Designing Culture

Chapter 1. Designing Culture: Behavioral Strategy for the Workplace

Humans are the biggest driver of growth, differentiated products, and profitability. Your workplace environment significantly affects human behavior. Behavioral strategy is the practice of strategically arranging environmental influencers to drive the behaviors that deliver desired results. Environments designed with behavioral science can be used to support creativity, collaboration, and innovation. They can be used to support execution and productivity, as well as improve attraction and retention. Your workplace environment reinforces brand identity, aligns the efforts of teams, and drives increased revenue.

This report outlines the framework of a behavioral strategy approach, looking at attraction and retention as one example of a business problem that can be resolved using behavioral strategy. At the end of the report, we’ll look at a case study where workplace success directly affected revenue growth.

Understanding the Behavioral Strategy Framework

Herb Simon, Nobel Laureate, American political scientist, economist, computer scientist, sociologist, and psychologist, authored the clearest framework for the practice of behavioral strategy. In 1990, he published a theory of bounded rationality, where using the analogy of a pair of scissors he argued that decisions were driven both by the limitations of the human brain and by the structure of the environment those decisions were operating within (see Figure 1-1 ...