Leaders responsible for planning and executing change programs often meet with mixed success. As researchers in the scientific study of influence and persuasion, we have experienced firsthand how strategies that deliver immediate results don’t always produce persistent, longer-term change in these situations and we know what can help.
Here’s an example: Several years ago we conducted a well-known study in which we applied two of Cialdini’s universal principles of influence to help the UK’s National Health Service address the challenge of no-shows: patients who make an appointment and then fail to keep it. No-shows are a major problem for health care systems and patients alike, leading to increased waiting times, worsening health issues, and significant extra costs. We found that small interventions — such as asking patients to write down the date and time of their appointments themselves, as well as changing signs decrying patient no-shows to ones highlighting the much larger number of people who do attend on time — yielded a 30% reduction in no-shows. The studies were published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and also featured in Harvard Business Review.
On the surface our studies were a big success. But when we checked in with the doctors’ offices six months later, things had reverted. We had assumed that since we had demonstrated what works, the health care teams would implement the insights into everyday practice. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
Over the past four years, our team of behavioral scientists, led by Eloise Copland, Olivia Pattison, and Clara Federrath, has been working with farming communities in Vietnam to deliver a range of environmental and climate change–related programs. While rice farming underpins many lives and livelihoods in this region, it also produces high levels of greenhouse gases, including methane, which contributes to climate-related issues. Indeed, half the nation’s agricultural emissions come from rice farms. So, in 2019, the Vietnamese government set targets for farmers to embrace more sustainable methods, such as reducing their reliance on certain fertilizers and limiting crop burning to curb greenhouse gas emissions — changes that need to be sustained over years for the environmental effects to be meaningful.
Following a period of observational studies, surveys, and stakeholder focus groups — financially supported by Earthcare Foundation (a registered charity) — our team implemented three interventions, delivering positive effects that have persisted for four years. Our experience in this research, as well as our wider observations of the influence process, lead us to believe these three approaches can and should be used by anyone who needs to deliver long-haul persuasion in a complex system:
