I’ve got a brand new COM-B harvester
I’ve got a brand new COM-B harvester
COM-B helps you look at problems through the lenses of capability, opportunity and motivation.
Last week I was recording an episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast when our regular contributor, Owen Ferguson, referred to L&D departments as ‘a honeypot for problems’.
Managers not doing their job? Sales teams not performing? Processes not being followed? Take it to the L&D department.
Owen’s take was that this puts workplace learning professionals like you in a privileged position. You are the band-aid for every cut, the ointment for every burn.
Ideally though, you’d be the doctor.
🎓 ‘We need training’
‘We need training’ is both the easiest and most difficult solution to every workplace problem. It’s easy, because stakeholders can commission a workshop, e-learning or program and know that in a short while a “solution” will be delivered.
It’s difficult, because a successful workplace learning solution requires that people make a conscious decision to change their behavior: that they go through the hard graft of learning a new thing, then acting on that.
In our podcast recording, guests Wil Procter and Jessica Holt from Nazaré and Inizio Engage XD, respectively, argued that learning is just one way to change behavior. Alternatives include altering the environment, offering incentives, running campaigns, or changing the defaults.
In fact, a new paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania (see ‘Deep Dive’ below) reveals the results of a meta-analysis into behavior change interventions and found that knowledge-based solutions, like learning facts about climate change, have little impact. The most effective interventions are based on increasing or decreasing access (or opportunity to behave in the desired way), followed by habit formation and social support (like a supportive manager).
How to determine the best intervention for your particular workplace issue? Enter the COM-B model, developed in 2011 by British psychologist Susan Michie.
I first heard about this model from our friend Julie Dirksen, who wrote about it in her book Talk to the Elephant. Wil and Jessica have also been using it extensively in their practice.
In simple terms, it acts as a prompt for you to consider behavior change (B) through three different lenses:
Capability (C): ‘The individual's psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity concerned.’ (Do they have the knowledge, skills and ability to perform the desired behavior?)
Opportunity (O): ‘All the factors that lie outside the individual that make the behaviour possible or prompt it.’ (Does the subject of your intervention have a chance to perform the behavior?)
Motivation (M): ‘Those brain processes that energize and direct behaviour.’ (Do they want to behave in the desired way based on a goal, emotional response, habit or decision? Can be conscious or unconscious.)
The definitions above are all taken from Michie’s original paper (2011).
As Wil tells it, the COM-B model can be used during the initial discovery phase of a project as a prompt to help stakeholders come up with their own ideas for changing behavior at work. For this to succeed, you need to include a broader set of stakeholders than might normally be the case. For example, your Head of IT is likely to bring a different perspective to your Head of Sales.
By bringing a diverse group of stakeholders together, and asking how you as a team can target the capability, opportunity and motivations of your people, you create an environment where multiple solutions can be identified: not just training.
💡A short example
The team here at Mind Tools are aware that we’re not always very good at talking about what Mind Tools does. I lump myself in this category: if you’ve read this newsletter for the past year and still have no idea, then the fault is mine (and, perhaps to a greater extent, my co-author’s 😉). FYI: We offer a range of products and services to build better managers.
Last week, we ran an online session with folks from across Mind Tools, asking them to think about the Mind Tools brand. And we set ourselves a goal:
‘In six months, internal and external stakeholders will have a clear idea of what Mind Tools is.’
This is hard to measure, and so we used the ‘Think, Feel, Say, Do’ framework to better define what it means. More about this in a previous post.
Then we split into groups to come up with ideas. These ideas included:
Capability
Setting up pitching practice sessions (a skill)
Providing brand guidelines and an asset library (knowledge and performance support)
Opportunity
Producing videos featuring folks from across Mind Tools (the opportunity to tell our story)
A social media calendar to encourage everyone to post at least a couple of times a year (a reminder/nudge to take the opportunity)
Motivation
Establishing rituals (conscious building of consensus)
Representing the brand physically and digitally (unconscious reminder of our key messages by establishing norms)
Here’s the funny thing: We didn’t use the COM-B model for this exercise. Freed from the instruction to come up with ‘training’, our colleagues intuitively came up with all sorts of different ideas to change our own behavior.
