Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Reducing costs is important for every organization. We have seen many cost-cutting measures introduced over the years. Today’s story is about saving the cost by changing the habit. This story is from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

Bathroom equipment manufactures have tried many ways to improve the cleanliness of the toilet. Male urinals in busy public places are a big focus of this. Several techniques and urinal designs have been tried to lessen the spillage but Schiphol airport has proved over the years that the simplest solution is sometimes the best.

The idea is simple. Placing a fake fly image in the base on the urinal gives users something to aim for. And psychologically, people like to do that.

This idea has saved 80% of the spillage and 8% of the total toilet cleaning cost. This is a great example of how to design the environment to change habits.

University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler has won the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on behavioural economics, which tries to understand how humans make decisions. This is a relatively new field that combines psychology and economics.

In his book – “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”, Thaler explains about “Nudge”. A Nudge is something that predictably alters people’s behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. Nudges are not Mandates or forced rules. Thaler calls the urinal fly as his favourite illustration of a nudge.

Several years before there was an initiative supported by Volkswagen, based on the idea that ‘something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. They set themselves the challenge of getting more people to take the stairs by making it fun to do so. Swedish capital Stockholm’s Odenplan subway station Stairs located next to escalators were transformed into a working piano, with every step playing a note to the Swedish public.

Behavioural economics in agile coaching.

I have used this technique with one of my team. Placed a candy jar on the sprint board to visualize the work item completion. Candy will be added to the jar whenever one work item is done. This technique enabled the scrum team to break the silos and swarm during the sprint.

Share your thoughts on how can we use these behavioural economics in agile coaching.