Maand: september 2023

Humanizing Rules: Bringing Behavioural Science to Ethics & Compliance – Christian Hunt

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Christian Hunt: https://www.human-risk.com/, The Human Risk Podcast, on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Human risk is “the risk of people doing things they shouldn’t, or not doing things they should”.

To be effective at influencing our employees’ behaviour means we need to focus not on what we would like them to do but on what they are likely to do. p18

Four techniques often used to influence employees:
1. Orders (My rule of thumb is that if you can write a checklist, then orders probably makes sense)
2. Rules & Principles
3. Bribery & Punishment
4. The Marketing Approach

However, these tools are incredibly blunt instruments that rely on presumptions about human behaviour that, as we will see, are not always valid. p 30

Behavioural Toolkit & BeSci

I’m a proponent of the Behavioural Toolkit: one that uses tools designed to understand how humans actually make decisions rather than how we’d like them to take decisions. Not only will that deliver better results, but we’ll also have an idea of when things don’t work as planned and why that might be. We can then refine our approach. In later chapters, we’ll explore some key drivers of human decision-making. By understanding those, we can start thinking about designing more effective tools. p31

What is the job? What is it that we want people to do? p37

Introducing Behavioural Science (BeSci) – three of the most significant drivers of human decision-making:
1. Our experience and knowledge.
2. What we see or believe other people are doing or thinking
3. The context in which we are making the decision.

[The curse of knowledge is] a problem that can be exacerbated when the subject matter is particularly complex or the frequency in which employees engage with it is low. In those cases, the gap between what the expert knows and is familiar with and what the general population knows and is familiar with is far greater. Someone who spends all their time working on an annual attestation or reporting process may, for understandable reasons, struggle to appreciate the level of understanding of someone who doesn’t. p53

When it comes to influencing our employees, it can lead us to deploy strategies that don’t work but that we have always used. If, for example, we think training is the solution to our employees not doing what we want, then our response to something going wrong is to add more training. We don’t stop to think about whether training is the correct answer because that’s our standard strategy. p54

if our message isn’t getting through to our employees, it might not be the message; it might be the messenger p63

HUMANS

Each element in the HUMANS framework allows us to think about different aspects of how our employees are likely to perceive what we are imposing on them: (p80):

H = Helpful: “How helpful do I find what they are asking me to do?”

U = Understand: “Do I understand what they are asking me to do?” and “Do l understand why they are asking me to do it?”

We also need to be mindful of the curse of knowledge. If we need our employees to understand something, then we need to remember that what seems obvious to us might not to them. We know why we’re implementing a particular rule; they might not. That doesn’t mean that we need them to have our level of understanding; they just need to know enough for it to make sense to them. p91

M = Manageable: “How manageable is what they are asking me to do?”

A = Acceptable: “How acceptable do I find what they’re asking me to do?” and “Do I accept that they have the authority to do so?” The more acceptable they find what we’re asking them to do, the more likely they are to do it.

N = Normal: “Is what they are asking me to do, normal?” and “Are other people doing this?”

S = Salient: “How relevant is what they are asking me to do?” and “How appealing is what they are asking me to do?”

Inspiration for HUMANS:

Dutch intermezzo Tafel van 11

Het CCV Interventiekompas is de opvolger van de Tafel van Elf. Dat gaat vooral over Willen en Kunnen naleven van regels. (Uit De interventie: “De Tafel van Elf is een analysekader om tot interventies te komen die gericht zijn op de reden(en) van het niet naleven”)

De samenvatting geeft wel goed beeld; exb-2018-11097.pdf (officiele-overheidspublicaties.nl). Tafel van 11 kijkt ook heel sterk naar spontane naleving, grijpt niet direct naar formeel ingrijpen. Vaak (denk ik) willen mensen wel maar kunnen ze niet (nog niet de kennis, tijd of capaciteit). Dan werkt straffen/sancties averechts en kan je beter met marketing, ondersteuning en makkelijker-maken werken. Klinkt soft maar kan veel effectiever zijn.

