Leila Byron

Organisational Behavioural Design : Moving beyond the Strategic Powerpoint and designing for the real world.

Often Strategy can be seen as being lofty, high level, and not grounded to the everyday reality, or baked in to so many other frameworks (think OKRs, KPIs, Roadmaps etc) with no regard to how the implementation will actually be used by the teams. The vision or strategy are so far removed from daily work routines and from the context of where behaviour needs changing.

When asked to come up with the Strategy for an Organisation the deliverable often lives in a PowerPoint. This is what the stakeholders have asked for and will be using to circulate around the organisation, but how do we move from a Powerpoint to actual implementation?

A study by the Covey Institute concluded that only half of the employees in a wide range of American companies knew what the strategy of their organisation was. What’s more, only about 25% of these employees were able to answer how they personally could contribute to the company strategy in their daily work. This means for every 100 employees, only around 12 of them can translate strategy into behaviour.

Without thinking of how this will be executed on the “front line” can lead to a frustrated Organisation, with no real movement on the direction.

How can behavioural design be used to bring design thinking methodology into the organisation and putting the customer (in this case the colleagues delivering on the strategy) in the center alongside the business implications and thinking of building trust and changing habits to help move the needle on implementation.

Behavioural Design

Behavioural design is a method designed to make you focus on humans as the core of your solution design. By using behavioural design, you can design practical strategies that help people master the tiny behaviour patterns that lead to behavioural change. Often enough, when looking at organisational strategies the thing that is missing is how do we ensure the entire organisation is on board, knowing that there may be legacy mindsets or resistance to any new actions.

It takes a lot of energy to ‘do behavioural change’, and we as people tend to resort back to the known or “easy” tasks to fulfil our motivation bucket and to see quick progress, meaning we are not in compliance or we are more likely to resist change because there is no clear link to how this bigger picture fits into our real world. What does this mean for strategy and change management?

Context is Key

What if we take the end user and understand their context at play and put that in the center of our strategy – the end user being the colleague driving the behaviour change. The strategy coming from leadership, but the change needing to happen on the ground.

Many organisations design their change management processes under the faulty assumption that changing knowledge is enough to change behaviour, which is just not the case. By identifying barriers relevant for behaviour change allows for a user-centric approach to design nudges and practices with the potential to change behaviour. The driving question is “What can we do on a small scale, to change behaviour?”

In order to understand the barriers for the individual, we will use Maurer’s levels of resistance, which allow us to anticipate the resistance we are likely to encounter and what we need to do to help the individual pass smoothly through the change. The remaining barriers can be divided into organisational and technical barriers. What is it in the context of the individual that powers the current behaviour, why is it attractive, and how does what is happening here and now serve as either a barrier to or a lever for reaching our desired goal?

Theory of Change

Another framework used to ensure implementation of the change you expect to happen is Theory of Change (ToC). ToC is a methodology or a criterion for planning, participation, adaptive management, and evaluation that is used in companies, philanthropy, not-for-profit, international development, research, and government sectors to promote social change. But what if we use the methodology within Organisational Design?

The starting point of the creation of a ToC is the description and analysis of the change that you expect to happen. This change is the goal (or goals) that you want to achieve. Then you work back to identify the conditions that must be in place to achieve the goal(s).

Theory of Change is essentially a comprehensive description and illustration of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It is focused in particular on mapping out or “filling in” what has been described as the “missing middle” between what a program or change initiative does (its activities or interventions) and how these lead to desired goals being achieved. It does this by first identifying the desired long-term goals and then works back from these to identify all the conditions (outcomes) that must be in place (and how these related to one another causally) for the goals to occur. These are all mapped out in an Outcomes Framework.

Using Behavioural Design, what steps do we need to take for a successful roll out of a strategy?

If we want to create value through our change projects, we must make it simple for the people involved to act in the desired way. There is no point in designing strategies and making sure to complete deliverables if we forget that people are the ones making those changes in every change process.

For years, most organisations have followed a structured approach designed to make them good at producing project deliverables and training staff to acquire the necessary competences. The same cannot be said about changing behaviour. The “change part” is seldom tackled in a structured and efficient way, and therefore we often fail to create the behavioural change we need. An approach to change that actually works becomes key to benefits realisation in most organisations. Without change there can be no benefits realisation.

What is required for behavioural design to make a difference in a business- critical change?

• A clear and relatable strategic hook: You must make the purpose of the change clear in order to gain organisational support for the use of behavioural design.
• A project framework: It must be possible to link the behaviour you create directly to the value you wish to realise.
• You must adapt the scale of the method: You must be able to see the big picture at the same time as taking the zoomed in approach to each individual part of the behaviour you are looking to change.
• Measure the behaviour outcome as well as the performance: With Key Behaviour Indicator, we can observe whether the behaviour is taking place or not. It might not be as black and white as a measurable increase in a KPI, but we can ask whether it is happening and whether they feel an improvement from last defined timespan.

Articles referenced in this blog post:

I’m Afraid Debbie From Marketing Has Left for the Day
With more than 50,000 copies sold in Denmark, this book has been on the bestseller list since its publication in 2017…www.adlibris.comWhat is Theory of Change? – Theory of Change Community
Theory of Change is essentially a comprehensive description and illustration of how and why a desired change is…www.theoryofchange.orgBenefits realisation requires you to focus on the individual, who will have to act differently…
It is not enough to design projects to create value and realise deliverables if we forget that the common denominator…implementconsultinggroup.com