Lecture: Rational people? Theo Janssen

1,5 hour

NL, EN

Title: People are not rational at all!

Do you recognize this? The director/management thinks up something new, something that is going to help the company further or something that is going to beat the competition or ... so much more, and then wants to implement that new one within the organization. What is meant by this: the people (read: the shop floor) have to work differently and think differently. The way to do that is by explaining to them why this change is necessary and what we are going to do differently now than before. All change management methods see this more or less as the first step in the change process. For example, Kotter talks about 'forming the leading coalition and then communicating vigorously'. If only it were that simple. If we were all rational silos now, this would indeed be a very good first step. Just explain it well, check if it's understood, and the change process is finished. But yes, there's a very big problem: we think we humans are rational beings but we're not at all. And so these kinds of change strategies don't work. Do we at least know again where that abominably low figure for the return on investment of change trajectories comes from (direction 0 %) ... No, psychologists have shown for decades that we are not rational at all, but that we are irrational by nature (Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler, Sunstein, Ariely, Cialdini). And so change strategies that assume we are rational beings do not work. But what does work then?

Keywords: Nudging, Kahneman, rational, irrational, functioning of brain

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