Make it easy

Make it easy is a principle which draws on the work of Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2002. He is a very illustrious behavioural scientist and when he was recently asked what the most important thing he’d learned during his 50-year career, he answered “Make it easy”.

If you want to change the behaviour of others, don’t make the mistake of thinking the way to do it is to motivate them to want to change. Of course that’s important, but the most important thing is to make the behaviour you want to change as easy as possible.

Reducing friction increases results

Two American psychologists, Bergman and Rogers, ran an interesting experiment with the Department of Education in 2017. It was based on a new service which texted parents advice about how to encourage their children to work harder. But the parents had to sign up to use the service.

The psychologists launched this service three ways, to three groups of parents.

The first group were sent a text explaining why the service was amazing, with a link at the bottom which took them to a webform. They had to complete their details to be enrolled and took about 60 seconds to do. 1% enrolled.

Next group were sent the same text with the same information, but with a message prompting them to enrol by texting back the message ‘start’. This only took 15 seconds to do. There was a huge change: this time, 8% of people enrolled.

Next group were sent the same text with the same information, but with a message that asked them to text back the message ‘stop’ if they didn’t want to be enrolled. This only took 15 seconds to do. 97% of people enrolled.

This resulted in a 96% variance in the signup rates: as Daniel Khaneman argues, even small barriers – or friction – can have a disproportionate effect on people’s behaviour.

That was just the first part of the experiment. Then came the clever bit.

Bergman and Rogers then recruited experts in education and asked them to guess what they thought the three sign up rates would be for the three different enrolment methods.

The experts knew that barriers would put parents off; so they got the direction of change right, but were wildly wrong about the scale of the impact.

They guessed that 39% would sign up to the first ‘standard’ approach, 44% to the second ‘simplified’ approach and 66% for the ‘auto-enrolment’, guessing a 27% change in behaviour based on the levels of friction. The experts massively underestimated the importance of friction, thinking motivation would be a much more important factor for parents.

How do you apply this idea?

If you want your staff to, say, be more environmentally-aware and photocopy fewer things, you might inform the staff about how paper usage creates CO2 and its environmental damage; and this might have a small effect.

But most studies show that if you want to change people’s behaviour, you need to make using the photocopier harder than not using it. Set it to print double sided, make users have to enter a code… these small barriers will have a disproportionate effect.

If you want to encourage a behaviour, don’t think of how to motivate staff, think about the small barriers that are stopping them behaving the way you want them to. Even inconsequential hurdles can have a disproportionate effect on behaviour.

Make it timely is based on the idea that the same message can have a markedly different effect depending on when people hear it. This is because a lot of people’s behaviour at work is habitual. We do the same things again and again. In a way, this is a sensible tactic: we have so many decisions to make in life, if we considered what the best thing to do was in every situation, we’d grind to a halt with the sheer effort.

So if we face a situation we’re familiar with, we’ll repeat what we did last time. Ideal if your staff are behaving the way that you want: but problematic if you want to change their behaviour – and how do you achieve that if they’re not even weighing up the merits of what they’re doing?

Choose your moment for better results

Psychologists have identified predictable moments when these habitual behaviours are weakened; one example is based on the work of psychologist Katherine Milkman who came up with an idea called ‘The fresh start effect’.

Her argument is that one of the biggest drivers to human behaviour is the desire to be consistent; and that when we enter new time periods our link with our past self is weakened and we become more open to change.

And she proved it. In her initial study she looked at volumes of Google searches for things like ‘quit smoking, start dieting’. She looked at gym attendance and registration data – an each set of data she looked at revealed a set pattern: at the beginning of new time periods, people were more likely to start diets, to quit smoking, to change their behaviour. So whether it was the start of the year, week, month, or after a holiday or a birthday, these were all moments where people were more open to change.

This was proved again in the commercial world, when Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ playlists were launched. These use subscribers’ listening history to suggest songs they haven’t listened to before. But when Spotify first launched it it was a complete flop; it had been launched midweek. Then Spotify discovered ‘the fresh start effect’ (and Milkman’s work) and decided to relaunch the playlist on a Monday. It was only then that ‘Discover Weekly’ took off and became hugely popular.