Four strategies for making change

April 4, 2009

I just finished reading an interesting article in Time Magazine: How Obama is Using the Science of Change. The article discusses “behavioral economics” being used by the administration to help us make better decisions. It lists four strategies to get people to alter their behavior:

Make it clear – provide better information
Make it easy – ultimately, make the desired behavior the default one
Make it popular – show that everyone is doing it
Make it mandatory – enforce rules, or make it so appealing no one would say no

While the context is politics and economics, the ideas in this article are easily applied to organizational change. Read it, then answer this question: