“Behavior Modification”

An interesting thing has happened since I started to blog 6 weeks ago.  Our supper conversations have changed.  Let me explain.

We eat together around the supper table as often as we can.  Normally, it is only Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings since our youngest teenager is a gymnast and practices the other days; CHALK UP!  [sorry about the yell]  Our supper conversations are usually entertaining as we dig into our teenagers’ lives.  We would discuss especially intriguing behaviors from our ever-wise duo.

These entertaining exchanges sometimes yield great material for a blog.  They’ve caught on.  I’m busted.  It wasn’t really that hard for them to catch on to my method since my wife would say “that would make great blog” material.  

The result was an immediate change in behavior.  Now, we both use the threat of the blog to  invoke behavior modification.  The threat of public embarrassment is a very efficient tool in behavior management for teens.  It is truly amazing.  

“Do you really want to sleep past your alarm and get the bulldozer treatment?  That would be a funny blog post.” - result: teenager is out of bed before the second snooze.

“You seem to be avoiding your writing.  Your dad might write about that in his blog.” - result: teenager completes his paper on time.

I wrote about incentives and unintended outcomes in a previous blog.  This was another great example.  I had no idea that my writing could be an effective discipline tool.  Just another club in the golf bag of parenting.

Proverbs 22:6  “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”

- What is your plan? -

“That is not what I expected.”

This post is about incentives, and more accurately, unintended incentives.  Have you ever set a plan in motion and the results were 180 degrees out from what you expected?  I bet if you looked hard enough, your plans include unintended incentives.

Plans with incentives involve people and we all know that humans are completely rational.  These “rational” humans can nearly always find the unintended incentive.

Need an example?

(Note: “S” asked that the next blog be about his brother since he didn’t like all the attention from the last one.)

“J” is my other teenage son.  He is at the age that he can shop for himself, and mom and dad see an opportunity to teach him about money matters.  Money matters like giving, saving and spending.  

He has job responsibilities around the house and, for his efforts, he receives weekly compensation.  We also decided to provide him with a small monthly clothing budget.  With this additional monthly income, he would now be responsible for buying his own clothing.  Sounds like a logical approach with obvious incentives.  Incentives like looking for sales, getting only what you need, and learning to budget monthly.

Recently “J” has developed the learned behavior of leaving his wallet at home.  What?  

Me - “How are you going to pay for your stuff?”

“J” -   “You can pay for it, and I will pay you back when we get home.” (which rarely happens)

or

Me - “Don’t forget your wallet”

“J” - “It’s ok.  There won’t be anything I want to buy.”  (repeat conversation above)

We had actually provided an incentive for him to “forget” his wallet.  The incentive was more money in his bank account.

Home is not the only place to watch out for unintended incentives.  How about an example from the workplace?

A couple of weeks ago at work, I helped conduct a large scale data collection effort in an attempt to track the outputs from our organization.  We built a spreadsheet to capture the information and we ended up with over 30 elements of data per line of entry.  We pushed out the instructions and the form with a short turn around time (as always).  The organization responded and the data started to flow in.  Lots of data.  Way more than expected.  We thought this was great support from across the entire organization.  What more can you ask for?  

Next step was data analysis.  We quickly realized that we unintentionally baked incentives into our data collection.  The category titles and selection choices provided enough indicators to drive the responders to a “preferred” choice.  

The results indicated that not one of our outputs was generated from a self-initiated project.  This is highly unlikely for my type of organization.  I suspect this is the same for others organizations.

Was this gaming the system?  Was the problem related to self reporting?  Maybe.  I think it had more to do with unintended incentives.  

It really doesn’t matter if you are dealing with a teenage boy or some other “rational” human, look for the possibility of unintended incentives in all the plans you set in motion.

Proverbs 16:3  “Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.”

- What is your plan? -