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behavioural insights: can local government use reciprocation to improve outcomes?

Thu, 8 Dec 2011 19:07:06 +0000

The With The Grain tool, which gives local authorities access to behavioural insights, draws on the (now quite extensive) literature on behavioural economics and psychology. One thing pretty much all practitioners agree on is the power of reciprocation.

Reciprocity is a very powerful urge. When someone has done something for you, you want to do something for them. When you consider how our species’s success has depended on our very social nature, it makes sense. And there’s plenty of evidence for this. In fact, there’s evidence cited by Cialdini as an extension of the behaviour change experiment that nearly everyone has heard of: the ‘getting hotel guests to reuse their towels by telling them most other people do’ story. You know the one.

It seems the most effective way of getting guests to reuse towels is to tell them that the hotel has made a donation to an environmental charity, and ask them to play their part by reusing their towels. Note the past tense: not ‘will make a donation for everyone who reuses’, but ‘has made a donation’. If it’s the other way round, it feels like a transaction and that it simply less motivating.

So, it seems that reciprocation is a much more powerful motivator of our behaviour (whether we are aware of this or not, and whether or not it’s rational) than incentives. You can see where this discussion is going, can’t you? In public services, we are used to thinking in terms of providing incentives to people to make smarter choices. For many, it’s pretty much a default setting when considering how to encourage behaviour change. We are not used to thinking in terms of reciprocation; and, what is more, there are real barriers to thinking in terms of, say, a local authority providing something in advance of the reciprocated action. It feels too risky to many; and we might worry about being criticised for being extravagant with public money.

And yet, and yet … there are examples of local authorities using the reciprocation effect. I’m thinking in particular of LB Sutton’s approach to gritting over the past couple of years. There are now 10,000 households who accept free grit from the Council. The expectation is that they’ll clear their – and their neighbours’ - pavements when there is snow. There is no obligation to do so, but sure enough they do it, which takes pressure off of local services. It’s interesting to contrast this with the (shall we say ‘mixed’) reactions to communities being asked to expected to staff libraries on a voluntary basis to replace an existing service.

Two points seem worth making. First, the Sutton grit example has legs: if we’re looking to encourage new behaviours, show that you trust people by fulfilling your end of the bargain first. In this way, what looks like a transaction, a ‘deal’ in a committee paper, might not even feel like one to residents. Second, more complex, is to consider how we might apply this principle more to relationships which are already transactional. Can we find ways of moving towards more reciprocal relationships, where the authority’s trust is rewarded by more independent behaviour and choices on the part of local communities, citizens and customers? I think this one has a long way to run.

can we have our localism back, please?

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:39:51 +0000

This afternoon, I popped in to the LGA’s conference on the Green Deal.

I’m glad I did. Not because I heard a host of good news, but because it helped me clarify what I think is wrong about local government’s approach to carbon and climate. It turns out that it’s about Localism.

Basically, this government’s interpretation of Localism – or perhaps it’s actually the interpretation of its civil servants – is a world away from what felt like a broad cross-party consensus not so long ago: that each place should be shaped differently, according to local circumstances and choices, within a national framework of minimum standards.

And, more upsetting from my point of view, the local government family doesn’t seem to be willing to contest the point.

Let me explain. Here’s why I’m at odds with the consensus on carbon:
1. Central government still thinks local government is there just to deliver stuff; basically, councils know about their local areas, so they can use that insight to deliver. A slide today revealed that CLG’s view of local government’s role (under a ‘localist’ approach, no less) doesn’t include anything you’d consider strategic, or anything that might fall under the banner of ‘place shaping’. Councils are expected to persuade communities, get local partners co-operating, etc – all good stuff, but purely operational.
2. Local carbon budgets seem to be off the agenda. There is a national carbon budget. You may well consider the previous government hubristic for having introduced it – and particularly for giving parliamentary accountability for it exclusively to central government departments – but is has been accepted by the Coalition, and exists as the state’s way of accounting for delivery of the carbon reductions required by the Climate Change Act. Surely national carbon emissions are the sum total of the emissions of every locality, so why wouldn’t we consider the case that every place should do its fair share? And why wouldn’t the local government family want to take this on? In CLG’s view, local carbon budgets are a ‘hard sell in a localist world’; my take on it is that they’re a hard sell in a state that has given up on meaningful localism. Or a nation that is so laissez-faire that we really think that not acting on climate change is a valid option.
3. Both central and local government agree to continue to ignore half our carbon footprint. When we look at the real carbon footprint any area is responsible for (taking account of all the goods and services that residents use and buy) we see that the size of the footprint is twice what official figures say, because the latter only count direct emissions (from exhausts, say) and the emissions from power stations to create the electricity we use. I understand that this flows from Kyoto; I understand that consumption-based metrics are difficult, because supply chains are devilish things to pin down; and I understand that this raises tricky political issues (no-one wants to be seen to be asking people to moderate their flying). But I don’t understand why this gets swept under the carpet, rather than treated as something we need to work out. As it stands, my Borough is measured as having a smaller carbon footprint if I fly off to Barcelona for the weekend than if I spend it at home watching TV; we act as though this is rational.

