Persuading people to change

Inspired in part by Mathemagenic and as recommended by my coach here at Novay, I've been publishing a few entries that have to do with preliminary results that will ultimately go into my final report.

However, truth be told, my current progress isn't well reflected in this blog. I've yet more results from a round of later interviews to publish, and plan to do so (and soon). The conclusions I've drawn from both sets of interviews are interesting, and will be shared here. And, I'm currently working on some usage scenarios for a couple of concepts...

But, first I'd going to take a moment to depart from progress reporting to do a bit of mental meandering on the topic of persuasion. Yesterday, during a Future Workspaces group meeting in which I presented some basic ideas for a couple of concepts, the question of how to effectively change people's attitudes came up.

This topic falls under the purview of persuasive technology. Perhaps the name most heavily associated with this field is that of BJ Fogg. According to Fogg, persuasive technology, generally defined, is the intentional use of technology to change human behavior and/or attitudes (Fogg, 1998). It is important to note that this does not imply the use of coersion -- as stated in the Golden Rule of Persuasion, it is unethical to use technology to induce people to do "something they themselves would not consent to be persuaded to do" (Berdichevsky & Neuenschwander, 1999). Socially-conscious examples of persuasive technology include an electronic doll for teens, meant to mimic the behaviors of a newborn infant (thus increasing awareness about the implications of teenage parenthood), or a website that is meant to promote and encourage healthy eating choices among children (King & Tester, 1999).

This topic came up in reference to some of the conclusions that I came to following both rounds of interviews. Namely, that staying in sync and in touch with colleagues at the departmental and organizational level can be a big challenge for mobile workers. There are some good reasons why this might occur (which I'll get into in more detail a future post), but suffice it to say for now that there are a few main ones.

• First, in doing primarily off-site project work, the number of opportunities to interact face-to-face with their departmental colleagues are few.
• Secondly, their primary needs deal principally with the activities that support their current project work and team -- thus making anything that falls outside of this narrow focus secondary.
• The favored tools for staying in sync and in touch at the project level include the phone, face-to-face meetings, and email.
• Finally, breakdowns occur when the preferred tools for staying in sync and in touch at the project level are also used for interactions at the more highly-distributed departmental level (and beyond).

In other words, the difficulty that a sizeable number of the mobile workers I spoke to face occurs when they try to use their favorite tools (the phone, face-to-face meetings, and email) to establish connections and stay up-to-date with a larger, more diffuse group of individuals -- that is, their departmental colleagues.

Certainly there are better tools for establishing and maintaining in sync and in touch relationships with a large group of individuals than the telephone. Twitter, for example, immediately comes to mind.

However, I also found new technology adoption among this group to be somewhat lagging. One commonly cited reason has to do with a lack of widespread following among their already established connections -- an argument that makes a lot of sense. After all, why use twitter if no one else you know is using it too?

But another big contributing factor had to do with the heavy emphasis placed on face-to-face communication.

All of this lead to a discussion about how to change people's attitudes. I also interviewed a group of highly connected (and networked) individuals, and their attitudes about the role of face-to-face communication tended to diverge from the first group of mobile workers. Generally speaking, in their view face-to-face communication was clearly beneficial -- but not always absolutely necessary, not even for collaborative work.

So, the question is, how to foster an attitude change in the more traditional group of mobile workers towards alternate tools or methods of communication?

The answer, I think, might lie in the use of persuasive technology.

To that end, I began by hunting down relevant examples. I looked into an effective system for building up an expertise localization database within organizations, ExpertFinder. Basically, the way it works is that a group of employees is sent an email asking them to assess their own expertise level in a given domain, as well as refer others who might also be experts in that specific area, too. In addition, users are able to add addtional domains, thus expanding the database with relevant topics.

This system is a nice example of the use of persuasive technology. In a pilot study, 500 individuals who worked in a R&D department of a large company submitted 2,500 emails covering close to 200 topics over the course of a single week. In other words, the system was incredibly effective at encouraging people to build up a database of expertise in a very short amount of time.

The evident question from all of this is how to draw on examples of persuasive technology in order to create a system that helps induce distant departmental-level colleagues to connect more effectively? Is it better to create a solution that works well with the tools mobile workers prefer (i.e., the phone, face-to-face meetings) or find a way to encourage them to expand their tool set?

I'm working on a couple of concepts that address both possibilites and will return to them in detail in a later post. Nevertheless, I'm interested in what others think.