The Information Management (IM) field needs to adopt more strategies and tactics from Behavioural Insights (BI).
Good IM is made up of many small habits. And practitioners of BI help people develop and improve their habits by planning small “nudges” or interventions.
In this post:
E.A.S.T. Framework
You can apply BI to your IM work with the Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely (EAST) framework:
- Easy
- Suggest pre-set default choices
- Make it simple & quick to start using a microservice
- Write simple communications
- Attractive
- Draw attention to good choices with sounds, colours, textures, etc.
- Give fun rewards for good choices
- Leverage poor choices as “teachable moments“
- Social
- Show how peers and role models have made good choices
- Plan ways for people to reinforce each others’ good choices
- Automate public celebrations of small good choices
- Timely
- Understand when people will be most receptive to a nudge
- Focus on immediate rewards and penalties (not future ones)
- Help people anticipate barriers and steps to overcome them
Planning
To apply the EAST framework you will also need to think about the bigger picture. Start by trying to reduce a complex situation down to a single behaviour or decision point. To do that:
- Define the outcome
- What set of behaviours leads to an outcome? Are you sure?
- What behaviour do you want to influence? Why?
- How will you measure actions? Is it easy to measure?
- How will many small improvements lead to a better outcome?
- Understand the context
- Who is involved in the behaviour you want to influence?
- What situations do they find themselves in?
- How would they describe the situation from their perspective?
- How can you sensitively nudge them towards better behaviours?
- How can your interventions be easily repeated in this context?
- Build the intervention
- Attempt to apply the EAST framework now
- Apply appropriate ethics/morals for your socio-cultural context
- Revisit the first two steps again as your understanding improves
- Improve your application of the EAST framework
- Test, learn, adapt
- Measure your interventions and resulting behaviours
- Use a random trials and a control group to see if your interventions are having the intended effect
- Watch for unintended positive results and attempt to replicate them
- Try to be patient and kind to yourself and your clients
Too often I see IM Professionals try to “boil the ocean” and improve multiple, complex issues all at once with huge generic best practices. This doesn’t work. Clients need to work on improving one small skill at a time, otherwise they get confused and frustrated. IM Pros need to make simple statements about one small skill a time, otherwise they confuse their clients and get frustrated. Trying to improve everything all at once will not set you up for success.
If your organization is feeling pressured by time and you want to scale up, then consider having multiple IM teams working on different small improvements at the same time. This way IM Pros and clients can keep things simple, and can also fix more problems in a shorter span of time.
Yoga Analogy
Improving IM skills can be compared to the first pilates or yoga class you ever take. You use your body every day without thinking about it, but as soon as you start your first yoga class you get twisted up in knots. The yoga instructor is able to monitor and distinguish many tiny movements simultaneously. But the new yoga student is not able to monitor all of their limbs, muscles, ligaments and internal organs all at the same time. It takes time and practice to become aware of new things, coordinate them, and eventually excel at them.
Improvement of a skill is a process that takes time. Like playing instruments, videogames, or making art. One does not simply start playing Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony with an orchestra. You start by playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the piano by yourself. And even if you can play a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star beautifully on your own, that doesn’t mean you’re ready to play orchestra music. The same is true for IM skills.
Learn More
Read more about the EAST framework on the Behavioural Insights.co.uk site.