Habits for Change: Knowing biases that resists change
Welcome to habits for change.
Change is essential for personal growth and business success. The Businesses and as individuals who can adapt to the change can evolve are more likely to thrive.
Yet, instilling change, whether in oneself or in others, is rarely straightforward. And this resistance often stems from how our brains are wired!
Anyone trying to promote new initiatives at work, would have experienced that there will be always section of people who express resistance to change! Even with clear evidence that current practices are ineffective, some employees resist changing their routines.
This resistance is often due to ingrained biases in our decision-making processes.
In this edition let's explore some of the biases that resists change and also one powerful persuasion principle that can be used to drive change!
Strategies to Influence Change To effectively instigate change, we can approach it from two angles:
Studies have shown that heuristic or shortcut method is what our human mind is habituated when it comes making decisions and though reasoning is very essential, it has far lesser influencing power in many of our decisions.
Addressing the biases
Let's discuss the biases that require us to adopt shortcuts to drive decisions!
Human like any other animal are creatures of habit, and ones habit is formed, it is difficult to break.
In the area of businesses, Psychologists and behavioural scientists attribute this to status quo bias.
People are wedded to what they’re already doing. The status quo.
With the status quo bias, another bias kicks in and that is endowment effect!
Once we have something used to, we're endowed with it, we start to become attached to it. And consequently, we value it more.
Studies have shown home owners inspite having enough data from the market, still value their homes much higher than market rates.
I remember when I was looking for a used car, was meeting many sellers and one particular seller stood out. He quoted me a price that was almost 50% higher that similar model cars in the market..
When I showed him prices of similar model, he said he doesn't care what others quote and finds his car value worth what he has quoted!!
Especially in businesses, if employees are used to any process or tools asking them to switch to newer solution is faced with resistance! To overcome resistance the new solutions must be shown up to 2.6X to 4X improvement in time, effort saved!
Ways to tackle status quo and endowment effect?
The most significant study in psychology of decision making is, loss aversion.
People are like to make decision when the potential to lose something they already have is much higher than gaining something of what they don't have!
Here is an interesting study done for energy saving company in UK.
The 2 types of message were tested,
2. You stop losing $1, for every unit of energy saved.
Though both the messages convey the same results, psychologically they impact in much different way.
Studies showed the 2nd message had 150% more conversions than 1st message because people don't want feel to lose what they have!
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If you have new innovative solution and you meet a client, at the end instead of saying only how your solution can benefit, highlighting how lack of your solution is costing them millions of lost money and will continue to do so, will trigger faster decision.
The power of social proof - overcome uncertainty
Uncertainty is a significant barrier to decision-making.
If the change initiative proposed is one of adopting new behaviours, routines, then uncertainty kicks in and this forms resistance to change.
To the uncertain mind it is seeking confirmations!
The best way to get confirmation is to look for who are similar to them already tried this, or who similar to them have benefited from this!
This is where providing enough social proof is critical.
In brief,
"when people are uncertain about a course of action, they tend to look outside themselves and to other people around them to guide what they do."
To take just one, in an experiment conducted by research scientist Stanley Milgram and colleagues,
An assistant of the researchers stopped on a busy New York City pavement and gazed skyward for 60 seconds. Most passers-by simply walked around the man without even glancing to see what he was looking at.
When the researchers added four more men to that group of sky gazers, however, the number of passers-by who joined them more than quadrupled.
How leaders can use social proof
Here is what Dr. Robert Cialdini suggests for leaders who like to drive changes to adopt social proof,
And if you’re a leader or a manager attempting to persuade employees to embrace a new system, instead of only explaining how well the system is and all the features, benefits,
You should ask for a testimonial from others within the same department who have already agreed to make the switch.
But what if you’ve tried that, yet you still have one stubborn employee – perhaps the person who has been working with the older system the longest – whom you still can’t win over?
A common mistake managers might make in such a case would be to choose the most eloquent co-worker to try to explain the benefits to his or her stubborn colleague, even if he or she is completely different from that person in a number of important ways.
Instead, the manager’s best bet would probably be to solicit the opinions of a similar co-worker – perhaps someone else who had also been working under the system for a long time – even if that person happened to be somewhat less articulate or popular.
Creating need for change
Selling is not just about showcasing product features or benefits. It’s about creating the need for change.
When potential buyers are indifferent to your solutions, the focus should shift from promoting the product to highlighting the necessity and urgency of change.
instead of looking it as buyer not happy with my product features or price, it is important to shift the focus on how do we create a need for change?
To buyers who are yet to feel need for change, explaining your solution is waste of effort. Only after buyer has made up mind to change and willing to explore, sharing information and how it compares to others solutions becomes relevant.
So having an idea of how much behaviour change your solution requires, helps you know drive the efforts to influence the change.
Finally,
If you have read this far and want learn more on how to apply this knowledge in your career, business, then join my free 5 day persuasion crash course - 5 video lessons to help you learn and persuade others using the science of persuasion!