Reforms as Behavior Modification

Reforms are basically desired improvements in the way institutions work. These changes may be formally established through policies and are only actualized by changes in procedures. Now, people make up institutions, policies are established by people, and procedures are carried out by people. So when we talk about reform, we are really talking about changes in people’s behavior.  

This suggests a strategy for pursuing reform: seek to influence the behavior of key individuals whose support is needed to carry out the desired changes. Identifying these people is the first challenge. While leaders are obviously involved in most institutional changes, influencers who can help convince the leaders are also important. So are the people who will carry out the leaders’ decisions - including, sometimes most importantly, front-liners whose actual work would be affected by the changes.

Systems analysts and software developers, in exploring functional requirements for application software, write “Use Cases” - narrative descriptions about how users interact with the software to deliver services. After a Use Case is written, the systems analyst picks out all the nouns in the narrative - these will be the users for whom the system will be designed.

In a similar way, reformers can write a narrative about the pre-conditions needed for reform - what needs to happen for policies to be established and for processes to be changed.  Then they can pick out the names of people involved in the narrative. This would be a good starting point to identify the specific individuals whose behavior needs to be influenced or changed.

Tony Robbins (“Awaken the Giant Within”) says people are motivated to do things in two ways. First, they want to move towards something that gives them pleasure. Second, they want to move away from things that give them pain.  For each key individual identified in the preceding activity, it is necessary to consider their moving-towards and moving-away-from  motivation. When you ask somebody to do something, they always ask (even if only in a subconscious way), “What’s in it for me?”  So it is important to link the desired reform to each key individual’s motivation.

Once this link is established, it has to be communicated. Messages have to be carefully crafted.  The simpler the message, the better. Aim for an “elevator pitch” - the kind you would deliver if you got into the same elevator with a key individual and you have only so many minutes before he before he gets off on his floor?

The messenger is always important. It’s easier to convince a key individual when you know him or her well, than when you’re strangers to each other.  When forced to try to convince a key individual whom you don’t know well, it might help to bear in mind that people tend to trust others who are like them - in gender, generation (age), nationality, and education. 

All of these steps can be done better by groups of reformers rather than by solo workers. Groups tend to have a wider appreciation of how things currently work, or ought to work - and thus write a more encompassing narrative, which allows them to identify more key individuals.  Members of a group tend to know more of the identified key individuals and their motivations. And different members of the group can assign themselves to the key individuals that they know best (different strokers for different folks).

So, about the reform you want to push - who are the key individuals whose behavior needs to be influenced? What’s in it for them to support the changes you want to see? Is there a group you can work with who want to see the same reforms?