Assurance as continuous improvement: learning from behavioural science

This is a side bar to share & test some 'Ahh-Ha!' moments recently in reading "The Dynamics of Business Behaviour: An evidence-based approach to managing organisational change" published this year by Beirem Ben Barrah and Philip Jordanov . This long-ish coffee read explains and explores the possibilities of using behavioural science ('BeSci') as a lens through which to view and approach the practice of assurance as one more of a number of use cases for BeSci.

Complementary colours

First, to paint a backdrop to the scene by connecting some dots across different areas of work experience to date. There is for me a natural complementarity in the mindsets and practices associated with strategic planning, continuous improvement, portfolio & programmes, and portfolio & programme assurance.

Strategic planning could be said to be concerned with tracing the course for delivery of strategy, its goals and its primary objectives. The course would be achieved via integrated, aligned and cascaded business planning of initiatives; and tracking progress would be via quantified milestones with changes to course as carefully deemed necessary. Arguably, perhaps, strategic planning is a form of enterprise continuous improvement in organisational change.

Portfolio & programmes offer a structured approach to delivery of initiatives associated with the business objectives that are carried through from strategic planning. As temporary structures and through the careful planned use of a palette of resources, portfolios & programmes deliver mandates for change aligned to business objectives. Being temporary structures does not mean being any less important than permanent departments or services. Rather, it underlines the skills, passion, creativity and professionalism needed for them to create the desired impact and long-term legacy.

Adherents of Managing Successful Programmes might naturally construct strategy planning & delivery through portfolios and programme tranches. Continuous improvement is supposed to be gathered throughout the delivery of programmes & projects through the management of risk and of knowledge. Lessons learned is meant to be a progressive activity throughout the initiative and especially after completion.

Recognising the complementarity and interconnectivity of practice between strategic planning and portfolio & programme delivery helps in shaping assurance work. Having experience of both definitely does. Assurance is concerned with supporting sponsors of these initiatives in proactively identifying risk potential in order to enhance the chances of programme & project success in terms of being to time, in budget, at quality and realising intended benefits. Assurance practice can and should also be as a form of continuous improvement.

As a newbie to the practice of assurance and its code of conduct (image below, covered in another post a few months back), there's nothing that beats turning concept into practice. Here the ideals of assurance come up against the reality of all the stresses and strains of programme & project delivery - where so much of the quality of conversation and feedback relies on preparation and good use of lenses or frameworks of approach.

Shaping a code of conduct from the background reading I did came from a deep recognition that success from delivering programmes, projects and business objectives ultimately ties back to the people involved. In contributing to continuous improvement for project success, assurance bumps into the behavioural aspects of how best to engage with the people involved across the range of roles they may hold for a portfolio or programme as well as, for many, roles they may hold 'within the business'.

Assurance as a potential use case for BeSci

This is where the 'Ahhh-Ha!' moments came in reading "The Dynamics of Business Behaviour". It wasn't something expected since getting the book came from noticing conversations about behavioural science through LinkedIn, and getting curious about whether knowing more would lend a hand to assurance practice.

We can understand that delivering programmes and projects is often with multi-million pound budgets, sky-high expectations of benefits realisation, and super compressed use of time, money and other resources. (They can also be with woefully inadequate budgets, sky-high expectations, etc...) Being useful in assurance means being able to interact effectively with the governance processes and the aspirations and drivers of all those involved. And yet at the same time holding integrity in remaining independent, objective and supportive.

In some organisations that have more mature cultures for sponsorship, governance and delivery of portfolios and programmes, assurance may have a clearly mandated space for everyone to work with. In circumstances where this not quite so, assurance may need to soft launch or use influence and persuasion in being focused and progressive.

Behavioural science potentially offers assurance practice an extra tray in the paintbox for delivering assurance service value constructively, productively and incrementally. This would be in addition to the six change areas identified in "The Dynamics of Business Behaviour", reproducing here as:

1. Planning and risk management: How to plan the change and balance risk with innovation
2. Narrative and communication: How to structure your change narrative and communicate
3. Leadership support: How leaders can effectively drive and support change
4. Measuring change: How to set good metrics and measure true progress
5. Stakeholder engagement: How to engage stakeholders in a human-centric way
6. Learning and development: How to facilitate continuous learning and development

In truth, assurance should be concerned with many if not all of these six areas as well insofar as they impact on portfolio, programme and project success. Assurance starts with assessing the risk potential of a programme or project. Indicators for initiating assurance activities will vary according to the risk potential profile, but examples are:

• complex and risky projects
• budget, schedule or status concerns
• significant transactions or organisational transformations
• progress in realisation of benefits
• merger synergies
• overall portfolio, programme and project risk
• compliance or regulatory initiatives
• unskilled workforce

In tailoring assurance activities to portfolio & programme needs, higher risk & higher complexity projects ought in theory to attract more rigorous assurance. The time focus also influences the approach taken. For example, assurance conducted at a planning stage of a portfolio, programme or project relies on assurers' experience to foreshadow risk and implications for the future. Conducted during implementation relies on uncovering the actual risks faced by the initiative in the present. Conducting assurance after the transition of activities to 'the business' relies on observing compliance to standards, procedures and practices executed in the past.

