Sometimes all you need is a nudge to learn!!

Developing leaders at different levels who can help businesses cope with various disruptions is the top challenge before any learning and development professional today. The ever increasing demand on the learner’s time and creating a mind-set that learning is “important” and not just “urgent”, only accentuates this challenge. 

 Given the above perspective and the fact that we have a variety of learners, the challenges and opportunity areas for L&D professionals can be summarised as following:

 1. Catering to learners with different needs, business and role context, learning styles and varying comfort with technology.

2.  Delivering an “Unified” and “Consistent” experience to the learners

3.  Improving the overall learning effectiveness by ensuring transfer of learning to the actual workplace.

4.  Quantifying the ROI and hence demonstrating the value addition to stakeholders

 The contemporary research on adult learning has identified a few strategies to meet the above challenges. The four concepts which many L&D professional find as powerful and useful are:

-          “Learning in the flow of work”, as popularised by Josh Bersin in his 2018 article “A New Paradigm for Corporate Training : Learning in the Flow of Work”, highlights that an average employee only has 24 minutes a week for “formal training”, so informal “in-the-flow” of work is necessary for successful learning design

 -          Principle of “distributed practice”, also known as spaced practice is a learning strategy, where a practice is broken into a number of short sessions - over a longer period of time, with an attempt to enhance learning effectiveness (Reference - Work done by german psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and more recently Alan Baddeley and Longman in 1978)

 -          “Design thinking” as a process helps in creative problem solving with a human-centred core. It encourages focus on people they are creating the learning solution for, leading to better outcomes (Reference - The origin of design thinking partially lie in the development of creativity techniques in 1950s, but it was adapted for business purposes by Faste’s Standford colleague David M Kelly, who founded the design consultancy IDEO in 1991)

 -          “70:20:10 rule” of learning emphasises on using a 70-20-10 ratio in designing the pedagogy - challenging assignments to give on-the-job experiences (70%), developmental relationships/from other people (20%) and courseware or training (10%) (Reference – Center for Creative Leadership research)

 These four concepts establishes the fact that learning interventions have to be blended, byte sized and integrated with his / her work. It has to be designed keeping the learner at the centre, so that it gives the learner a freedom to choose the what, when and how to learn. The ultimate aim is to transition from a mandate, push based learning agenda to creating an ecosystem for the learner to be motivated enough to making learning a habit.   

Habit formation as we know through principles of classical conditioning is a behavioural shift which can be brought about through direct positive or negative reinforcements by deploying rewards and punishments. However, a more recent concept has been propagated that such a change can also be achieved through “Nudges”. This concept, was popularised in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” by two American scholars: economist Richard Thaler & the legal scholar Cass Sunstein. 

 “Nudge” as defined by Thaler & Sunstein, is any aspect of the “choice architecture” that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentive. Nudges are not mandates but a gentle push in the right direction, a little support, a bit of guidance – Putting a fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not! 

 This article makes an attempt to integrate the key principles of “Nudge” theory into designing the learning lifecycle of planning, delivery, transfer of learning and the overall learning experience.

-          “Anchoring”, described as a subconscious phenomenon, simply means our mind starts with something we know and adjusts in the direction one thinks is appropriate. Hence “Anchors” serve as nudges because we can influence the figure an individual will choose in a particular situation by suggesting a starting point for the thought process. 

 Leveraging it for L&D, since the first experience with a topic has a disproportionate impact on the future investments one makes on learning it, teasers (first association) or the launch itself should be highly enticing. Leadership insights, relevance to the learner, testimonials and data should be presented in a manner which clicks immediately with the learner. The key here too is - Well begun is definitely half done!

-          “Availability”, is referred to visibility or how commonly something is known to people as an indicator of trust. The psychological principle is that familiarity of something produces a perceived popularity and hence a basis of credibility.

 Hence as L&D professional, it will be worthwhile to invest due time and attention in making the courses and learning nuggets as visible & available in the learner’s ecosystem (in the flow of work). Timely, relevant & continuous communication will nudge the employee to a more positive disposition on perceiving that the recommended input as value enhancing. 

