How does the Nobel Prize in Economics have practical applications for organisational change management?

Firstly, a very “quick and high-level tour” of the Nobel Prize for Economics recently awarded to Professor Richard H. Thaler of the Chicago Booth School of Business. Richard Thaler is the co-author with Professor Cass Sunstein, Harvard of the best-seller (yes, really!)  “Nudge”.

Thaler is an interesting person for many reasons. Here’s just a couple:

1. He chose to work at Chicago which is widely seen as the center of “rationalist economics” if you like, the center most likely to challenge his thesis.
2. Thaler proposed people are more irrational, human if you like, in their approaches to the practicalities of personal and organisational decisions regarding spending decisions.

(NOTE: There’s obviously much more to his work and it’s well worth a read. If there wasn’t more to it, we’d all have Nobel Prizes and the associated $ Million prize)

Secondly, what are the organisational change management applications?

Here we go!

Most senior people, especially those in the C-Suite take a pride in being “rational” in their approach to decisions, especially where spend is concerned.

However, my experience is that there is an element of rational decision making involved, however it is less and often significantly less than would ever be acknowledged.

As a friend of mine often said “if you torture the data for long-enough, it’ll tell you what you want”. I’d go a little further by saying more decisions are taken by the application of “xxx (senior person) wouldn’t like that…” or “in my opinion (senior person) this is what we should do.

Should any of this seem familiar, there is some, but not much comfort in not being alone!

 What to do?

Here’s some suggestions based on 20 years of change management experience, by the way their application can be challenging. Take some comfort from, “if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it…”

1. Providing a bit of incentive for doing things differently, take an adaptation of Thaler’s choice of working with a group that he knew would challenge him. He saw this as improving his thinking and approach.
2. If you are constantly being asked why we are we not on/getting back on plan, then maybe there is a misunderstanding of what is really involved with implementing organisational change management and the purpose of a change management plan. What I mean is no matter how thorough a planning process used, the final plan is a composite of experience, data, interpretation, context, judgement and opinion. It’s in this arena the “Planning Game” is played. There is bias towards viewing the agreed plan as objective and rational. It is but only in part. Here’s the thing, the reality that objective and rational is only part of the plan should be acknowledged. It’s in this acknowledgement that more effective planning takes place bringing with it an improved chance of delivering the plan in a less stressful way.
3. Taking account of Thaler’s constituent of irrationality, my recommendation is that this could and should be introduced into the planning process and subsequently cascaded as the context for delivering on the plan.
4. Above I do not mean that this should be interpreted as not using data, quite the opposite. In the age of big data that would be silly! However, organisations must use the correct data gathering and arguably more importantly, the correct analysis and actions.
5. Lastly, by acknowledging and using both objective and subjective parts of the planning process coupled with the correct team and individual mind-set & behaviour (for example, trust, transparency, responsibility, openness, collective responsibility for starters), there’s a better chance for a reality-based plan and delivering the organisational changes to the plan.

In summary. If what you’re doing isn’t getting the expected results, change what you’re doing.

Just be thoughtful with the changes you make to what you are doing and manage the risks and issues that emerge as true learning and adapting opportunities.