🌿🧭🌳 OD09: Transitioning to working remotely ∙ Behavior change ∙ Tweet for Thought ∙ A new lens for understanding risks
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Foreword
Given the current uncertainty context across the globe, the value that we aim to bring through this newsletter is by sharing some practical ideas that could help ”clear the fog” around some organizational aspects that matter during this period:
what are some important points to consider when an organization starts to work remote
how can behavior change be supported in the whole organization
the importance of trust during a (possible) crisis
how to manage risks better
If there is any specific topic that you’d like us to cover in a future edition of the newsletter, just hit reply and share it with us. We’ll do our best to address it, with clear ideas and practical tools that you can use with your team.
Transitioning to working remotely
The NOBL team has created a practical guideline for organizations that are starting to work remotely. We recommend it for the clarity of structure & brevity.
Practical ideas
If you are leading an organization going through this transition these days, you probably got most of these points covered. We recommend going through the article to see if there’s any useful thing to add to your current approach.
If you are leading a local strategic initiative and most of the team has started working remotely, you could pay special attention to: clear purpose, collaboration, transparency, quick training in collaborating remotely, shared rhythms and rituals in your team and also making digital norms/agreements explicit.
The upside is that this experience will help your team members become better at leading/contributing to global strategic initiatives.
Behavior change
Michael Hallsworth, who leads the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) in US, has put together many behavioral science considerations around carrying out an unexceptional behavior: washing hands.
Context: BIT generates and applies behavioral insights to inform better public policies.
There’s much to learn and apply in the private sector as well, especially around encouraging desired behaviors at work.
Key takeaways
It’s useful to understand the physical and mental barriers people face in regards to the behavior, rather than lecturing them that doing it is right.
Tweak the environment to make it as easy as possible to do the new behavior.
Build new habits by linking the new behavior to existing, recurring ones.
Tweet for Thought
A new lens for understanding risks
A new concept that we discovered by studying the references in the behavior change article shared above is about 3 kinds of risks, based on the associated uncertainty level.
Below you can find a screenshot from the reference paper, a couple of practical ideas and the definitions of the different risks.
Practical ideas
If you are leading an organization, consider including a discussion about the types of risks that your organization faces when you revise your strategy and strategic plan.
Besides the risks that your team perceives directly, are there any risks that the management/organization scholars have uncovered with their research? How do you approach virtual risks?
If you are leading a strategic initiative, you could consider these 3 types of risks as an additional dimension to the impact/probability matrix.
If there are risks around your initiative that are worth managing actively based on impact x probability, how many of them are virtual risks? What’s the evidence that those risks could materialize as part of your initiative?
Directly perceptible risks
are managed instinctively and intuitively.
the ability to deal with them successfully has been built into us by evolution.
we seek to manage these risks ourselves.
we monitor our environment for signs of safety and danger and respond to what we see.
“We all duck if we see something about to hit us.”
“We do not undertake a formal quantitative risk assessment before we cross the street.”
Risks perceived through science
While directly perceptible risks are still mostly managed by individual perceivers, risks that can only be seen with the help of science usually have institutional risk managers.
Advancing science is routinely discovering risks invisible to the naked eye.
Risk is a close relation to uncertainty. Where we cannot be certain about the connection between cause and effect we clutch at the straw of probability.
“At present, for most illnesses we must content ourselves with probabilities. Ultimately, genetic science may be able to identify the causes of certain diseases precisely; we may be able to say with certainty who will, or will not, develop a particular illness. But difficulties in measuring exposures, ignorance about dose response relationships, and variability in human susceptibility will continue to make work for actuaries and epidemiologists who deal in probabilities, as will accidents that are the consequence of human fallibility or an unpredictable nature.”
Virtual risks
Here we can no longer pretend to sufficient knowledge to ascribe probabilities.
Virtual risks may or may not be real, but they have real consequences if sufficient numbers of people believe in them.
“When scientists admit to ignorance, or reputable scientists contend with each other in ways that mystify the rest of us, we are in the realm of virtual risks. They are liberating. If scientists cannot pronounce convincingly, we are freed to act upon our convictions, prejudices, and superstitions.”
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as Organizational Development Advisors, offering elegant guidance for implementing strategic initiatives in client organizations.