Are you really irrational? Are your employees and customers?
Of course not, and it is time to start moving the conversation from irrationality and a list of biases when creating solutions to drive behavior change and decision making.
We must assume people are rational and what is driving behavior is much to do with the context. People should not be judged against an unrealistic standard of perfect rationality - what works in a lab without context is not what works in the real world with actual context.
When we talk about context in behavior change, people tend to treat it as a giant catch-all category that’s hard to understand and even harder to assess.
The Center for Implementation created a nice Framework to help take some of the overwhelm out of context work (and you can of course adapt it to your organization)
What the Context Compass (in the image) does well is make context more intentional and more workable.
Instead of assuming we need to understand “everything around the behavior,” it asks a more practical set of questions:
1) does the behavior or intervention even fit the setting 2) is the system ready for it 3) what will get in the way during execution 4) what will it take for it to keep going over time?
Those are different lenses, and they surface different parts of the environment, policies, workflows, leadership, norms, resources, partnerships, etc...that we know play a major role in driving behavior.
I think it is time we start moving away from what is "easy to sell" the bias and the irrationality and work on what is right to do, even if it isn't always easy...