How behavioural tests can help you lead for the long haul

• Leaders can use behavioural experiments to take concrete steps to instil responsible and sustainable behaviours in their organisations.
  
• Organizations can de-risk change and completely unlock human potential by using behavioural experimentation.
• Organizations that accept iterative change dramatically improve their sustainability score, according to leadership experiments with ten Young Global Leaders.

Accenture and the World Economic Forum recently published Shaping the Sustainable Organization, which described what leaders must do to imprint the DNA essential for a sustainable and equitable future. The next stage is to put this framework into practise by utilising behavioural science to activate and entrench attitudes and behaviours in leaders and their teams.

Over the course of three months, we worked with a select group of ten Young Global Leaders (YGLs) who were interested in designing behavioural experiments to help their businesses integrate ethical and sustainable leadership practises. The World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders programme is an accelerator for a dynamic community of extraordinary people with the vision, courage, and power to make positive change in the world.

The project was part of Accenture's Responsible Leadership programme, a multi-year partnership between the Forum's YGL and Global Shaper communities and Accenture.

What are behavioural experiments and how do they work?

Behavioural experimentation is a low-risk, high-impact strategy for scaling and sustaining innovation. It enables businesses to adapt their culture via experimenting, reducing the risk of change and maximising human potential.

Our strategy is founded on a simple but essential truth: ideas drive behaviour change, and experiences shape beliefs. We equip leaders with practical tools to execute quick, crisp, measurable experiments around new ways of working, rather than spending months diagnosing and talking about how to alter culture.

Leaders may foster a culture of continuous improvement and creativity by being upfront about the behaviours they want to change. In a few of months, these trials produce real results and have an enviable influence across enterprises.

The quest to change responsible leadership behaviour was a collaborative effort. We teamed with five behavioural change specialists — Tinna Nielsen, Joe Hildebrand, Lauren Kelly, April Durrett, and Simon Hayward – in addition to our ten YGLs, to leverage their thought leadership and approaches to embed sustainable behaviour change.

There were three stages to this journey:

1. Make a diagnosis:

Each YGL was awarded a sustainability score based on Accenture's Sustainable Organization Diagnostic, which examined the maturity of their organization's responsible infrastructure. The research also identified areas of leadership strength and weakness, laying the groundwork for the YGLs' behavioural tests.

2. Layout:

Each YGL would engage with an innovation coach over a series of two-week sprints to build bold, rapid, measurable experiments to activate the target behaviours.

3. Create:

The YGLs regrouped after numerous rounds to share lessons learned and take efforts to sustain and scale the impact of their behavioural studies. A "Leading for Responsible Impact" toolkit was given to each YGL, outlining practical actions for continuing their behaviour change journey.

To optimise learning and stimulate change, behavioural experiments demand consistency and commitment over a sprint. While having access to particular coaching might be beneficial, once you've identified the cultural shift you want to make, you can create behaviour experiments on your own by altering the "diagnose," "design," and "develop" processes.

Taking risks when it comes to behaviour change

"Internal behavioural change is extremely difficult, especially in a high-pressure, fast-paced start-up setting. The capacity to swiftly attempt and learn from experiments led to the discovery of a more sustainable outcome as a result of the behavioural experiment experience "Arvind Satyam, Pano's Chief Commercial Officer and a member of the YGL cohort 2021, agrees.

Arvind's top aim as a leader was to establish a safe environment for his team to make errors, reflect, and communicate their issues with one another. Arvind experimented with spending the first 20 minutes of a weekly call for the team to each express a problem they are encountering to enable these behaviours of "listening to understand, rather than listening to solve."

By the third week of the experiment, every member of the group had disclosed at least one issue, allowing them to go beyond tactical concerns and consider larger issues. Arvind identified other leaders to act as "risk allies" and conduct similar problem-solving sessions to develop more creative, empathetic, and open teams in order to continue and scale this effort.

"There was increased awareness among the team of our collective strengths as a result of knowing more about each other's difficulties," Arvind said of the impact of these experiments.

Susana Sierra, Executive Director of BH Compliance and a member of the YGL 2020 cohort, faced the issue of instilling trust and empathy in her team in order to create a more collaborative environment.

Susana experimented with amusing "weekend challenges" for her staff to cement these behaviours, encouraging everyone to create interesting projects to undertake over the weekend and discuss their experiences on Monday mornings. For instance, send them a snapshot of something special to them or prepare a meal with a purple ingredient.

BH Compliance was able to create trust within the team and engage on a human level because to this quick action. Susana describes testing behavioural experiments as "a very good experience with great results in a short time period," at a time when remote working and Zoom calls felt very transactional. It allowed Susana to embed empathy, vulnerability, and trust in her team, describing it as "a very good experience with great results in a short time period."

Every week, the team experimented with entertaining challenges, which resulted in a 100% boost in team engagement and a 30% rise in BH Compliance's sustainability score.

The beauty of behavioural experiments is that even if they "fail," you'll learn more about your business and be able to build on those insights to create a solution that works for your team.

The programme was described by participants as incredibly beneficial and an informative technique to expose pain problems that existed within the firm. Nino Zambakhidze, Chairwoman of the Georgian Farmers Association (GFA) and member of the 2017 YGL cohort, noted that her "only regret was not undertaking something comparable sooner" when reflecting on her experience with behavioural trials. The GFA's maturity of ethical business practises rose by nearly 15% after adopting an experimental approach to culture transformation.

This three-part series on experimentation to unlock your organization's potential might help you learn more about exploring a novel approach to behaviour change. Let's #ExperimentSomeMore.