You might respond that my analysis is only partly about what localism means (point 1 above). But points 2 and 3 above would surely not be so uncontested if local government collectively was prepared to assert its strategic role.

I’m sure some will wonder why this matters. Why do I get so worked up? My response is a rhetorical question: why would anyone talented, or ambitious for their area want to be a chief executive of, or stand for election to, an organisation whose role is seen to be so limited? The long-term implications, for a sector already damaged by decades of increasing over-centralisation, are depressing.

So, what do you think? Have I become hopelessly romantic and idealistic in my middle age? Have I misunderstood? Is there something about times of austerity that makes ‘place shaping’ – or whatever you want to call it – less important (to me, the reverse seems true), or less possible?

Working with the grain

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:47:49 +0100

Warren Hatter and Kieran Stigant on how West Sussex County Council is learning to work ‘with the grain’ of human nature.

For the past year or so, policy makers and academics have found it hard to steer clear of the topic of behaviour change. Cue conference speeches, broadsheet articles and the important debate taking place on the role of the state (most recently highlighted by the House of Lords Science & Technology Sub-Committee report on behaviour change). This discussion needs to happen in the public domain, as it affects citizens’ expectations of government, but it does not need to get in the way of using behavioural insights. So we have decided to sidestep most of the debate and get on with developing the practice. Our rationale is simple: human behaviour is strongly influenced by context all the time, so we should be looking to influence that context to encourage the type of behaviours that improve wellbeing and reduce costs. Though a simple principle to work with, we acknowledge that it goes against the grain of 200 years of post-Enlightenment thinking. Mainstream economists and policy-makers have tended, until now, to assume that people behave rationally, but the evidence from a wide range of disciplines – not least behavioural and evolutionary psychology – now is clear that human behaviour is subjective (though often predictably so), context-dependent and intensely social.

Equally, reservations are sometimes expressed that local or central government using insights from behavioural sciences to shape communications or services is somehow sinister. We disagree; we think that local government’s responsibility is to get the best outcomes as effectively and efficiently as possible. HMRC increased tax revenues last year by changing the wording of letters sent to citizens in a way that employed behavioural insights (telling people, for example, the high percentage in their area who pay their taxes on time); we have yet to see any serious argument that this is underhand behaviour inappropriate for government. Likewise in local government: if we can reduce the number of unnecessary school admissions appeals by wording the communication with parents more effectively, then we should do so.

What has inspired us is less the theory and the policy debate, more the practical examples. In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the amount of evidence we can draw on. We have seen practical interventions using behavioural psychology and behavioural economics, carried out by organisations in all sectors, sometimes with academic engagement, and analytical approaches (the highest profile public sector example being the MINDSPACE report) that help us understand the range of behavioural effects that can be employed. We decided to draw on this evidence to see what opportunities it provides.

Having explained the imperative behind our work, we want to share the three principles that have inspired our approach. It is driven by three insights we gained from our research and initial work: the first, key, one is that we can improve outcomes and efficiency with low- and no- cost interventions. There are numerous case studies where this has been shown, for example well-evidenced examples of a smiley face helping to ‘lock in’ appropriate behaviour such as low energy usage or safe driving. This can be hard for people to accept, as we have rarely questioned narratives that assume we behave rationally.

The second principle is that Councils can do this. It’s not the exclusive domain of university academics and high-priced consultants and – to most – it’s not just interesting, it’s useful, too.

The third is that need greatly exceeds demand. In our view, just about every service has aspects that could benefit from using behavioural insights, but very few are actively ‘in the market’. Managers are not in the habit of using behavioural insights to generate ideas on how their approach could be configured differently, or communications reframed. We have started to change this.

And we also recognise the starting point that WSCC is like almost all other authorities. We have no staff with ‘behaviour change’ in their job description or job title, and hardly any staff who would describe ‘behaviour change’ as part of their role. And yet in many areas, West Sussex, like other Councils, is ‘doing’ behaviour change by encouraging residents in, for example, pro-environmental behaviours.

Our focus now is on using behavioural insights wherever human behaviour is a factor in our work. So, for WSCC, this is about building capacity; growing the amount of expertise in the authority on using behavioural insights.

The With The Grain Tool
The way we are building capacity is project by project using our new West Sussex With The Grain tool. To create WSWTG, we worked with experts in the two professions who make most use of behavioural insights to affect behaviour: designers and communications professionals, as well as getting input from academic experts and practitioners in local government.

