| | NOVEMBER 2021MANAGEHRMAGAZINE.COM9to go on until we do not even think about flossing anymore, it becomes a kind of "muscle memory" and we have created a new habit.When we communicate organizational change in corporations, we often still refer to concepts like creating a "burning platform" and formulate a strong data-driven "why" to explain the organization's need to change. We use PowerPoint slides with data and ask employees to get excited about the new ways of working. Nothing wrong with continuing that, but it is not enough to drive behavioural change especially if habits are involved.In digital transformations, we have become savvier. We learned from the best tech companies that the user experience is key, and we increasingly involve design-thinking in creating new solutions and processes. However, in many cases, the new solution is not as easy as your favorite app on your latest phone, and there is still an alternative, habitual, way of getting the same results. Let me provide you with an example for knowledge management, given its importance in larger organizations. In my experience, most employees still share information, including attached documents, via email. For knowledge management in teams, this is obviously not ideal, for many reasons like version control, access to the documents and knowledge transfer if employees are moving on, to name just a few.To improve this knowledge management problem from a user experience point of view, you would create tools that allow employees to store documents easily. You would also allow them to find relevant documents just as easily through relevant access rights, a brilliant taxonomy--not easily achieved--and a state-of-the-art search engine. Not a light task to accomplish. However, if you succeeded in creating this wonderful tool, you would have managed to minimize the "friction" for users of the novel knowledge-management tool, which makes it more likely to be fully utilized. On the other hand, there will still be many employees who had developed the "muscle memory" for the old style and will continue using emails to share documents. How could you effectively change their habit? As we strive to decrease "friction" in design-thinking, you could think about increasing "friction" for the old habit; for instance, when employees try to attach a document to an email, a reminder of the new knowledge management system could pop up which they would first have to acknowledge before they would be able to attach anything. Alternatively, you could use social proofing as a nudge, by sending a message to all stating how many employees have already stored or searched documents in the new system. You could celebrate the 100th person storing or opening a document in the new system.Bottom line, don't only rely on convincing people with data, wherever habits are involved. Change management needs to become much more creative if our ambition is not just launching changes, but truly implementing sustainable changes in an organization. I would like to illustrate the behavioural economics concepts with a wonderful example, recently gone viral from German supermarkets during the Covid-19 pandemic
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