Sunday 31 August 2014

What is the role of behaviour change in business?

Why should your business consider behaviour change? What good will it actually do? There are a number of reasons for changing staff behaviour, but I am only going to focus on one today. Energy.

Energy is a stunningly unscientific concept that is not even defined by psychologists. We have a very vague vocabulary about it in modern english - we talk about low energy, apathy, lethargy, tiredness, sluggishness or, conversely, high energy, excitement, motivation, passion. But these things mean different things to different people. The ancient Greeks had a wonderful word for this - they called it Kratos which translates roughly (though not exactly) to power. Power is the energy which which we take on the world.

If you’ve ever worked anywhere, ever, you’ll know that many jobs these days are devoid of the immediate satisfaction of the more “fun” activities like gardening, reading, woodworking etc... that we fill our free time with. We tend to lack power. We get through the day, splitting our energy hither and thither, pulled in a million different directions. This is largely a product of a bad work environment which are often ill conceived to deal with these demands.

One of the goals of a behaviour change intervention could be to address this energy dispersal issue. Consider your own daily routine. Imagine yourself as a nexus point of energy, like a star burning all it’s energy out in 360 degree circumference. Your energy is strong in the aggregate but diffuse on a project-by-project basis. Each demand on your time takes more energy just to keep at bay, you might progress a little but at the end of the day, burnt out, hollow, you struggle home and collapse, no real work done - or so it seems.

Your energy of course, is finite, just like a star. You have only so much fuel before you are all burned out. A bad work environment often encourages people to act like stars - in a bad way. We expect people to burn in every direction. Multi-tasking is king and yes-men are given pride of place. A person tackling six projects is, on the surface, more capable than someone handling, three or two.

If you’ll indulge me I’ll stretch this example on a bit further - the nature of light and heat is such that it is weakest when dispersed. It has a physical nature and cannot be multiplied out without a loss of power. So too can we say of a person there Kratos - or power, or energy - cannot be forever stretched whilst expecting it to maintain it’s potency. Instead, consider what happens to light and heat when we focus it; have you ever heard of laser?

A laser is focused light and heat. It travels much further than diffuse light and heat does and is incomparably more powerful. To cut a piece of metal we don’t leave a light bulb hanging over it, we focus the light and heat and slice right through it. A good work environment will encourage people to focus, laser like, their Kratos, and cut through projects that are essential to achieve their goals. Efficiency standards rise, well being rises, and everyone is better off for it.

There are far too many behavioural interventions to go through in this blog post but if you have any questions or want to discuss how you can encourage your employees to become more like lasers and less like light bulbs you can contact us at the Wales Centre for Behaviour Change for a free consultation if you are in the Wales Convergence Zone (www.behaviourscience.org).

Tuesday 19 August 2014

What can you learn from Trofim Lysenko?

Trofim Lysenko was the Director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin.  He was a fierce critic of modern genetic theory, and instead advocated the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants. In other words, if you grafted a branch from one tree onto another, the offspring of that tree would have the hybrid properties of the two trees. Similarly, if you, for example, pulled all the leaves off a shrub it’s descendants would be similarly leafless. A fascinating, internally logical, and very intuitive theory. Unfortunately, it was complete nonsense.

At this time in scientific theory Mendelian genetics had been accepted by the broader scientific community. Mendelian inheritance - the core of this genetics theory - was initially introduced in the work of Gregor Mendel published in 1865 and 1866 and was then rediscovered (as it were) in the early 1900’s. It was initially very controversial as most paradigm shifts in science are, but when the theories were integrated with those of Thomas Morgan in 1915, they became the beginning of what we now know as modern genetic theory.

So, we must ask our self, why did Lysenko receive the attention he did? 20 years after the foundations of genetics had been laid bare for the scientific community Lysenko, a peasant farmer, rose to prominence in the USSR by flatly contradicting what most scientists took as writ. The answer, as I have discussed before, lies in political bias.

