Thought Leader Interview: Dilip Soman
You have said that every organization is fundamentally in the same business. Please explain.
Whether it be a for-profit business or a government agency, every enterprise is in the business of behaviour change. In each case there is a collection of individuals interacting with other individuals with a particular goal in mind. It could be a sales team dealing with external customers to sell a product or service; HR managers dealing with an employee base to optimize productivity; or a CFO dealing with shareholder concerns. All of these interactions involve some form of desired behaviour change.
Some scholars have focused on the persuasion aspects of changing behaviour, but I would argue that what we are really doing is helping people get things done and make welfare-enhancing decisions more easily. Once you accept this, understanding human behaviour moves to the forefront of your challenge. And in many cases, time is of the essence, because we want people to do things sooner rather than later. We want them to open a retirement account before it’s too late; we want them to switch to a healthy diet before it’s too late; and we want them to make environmentally friendly choices today. Within organizations, the challenge is the same. Maybe you want your employees to be more productive, more efficient or more inclusive — and the sooner the better.
The problem is, even when people want to do something, they often don’t do it. Describe how the ‘intention-action gap’ gets in the way of behaviour change.
This is one of the most robust phenomena from the behavioural research, and it is true of individuals as well as organizations. The basic idea is that we often don’t do what we intend to do, and this happens for a number of reasons. and his co-author boil it down to the dichotomy between the and the within each of us. They argue that each of us has
