiatives, and transformations, people usually need to know, do, or believe something different. And people in organizations don’t “just change” because they receive a launch communication. CM is about applying a deliberate approach to preparing and guiding people through a transition from their current state to their future state. If projects are about implementing new solutions (processes, tools, systems, structures, routines), CM is about encouraging people to adopt and use those solutions!

Applied behavioural science (BeSci) builds on research insights from the behavioural and decision sciences (e.g., psychology, economics, consumer behaviour, and sociology) to understand how people think, make decisions, and behave. BeSci leverages these insights to design behaviourally-informed solutions that help individuals and organizations make positive change. Importantly, BeSci uses rigorous evaluation methods and experimentation to test solutions and learn whether and how well they work. In the words of the UK government digital service, this makes “big failures unlikely and turns small failures into lessons”.

How can Change Management benefit from incorporating Applied Behavioural Science?

Apply BeSci Tactically to Make your change interventions more effective

Change Agents, whether they are in formal Change Management roles or are simply employees promoting change within an organization, know that everyone is being constantly inundated with more information than they can handle. To manage it all, our busy human brains take predictable short-cuts to help us process all of the information and decisions coming at us. BeSci has identified many of these short-cuts along with some best practices that Change Agents can apply to improve the effectiveness of their change tactics.

Here are a few examples to get you started:

Communicate better:

Make it salient! Our brains are overloaded so simpler and more eye-catching communications often work better. Try making your written communications easier for readers by breaking long paragraphs into chunks or bullet points, using colours and bolding to draw the eye to key messages, and adding visuals to make the messages stick.
Make it social! As you’re online shopping, have you ever seen the product with 4.8 stars from 10,000 reviews and thought “it must be pretty good”? That’s social proof in action; we trust the opinions of others like us. Try gathering and sharing testimonials from stakeholders to build credibility for your change.

Re-think solution design:

Co-create the solution! People are more likely to buy-in and adopt a solution if they’ve had a hand in creating it. The IKEA and endowment effects work in a powerful tandem here: (1) When people roll up their sleeves and help build something (whether it’s a piece of furniture from IKEA or the design of a new process), they feel a sense of ownership; (2) When people feel that they own something, they “endow” it with more value than the identical thing that they don’t own. So, when people help co-create something, they feel more of a sense of ownership, value it more highly, and are more likely to adopt and even champion it.
Give people agency! People like to feel in control of their situations. So, when a change is introduced and we tell people exactly how to do their jobs, sometimes it can backfire. Reduce resistance to change by giving people agency over how a change is implemented within their team. Provide clear outcomes and guardrails, then let teams decide how to make the change work best for them.

Measure your change outcomes:

Define the target behaviours! Too often project leaders say that stakeholders need to change behaviours without being explicit about what they will need to do differently. Tools from BeSci like behaviour mapping can help Change Agents facilitate discussions to elicit the specific behaviours required to produce business results. For example, in a new workflow tool launch, people might interpret “use the new tool” in different ways, but “monitor incoming requests in the new tool every hour and triage any escalations within 15 minutes” is clear to everyone.
Collect & analyze results like a scientist! Use your crisp definitions of the desired behaviours to determine what can be quantitatively measured to assess stakeholder readiness and adoption. Brushing up on some basics from statistics can help ensure the insights from your data analysis are robust and reliable. Continuing the example above, “usage” might be hard to reliably measure, whereas hourly monitoring can be logged and triaging effectiveness might be measured as the proportion of cases handled within the desired timeframes.

Leverage methodologies and approaches from BeSci:

Improve stakeholder analysis! BeSci uses specific, robust techniques for qualitative research like surveys, focus groups, and interviews to ensure the results are valid and as unbiased as possible. Change Agents can borrow from these qualitative research methods to improve the quality of stakeholder engagement and assessments. For example, avoid using leading questions such as ‘to what extent will the new workflow tool improve the customer experience’, which implies that the tool will have a positive effect and thus makes it harder for respondents to raise concerns.
Understand driving & restraining forces! Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis is a powerful framework Change Agents can use to anticipate the factors that will help and hinder their change efforts. Try facilitating your project team through an exercise to identify the driving forces and restraining forces to help them self-discover what might derail your change. Then focus on minimizing or eliminating the restraining forces to help the change take hold! For example, imagine the new workflow tool provides much better reporting to help balance workloads across teams (driving force), but it takes twice as long to input information (restraining force). By identifying the restraining force, your team can focus on ways to remove or reduce it and thus ease adoption of the new tool.

Want to Learn More?

We hope that parts of this blog post resonated with your experiences and maybe even some of the ideas felt intuitive or familiar. Deepening your knowledge of both CM and BeSci will give you the evidence to support some of your intuitions, the skills to test other intuitions, and the theory and practical knowledge to spur more intuitions.

Resources

Listen to us chat about CM & BeSci on the Calling DIBS podcast episode 68.
Learn about Change Management:
- Change Management Institute (CMI) blog & website
- CMI’s Change Portfolio Management course
Learn about Behavioural Science:
- Behavioural Insights wiki
- University of British Columbia’s Fundamentals of Behavioural Insights course

About the Authors

As a behavioural science consultant, Kirstin Appelt has worked with a number of public and private sector organizations to find behaviourally-informed solutions to the challenges they face. Kirstin is the Research Director of the University of British Columbia’s Decision Insights for Business & Society (UBC-DIBS) and the Academic Director of UBC’s Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights.

As a change and transformation leader, Yarnel Bender has spent over a dozen years helping organizations in the public and private sector execute their strategic visions and achieve their transformation goals. Yarnel is currently the Associate Vice President, Change Management at TD Bank Group.

Complementary Disciplines: Change Management & Applied Behavioural Science