Embedding new ways of working from frontline to head of the organization

Due to confidentiality, the case study is at a high level with minimal visual artifacts.

TOOLKIT Service Design, Behavioral Design, Digital Design, Product + Project Management, Client Relationship Management, Program Evaluation

TEAM Behavioral Economist, Data Scientist

MY ROLE Created the concept, designed the interventions, co-created the measurement approach, led the team

Background

I lead a cross-functional behavioral design team for a program at McKinsey & Company that serves clients who are undergoing large-scale change. For example, a client undergoing a merger or rethinking ways of working after work-from-home became the new norm. The program's goal is to equip everyone in the company with the essential skills they need to execute the day-to-day. 

The skills cover areas such as giving feedback, running meetings, and assessing risk, which we implement through dozens of mediums to reach the entire client organization in a way that matters to them. We use behavioral economics, organisational psychology, behavioral design, and learning science to change and sustain these behaviors. At the end of the program, everyone from the head of the organization to the frontline uses the same language and works in similar ways. 

This Essential Skills project excites me because it is an application of behavioral & social science and design-for-good. This story from a frontline manager illustrates one of the program's impacts.

"I was in charge of making reports for a handful of people. I would come to work and wonder, 'why am I doing this?' it doesn't really matter. Then I learned about that Essential Skill about giving feedback. [The program] asked us to think about where to give feedback. These reports were the first thing I thought about.  

I was pretty nervous but I knew my coworkers had been taught these skills too so I thought they'd at least know where I was coming from. I just went and asked them 'what about these [reports] do you like? what don't you like?' It turns out the reports are actually pretty helpful. They even gave me some changes to make them even better. 

Now I come to work and feel confident that what I am doing matters."

- Frontline Manager

Challenge

The goal was to measurably and sustainably change behavior across the Essential Skills (e.g., giving feedback, running meetings, and assessing risk) outside of the typical program methods (i.e., workshop, digital course, communications plan). 

The key challenges were 1) sustaining behavior change for the long-term, once the bulk of the program was complete and doing so in a 2) scalable, 3) measurable way without disrupting the client experience to conduct testing.

Approach

Conducted initial research. 

The most fundamental challenge was creating sustainable change; without that we did not have a viable solution. To solve that challenge, I turned to both secondary behavioral & social science research and primary design research. I referenced a compendium of behavioral science research co-created with the behavioral economists on our team and our behavioral science advisor, Professor Francesca Gino from Harvard Business School. I also referenced research I conducted earlier in the project that showed embedding 'defaults' into existing systems was one of the most effective interventions for lasting change. An example of a 'default' is promoting shorter meetings by automatically setting all company meetings to 50 minutes instead of one hour. To round out the research, I held a brainstorming session with a cross-functional group of designers, engineers, behavioral scientists and others. 

Ensured the solution was scalable. 

However, embedding 'defaults' for all of the Essential Skills would be too burdensome for the client. Instead of trying to embed all behaviors, I worked with our data scientist to understand which behaviors are most likely to change in each segment at a given client. Based on those findings, we recommend embedding defaults only for skills with a high likelihood of changing in for a given segment. The targeted interventions help develop a critical mass of people exhibiting the behavior and spread it throughout the rest of the organization. 

Created measurability without disrupting the client experience. 

The behavioral economist and data scientist co-created an approach for conducting an a/b test, which was scientifically rigorous but not feasible for the realities of client context. Using my understanding of the client experience, I helped the team develop a novel approach to simultaneously maintain rigor and not create additional work for the client to enable our test. 

Outcomes

In the process of working with our data scientist to make ‘smarter’ behavioral interventions, I noticed an opportunity for larger scale automation and improved client experience. This was not in the initial scope, but I knew that it would solve several problems:

• Time spent to collect requirements from the client in order to recommend behavioral interventions

• Variability in intervention selection depending on person delivering

• Lack of incentive to update and improve the behavioral intervention database

I designed an assessment that integrates our measurement system, delivers a superior client experience, and lays the groundwork for an intervention database that improves with each use.

Takeaways

Behavioral economics and human-centered design make a great match. The best ideas came when we used design's bottom-up approach to understand people combined with behavioral economics top-down approach to rigorous evaluation.

Stay open to possibility. If I had not taken time to pause and reflect on my work and was instead simply focused on the final deliverable I would have missed a significant opportunity that presented itself through the work.