‘Carrots & Sticks’ For Better Behaviour — and Can We Use Them for Women’s Rights?

“We need to explain it to them.”

“If they only knew the facts, they’d support it.”

“We have to improve our communication and do more of it.”

“What’s a good ad campaign cost?”

Most people working in corporations, public administration, politics and elsewhere have heard some form of the above words at some point from some boss or colleague. Somebody gets frustrated that an idea, proposal or policy isn’t gaining traction among audiences — be it a workforce, a constituency or a supply chain — and then they decide it’s about what and how much is being communicated.

So, they crank up the volume. Usually using some internally accepted fact set and untested arguments, they pump out more emails, more ‘town halls’, more collateral, more ‘mar-comms’, more advertising. more marginal seat visits, or whatever the means might be. A colleague likens this to ‘volume shooting’ in basketball — that the more shots you take, the more you will inevitably sink.

What a load of bollocks. What a waste of time, money and effort. Just like that NBA guy, hogging the ball doesn’t usually make your team win, it just makes you a ball hog that everybody else resents.

It’s amazing how many business and political leaders never ask themselves or those around them the question: what best helps to honestly influence the attitudes and behaviours of the people that are important to us? In other words, what’s our ‘theory of change’?

I have used several in a variety of different leadership situations. One that I always come back to is Dr Doug Mackenzie-Mohr’s ‘community-based social marketing’(CBSM) framework. (It was awesome to bring Doug, a Canadian behavioural psychologist specialising in governments’ environmental change programs, to Australia for the first time some 20 years ago.)

Doug’s stuff is great partly because it takes the complex — human behaviour — and provides a simple, evidenced-based set of tools for coping with it. For the sake of 700 or so words that don’t do him justice, here it comes:

If you want to influence what people do, make the new behaviour easier and make the old behaviour harder.

Or put another way, behavioural change happens when we change the mix of drivers toward the new behaviour and barriers against the old behaviour.

Or yet another way, carrots and sticks.

Want people to use less household water? Carrot: Give away water-saving shower heads and subsidise rainwater tanks. Stick: Show that water prices must come up if we don’t do a better job with conservation.

Want people to pay their taxes and reduce enforcement costs? Carrot: Set up monthly direct deposit capabilities for smaller but regular amounts. Stick: Threaten to audit their expenditure.

And, let’s use nudges, hints, prompts etc to remind people of both what’s on offer and what the consequences are for not taking it.

This is such blindingly obvious stuff that it often amazes me how little of it we practice in running or discussing things at the highest levels. Perhaps, because it takes some empathy and nuance in understanding how people feel and think, and having the ability to see that our colleagues and neighbours are not one-dimensional beings. That they are necessarily not just ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or ‘allies’ and ‘opponents’ when it comes to their emotions, thoughts and choices.

Indeed, when you see or hear broad generalisations about a group’s behaviour — say Somali teenagers in Melbourne — it’s usually because somebody’s scoring some self-interested point — rather than being interested in genuine change and improvement.

Here’s a contemporary and maybe controversial example: the behaviour of boys and men in relation to girls and women, which is appropriately under intense debate right now. As you sift through all the commentary, look for this:

· Is it a sweeping statement that lumps all men and boys together or does it distinguish?

· Does the view expressed allow for other factors besides gender — say porn culture or historical legacies — to explain behaviour?

· Does it offer solutions beyond ‘men have to change’?

If we genuinely want girls and women to be fully respected and fully equal in this society, we need more than a (fully understandable) call to arms and anger at past traumas and tragedies, as painful as they are. We need an open-minded approach to reorganising the ‘benefits’ and ‘consequences’ around sexual / gender views and behaviours.