Using Gentle Nudges to Change Organizations

Gentle nudges can subtly transform organizations by virtue of being structural elements embedded into the company architecture, reports Forbes . Nudges are human-centric, voluntary, and they avoid invoking an economic decision frame. Organizations should trial a nudge before scaling it and quantify the results. Outcomes will not always pan out as intended, and the organization should re-design, test, and repeat the process until something that works emerges. When nudging is adopted by many as a generalized mindset, it can help change organizational culture. The collective influence of co-oriented nudges, channeling behaviors toward a desired outcome, can re-orient the playing field so that innovation and change feel natural instead of forced. Nudging can release its potential more fully as the number of people applying this strategy to their respective work-streams grows. The nudge unit should co-generate nudges in cooperation with employees, thus enabling the transfer of useful methodological skills to them, while the nudge unit gains contextual insights from employees needed to design sensitive and practical interventions. Organizations also can spread nudging skills by integrating the strategy into learning and development activities, motivating many nudges at all levels of the organization. As long as there is an ideation platform that can capture the resulting wealth of nudge ideas, this allows the aggregation and analysis of the emerging portfolio of nudges and identifying opportunities for cross-pollination and scale-up.