Imagine this...

An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:

Imagine this: a revolution that needed to understand upfront the correlation between the personality of the revolutionaries and the outcome of the revolution; a revolution wanting to know the differences in adoption of the revolution depending on some cognitive and mental capacity of people. Or needing some survey on ‘change readiness’. I am not trying to trivialize the importance of ‘knowing’, but the scaling up of ‘acting’ is very much independent from it. And that’s the very significant distinction of the behavioural-pragmatic approach. Large-scale change? Bypass the individual ’understanding’, the ‘state of readiness’, the ‘intellectual awareness’, the measure of ‘emotional engagement’, the degree of ‘personal internalization’, etc. Behaviours x influence x networks will give you the scale-up statistics you need. Remember: cogito is a

bonus.

A great deal of modern management thinking has been influenced by a poor understanding, poor grasp and poor execution of behavioural sciences, which seem to stay stuck at the very superficial level of the ‘carrot and the stick’. Performance appraisal systems, sales management incentives, bonus schemes...they all look somewhat (or a lot) like carrots. A few years ago, I conducted an informal review of about a dozen sales management incentive schemes in several pharmaceutical companies. Only one made sense from a behavioural perspective. All the others were completely flawed and at least half of them had outcomes that were the opposite of what the scheme had intended to reward. All of them seemed to have been designed by a (well-paid) quantum physicist. The problem is that behavioural-sciences-carrot-and-stick models seem cheap to apply. Everybody seems to know how. But they’ll also need to bear the consequences, of course.

For more visit www.viralchange.com