EXPERIENCES <br> DRIVE<br> CHANGE
An excerpt from our latest Orange Paper, How to Change a Mind.
Whether it’s encouraging people to adopt new ways of working, adapting to new technology and different situations, changes to policies or procedures, or facing disruption — change is as crucial as it is inevitable.
Yet change isn’t easy.
Behaviour Change and Behaviour Based Safety programs are stalwarts of the business world. Yet this type of transformation tends to happen at surface level, taking the form of compliance, and lacking the necessary conviction needed to foster and sustain real change over time.
In our latest Orage Paper, How to Change a Mind, we explore various tactics for changing the beliefs, values and attitudes that drive behaviours. And one of the most influential catalysts for transformation is experiences. Think of how often we hear people say the experience changed them or they were never the same after a particular event. Experiences create the ideal environment for change to occur — bringing together all the necessary elements with strategic intent. Far from intangible, experience design allows us to map the various touchpoints between people and the organisation, influencing people’s feelings and memories, their attitudes and behaviours.
We can think about the experience in terms of three layers. On the first, we have the touchpoints, channels and mediums. Then we have emotions — the way we want people to feel at each stage. Finally, there’s a narrative layer that runs throughout — an arc from beginning to peak to end — bringing cohesion and context.
One of the more challenging components of change is breaking mental and behavioural habits. To do this, we can use nudges — simple tweaks to the typical experience that disrupt people’s usual behaviour in an intentional way, without using rewards or punishment.
These interventions should be easy to avoid, yet cause enough of a pause to break the habit and force people to consider their actions. For example, placing fruit instead of confectionery near the register is a nudge, while completely removing confectionery is not. In this way, nudges are particularly helpful in mitigating cognitive biases during decision-making.
Another important consideration is ensuring people’s memories encode the desired emotion and retain it over time. To mitigate inaccuracies caused by subjective memory and retrospective cognitive biases, we can use evidencing. This might be a physical artefact or follow-up communication that serves as a trigger for the original feeling.
Above all, transformative experiences should be social. These are opportunities to build connection and trust with leaders and peers — making it more likely people will adjust their values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to match.
We also fear what we don’t understand. British philosopher Alain de Botton proposes sharing meals with those who disagree with us:
Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal — something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt — disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted.
This isn’t just philosophy or theory, though.
Daryl Davis, an African-American musician, wanted to discover why racist people are racist. He wanted to know how people could hate him without even knowing him.
He began by setting up an interview with Roger Kelly, national leader of white supremacist hate group the Ku Klux Klan, but left out the fact he was African-American. When Kelly arrived, things took a turn towards awkwardness, but Davis conducted the interview anyway, discovering a shared love of music.
Over the following years, Kelly invited Davis to numerous Klan meetings, and Davis invited Kelly to his house for dinner. In time, Kelly, the grand dragon of the KKK, a group founded on the belief that people with darker skin colour are inferior and should be segregated or eradicated, became friends with Davis, the very person he was supposed to hate.
Because of his friendship with Davis, Kelly eventually left the KKK. And he wasn’t the only one. Davis continued attending Klan meetings and inviting Klansmen to dinner, leading to an estimated 200 Klan members quitting over a 30-year period.
Davis, like de Botton, concluded that hate stems from fear of the unknown. Through shared social experiences, both sides learned more about each other and discovered commonalities. This in turn prompted a massive shift in values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
In the workplace, opportunities for social experiences can include anything from team offsites and family days, to cultural rituals and touchpoints, to the way spaces, like break rooms of cafeterias, are configured.
TL;DR
Experiences create the ideal environment for change to occur, bringing together all the necessary elements, including emotions, narratives and memories.
Nudges can help break cognitive and behavioural habits.
Evidencing helps trigger memories of the experience with the right encoded emotions.
Shared social experiences build trust and connection, making it easier to influence a change of mind.
