Building your business case for behavioural techniques

One, two, three, four Nobel Prizes.

That’s the current number of Nobel Prizes in Economics awarded to behavioural researchers after economist, academic, and author of Nudge and Misbehaving Richard Thaler was honoured for his contribution last week. It follows Herbert Simon (1978), Daniel Kahneman (2002) and Robert Shiller (2013).

Why is it a big deal? Behavioural economics is here to stay. It has been recognised as instrumental to our understanding of economics.

In other words, commerce.

In other words, business.

In other words, your business.

Which is why it was great to hear behavioural scientist Matt Wallaert advocating a new role within organisations — chief behavioural officer (CBO).

A CBO would lead the identification, development and measurement of interventions to improve the effectiveness of what you are doing. They may look at:

• How marketing can better influence customers
• How the procurement team negotiates more successfully with suppliers
• How finance gets people to pay attention to the right numbers
• How HR and managers influence staff performance

What do you think? Do you need a CBO? Or at least, the function of one?

Even if you are in a small business, I believe the function of a CBO is the biggest untapped opportunity available to you right now.

It costs very little but can improve every single touch point you have with people. Customers, staff, stakeholders and suppliers.

Over the next couple of blogs I’ll be outlining how you may go about embedding behavioural economics (BE) in your business, starting with building a case for it.

Building a business case for BE

The first step to embedding behavioural techniques is get decision-makers on board through a business case. In short, you need to convince them why you should do this.

Central to success is your ability to shake your stakeholders out of their status quo – the prevailing “business as usual” (a.k.a. not using BE). A couple of years ago, I covered how to use positive tension to influence stakeholders by ensuring your presentation includes points that are salient, surprising and/or scary. Here’s how we can use them for your business case.

Engaging your stakeholders

To get stakeholders interested in your BE business case your presentation needs to be:

• Salient – messages cut through more effectively with visuals and elements that are memorable. Bring in a stack of behavioural books to show how BE is seeping through leadership ranks, table case studies and articles of how others are applying BE. Show results of any small trials you may have run in the lead up to this business case and detail what your BE-embedded organisation would look like.
• Surprising – what will make your stakeholders rethink their assumptions about how you do business? Point out any gaps you’ve noticed in how your business thinks people behave and how they actually do. For instance, did customers tell you they’d love a particular feature but it didn’t make any difference? Has customer satisfaction remained consistent but churn increased?
• Scary – paint a picture about what your business has to lose if you don’t adopt BE. The “something to lose” strategy might include that your competitors are using it (especially likely in retail, finance and health industries) or how many customers your website is failing to convert. Your aim is to make your stakeholders feel anxious about keeping things the same so they will be interested in seeking a solution.

Convincing your stakeholders

Now that your stakeholders are interested, your other task is to convince them to proceed by making them feel comfortable with adopting BE.

• Use analogies – to apply BE you are asking people to make a change. People cope better with change if it feels familiar, and to make a new thing feel familiar you can associate it with something they are used to. For example, if your organisation uses the Agile method, draw parallels such as BE being iterative (low risk experiments and constant improvement), inquisitive (looking for small, nimble opportunities) and collaborative (more minds, company wide endeavour).
• Minimise perceived risk – reduce the real and/or perceived exposures to the business and to stakeholders if you adopt BE. Draw on what other businesses are doing to show how it can be done, propose small, contained trials so people can build their confidence, and get key senior influencers on board so that others feel less vulnerable.

Ensure reward is greater than effort. In order for anyone to bother adopting a change, the payoff needs to exceed effort. That means you have two sides of the equation to work through – maximising the reward for embedding BE while making it easy. Some thoughts to get you started:

You’ve got buy-in, now what?

Now that you’ve tackled the business rationale for behavioural economics and won your stakeholders over, your attention should turn to how best to resource your BE function (e.g. centralise or democratise, in-house or outsource) and how to actual embed it in your organisation (where to start and what to do). We’ll tackle these considerations in part two.

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