 -          “Optimism & Overconfidence” is a cognitive bias which makes people unrealistically optimistic consequently making them underestimate costs, timelines, complexity and level of difficulty in completing an activity. Latter it manifests in denial, complacency and ultimately giving up.

 Translating it to learning, an individual might over-estimate his / her ability to make time for learning amidst multiple priorities and unpredictable activities and urgencies. Thereby risking an under estimation of time commitment which could later hamper the course completion. Hence breaking a practice to byte size learning distributed over a period of time, blended into the flow of work and reinforced through post program application nuggets can prove to be more useful than one time, time consuming activity/project.

 -         “Status Quo & Mindlessness”, people generally fear change because of fear of error, embarrassment, rejection and uncertainty of outcome. They therefore try and maintain things in the current form resulting in inertia. Sometimes this could stem from sheer laziness , aversion to time consuming complexity. This may even manifest as a yeah-whatever heuristic leading to “mindless choice” or “a tick box attitude”. Research indicates that a default option will attract a large share and serve as a “powerful nudge” to overcome this bias.

 Hence for an L&D professional, firstly the way we leverage the “default” option will make a lot of difference. Things which we wish to promote, which have been evaluated to be highly effective, relevant and will create the maximum benefit should ideally be put forth as default choice. The second important element is bring in “simplicity” in design and delivery of the learning intervention. The idea here is to take away any type of friction that could stop your learners from accessing and completing your learning program. The elements of the platform architecture and its entire ecosystem (access, navigation, instructions, recommendations, communication videos, etc.,) should provide highly intuitive & seamless user interface & user experience.

 -          “Loss aversion” as explained by Thaler and Sunstein, is “roughly speaking, losing something makes one, twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy”. People tend to overvalue what the possess and hence resist to a disproportionate degree, losing something which they already possess in exchange of getting something of same or higher value. 

This can serve as a nudge-able opportunity when the L&D professional introduces, a learning opportunity as a “limited edition” or “exclusive offer” putting boundary conditions might evoke a sense of loss for not being able to avail the same. Or giving a learning budget which lapses after a certain period could trigger the same heightened sense of a lost opportunity. 

 -          “Social influence”, involves two sub categories first is information (if many people do /think something, their actions and thoughts convey information about what might be best for you to do/think). The second is peer pressure (humans are easily nudged by other humans because we like to conform and not face the disapproval of the group). This herd mentality can be harnessed for behaviour change. Studies have shown that if people see that the majority of people take a certain action in a particular situation, then they’re more likely to follow suit. 

Hence Social Nudges serve as Choice Architecture. Social learning platforms where identified cohorts of learners working on similar themes come together to share and learn from each other’s experiences leads to a broader learning for everyone. There is also an element of peer pressure which can be brought in through leaderboards to give that subtle nudge towards doing better or even course completion. Program recommendations works best when made by a cohort of people who a learner feels to be a part of.

-           “Priming” & “Feedback”, are two heuristics which can help people become open to understand their situation while making a choice, the former happens primarily before a choice is experienced while the latter can happen concurrent to an activity or post the activity for reflection. Both require skill as the process of bringing both the inputs to an individual as a nudge, necessitates understanding both at an intellectual and emotional level. 

Every L&D professional can effectively use both priming and feedback in either a self reflective / self-evaluative methods like psychometric tests, cognitive tests, functional knowledge tests where in the learner does get to realise the gap he / she wants to bridge. Feedback can be seamlessly embedded in the flow of work through performance metrics, appraisal discussion, career conversations, 360 degree feedback and many more such techniques which helps the learner set the course of his learning agenda.   

Capability building is an investment that every organisation makes and expects maximum return on these investments in a visible change of competencies and behaviours of the learner. At the same time we do understand that there is a generational diversity of learners each requiring a different stimuli to be motivated to learn and change. While “Nudge” stems from the study of Behavioral Economics, the application of the concept as we see can be made to learning and development function. It is hence an opportunity for us, the L&D professionals, to apply the principles of Nudge into the design architecture of our program design.