Behavioral Change

When someone says to you, “You need to __________.” or, “Everyone should ________.” How do you typically react? Do you have a typical response that easily works the “F” word into it? That’s probably the reason that those who wish to impose behavior modification rarely accomplish anything. It’s true for individuals and organizations.?

Behavior modification goes back over 120 years to American psychologist Edward Thorndike who studied how “satisfying” and “annoying” consequences, which we now call reinforcement and punishment, affect changing behavior. Later, the more famous B.F. Skinner found he could train rats to press a mechanism to get food. Rats did this because, well, they needed to eat.?

For individuals, these ideas fall under the rubric of “behavioral change” or, in organizations, it’s called “culture change.” Either individually or organizationally, it usually fails. One current example of the latter is FDA’s food failures. Despite recent food safety Congressional hearings and increases in funding, FDA’s food Center now stands accused of being a large, slow organization.?

It’s not just food safety. In public health, we know that “unhealthy behavior is responsible for much of human disease, and a common goal of contemporary preventive medicine is therefore to encourage behavior change.” For food, we have had the Dietary Guidelines for over 40 years and food labels and the Food Guide Pyramid (now MyPlate) for over 30 years. In 1980, when we got the first advice on how we should eat from the Dietary Guidelines, 13% of Americans were obese. Today, it is 42%. By 2030, 50% of all Americans are expected to be obese. Among other issues, infant mortality increases when babies are born to obese mothers and the mothers themselves are more likely to die. This is illustrative of how difficult behavioral change is because the people most likely to change their behaviors are pregnant women who are concerned about how their habits can affect their potential child. The federal dietary tools are all about behavior change and they have failed.

Does behavior change work when applied to organizations? Sometimes, but only about 30 percent of the time. It clearly depends on what type of organization we are talking about and under what circumstances. For-profit companies need to change their culture, i.e., their behavior, when their profits fall because, if they don’t change, they go out of business. One example forcing companies to change is when technologies bypass them, and they have become too arthritic and rigid. Others may feel the pressure to change because they have come under attack for being too big and too powerful.?

For example, Netflix is currently showing, “The Playlist,” that talks about how, following Pirate Bay, Spotify created “free music” streaming that put the big, inflexible record companies in a position where they had to change or go out of business. Interestingly, eventually Spotify was attacked because it was big, powerful and inflexible.?

The adjective “big” is often used in a pejorative sense such as in “big government,” “big pharma,” “big business,” “big media,” “big tobacco,” “big unions” and “big bureaucracy.” One of the reasons we don’t like big institutions is because they exhibit monopoly power, something Americans have hated since its inception.

And that brings us back to a big, powerful and inflexible institution, the Food and Drug Administration – in particular their food center, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Because of the on-going failures in infant formula, nutrition (obesity) and food safety, many, including Congress, are beginning to question whether FDA’s food program needs massive changes. The behavioral change needed to make it more responsive to new market conditions, consumer nutrition issues and new food technologies are not being addressed.

For profit companies, when faced with fundamental challenges, will cast off unprofitable divisions, change their products or find ways to increase their value. These types of moves will drive changes in their culture, or they will fail. Instead, comically, FDA has decided to reorganize its senior management.

This will almost guarantee that FDA’s long standing culture and regulatory programs remain intact. Nevertheless, as new food-related markets emerge and FDA falls further behind, we will see if this 117-year old organization continues to exist.

---

To learn more, go to?richardawilliams.com?and?sign up?for weekly posts.