Did you you know that in the vast arsenal of Behavioural Economics tactics to deal with our +200 biases, one of them alone can increase your chance of success in execution by 300% or a factor 4?

We are talking about small commitments as opposed to big bang implementation. We all have a tendency once the whole strategy has been thought through, decided upon and written up in beautiful slides to spring the whole thing on our organization.

And why should we not? After all they deserve to know. We also need to get going. Plus how can they can they execute correctly, if they do not understand the full picture? All valid reasons. But if you want to succeed, research says it is not the way to go.

There are several pieces of research, but our favorite one is this one from London, where families on two adjacent streets were asked to put up a big ugly sign in their front yard like “Drive Slow. Kids Playing”. On one street 20% of the houses put one up, but on the other street 80% agreed to do it. 20% vs 80%!

Now the streets were adjacent, there was no timing or demographic differences. It was the little differences. On the street with 80% the families had been asked a week in advance to put up a small postcard with the same worlds in their window – who can say no to that? Well, once you have made even a small commitment, it is very difficult to for humans to back down, when a week later they were asked to put up the bigger sign…

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