Lenin, a monster by all accounts, also introduced the term “politically correct”, meaning of course that the standards of truth were variable and ultimately politically malleable. Something was true if the party decreed it. This was the first, central idea of the communist regime; the State was God.

Second, a popular idea in Marxist ideology is that man is, in his entirety, a product of his class and social environment. Although there is some truth to the notion that we are products of our environment and upbringing our propensity to be reinforced by our environment is a product of our genetic makeup. Marxist intellectuals, however, did not wish to allow people the freedom (as it were) to naturally select their own behaviour, instead a man must be entirely at the whim of his environment.The idea was simple. if they could force people to adopt the moral and practical applications of socialism then the offspring of those first generation would be genetically predisposed to such collectivisation and subjugation at the hand of the state. A beautiful theory, and very appealing to Marxist leaders who, privately, must have realised the difficulty (or impossibility, as we now know)  in maintaining their world indefinitely.

So what has this little trip down history lane have to do with behaviour change and modern psychology? Well modern psychology has been broadly lucky. We have not been subject to the political pressures some modern sciences have (i’m thinking climate science). We are under little pressure, as it were, to agree with modern intellectuals and prop up ailing philosophical movements.

Except there is one aspect of modern psychology that IS under this pressure.

In a sense, it is our Original Sin, our ultimate flaw. You see - as you may have heard - we are unfailingly irrational. Much like the area of climate change (and all it’s difficulties and judgements) has been seized upon by political opportunists on both the left and right so too has the idea that we are (now famously) “Predictably Irrational”.

Yes, we are flawed. To the core. We are incapable of making rational decisions and, as such, must be hand-walked through life by our benevolent leaders. It’s the vogue idea of the radical political leaders who, with apparent benevolence, wish only to relieve us of the burden of freedom. I’ve talked about this before so I won’t dwell, but consider how Lysenkoism may inform this interesting leap to irrationality.

It’s patently clear that we are not predictably irrational - not only does our social, economic, political and environmental world withstand the day to day activity of billions of people who (apparently) should be making irrational decisions, but when you actually look at these experiments (and I have) you find results that say something along the lines of “46% made the wrong choice”. An alarmingly high number, perhaps, but let us not forget 54% chose correctly. Are we supposed to write them off? Why did they choose correctly and the others didn’t?

I propose that we are not definitively doomed to make illogical choices, but are in fact capable of learning how to make rational decisions - we may learn rationality (an idea common in the time of Plato and Aristotle, but apparently forgotten today).

Yet I ask, have you ever tried to convince a psychologist of this? Our political leaders have seemingly decided that their constituents are morons (Gordon Brown calling a woman bigoted, the way Labour Party allow self serving unions to dictate terms to workers, the way Conservatives seem chronically incapable of listening to constituent complaints) and so have lapped up (as a post hoc rationalisation) the idea that we are predictably irrational. It may not surprise you that funding is directed towards those who can - in novel and interesting ways - show why people are incapable of living on their own and need a new social program to help them.

Lysenkoism is still alive in many ways, more as a methodology than a specific idea. Psychologists are pressured to continue lines of research that reinforce the politically correct opinion that people are incapable of making appropriate choices and that the solutions are almost always expansions of government provisions in some way. To suggest the alternative is to be labelled a denier, an extremist or - shock - a Libertarian!

Obviously not all psychologists, funders or politicians are corrupt or malicious. We are all doing the best we can with what we have. I am not saying there is a direct - soviet style - conspiracy to cover up the truth, merely the interaction of conflicting interests between the slave and the master (or, if you prefer, the beggar and the purse-holder). I’d caution you, in whatever line of work you partake, to keep an eye out for Lysenkoism. Never accept a truth, simply because the authority above you has said it. Be critical, skeptical and active-minded and you won’t go far wrong.

Wednesday 6 August 2014

Old World Blues

I don’t consider myself a massive gamer. I’ve owned a playstation since the 90’s however and have many fond memories of playing those earlier games, and enjoying the subsequent developments in technology... As I say I am not a massive gamer; I don’t own a headset, I don’t spend my weekends “pwning n00bs” on “CoD” (if that confuses don’t worry... you don’t need to know...), and I don’t queue up to get the latest tech (nearly a decade into it’s life cycle I’ve only just recently bought a PS3).