What the COM-B model can do though is provide a framework to ask the right questions, and provoke the kind of responses that learning professionals like you and I can then use to inform our interventions: Whether that end up being formal learning like a workshop, job aids and resources to help people do the right thing, or structural changes that shape behavior less explicitly.
The podcast discussed above, with Wil Procter and Jessica Holt, will be available on May 28. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss it!
How will you know that your behavior change interventions are working? Our Insights team are experts in measurement, our Custom team are experts in intervention design. Chat with us today to explore how we make a measurable difference to your organization’s performance. Get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, I had the joy of hosting Neil John Cunningham: Learning Network board member and founder of Align Learn Do.
Neil and I got chatting about his new book, Narratives and Numbers, and I wanted to invite him onto the show to share his straightforward approach to demonstrating the value of L&D with just a seven-slide PowerPoint deck.
If you’ve ever needed to ask for budget, demonstrate impact, enter for an award or justify your role, then give it a listen.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
As mentioned above, a great new paper provides an insight into not just the array of behavior change interventions we can try, but also their effectiveness.
Albarracín et al. (2024) split the interventions into individual factors:
Knowledge
General skills
General attitudes
Beliefs
Emotions
Behavioural skills
Behavioural attitudes
Habits
And social-structural factors:
Legal and administrative sanctions
Trustworthiness
Injunctive norms
Monitors and reminders
Descriptive norms
Material incentives
Social support
Access
If you create a lot of knowledge-based training, I’m afraid it’s bad news:
‘[These are] interventions that target knowledge involve education (for example, systematic instruction to individuals or groups) and other didactic approaches intended to reduce a knowledge deficit. Meta-analyses of behavioural effects suggest that these interventions produce negligible effects.’
Training on ‘general skills’, like mindfulness, also produce only a small effect.
Much more effective is training on targeted ‘behavioural skills’ that involve practice and feedback, as well as interventions that help people develop habits or where support is provided by someone like a manager.
The most effective intervention type? Access.
If you really want people to perform a desired behavior, make it incredibly easy to do the right thing.
Albarracín, D., Fayaz-Farkhad, B., & Granados Samayoa, J. A. (2024). Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1-16.
👹 Missing links
💃 We’re living through the Taylor Swift Era(s)
I spent last weekend in Stockholm, watching one of the 152 shows that Taylor Swift is performing as part of her Eras tour. Needless to say, Swift’s performance is meticulous and awe-inspiring. The current tour has also broken records, earning Swift over $1bn and taking the top spot as the highest grossing tour of all time. But just how big is Taylor Swift? These great visualizations from The New York Times show her success versus The Beatles, Michael Jackson and Beyoncé.
🤖 PR burp or genius marketing?
OpenAI made headlines last week with the release of ChatGPT’s new voice, a voice that sounded suspiciously like actress Scarlett Johansson’s performance in the science fiction tragedy Her. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a voice assistant who can’t love him back. The question is: Is it possible that the OpenAI team completely missed the point of Her? Or are they betting that the silent majority are actually willing to pay for that experience? As is often the case, The Onion puts it best with the headline: ‘Jerky, 7-Fingered Scarlett Johansson Appears In Video To Express Full-Fledged Approval Of OpenAI’.
💻 An alternative to Moore’s law
Many readers will be familiar with Moore’s Law: that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years. If that sounds complicated, it basically means that the chips which power our devices get more powerful at a predictable rate. As those chips get cheaper, they are demanded in larger quantities. But the relationship might also go the other way: according to Wright’s Law, demanding things in larger quantities makes things cheaper because of economies of scale. In this article, economist Tim Harford argues that fossil fuels could have been ‘left in the dust 25 years ago’ if we had embraced Wright’s Law over Moore’s. Rather than wait for solar panels to get cheaper, we could have invested heavily in them knowing that doing so would drive the cost down.
👋 And finally…
Here’s a glimpse into the future: ChatGPT talks to ChatGPT. The result? A rather tedious and wearily upbeat discussion on quantum computing.
Thanks to our pal Marc Zao-Sanders (check out his newsletter) for sharing this.
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If we sent this pair into space, they’d come back in 250 years as V’ger.
If you get that joke, live long and prosper! 🖖🏽
👍 Thanks!
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