Whether through deep dives, health checks, risk register reviews, or other assurance activities at different points in time, it is essential to gain information and insight in open, honest and forthcoming ways from those involved. Equally important however for the assurance paintbox is the means to be self-aware, objective and constructively sceptical of what is shared, by whom, how, when and why. The BeSci lens can help with the optics.

Planning and conducting assurance can sometimes cut across a number of different disciplines both within a programme or project and within 'the business', all with their differing pressures, priorities, philosophies and practices. Tailoring and adapting assurance approaches without losing rigour calls for pragmatism and strong empathy. After all, the aim is to give time-poor sponsors the sufficiency of assurance they need, quickly.

Nuggets from the book

Use cases

"The Dynamics of Business Behaviour" identifies a range of use cases for behavioural science:

1. Business strategy - offering insight into human motivation and behaviour 'to anticipate potential roadblocks and biases'.
2. Marketing and consumer behaviour - offering understanding into 'customer preferences, decision-making processes, and shopping behaviours'.
3. Product design and user experience - helping to understand how 'users interact with a product and what drives their behaviours'.
4. Finance and risk management - bringing in 'the influence of cognitive biases, emotions, and other nonrational factors on human decision-making'.
5. Human resources - to help foster 'organisational insight (people, teams, culture) across diverse HR contexts' through various means.
6. Organisational change - offering 'evidence-based interventions to facilitate change management.'

Recurring challenges

The authors discuss their findings about a broad range of recurring challenges in managing organisational change:

• Change fatigue, arising as an impact of continuous turmoil or change saturation (defined as 'the situation that arises when the number and intensity of changes exceed the capacity of your people to adopt them').
• Reinforcing change, which the book says calls for 'grit, a combination of passion and perseverance'.
• Implementing change, seen to come down to issues regarding time for doing the right things, capacity of stakeholders, timeliness, and prioritisation.
• Making time for reflection, stressing 'the importance of learning agility among change leaders, the ability to reflect, seek feedback, and learn from errors'.
• Prioritising change management not as a 'nice to have' but as a key responsibility and with early involvement in its planning.
• Balancing short-term and long-term change, with flexible approaches and speed being key, and where 'people want to work in a dynamic environment but [not] want their work to become too dynamic.'

Essential BeSci concepts

The authors summarise three core concepts from BeSci research that are used to explain human behaviour as well as 'provide actionable insights for designing impactful interventions during change management':

1. Bounded rationality and dual processing, which is the idea that the human brain has limitations when it comes to judgement and decision-making. To get round the problem of finite cognitive resource, our brains deploy two systems of thinking. System 1 is fast, instinctive and automatic; 'intuitive' thinking. System 2 is slow, deliberate and needs conscious effort; 'reflective' thinking. Understanding this dual processing can inform the design of change interventions to make them more effective and easier to adopt.
2. Cognitive biases which are 'systemic patterns or blind spots in our thinking that emerge primarily from our reliance on system 1'. The 'loss aversion' bias is our tendency to prefer avoiding losses (especially in the near term) over acquiring equivalent gains (especially over the longer term). 'When you know how to look for it, [the bias] is everywhere'. The 'confirmation bias' is our tendency to see new evidence as confirmation of our existing beliefs and to discount evidence that says otherwise. 'It's quite easy to spot in others, but often impossible to catch in ourselves'. The 'anchoring effect' causes us to rely too heavily on an initial piece of information ('the anchor') when making decisions. Knowing about cognitive biases is one thing; putting that knowledge to use dynamically to understand human behaviour is another (during in-person assurance work, for example).
3. Interventions, nudges and choice architecture have become more known in recent years, and refer to the ways in which we are 'gently' guided towards particular decisions or behaviours without seemingly restricting options. The 'default effect' leverages our tendency to stick with a preset option. 'Choice architecture' design the ways in which choices are presented to us to influence decision-making.

To be clear, the book offers much more than these gold nuggets which have been panned from the river for the purposes of glimpsing possibilities for assurance practice as a use case for BeSci. The authors further explain change management frameworks, behaviourally informed change management, and evidence-based change interventions before going in depth about eighteen interventions across the six change areas mentioned above.

