Nudging and bluffing
The technology hype cycle is well known, but the strategy hype cycle doesn’t get talked about as much. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, 'deliverology' was flavour of the month in government. At the time GDS was starting to get going in the UK, it was behavioural economics, or nudging.
In 2012, GDS worked with the Nudge Unit to run one of the UK’s largest ever randomised control trials, testing the effectiveness of different messages encouraging organ donor registration. Unfortunately, there seems to have been few joint projects between the disciplines since, in the UK or elsewhere.
🚗 A bit like digital service design, nudging isn’t intrinsically good, bad, effective or ineffective; it depends whose hands the tools are in. This 2015 NYT article by Richard Thaler is good on the moral balance. The other similarity is that however clever officials may think they are being, people will always outsmart government to do their own thing. Greek petrol stations sell dummy fasteners so you can drive without a seat belt with no annoying alarm. Nudge your way around that level of commitment to breaking the rules.
One strategy that never seems to go out of fashion is bluffing. The only counter-strategy to that is to know your enemy. This excellent academic paper on ‘Bullshitters: who are they and what do we know about their lives?’ is a must read.
Bluffing at its worst is one sophisticated form of an internal sabotage technique. The CIA’s simple sabotage field manual from 1944 includes most of the rest. I like a manual, and this is one of the best. ‘Disruptor’ is a badge of honour for those doing it in a conscious, creative way. But there are plenty of unwitting, destructive disruptors out there. |