7 Examples of Nudge Factors

You may be familiar with the idea of nudging, from behavioral economics, which they define, with some fancy words, as designing a choice architecture in order to influence the decision making process of the “users”.

Plain English, you don’t want to limit the number of options, or force someone to choose an option, but you structure the options in such a way as to make people, maybe even without realizing, be more likely to choose a particular option.

For example, mentioning on your energy bill how much more or less energy efficient your house is compared to other houses on the same street. This one extra sentence on the bill doesn’t force you to do anything, but it does have an impact on people’s energy consumption.

Today I want to list 7 example of nudge factors that we can all use in our day to day work, in many situations. 

7 Examples of Day to Day Nudge Factors

1. How you structure the meeting

The difference between 

“Anyone has anything to add?” 

vs nominating individuals and asking them one by one

“X, do you have anything to add?” 

Especially if you start from the most junior going up, is going to result in very different engagement. 

2. How you react when people bring you problems

If you tell them “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”, even with good intentions, you nudge them towards not highlighting issues. 

If you immediately take the problem over from them, “I’ll take care of it”, you nudge them towards low autonomy and dependency on you. 

If you listen to them, while also coaching them towards fixing their own problem, when possible, you nudge them towards confidence and autonomy. 

3. Simple Systems

If something is complicated, people will use it less. Unnecessarily cumbersome job application processes, or timesheet filling, or any other such “small annoyance”, while they don’t really take more than a few minutes, they are extremely annoying, and a lot of people will not do something just because the system is not smooth. 

So make systems smooth, clear, obvious, easy to use. 

4. Opt-In vs Opt-Out

“Please let me know who wants to attend the event“

vs

“Please let me know who does not want to attend the event”

Will lead to different results, even if you do nothing else to push them one way or another. 

5. Number, explanation and order of choices 

“Dear client, the project will cost 500k and take 6 months” 

will lead to different results vs

“Dear client, the project will cost between 400-600k and take between 4-8 months, depending on further details”.

Even though is still just one choice, but the second conveys the fluidity behind it, while the first looks set in stone, and that leads to a different response.

Or “For lunch, do you want 1) pizza 2) pasta 3) a burger 4) Chinese, and let me the details of what you want”

will take a lot more time to get answers compared to

“What kind of pizza do you want from location X?”.

Too many choices take us into tyranny of choice, making the decision harder. Too few choice may seem restrictive and cause resistance. 

It all depends, but generally speaking, 3 choices, from 1) low/cheap/simple → 2) medium → 3) big/expensive/sophisticated is a good default approach, also called the Goldilocks approach, with the choice in the middle being “just right” and the one most people will usually choose. 

I gave pizza examples, but it’s the same with technical and commercial choices. 

6. Confidence 

Your confidence is a nudge factor when it comes to convincing people to support you. 

And I mean overall, not just talking with confidence, but your actions and decisions and how you approach something. 

People pay more attention to someone who is confident in what they say and do.

7. Push vs Pull Dynamic 

This is a bit like reverse psychology, but a lot of the time, when you push for something, and you insist too much on it, and you get to be known as the “X guy”, the person that always talks about X, you may generate resistance by simply being too pushy. 

“Oh, here comes Andrei again to preach to us about leadership, oh boy!”

So calibrating your passion so to say, or at least its external expression, is an important nudge. 

And the examples are endless of course, I just wanted to give enough for you to be able to identify more.