• Agile Coach

The 3 Pitfalls & Opportunities in Influencing Behavior

Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) can be used as the change management key to success. It is known worldwide and in the Netherlands we often call it Behavior Management. Improve your management style, influence people’s behavior Agile and ensure excellence in performance. As Aristotle put it, “Excellence is not a one-time event, it is a habit.” But in classical Greek, of course.

If we use Agile & Scrum to strive for agile and fast organizations, then the role of human behavior is critical to this. After all, the philosophy of Agile assumes that everyone experiences it as “normal” to work this way. However, if team members and managers are not yet used to this and do not accept Agile working, little will change.

Behavior change as an understudy

It sometimes happens that – after a period of Agile working with, for example, Scrum training – the enthusiasm to “move on” wanes. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Scrumming is done nicely, but real breakthrough value is not delivered (yet).

Middle management is also busy again with a sexy new project. Attention slackens and the temptation to fall back into old habits lurks. This while there has not yet been a change in culture. That was not what you had in mind.

This has nothing to do with Agile & Scrum. The philosophy behind it is sound, that too has been researched and demonstrated many times. It has everything to do with how it is deployed. But also how management and self-organizing teams deal with habits and interrelationships. Now it is time for the change element.

3 pitfalls

Properly influencing human behavior is critical to creating effective Agile habits. And securing these habits is essential to achieving a true Agile culture. The way many managers and teams handle the transformation of this behavioral change is not always effective. That’s because the right way to influence behavior often works counterintuitively for many managers and team members. This is because of the following common pitfalls that occur

Rest assured… we also come up with 3 opportunities that turn things around positively.

Pitfall 1: Too vague incentives as a trigger for desired behavior

Very nice those dots on the horizon and vistas that hopefully encourage people to adopt new behaviors, but it is far too imprecise. A good incentive is one with sufficient predictive value about what happens or might happen to the person, if they indeed exhibit the desired behavior. So this incentive carries both information about utility and necessity, as well as a chance component (i.e., it is not completely fixed). In short, “If you do this, you will get that.”

Pitfall 2: Misuse of consequences

Consequences are events that follow behavior. They influence the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. As long as the consequences are not clear, a stimulus has no or only a temporary effect (Rietdijk, 2009). Roughly speaking, there are 4 consequences that are deployed:

1. Positive rewards: you get is what you like

2. Negative reward: “do this differently….”,

3. Punishment: for a short time, unwanted behavior decreases (but desired behavior does not always increase)

4. Extinction: not getting what one wants, by being ignored, the urge to act decreases, resulting in extinction.

Often we are concerned with the last 3 consequences when we should be spending 80% of our time focusing on Positive Rewarding.

Pitfall 3: Rewarding incorrectly

If the average manager thinks at all in terms of rewards, they quickly think in terms of financial compensation. One then comes up with material rewards, often in the form of a performance bonus that lies far into an uncertain future. Herein lies the third pitfall. As we saw above, any activity by people that is positively reinforced increases the likelihood that the activity will be repeated. Simply put: you get what you reward.

However, that positive reinforcement must follow the behavior as directly as possible to make the connection between the two as strong as possible: butter to the fish. The best and cheapest way to do that is by giving appreciation and recognition. How about giving a compliment, for example. Of real attention!

The 3 Opportunities

Enough about what doesn’t go right. So how can it be done? There are three opportunities that we can all do better together when it comes to positive behavioral influence. And these are:

Opportunity 1. less use of wrong incentives, more focus on consequences;

Opportunity 2. focus more on rewarding than punishing, forcing and ignoring;

Chance 3. more social reward of behavior, than material reward of outcome.

That this still happens too little is not the fault of the average manager. Business administration in the Netherlands has only had an answer to this for a few years. Chances are that people have not yet been trained in the use of this change methodology cum management method. But what is the answer then?

Organizational Behavior Management

Or OBM… A not entirely unknown angle: the very well described and over 100 years old behavioral sciences, based on the work of Nobel Prize winner Pavlov, among others. Since 2009, the bridge between the behavioral sciences and business administration has also been built in the Netherlands through the dissertation of Dr. M. Rietdijk. Particularly at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Faculty of Business Administration pays much attention to increasing work performance through the use of Organizational Behavior Management.

This is a relatively new way of leading measurable change. It goes well with Agile & Scrum. In fact, the business protocol used bears great resemblance to the pillars of Agile: Inspect and Adapt.

OBM comes from the United States and has been successfully used there for several decades in various companies (including several Fortune 500 companies). It is an evidence-based method based on the scientific foundations of measurement, analysis and control of human behavior. Meanwhile, hundreds of people in the Netherlands have been certified in it since 2009 and OBM is applied in many dozens of organizations.

And not just in Agile and Scrum. OBM also applies in many other areas. After all, wherever people work there is behavior. And wherever one desires a new culture around a new way of working, behavioral change is needed. And that requires executives who can manage this effectively.

You yourself are then rewarded with behavior change by people who start doing things because they want to, rather than because they have to. And that might then be the prelude to a good and effective habit: getting the best out of people.

Want to know more about OBM,the pitfalls in behavior change, and the three golden opportunities? Then register now for the Masterclass.