🌿🧭🌳 OD25: Applying behavioral insights in strategy ∙ What if we don't accept surveillance software? ∙ OD goodies
Join 4,000+ others who get our bi-weekly Strategy & Organization resources on Business Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development and adjacent fields like Change ∙ Foresight ∙ Complexity ∙ Leadership and others.
1. Applying behavioral insights in strategy
First pick this week is the D.R.I.V.E. framework created by Affective, a behavioral consultancy. We discovered the framework via the Habit Weekly newsletter and we chose to feature it because it's easy to understand and to explain.
It also connects two important organizational topics: strategy and behavior change.
Here are some snapshots:
The "prism" has 3 dimensions:
4 behavioral levers: triggers, motivation, capability, feedback
2 cognitive levels: Kahneman's system 1 and system 2
2 implementation levers: adding enablers and removing blockers
If this short intro made you curious, you can read the detailed description of the D.R.I.V.E. framework here:
Some of the organizations that we work with have started creating their own change frameworks that inevitably cover behavioral aspects. We're happy to see that applied behavioral science is starting to be part of the conversations and decisions of leadership teams. At the same time, we feel that ethics is not addressed very often.
That's why the second pick of this edition talks about the management trap of treating employees like prisoners.
What if we don’t accept surveillance software?
John Dobbin wrote an insightful article titled “How to treat employees like prisoners”. It describes a phenomenon that goes against our values and that’s rapidly expanding across the globe.
The pandemic is creating a small boon for employee monitoring companies. It seems that a lot of managers are deploying surveillance solutions to crack down on ‘time-thieving’ remote workers. They are also generating an unwarranted climate of oppression.
This climate of oppression is then compared to being trapped in a digital prison:
In the 18th century, utilitarianist Jeremy Bentham designed the 'ideal prison': the Panopticon. It was a doughnut-shaped building with a single guard tower in the centre. Each prison cell had a cage facing the centre so the guards could easily observe the prisoners, with zero privacy, without interruption.
Boundary control, the various ways in which managers cajole, encourage, coerce, or otherwise influence the amount of time employees physically spend in the workplace, has been a longstanding management topic. Traditional methods focused on ensuring physical presence through various rules, devices and norms.
But with digital surveillance, organizations exert boundary control by shaping an individual’s moment-by-moment attention.
The panopticon is complete: there is no private space, physical or mental, in which the employee is not subjected to the gaze and judgment of their superior.
What if we don’t (silently) accept this becoming the new status quo?
OD Goodies
Curious about more resources on leading organizations?
Here’s a section with very short descriptions and links.
The NOBL team has launched Work of Fiction, a podcast that analyzes the culture of fictional organizations. Here's the episode that looks at Monsters Inc's culture.
Anthony Mersino has put together an overview of approaches to scale Agile in organizations, based on several global surveys. Looks like there's a lot of soul searching in the scaling Agile space.
Speaking of soul searching, OD has its own share. Graziadio Business School wonders whether OD is living up to its promise of being fully integrated and system-wide.
We found the Graziadio article via Paul Thoresen, who chairs the Minnesota OD Network. MNODN is publishing an excellent OD newsletter, which we recommend wholeheartedly.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as OD Advisers to high performing cross-functional teams, guiding strategy execution and increasing team effectiveness in complex and uncertain contexts.