Kate Niederhoffer will be presenting at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit 2010 on the topic of how to use some principles of social psychology in your organization to help manage and understand how people react to change.
You’re going to talk about some principles of social psychology that can be extremely useful in the enterprise. Why don’t we learn this in business school?
Academia faces the same problems that businesses do: cross-departmental communication is not that good. It’s a pretty closed ecosystem. This is changing though, thanks to the popularity of books by Malcolm Gladwell (e.g. Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink) and the Heath brothers (Made to Stick, Switch) that make it to the Business Best Sellers Lists. Those are all filled with social psychology and written in, arguably, more compelling ways than academics write journal articles.
Tell us about your favorite research study that you won’t have time to include in your talk, and why it’s so fascinating?
Social psychologists have derived some really creative experimental paradigms! I’ve always loved Dutton and Aron’s (1974) Misattribution of Arousal. The experiment took place at Capilano Canyon in Vancouver where there’s a suspension bridge made of swaying planks, several hundred meters high. They were allegedly studying “scenic attractions on creativity” and used a very attractive female experimenter. The experimenter intercepted men after crossing the bridge– either immediately after, or on a park bench a few blocks away– and asked them to fill out a well-known psychological questionnaire where participants had to respond to some ambiguous images (Thematic Apperception Task). When they were done, as is typically done, the experimenter explained she would be available for questions about the experiment and provided her phone number. Turns out, this was one of the outcome measures! Men intercepted immediately after crossing the bridge had more sexual imagery in their responses AND were more likely to call the experimenter and ask her out than those who had a chance to catch their breath after the exhilarating walk! What happened was, the men misattributed their aroused physiology (fast heartrate and breathing) to the experimenter. The results speak to our shocking inability to understand why we feel a certain way, but powerful need to ascribe ambiguous feelings to something/ someone– usually whatever is staring us in the face. I think this actually has some implications for social businesses. There’s an opportunity to harness the ambiguous arousal of participating in social technologies– giving employees, for example, something to which they can attribute the positive sentiment that might result from being a part of a more open conversation.
When we’re talking about change in the enterprise, is it best to apply change quickly like ripping off a band-aid or is slow change better?
Unfortunately you don’t really have much of a choice. For enduring change, it’s going to take a while. Bringing behaviors and attitudes in line with each other is challenging – it takes commitment, mindfulness… and change. Culture is not a superficial construct, so be wary of measures that show a lot of fluctuation after a short amount of time. They’re likely not breaching the surface.
How would you measure the success of any type of culture change?
Use objective, naturalistic, and multiple measures. With all the data we produce on a daily basis, it’s relatively easy to tap into attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs unobtrusively and glean a deep understanding of a culture. As I said above, culture is not superficial. You need to tap into the mechanism of change (how effective is the motivation to change), people’s probability to change (attitudes, beliefs, perceptions), and the change per se (desired outcome).
