Are your customers or employees not adopting the solutions you are creating for them?
Are they using Excel, instead of that fancy new software that your team invested millions in?
I have seen it happen often - perhaps too often.
What does the team working on it say? Ohh they don't get it, we just need to tell them and they will do it.
Yet, this rarely works - because after we get hired to do a behavioral gap analysis for an organization to understand the actual things that may be driving a behavior -"telling them" is usually not at the top of the list.
We use different models to do these analysis - say we may use COM-B or ISM as a first layer - but you need to add other models/theories that can help you with the context that you are working on.
What models/theories could help us when working on behavior and adoption of technology for example?
-Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) -Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) -Technology-Information-Behavior (TIB) -Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) -Social Cognitive Theory (SCT)
These theories come from different fields such as sociology and social psychology and have been used to explain behavior in different contexts.
Some of these theories focus on the behavior of individuals, while others focus on adoption decisions that are influenced by organizational characteristics.
In addition, some theories focus on the perceived outcomes when forecasting behavior while others focus solely on beliefs about the technology - all of these are variables you need to account for and classify, so you then can focus your solutions more precisely.
The value of adding behavioral science to your work lies in being able to find and use models and theories as new thinking tools that you can integrate with your ways of working so you can increase adoption and build for the people you are trying to help make progress.
(Image credit: H. Taherdoost A review of technology acceptance and adoption models and theories)