However, there are a couple of games that, through the ages, have kept my attention either through some accident of association or because the story or gameplay has been spectacular. Two such games from more recent times have been Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas. If those names mean nothing to you, let me hand you over to the capable hands of wikipedia to provide an explanation:


Fallout 3 takes place in the year 2277, 36 years after the setting of Fallout 2 and 200 years after the nuclear apocalypse that devastated the game's world in a future where international conflicts between the United States and China culminated in a Sino-American war in 2077, due to the scarcity of petroleum reserves that ran the economies of both countries. The player character is an inhabitant of Vault 101, a survival shelter designed to protect up to 1,000 humans from the nuclear fallout. When the player character's father disappears under mysterious circumstances, the Overseer, or the leader of the vault, initiates martial law, and sends security forces after the player, who is forced to escape from the Vault and journey into the ruins of Washington, D.C. to track him down. Along the way the player is assisted by a number of human survivors and must battle a myriad of enemies that inhabit the area now known as the "Capital Wasteland".


Whereas Fallout: New Vegas:


[...] is based in a post-apocalyptic, open world environment around the area of Nevada, California, and Arizona. The player takes control of the character known as the Courier, who is hired by a delivery service to take an unknown package across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas Strip but is intercepted, shot in the head, and left for dead by a mysterious man who steals the package. After being found by a friendly local robot, Victor, and healed by a man named Doc Mitchell, the Courier is thrust back into the desert to seek revenge and recover the stolen package. By doing this, the player becomes caught between various factions competing for control over the desert and its most valuable asset, the Hoover Dam, ultimately coming to shape the future of its inhabitants.


Why am I telling you about this? Well I am getting there...be patient.


These games are some of the most compelling, interesting, and thought-provoking games I have ever played. The dry humour and sometimes devastating emotional impact combined with excellent story progression and replay value like nothing else make it worth the price in and of itself.

I was playing Fallout: New Vegas last night, in fact, and had completed one of the Downloadable Content packages called Old World Blues. Now, before I carry on, one of things that is really quite disturbing about the series is the constant reference to nostalgia. Despite total annihilation and utter destruction there is almost a pathetic, desperate attempt by many of the inhabitants of this world to preserve the old way of life and bring back the 50’s style life of the former civilisation.
Completing Old World Blues I was struck by the message of it all; don’t cling to the past to the exclusion of the future. Don’t spend your life trying to resurrect some golden age, instead appreciate what you have now and look to the future to develop something new.


What does this mean for us? Well it’s not my usual pure-behaviour screed, so forgive me a moment of philosophical postulation. I wanted to share with you a sentiment that I felt very strongly from this game. Many characters are practically driven mad, driven to do unspeakable things, in the name of resurrecting a lost and fatally flawed (read; trigger happy) culture. Now we aren’t nearly so bad in our own lives or indeed in our national lives, but consider the implications.


There is always a desire to return to what we perceived to work before. Many politicians in the UK seem to suggest policies that were first put in place in the 1950’s, a wholly different context. Or indeed there is a case of rose tinted glasses. Under state control the trains in the UK were not managed effectively or efficiently, there was chronic under investment and poor service all around. Partial privatisation has led to a massive increase in quality and service provision, but there is still some who nostalgically long for the days of state control.


Under times of stress there is a tendency for many adults to desire regression to a childlike state - something Freud spoke about at length. We also tend to look backward fondly e.g. “when I was a child it was perfectly safe to play outside, nowadays...” and so on.


I suggest we give up looking to the past in an attempt to restore the golden age that never was, and instead look to the future. Analyse the culture we live in and the lives we each, individually live, and say what works, and what doesn’t, and be done with the what doesn’t and work on what does. We can only gain from such an exercise, and maybe - in the words of the Fallout narrator - we can swap out our Old World Blues for some New World Hope.


Wouldn’t that be something?

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