Making Change Stick

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Sustainability

The sustainability question, or problem, is ultimately the biggest and most important question or issue.

Why?

Because behavioural change is, more often than not, about creating long-term change, or meaningfully changing habits. And, no way around it, the research is pretty grim. This ranges from those who diet and manage to keep the weight off, to those who manage to give up smoking, to those who manage to exercise more, to change programmes in businesses, to poverty reduction programmes in society.

So why is it just so difficult? There are multiple reasons

Gravity Effect

“What goes up must come down” goes the saying. Indeed – this refers to the gentle, or rather strong, pull of gravity. In behavioural change scenarios we need to think of what is the natural pull? What is the natural tendency? Is there a gravitational pull that without input will pull behaviour back to old patterns, or away from optimal patterns?

Here are some gravity effects:

Natural Distributions

Natural distributions (or redistributions) we noted can limit scalability of change (The Equilibrium Effect). A natural distribution refers to things that naturally distribute over large populations.

Human Nature

In the SCOAP model we outlined how reflexive behaviour also guides human beings. These natural desires, also biological desires, exert a natural pull on certain behaviours, or behaviours we may want to change. An obvious one is healthy eating whereby the natural biological pull of high-calorie food leads many (if not most) people astray.

In business this can be cognitive ease, which means anything that requires exerting effort will be likely to reduce over time unless it can be embedded in processes and reward systems.

Norms

Norms are standard ways of behaving: this may be positive or negative. Behaving within the norm is normally easy and there are many subtle, often unconscious nudges to this. Society norms will also transfer to the workplace. Want to start an ecological initiative – this will be easier if certain society norms around recycling, and public transport are present.

In short if the change you want to implement or guide goes against norms, it will be difficult to maintain.

Other limitations to sustainability may be around other factors

Phase Transitions and Critical Mass

Phase transitions, critical mass, and virality are terms that indicate whether momentum for change has been reached and is likely to continue, at least for a while.

Phase transitions are situations whereby you need to exert a lot of energy initially, but at a certain stage there is a shift. For example when water freezes, or turns into steam, there is a phase transition. It takes a significant amount of energy to get to the point, and there may be no transition even after exerting considerable amounts of energy. But then suddenly there is a transition and transformation. There has been a phase transition.

Generally it takes a lot more energy to get to the transition than to maintain the transition. So in a change initiative it may require a lot of energy to get people to do something but then if there is a phase transition this can be maintained with much less input.

The phase transition can be because of system/contextual problems. For example transitioning to electric mobility requires high effort and investment to make sure there is charging capability, suitable vehicles at suitable prices, all with practical driving ranges. Once you can hit all these (which is a huge challenge), a change transition can happen…and in the case of electronic mobility likely will happen.

Critical mass is a similar concept this refers to needing a certain mass to get moving and get momentum. In business this will be a certain amount of people exhibiting the behaviour so that it is seen often, passed on more often, and can’t be ignored, or can become embedded.

Virality

Virality is most often used in the social media space as is the term meme. It refers to how an item, a picture, a video, an action can develop a life of its own and be passed on to ever increasing numbers of people.

The term, obviously, comes from how a virus grows infecting ever more people. Simply put if each individual passes it on to more than 1 person it will grow (the reproduction number we have become familiar with during the pandemic).

Though we may try to plan virality it is often at the whim of the market or a population group.

For things to go viral they tend to be appeal to a basic human emotion (SCOAP), be simple, and be easy to pass on. Therefore, simple actions can become viral – however, they may also fade quickly.

Habituation

Habituation refers to a process whereby we become habituated to certain stimuli – we fail to respond to this. This is a danger in many engagement campaigns within society or within business. For example, there may be posters hung up in the corridors or in recreation rooms to inform people of new initiatives and function as a constant reminder. But over time, these will blend into the background, and barely evoke a response. In fact this is precisely what happens in the brain – the brain will fail to respond to repetitive stimuli.

So the above show natural processes which can and will block behavioural change becoming fixed.

For behavioural change to really set in it must become a new behaviour, a new way of doing things, and therefore become a new habit. So how do we make behavioural change sustainable?

Plan for Sustainability

The first and most obvious factor is to plan for sustainability. That is a behavioural change initiative will need to carefully think about how to engage in stimulating change – it will also need to have a plan on how to sustain this change once achieved.

Resources

This plan for sustainability will need resources – the supply side problem is a key reason for so-called voltage drops. this means long-term commitment of resources which include finances, but making sure there are the people, and time to constantly push, nudge, motivate, and control the behaviour and prevent it from slipping.

Stimulus

Another approach is to give repeated stimulus. However, beware of habituation above. This means a stimulation campaign must come at irregular intervals and be different to avoid habituation and becoming accustomed to a message.

A stimulus campaign can be a regular re-push supporting an initiative, or a redesign, or new focus.

Institutionalise

When a behaviour becomes a part of an institution, the culture, its way of doing things then, a behaviour has changed. So we should aim to institutionalise behaviours as much as possible. This means embedding the behaviour in as many formal, and informal ways as possible.

Ritualise

Rituals are very important in society and in various cultures around the world. Rituals are often high energy and “expensive” in terms of resources dedicated to them. This is in contrast to many behaviours that come with ease and comfort.

Rituals are also very powerful bonding and identification instruments. Therefore if you can make a behaviour a ritual then it becomes embedded and will stick.

Simple Takeaways

• • Plan for sustainability
  • Identify gravity effects
  • Embed in as many ways as possible

© leading brains 2022

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