All posts by Christopher Fan

Serious Behavior Change: End of Life Discussions

Move People

One of the most difficult situations to have is discussing end of life conversations. End of life discussions concern making an “advanced directive” outlining how people want to die.

Some 96 percent of people who die in La Crosse, Wisconsin, have an advance directive or similar documentation. Nationally, only about 30 percent of adults have a document like that.

La Crosse’s success at implementing such a difficult widespread behavior change is a great example of the principles of altering the situation with nudges. The La Crosse medical community proactively incorporates end-of-life discussions in every comprehensively across many patient interactions with hospital nurses in a multitude of situations. Essentially, members of La Crosse as patients are unable to escape the medical hospital being an open resource to be “trusted advisors” to start end of life discussions. By sprinkling “nudges” across numerous interactions with medical staff, La Crosse maximizes the chances that patients will say start the discussion instead of postponing it indefinitely.

Since 25% of medical costs is spent in the last year of life, La Crosse’s efforts have led it spend less on health care for patients at the end of life than any other place in the country, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas.

Article Synopsis: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/03/05/286126451/living-wills-are-the-talk-of-the-town-in-la-crosse-wis

Full Podcast:http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/28/283444163/episode-521-the-town-that-loves-death

Peer Pressure: Changing Electricity Consumption Habits

Move People

Opower is a company that uses old fashion subtle peer pressure techniques to get people to use less energy. It just recently went IPO this week  and its success follows failed attempts by both Google and Microsoft to generate similar consumer outcomes.

Basically Opower has implemented many of Robert Cialdini behavior changing techniques. The key magic is a paper statement to each household 1) comparing the house’s energy consumption with the community’s average and 2) giving a simple grade assessing your energy consumption made of smiley faces.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_efficient_planet/2013/03/opower_using_smiley_faces_and_peer_pressure_to_save_the_planet.html

Spirit Airlines: Do Less Means being the “Dollar Store” of the sky

Do Less, Not More

Spirit Airlines has fully embraced the focus strategy and essentially does only one thing: “Offer the Cheapest Airplane Seat” and nothing else.  The base line price of the airplane ticket literally only includes the seat. Everything else cost extra: water on the plane, extra over head luggage, even peanuts.

And despite getting one of the worst Consumer Reports ratings for customer satisfaction, Spirit Airlines breaks one billion in revenue and is the fastest growing airline.

This podcast features the CEO of Spirit Airlines advocating directly for a do less and focused strategy.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/276973956/episode-517-the-fastest-growing-least-popular-airline-in-america

Rethinking Performance Reviews: How to Communicate Feedback

Champion Forcefully, Move People

So far we have focused on how individuals who have dedicated themselves to being the best have voluntarily sought out critical feedback to improve themselves. This begs the question about what happens when people are involuntarily made to provide or receive feedback. Does this feedback actually lead to improvement? The most common example today is the tradition of the employee performance evaluations often used by companies.

The short article, “The Case against Performance Reviews” by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic is interesting because it focuses on the big question about whether the “evaluation process” itself is a flawed system.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-case-against-performance-reviews/283402/

Theoretically, the performance review is supposed to convey information from the evaluator on how the receiving employee can improve. However, there are many potential pitfalls that could diminish the effectiveness of performance reviews.

  • The evaluator is unable to provide objective feedback because of intrinsic biases. Thompson provides an example that most evaluators tend to favor other people who are similar to themselves and bias evaluations of employees who are different.
  •  Most criticism is received negatively by employees. Thompson cites research that the tendency of the average person to dislike receiving feedback/criticism perhaps can influence how that person acts upon the feedback information received