The book is an invaluable resource in this context of assurance. In their discussion about the 'planning and risk management' change area for example, they cover three evidence-based interventions to help with more 'realistic planning, better risk governance and mitigation, and improved ownership and accountability by mitigating bias'. These are: (i) 'premortem' scenario envisioning of extreme failure or success to retrospectively identify reasons for these; (ii) 'reference-class forecasting' that uses 'data from similar past projects to forecast the potential outcomes and risks of your current or upcoming change project'; and (iii) 'whole systems in the room' collaborative event with all stakeholders to co-create a change process, enabling diverse perspectives and fostering shared ownership.

In discussing these evidence-based interventions and how to use them, the authors add to the cognitive biases mentioned above:

• Planning fallacy where we 'underestimate the time, resources, and difficulty required to complete a project' resulting in 'unrealistic timelines, inadequate resource allocation, and a lack of contingency planning'.
• Optimism bias where we 'over-estimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes'.
• Groupthink in which individuals conform to the opinions of the group rather than considering alternative and diverse perspectives, which can lead to a false sense of unanimity that often leads to poor decision-making. [It's worth linking this to social psychological theories of social influence and social cognition, for example the impact of power, attractiveness and trustworthiness in persuasion dynamics; the structure and presentation of 'argument'; the characteristics of the audience such as self-esteem and prior experience; and much more besides.]
• Hindsight bias where we come to believe, 'after an event has occurred, that we predicted or could have predicted the outcome' and this, in turn, can prevent us from learning from mistakes.
• Availability heuristic where we rely on immediate examples when evaluating a specific topic, concept or decision.

Many of these biases will probably be instantly recognisable to those faced with working out what the heck happened in one meeting or another that resulted in this decision or that outcome.

In their discussion about the leadership support change area, we learn about three evidence-based interventions: If-Then Planning, Re-anchoring, and Gradual escalation of commitment. The common biases prevalent in this change area would appear to be the status quo bias ('if it ain't broke, don't fix it' mindset), the availability heuristic as explained before, and the sunk cost fallacy which is not a cognitive bias strictly speaking but a logical fallacy. These interventions could be especially useful for assurance practitioners when it comes to advising sponsors of their own contribution or not to portfolio, programme and project success.

Take aways for assurance practice

The opportunity presented by having this book - along with resources from other sources too - is to take inspiration from the discussion of the eighteen interventions across the six change area in order to create take-aways for assurance practice. As many who might be seduced by the apparent 'common sense' of social psychology have come to realise, there will be considerable nuance and context to attend to when exploring the value of BeSci for assurance practice. This covers activities such as risk potential assessments, deep dives, gated reviews, 'go live' reviews, post-implementation or lessons learned reviews, health checks, maturity assessments of portfolio, programmes or PMOs, and observing board meetings to advise sponsors.

Being more informed and equipped with BeSci insights and evidence-based interventions should enhance assurance practice in ways that bring out more explicitly what might otherwise just be left to the (not infallible) judgement and (not totally unfiltered) experience of the assurer. Building in BeSci insights into assurance helps recognise the impact of the people aspect in the planning and delivery of business objectives, portfolios and programmes. Examples of areas to look at could include:

• how business cases frame the argument; or
• how commercial strategy is determined and tenders awarded; or
• board decision-making in differing stages of a programme or project; or
• requirements gathering and presentation of solutions for acceptance sign-off; or
• resourcing and cost estimation; or
• benefits identification and approaches to their realisation; or
• risk identification, mitigation and reporting;

and much more besides. In all and any of these, an assurer will (or should) have already adapted an assurance plan to align with the chosen delivery method (waterfall, agile, etc; Managing Successful Programmes, APM, PRINCE2, RIBA Plan of Work, others and bespoke adaptations of any of these). BeSci presents fresh opportunity to revisit assurance planning for all of these adaptations and try out some of the BeSci paintbox.

There is also the atmosphere of change within a portfolio, programme or project and how change dynamics are managed for those hell-bent on delivering an agreed change initiative but may have to shift course, or pause to digest the impact of new information on project success. Assurance needs to pay attention to this as well, and therefore to be sufficiently aware of change management practices and BeSci insights to comment effectively on how shifts in the project environment need to be handled to manage risk potential for project success.

These are just some of the areas to explore in learning about the use of BeSci as a lens for enhancing the value of assurance service to organisational change management and continuous improvement. This may be in the context of portfolios & programmes per se or, in demonstrating versatility of approach, in the context of assuring approaches and progress with business objectives being delivered within the cyclical process of strategic planning. Much to do!

Vote of appreciation

With many thanks to Beirem Ben Barrah and Philip Jordanov, the authors of "The Dynamics of Business Behaviour: An evidence-based approach to managing organisational change", for inadvertently diverting attention to the possibilities of assurance practice as a use case for BeSci.

And to you too, the reader, if you got this far. Hope this little trip has been worth it.