Saturday, January 1, 2011

Carrot Halwa & Cane Soup

Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports from Milan that a clinic for premature children managed to bring down the rate of hospital-spread disease by a dramatic 30 per cent with a simple measure. Fabio Mosca, head of neonatology at the clinic, offered his seventy nurses an annual bonus of €3000 for washing their hands thoroughly each time they touched a baby. Closed circuit TVs monitored their washing to check if they followed the prescribed procedure for washing. Of course they wouldn’t get the bonus if they didn’t scrub their hands well or spend enough time washing.

Is this a case of the age-old carrot-and-stick approach to persuasion? It is. Obviously, the bonus was offered because neither repeated explanations about the importance of washing hands nor fervent appeals had persuaded those nurses to do it thoroughly before touching the hypersensitive babies. Monitoring them and penalising them for failure to wash their hands would have led to some improvement, but also caused resentment. There would have been no buy-in. Offering a bonus without monitoring compliance would have led to little improvement. It’s the combination of the two that worked.

But there are more persuasive forces at work in this act of mass persuasion. Dear reader, now let me throw you a challenge. Can you speculate on the other forces at work in this apparently simple act? Are there ways in which we can use insights from this incident for attempting mass persuasion in our companies?

There are no right answers. All views are welcome. I shall present my views after I hear from a few of you. I look forward to hearing from you.

2 comments:

  1. I faced a similar issue. There was a mock bidding for PGPs which was compulsory. We had informed that 5 points would be deducted for not participating. There was a very strong resentment. Instead of that if 5 bonus points would have been given to those who had participated, it would have been entirely different. (obviously I had not done Persuasive communication at that time :P).
    The concept of penalty or punishment is strongly resented by people. Maybe the ego comes into picture. Nobody wants to be directed, they want to be invited, even if both eventually mean the same thing.

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  2. I agree, Arpit. Penalty is powerful,but it works best when it is in the background. An incentive that we are in no danger of losing is no incentive at all.

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