Meer informatie over Tafel van 11:

Meer de diepte in zijn deze twee boekjes over toezichtstechieken, ik ben fan van beide:

Six rules

  1. Rule One: Compliance Is an Outcome, Not a Process
  2. Rule Two: 100% Compliance Is Neither Achievable Nor Desirable
  3. Rule Three: When Putting on a Show, Make Sure You Know Your Audiences
  4. Rule Four: Design for the Willing, Not the Wilful
  5. Rule Five: If One Person Breaks a Rule, You’ve Got a People Problem; If Lots of People Break a Rule, You’ve Got a Rule Problem
  6. Rule Six: Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

If we genuinely want to ensure that an organisation is compliant, we must ensure that Compliance has the mandate, skills, and resources to influence employee decision-making. Historically, most organisations haven’t adopted that approach, which has meant that the processes designed to deliver compliance aren’t thinking about influencing people.

We also need to remember a simple fact. The average employee isn’t interested in Compliance. If they were, they’d be working in the Compliance function. What they are interested in is compliance. Most people want to turn up to work and do a good job, not break any rules, and do the right thing. The role of Compliance is, therefore, to help them achieve that. For that to happen requires us to humanize our rules. p123-124

Their [Netflix] philosophy is to separate errors into “recoverable” and “irrecoverable” errors (see Humanizingrules.link/netflix Culture (slideshare.net). When I say that 100% compliance is impossible, I mean in aggregate. I’m not suggesting that we tolerate all mistakes. But we need to accept some. p128-129

Design for the Willing

The whole idea of training only works if, on some level, the person being trained wants to learn.
If we want to prevent the “bad” people, we will need different tools than the ones we use for “good” people. p139

compliance requires a more relationship-based approach [vs transactional]. As we’ve seen, many things we need our employees to do rely on their goodwill; or, at the very least, their acceptance

If we design compliance processes for “bad” people, we’ll do things that we wouldn’t do if we were designing them for “good” people. For example, a process for “bad” people might intentionally send a signal that they’re not trusted. But if we also send that same signal to “good” people, we risk them responding in kind. p141

If One Person Breaks a Rule, You’ve Got a People Problem; If Lots of People Break a Rule, You’ve Got a Rule Problem

Rule 5
Imagine lots of people aren’t complying with a rule and we discover that it is likely to be down to a system that is hard to use. If we don’t fix that system, then we provide air cover to those who are failing to comply because they can’t be bothered. Not just in terms of giving them an excuse, but also when we review compliance risks, they will be “lumped in” with the others. Solving the problem will ensure we isolate their behaviour. To put it another way, if we make it easier for people to be compliant, then we’ll know that those who aren’t are more likely to be doing it wilfully, and we can react accordingly p147

COM-B

The idea behind COM-B is that there are three main components to any Behaviour (B). For a behaviour to occur, an individual needs to feel:

they are psychologically and physically able to do so – in other words, they have the Capability (C);
they have the social and physical opportunity to engage in the behaviour – Opportunity (0)C
they want or need to carry out the behaviour – Motivation (M)

The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions – PMC (nih.gov)

RADAR

RADAR uses five radars to highlight where employees are either already in breach or showing signs that they could potentially be in breach of our rules in the future. Understanding where this is occurring or is likely to occur can help us to recognise where our control framework needs strengthening. In other words, where there is a strong likelihood, we will need to deploy behavioural interventions, either adding new ones or removing or enhancing old ones.

  • Rebellious – widespread noncompliance
  • Adaptive – bending the rule (loophole, follow letter not spirit of law). Especially likely when voluntold (told to volunteer)
  • Dissenting – widespread dislike of rule
  • Analytical – paying more attention to the rule, analysing rule
  • Remarkable – If our rule has produced an unexpected (positive) compliance outcome, we should investigate what we can learn from it

[R]ules can and should be treated as attempts to influence human decision- making. On the face of it, the word “attempt” seems inappropriate. After all, rules are mandatory and backed by an authority, so we tend to expect people to follow them. But we also know that not all rules are followed all of the time; if they were, there would be no need for this book! p198

In a compliance context, we often don’t have that luxury. Not only are we not set up to do lots of testing, but we don’t have the time. Surprisingly, this can actually be an advantage, because it means we can move more quickly. Unlike marketing, we’re not seeking to maximise outcomes; if we can make our population more likely to do something by making small changes, that’s great. (…) I contend that if we can make things better, then we should. A small win is better than no win. p204