Brain Science: Can Training Change Your Corporate Culture?

Competitive companies need toadapt to circumstances and quickly change their organization so that it remainscompetitive. Once the executive team decides to make an organizational change, it’sup to you and your training department to make it happen. For example, let’ssay your executive team decides that, to meet the needs of millennialemployees, tenured supervisors need to begin using consensus decision-makingtechniques.

Now it is up to you. Where doyou start? How do you create a program that is going to change behavior andmake managers more likely to seek agreement among stakeholders?

By our nature, trainingorganizations are focused on teaching and learning, and so our first instinctwill be to develop an educational initiative. You’d probably start with a setof measurable learning objectives, then author a training program, and finallyget it vetted by the stakeholders. After deploying the training program, I hopeyou then deliver a comprehensive after-training program that will reinforce retention of the material.

But at the risk of being flamedoff of this website, let me ask a scandalous question or two. What are the oddsthat the training program will succeed at changing behavior? Put another way, “Doeseducation matter?” If your goal is to get people to behave in new ways, isteaching them new information really going to get them to behave in the way youwant?

Doeseducation create behavior change?

The evidence for a relationshipbetween training and behavior change is, by and large, not encouraging. Forexample, the anti-smoking campaigns of the 1960s and ’70s sought to teachAmericans the link between smoking and cancer. It worked; eventually Americansclearly understood the link. But they kept right on smoking.

When the HIV pandemic hitSouthern Africa, the first intervention programs were focused on helping peopleunderstand the indisputable link between certain sexual practices and deadlyinfection. Millions of dollars were spent and people learned the links. Buttheir risky behavior did not change.

Recently in the United States,the 5 A Day fruit and vegetable initiative explained to modern Americans howadjusting our diet in small ways would lead to a longer and leaner life.Follow-up surveys proved that citizens learned the information (Kirkpatrick’slevel 2). Unfortunately, their behavior remained stubbornly unchanged.

So now what? If your proposededucation program cannot produce behavior change, what else can you do?

Over the next few months, I am going to look back at research projectsexploring the most effective ways to change human behavior. We begin with my favoriteprogram which was conducted between 1943 and 1945 and is known collectively asthe sweetbread studies.

Wouldyou eat sweetbreads?

During the Second World War,Americans were exporting massive quantities of meat to soldiers and alliesoverseas. In turn, the US government needed Americans at home to begin eatingother available protein sources which, until then, had been consideredunsavory. These so-called sweetbreadsincluded the throat, gullet, heart, stomach, ears, tongue, and even testicles ofsheep, cows, and pigs.

Americans were reluctant to eatthese foods not only because they seemed unsavory, but also because even duringthe recent depression, these cuts had been eaten only by the poorest of people.

Weneed a committee

Anticipating a long war, the USgovernment was concerned about the nutritional integrity of the country. Specifically,they wanted Americans to eat all available food sources because, as former presidentHerbert Hoover argued, “Meats and fats are just as much munitions in this waras are tanks and aeroplanes.”

As governments often do whenthey need action, they appointed a committee. The good news for America wasthat this “Committee on Food Habits” was headed by the brilliant andcontroversial anthropologist Margaret Mead and the equally brilliant socialpsychologist Kurt Lewin (Figure 1). Their task: convince Americans to adjusttheir food habits and consume more sweetbreads.

Figure 1: MargaretMead and Kurt Lewin

Over the next two years, thecommittee inspired research that provides intriguing insights into what doesand does not cause groups of people to change their behavior.

Keyfindings of the Sweetbread studies

The committee sponsoredhundreds of research projects using dozens of research protocols, all aimed atchanging American attitudes, tastes, and behaviors. The research came to threeimportant conclusions.

You need to provideincentive systems.

Their most obvious finding wasthat people are far more likely to comply when you provide them withincentives. These incentives can be extrinsic rewards (such as monetaryrewards), or intrinsic rewards such as convincing people that their actions arecontributing to a patriotic cause.

You need to overcomeobstacles.

Second, Lewin stressed that weneed to identify obstacles that may prevent the social gatekeepers (the peoplewho really make the decisions) from changing their behavior. Through a seriesof interviews, Lewin determined that housewives (and not their husbands)actually decided what foods were consumed by families. He also discovered thatthree principal obstacles prevented these women from adopting sweetbreads: (a)they believed it was not appropriate, (b) they believed it would taste bad, and(c) they did not know how to prepare them. His team then provided training thatwas designed to help the women overcome each of these obstacles (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Researchers found that women were the gatekeepersof the dinner table

You need to let peoplediscuss their options.

Finally, Lewin compared theeffect of educating gatekeepers using a lecture-style versus adiscussion-decision method. In the former method, the women were told about howthey could overcome their obstacles. In the latter, the women had theopportunity to discuss their options and decide among themselves whether or notto adopt it.

The results of this studyaffirmed the results discussed earlier, that education alone produces littlebehavior change. Indeed, the discussion-decision method produced five timesgreater participation in the program than the lecture style. Researchers havesuggested that the discussion-decision method produced more long term changebecause it involves more active behavior and more public commitment than thepassive lecture style.

Behaviorchange in the modern corporation

The findings from the Committeeon Eating Habits are as valid today as they were 70 years ago. Sadly, however,most of our corporate behavior change initiatives continue to make the samemistakes over and over. For example, in spite of the evidence, we continue to:

• Assume thateducation alone will create behavior change
• Ignore the roleof incentives to produce productive behaviors
• Fail to identifyand remove obstacles
• Fail to letpeople discuss and publicly commit to a program of action

Why have we failed to take thisresearch more seriously? One reason is that the research we are discussing hereis not well known. When the war came to an end, much of the data was sealedaway within the Department of Defense. It was not until recently thatscientists and journalists have used the Freedom of Information Act to retrievemany of these findings.

A more important reason is thatwe play to our strengths and use the tools that are familiar to us. Trainingdepartments provide, well, training. We limit ourselves and think first aboutinstructional design and lesson plans. But if we want to fulfill a largercorporate function, we need to learn more about the science of behavior changeand thereby position ourselves to become the critical agent for change withinour organizations.

In future months, we will lookat other studies which have shown us how to fundamentally change beliefs,organizational norms, and social behavior.

Digging deeper

• If you would liketo have your memory of this article reinforced, send an email to ELGG [email protected]. You will automatically receive a series of boosters onthis article. The boosters take only seconds to complete, and they will profoundly increase your ability to recall the content of this article.

• If you want to know more about the psychology of food,be sure to visit the food-psychology group at Cornell University which is full of interesting ideas and information.While you are there, have a look at this article by Brian Wansink which does a great job of summarizingmuch of the research discussed in this column.