Accessibility, complexity and ambidexterity - 3 things I learned about human behaviour from Nudgestock 2021

Only a few people are crazy enough to watch all the 12 hours of a conference. I am - although, admittedly, not in one sitting. Nevertheless, I picked three of my favourite takeaways about human behaviour from Nudgestock 2021.?

A couple of days before this year's Nudgestock my girlfriend asked me if I was going to do a similar article this year as I did last year. I wonder if it's because she's learnt a lot from living with a behavioural science consultant for some time or it's just an accident - but this is a perfect commitment device: once I said "Of course I will!", my already existing plans to write this article became even stronger. Saying out loud and committing to writing this article already prompted me to start thinking about when and how I will follow the live-streamed conference and when and how I will write this summary. Also, ending up not writing it would fly in the face of my earlier promise to her - damaging my ego by being inconsistent with myself.

So that's the story of why I'm writing this article about Nudgestock 2021. But what exactly is Nudgestock? The world's largest festival on behavioural science and creativity. An annual convention by Ogilvy, one of the top creative and advertising agencies in the world which was a trailblazer in recognising the importance of behavioural science. Nudgestock was marked in my calendar months before. Not only the lineup is incredible (managing to get all these fantastic speakers together on the same day must be a hell of a work) but they also create an atmosphere that really gets you addicted to it. Of course, Nudgestock was held online again this year but the way these guys (many of whom I know from my summer school with the Ogilvy Behavioural Science practice 2 years ago) found the perfect way to create an authentic online festival feeling is just astonishing.

If I managed to get you excited about it, I encourage you to go and watch the whole recording here. Let me share with you these three important insights I learned about human behaviour on accessibility, complexity and ambidexterity.

#3. Clare Purvis, Head of Behavioural Science at Headspace: "We want people to feel that some element of a practice is accessible to them."

It is a classic tendency for everyone who has a passion or deeper knowledge about a topic to become blind to the differences in knowledge. When encouraging people to begin regular exercising or meditating, in the process of flooding them with the facts, long-term benefits and tools, we might end up scaring them away. They feel too far from the subject which seems complex, hard-to-grasp, and therefore inaccessible. What Headspace, the leading meditation startup did was that instead of telling people how much they will benefit from meditation in the long term, they developed a 5-day stress therapy that yielded short-term results. As Clare Purvis said,

"people won't explore long-term benefits unless you give them short term inklings."

By breaking "regular meditation" down and first showing them how only a 5-day stress therapy can bring tangible results, Headspace enabled users to easily understand the concept and get immediate, although maybe less impactful results. This helped users to feel the subject of meditation more accessible to them. If, according to Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do" then

the essence of a behavioural strategy is choosing what we do not want people to do.

I believe there is a key learning point here for every business that wants to introduce something new to a market or is preparing to sell a product that has a never-ending list of benefits: what can you give people so they understand the benefit of your product after 5 days? Maybe it's not exactly aligned with the long-term benefits, and it is definitely a shorter list. However, giving something to the customers early on that makes it more accessible to them will help bridge the gap between no-usage and full usage. You don't give beginner language learners a lesson so they can read War and Peace - instead, you set a reasonable goal, such as ordering a drink at a bar which seems more accessible.

#2. Sam Tatam, Global Consulting Partner and Head of Ogilvy Consulting's Behavioural Science Practice: We need to be able to reduce complexity in the world so we can induce improvement in our life.

The reason why Sam's speech appealed to me might be that I'm reading the late Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking right now - a skill regarded very highly at Ogilvy as well and appearing in Sam's talk, too. I'm not getting into lateral thinking now - let's say now that it's an insight tool, closely related to creativity and insight, that involves restructuring, escape and the provocation of new patterns. If vertical thinking is digging a hole deeper by moving forward in sequential, logical steps than lateral thinking is digging a hole in a different place by considering first seemingly irrelevant and incorrect information.

