Introduction

HOW CAN WE leverage behavioral psychology and neuroscience for organizational change? This book is about humanizing change management for managers, executives, project managers, and change professionals in areas like HR, L&D, and DEI. It combines scientific research, management consulting experience, and insights from 40-plus interviews with industry leaders and scientists to provide you with a behaviorally informed toolkit to drive positive and lasting change with step-by-step guides on 18 evidence-based interventions.

Behavioral science can, and should, significantly improve the success rate of organizational change initiatives while making it more human-centric. This bold claim is the core hypothesis behind our quest for knowledge. Why do so many organizational change initiatives fail? Why are so many employees disengaged? And what can you do to leverage scientific insights for better answers to these and other questions?

This book is not an all-encompassing approach to change management and is not intended to replace existing change management theories or practices. Neither does it claim to provide plug-and-play solutions to complex organizational challenges. Rather, it will provide you with the knowledge, tools, and strategies to identify behavioral challenges and tackle them with evidence-based interventions for positive and sustained change.

This book combines three main components to ensure practical value: behavioral insights, evidence-based interventions, and insights from industry leaders. The behavioral insights help you understand why things happen and what drives this behavior. The 18 evidence-based interventions—the core of this book—are tools that help you solve behavioral challenges, and each comes with a detailed, step-by-step guide to enable you to enhance your change management skills across the discussed six change areas.

But the leap from academic insights to organizational reality is often more complex and dynamic, with outcomes influenced by countless variables, including the organization's culture, the sector it operates in, structure and governance nuances, and the people involved. To ensure that the book's content is not only scientifically robust but also broadly applicable within an organizational context, we interviewed more than 40 leaders across a diverse array of sectors, including telecom, finance, retail, consultancy, the public sector, energy, tech, construction, mobility, recruitment, facilities, and healthcare. Their insights on change approaches, challenges, and interventions help bridge the gap between theory and practice, and navigate the complex dynamics of business behavior.

Who Is This Book For?

This is a book for managers and executives who are responsible for driving change across the organization. These people go under many flags but some of the most common names include change management, people and organization, human resources, organizational design, internal communications, and learning and development. This book will be just as valuable for managers of teams undergoing changes, regardless of whether they're in HR, tech, sales, support, or any other department.

Whatever your role, we assume that you continuously drive change in your organization, both directly through planning, implementing, or reinforcing change initiatives, and indirectly by, for example, role modeling and contributing to your organizational culture. Your ability to effectively drive organizational change depends on your ability to deal with situations as they arise. Often there is a large behavioral component and, as a manager or executive, you strongly benefit from a better intuitive grasp on the behavioral drivers behind change, as well as evidence-based tools to deal with recurring challenges.

We also wrote this book with two other audiences in mind, both of whom we consider our colleagues. The first is the broader organizational change management community, whether that is in the public or private sector, freelance, or at a large consulting firm. With your knowledge and experience in managing organizational change comes a strong intuition, and we aim to provide you with a more in-depth understanding of behavioral science. This will empower you to better understand and explain why some approach is more likely to drive the results you need. And from experience in working with a variety of organizational change management (OCM) teams, we know that many of you will benefit from the evidence-based interventions.

And of course, we wrote this book to give back to the behavioral science community that is the giant upon whose shoulders we stand. Experienced behavioral scientists who want to learn how to apply their expertise in an organizational context should find many actionable pointers. And young, aspiring behavioral scientists who are exploring career opportunities should find inspiration for use cases and examples of skill-building exercises. For other behavioral practitioners in the field, we salute you and hope you find this helpful in optimizing your approach and expanding your toolkit.

Why Behavioral Science Matters in Change Management

It's worth asking why the field of change management that has its own tried and tested methods and frameworks needs to be enhanced with behavioral science in the first place. We would argue that it's not about viewing behavioral science as an optional add-on to change management; rather, it's about recognizing it as a fundamental part of the process. This perspective holds across many of the challenges we face today.

Let's look at climate change as an example. Hard sciences provide clear guidelines on how to tackle this global issue. Yet the real challenge lies not in the scientific recommendations but in motivating individuals to adapt their behaviors in line with these solutions. The same is true in the medical field. Even though professionals know how to handle diseases like obesity, the real struggle is to incite changes in health behaviors.

In organizational change, a similar argument applies. No matter how well-structured or comprehensive a change plan is, it's still set to fail if individuals in organizations don't adapt their behaviors. Here's where behavioral science steps in. It helps us not only to identify but also to understand and influence human behavior for better outcomes.

In the last 15 years, applying behavioral science beyond academia has started to show real-world results, both in business and in society. One example of how a small behavioral science intervention can have a big impact comes from the public sector. To address long-term retirement saving, the UK government introduced automatic enrollment in workplace pensions, implemented between October 2012 and February 2018.1 This policy mandated employers to automatically enroll eligible employees into a qualifying pension scheme and make minimum contributions. Employees aged 22 or over and under the state pension age earning over £10,000 annually became part of this scheme.

This behavioral intervention resulted in the number of eligible employees participating in a workplace pension rising from 55% in 2012 to 87% by the end of 2019. Moreover, the annual total amount saved in pension funds stood at £90.4 billion in 2018, an increase of £7 billion from 2017.

These types of behavioral interventions have shown a big impact in the private sector too. A satisfying example could be seen in Facebook's response to Apple's iOS privacy changes, which led to a significant shift in user behavior and a substantial financial impact on Facebook.2 In 2021, Apple introduced the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature on its iOS operating system, enabling users to opt out of being tracked when using apps. This behavioral shift drastically reduced the ability of advertisers like Facebook to target specific demographics, resulting in a predicted $10 billion decrease in Facebook's ad revenue for the year. By simply giving users the choice of whether to be tracked, Apple initiated a minor shift in online behavior with major business impact. We explore these interventions further in Chapter 2.

As seen in these examples, behavioral science offers potent tools for change, but it's not a cure-all. Small behavioral interventions alone won't solve massive organizational issues. However, this book's essence isn't about seeking a silver bullet. We focus on a mix of intervention strategies—from minor tweaks to systemic changes—and tailoring them to your context.

The Challenges of Applying Science

In the daily grind of getting things done, we often forget that many of the problems we encounter have already been solved by others. This is where scientific insights could and should make organizations more human-centric by imbuing organizational processes with scientific insights.

Science is such an essential asset for societies that its core institutions are generally funded by the state. Their mission is to develop a network of scientists who help us solve the unsolvable questions. If much of the most important research is in the public domain, why don't we—meaning corporate professionals—all fully leverage this? As it turns out, there are many reasons. There is too little time. There is too much information. It is hard to ask the right questions. The information is too fragmented. General models do not apply to unique problems. We need action, not theory. Key info is behind a paywall. And so on.

In addition, behavioral science has its...