WSWTG gives officers (and staff from partner organisations) access to:
• a way of pinning down the behavioural changes we are looking to encourage
• a presentation and poster explaining a wide range of behavioural effects, using the most memorable (as opposed to the most worthy) examples; and
• a method for systematically exploring the full range of behavioural effects to generate ideas from which the team can identify those worth pursuing

We have identified four clusters of behavioural effects that we introduce to officers. These are:
• approval effects, which make the ‘right’ choice (that is, the behaviour we are looking to encourage) seem normal;
• ease effects, which make it easy/ier to make the ‘right’ choice;
• reward effects, which increase the perception of reward for the ‘right’ choice; and
• obligation effects, which help people feel a sense of obligation to make the ‘right’ choice

So, for example, when we looked for ways to encourage all staff to clear their desks at the end of the day, promoting flexible working and enabling the authority to save money by reducing the desk:staff ratio, the following ideas were generated:
• Status quo bias (one of our ‘ease effects’) tells us that new behaviours are maintained when they fit into existing routines, so we are considering including a ‘clear your desk’ prompt or verification to be included in the logging out process at the end of the day. This could be like checking the box to confirm you understand the terms & conditions before you are able to make some purchases, such as train tickets.
• A range of ‘reward effects’ can be employed. Rather then communicating the benefits to the organisation (the likely default option), internal communications can focus on the ‘payoff’ for individuals, particularly in light of temporal discounting, which makes us favour immediate gains: in this case, being able to get up in the morning and decide where to work.
• ‘Approval effects’ are very relevant, in particular social norms (none of us wants to be the ‘odd one out’) and authority effect (chief officers and senior managers will need to lead by example).
• Commitment and consistency may be the key ‘obligation effect’; we all want to behave consistently with a commitment we have made publicly. In this instance, asking teams to sign a declaration recognising the benefits of flexible working – not least the end of ‘presenteeism’ - and also the commitment involved (to clear one’s desk) may be a way of driving ‘bottom up’ change.

This is a very brief example of how behavioural insight can be useful, drawn from a current project. Our experience so far is that using the WSWTG enables staff to generate a better understanding of the behaviours which are a factor in their service and generate many more, better ideas than would have been the case without considering behavioural insights in a systematic way.

Having innovative ideas is not enough, of course; success will depend on being able to test and implement the best ones. We will be open about what we learn in West Sussex from now on, not least because there is a good chance that innovations driven by behavioural insights that work here will work elsewhere.

The debate will continue; in the meantime, local authorities have the chance to use behavioural insights to shape future services.

Warren Hatter is a Local Improvement Advisor working with WSCC on behaviour change. Kieran Stigant is Chief Executive of WSCC.

New metrics, new thinking

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:31:01 +0100

Here’s the full version of an article I wrote for the recent SOLACE Foundation Imprint on Local Government and Climate Change. My chapter had to be edited at the last minute, so a useful graphic, and the summary, were missing from the published version. This version, I think, tells the story a bit better.

Let me know what you think.

shaping low-carbon communities (the pre-mix)

Fri, 1 Jul 2011 11:39:58 +0100

Next week, SOLACE will be publishing its latest Foundation Imprint on climate change. This will include a chapter of mine which focuses on consumption-based metrics and carbon budgets. It’s more intuitive, more fun and more of an opportunity for local government than you might think.

The thing is, all the contributors first wrote their chapters a year ago. So when publication was back on, a lot of time had passed, and I made plenty of amendments, to include the most up-to-date thinking and approaches. This meant that, regrettably, I removed a section that I really wanted to see the light of day, particularly the diagram that Ian Christie and I worked on together to help decision-makers get a clear perspective on carbon, and help them take a broader perspective. So here it is, instead:

“It pays to go back to first principles to see what emissions targets really mean for a local authority, because it makes us raise our sights from the processes that were put in place to enable authorities to respond to the demands of the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan and the previous government’s performance framework. I have often argued that local government needs to avoid treating climate change as ‘just another agenda’, on a par with the dozens of other agendas we work on. There are a number of reasons why this is important, not least the consequences of failure.

One approach that can help raise members’ and officers’ sights – and help establish a place-based understanding - is to visualise the emissions in the authority area. This can be done in a number of ways; the diagram below shows one way, focusing on responsibility. It seeks to outline who is responsible for the emissions in the locality. For the sake of readability, it exaggerates the size of the council’s own emissions and those of public sector partners: typically, an authority will be directly responsible for 1-2% of emissions and the total impact of the local state (including what it procures) is a little over 10%. So Zone B in the diagram represents nearly 90% of emissions.

Emissions in a place: who’s responsible?