Sam's core argument was that even if our world is noisy and complex, we are surrounded by problems that are often solved with similar underlying concepts. Genrich Altshuller, a Soviet engineer, inventor and writer who served at the patent office of the Russian navy once recognised that 90% of the problems had already been solved, often in another scientific field. The reason behind this was that patented ideas used a relatively small number of objective principles to solve a problem. So Altshuller and his team developed TRIZ - the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving that drew up the patterns behind these principles. For example, No 7. was the "nested doll" approach which is used in telescopic lens, nail polish or retractable tape measure (screenshot's from the presentation).

Based on this, in my opinion, businesses have a seemingly very easy, but in practice lot harder job: to look for inspiration on completely different fields. How do bee-hives work? How do car engines work? How do challenger insurance companies, such as Lemonade twist traditional insurance offerings to reframe what insurance means? There is an inherent complexity in how diverse our world is and how diversely we people behave in it - but by reducing this complexity and learning from it, we can apply these unexpected best practices in our private life or organisational and business challenges.

When we are looking for solutions, we are mistaken to look for similarities in the problem - we need to look for similarities in the context.

1. Michele Gelfand - Cultural Psychologist, University of Maryland: Cultural tight-loose ambidexterity helps as small of a community as a startup to as big as a nation

Social norms are one of my favourite topics - the way people's behaviour (descriptive norms) or opinion (injunctive norms) influence us reveals so much about human personality as well as business dynamics. Professor Gelfand became well-known for being an expert on tightness-looseness theory which seeks to explore the flexibility of these norms.

Tight cultures are those where norms are clearly defined and reliably imposed. Unruly behaviour is expected to be punished: there is order, lower crime, more policy but also more uniformity. The clocks are more precise in cities and people have higher self-control.

On the other hand, loose cultures have weak social norms and thus a high tolerance of deviant behaviour. There is more room for individual interpretation and improvisation, resulting in more openness and creativity, but potentially also more disorder.

This dichotomy applies to nations at least as well as to organisations, leadership or even parenting. Too little discretion, that is, too much strictness, can lead to low autonomy and an authoritarian atmosphere with more fear. On the other hand, left with too much discretion people might feel distant and lost. I think it is easy to recognise that what applies on a national level also influence our organisations.

People who need more guidance and have less intrinsic motivation might end up feeling lost in a loose culture which is nevertheless very open, whereas those who long for less order and more flexibility will not be able to stand a tight culture which has more order.

Fascinatingly, a research published by Gelfand and her team this January also showed that tightness-looseness also predicted COVID-19 deaths. Compared to people in loose culture countries (such as Israel, the Netherlands, Brazil - and also Hungary!), people in tight culture countries (for example Japan, China, Singapore, and Austria ) reported more fear that they will contract COVID-19 leading to more compliance with the restrictions and consequently fewer cases and deaths. This is not surprising as historically groups that have more threats (be it environmental, health or territorial) are more likely to develop strong rules and tight norms to enable cooperation.

The main message is that neither tight nor loose culture is good in itself - instead,

countries and organisations need to aim for tight-loose ambidexterity enabling a structured looseness.

For those familiar with innovation literature, this might ring a bell: the concept is similar to that of organisational ambidexterity that ensures both risk-averse, business-as-usual work (corresponding to tightness in the model) as well as risk-seeking, innovative work (corresponding to looseness).

I hope you enjoyed my summary and please do not leave without sharing your thoughts on at least one of the questions below!

Accessibility: I think all of us often get the feeling of being incompetent and thus lacking the motivation to do something - but what if it's the fault of the product or the service, not us? What was your most recent experience with inaccessibility when engaging with a business?

Complexity: Reusing solutions is one of the greatest feelings an inventive mind can have. The "click" of recognising the aptness of a once proved-to-be-successful idea gives immense satisfaction. Did you have an experience recently where you could re-use an insight or approach in a very different situation, whatever mundane it was?

Ambidexterity: I was wondering after the talk: how can we help people express their tightness-looseness preference without being stigmatized in an opposing cultural context? Many of our current societal challenges are rooted in our struggle to see the world with our counterpart's eyes. Recognising that someone comes from a tight culture while currently being in a loose one, or vice versa, might help us take a different perspective - but what can the individual do to facilitate this?

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