Should Chief Behavioural Officer take over from Chief Learning Officer? WARNING: headline is deliberately provocative, but there is a point to it

Team one are told that if they can deliver a working prototype of product x by the end of the month, they'll get a bonus. Team two are told a provisional bonus has been allocated and they need to deliver a working prototype of product x by the end of the month, otherwise it's lost. Who is most likely to deliver?

I am shamelessly poaching and reworking an example given on the impact of behavioural insights in learning and HR at the Community Housing Cymru conference today by the excellent Anna O'Halloran. It's the type of example familiar to those interested in behavioural economics. But before we detour into a debate of whether this is manipulation the likes of which bleak novels like 1984 build upon, my interest is more on the method and we'll return to that shortly. There are certainly moral dilemmas regarding influencing an individual's behaviour but understanding better why people make the decisions they make or chose certain actions over others is the key to creating better ways of working.

The trouble is, we are simply not sure what the result of any given solution may be because there are so many variables at play and we often don't act predictably - even in the face of situations that are seemingly very familiar, the outcome or choices we make are not always predictable. So going back to the method, what behavioural economists are well versed in is conducting randomised control trials to test their hypothesis and compare results of often small but meaningful differences. Another example stolen with pride from Anna is that of labelling refuse bins - what effect do the labels 'general waste' or 'landfill' have on recycling rates? It's straightforward to test and we can gather data from that trial - we have a clear metric we want to influence, we establish a hypothesis and trial conditions to test it.

In reality in learning and development, do we conduct trials? Is part of the issue facing the profession today a drive to do something 'really impactful' rather than test out small changes and explore their effect?

But is Behavioural Insights another emperor's new clothes? Last year at Learning Live, whilst taking part in L&D Question Time, I was asked what I thought of neuroscience in learning by a deliberately cheeky Paul Morgan and it was to make the point that we often adopt a trend to justify decisions or try and offer something regarding as new and exciting. However neuroscience as an area of study is not at fault, there are legitimate reasons to develop your understanding of the effects of environment, stress, cognitive load and other factors on human performance.

So whilst many are concerned that a shallow adoption of behavioural insights into learning practice could be another one of those annoying 'initiatives' or attract a swathe of new thought leaders in the area promising to distil it down to some attractive soundbites, I believe there is something to reflect on here about how we add value to an organisation and how we can do it. My friend Ajay Pangakar spends huge amounts of energy imploring learning and development to start with business need and the metrics used by the business itself. If we do this, then it's entirely appropriate to test alternative possible solutions to see which has the most positive impact and continue to improve from that point. Actions are placed with the context of a clear desired outcome and a recognition that there is unlikely to be one optimal solution whose effectiveness is entirely predictable from that outset. The difference here is rather than throwing spaghetti on the wall, we start from a clear hypothesis we want to test. It's also likely that it may take small changes and investments to come up with alternatives rather than massive whole scale investments (or at least if that is the result, it's based on data gathered from other solutions).

So yes, the headline was deliberately provocative - did it work? Well the likes and comments may indicate that but I mustn't rush to judgment because I didn't give you an alternative. If LinkedIn enabled me to do an A/B test, perhaps the headline 'Should Chief Donut Officer take over from Chief Learning Officer would have got greater views, but right now, I simply don't have the data insights to back that up!