Goal achievement through behavioral science

Economics has been a different perspective as far as the human behaviour is concerned. Nobel Laureate professor Richard H Thaler did a decade-long research and broke the myth that people do have rational and well-understood choices in life.

Have you ever thought as to why some are so good with data management but total clueless in the kitchen? Or one can keep forgetting passwords but remember trivial details of work done a decade back? Somewhat bewildering but as smart as silly of the same person at the same time.

So why does this happen?

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School Professor, explains this as an automatic and reflective thinking. Automatic is your gut feeling and reflective is based on behaviour learnt from surroundings and upbringing. An automatic feeling can tell you that the new job offer is not so great. But if the raise is 12% higher, but the transit will increase by 55% of your time, reflective thinking can tell you that it is logical to take it.

According to Brunei University’s Research, people change their choices if the economic incentives do not change or they are not forbidden significantly. That is the reason when there is a strong implementation of autocratic discipline, the rule-breaking atmosphere kicks in. Say if you announce a compulsory wellbeing program in the organisation and get very unwilling, flinching people to enrol, a get together with bottomless food stalls gets immediately popular. "If the choices are easy and people don't feel being dictated, 76% of them blissfully slip into comfort zone." This behavioural pattern is the reason behind 34% organisations falling short of their targets. Well, the good news is that same pattern, if nurtured well, gets organisations up and rolling by 63%, according to the research.

Organisation across the globe are now setting up behavioural science teams to get the interventions more result-centric and people-friendly. Behavioural insights are used to retain, achieve, and shape people better.

So, ask the HR department to arrange employee retention campaign based on people’s reactions on exit interviews. The finance department can get into soft cost cutting based on what people do not eat in employee canteen or why they did not like the last picnic arranged on the foothills of Nashik. If thinking patterns are read properly, the organisations can have an enormous impact. It is mandatory to set an outcome which is agreed by all the team members. Since departments differ on deliverables, the application of behavioural science differs too. Each team should have representatives to speak for them and use the resources and data. Say if it is found that people do not come back in time from smoke break, the reason can be long but unnecessary stretched working hours.

Automatic or gut feel tells us what to do but at times, we are too scared to hear it. At the same time, reflective feeling governs our logical bent and keep warning us from taking right decisions too. To be able to use behavioural science for better goal setting, one needs to have unclouded vision and demand in mind. Then set an objective and zoom off to the winning path.

The writer is a strategic advisor and premium educator with Harvard Business Publishing