Republicans Just Killed Their Own Health-Care Idea. In 2009, prominent Republicans, skeptical of requiring people to buy health insurance under the legislation that became Obamacare, proposed an alternative approach: making large employers automatically sign employees up for health insurance, while also allowing them to opt out. A version of this idea made its way into the Affordable Care Act. But as a result of this week’s budget deal, it is now out -- and Republicans are celebrating. How come? The answers shed new light on some thorny issues in behavioral economics, and also on contemporary politics. During the early health reform debates, right after Barack Obama was elected president, Republican enthusiasm for automatic enrollment was spurred by the analogy to 401(k) plans. A lot of research shows that if workers are automatically signed up for such plans, participation increases significantly, even if it is easy to opt out.
It’s unclear why the department stalled, but any such regulations would not be simple to write. CONTACT | International Behavourial Insights Conference 2015. Make Room for Innovation « MindBlog. How do we create the ideal setting for exploration, creativity, and innovation? And why doesn’t it automatically happen in our offices during a regular workday? Our work setting has a huge impact on how we think and interact, and by changing it we can make an ideal environment for innovation. This was one of the ideas behind the Design for Europe seminar “Immersion in Public Design” that MindLab co-hosted with La 27e Region in Paris.
We invited co-workers from ministries, a municipality, and innovation experts to work together on projects in the garden of the French Ministry of Public Affairs. By changing the atmosphere and surroundings, a setting was created where civil servants could reflect on their projects without restraint or pre-assumptions. An important insight regards the way we work with several projects simultaneously, jumping from one to another. Taking the trip to the seminar from Copenhagen to Paris meant that day-to-day office culture was left behind for a while. You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic: Researchers explain human decision-making with physics theory. The next time someone accuses you of making an irrational decision, just explain that you're obeying the laws of quantum physics.
A new trend taking shape in psychological science not only uses quantum physics to explain humans' (sometimes) paradoxical thinking, but may also help researchers resolve certain contradictions among the results of previous psychological studies. According to Zheng Joyce Wang and others who try to model our decision-making processes mathematically, the equations and axioms that most closely match human behavior may be ones that are rooted in quantum physics.
"We have accumulated so many paradoxical findings in the field of cognition, and especially in decision-making," said Wang, who is an associate professor of communication and director of the Communication and Psychophysiology Lab at The Ohio State University. "Whenever something comes up that isn't consistent with classical theories, we often label it as 'irrational.' Share Video undefined. Behavioral Science & Policy Association - The Behavioral Science Approach to Policy Making: a Conversation with David Brooks. Games Can Make You a Better Strategist. Play has long infused the language of business: we talk of players, moves, end games, play books and so on. And now we hear often about the “gamification” of work—using elements of competition, feedback and point scoring to better engage employees and even track performance.
Even so, actual games are still taboo in most organizations—the stereotype of the work-avoiding employee cracking new high scores in Minesweeper has given gaming a bad name. And the corporate executive playing games to improve his or her strategy-making skills is still rare. This is unfortunate. We think that games have an important place in cultivating good strategists, and that now more than ever games can give executives an edge over their competition. First, there has never been a greater need for companies to learn new ways of doing things in response to a complex and dynamic business environment. We think that the next generation strategy apps will finally be able to prove a real business case. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Using design thinking to introduce design thinking in government | spark! As if by divine intervention, “Design for Action” by Tim Brown and Roger Martin, published in the September 2015 edition of the Harvard Business Review, magically fell into my lap. Actually, it was by subscription, but what is fortuitous is that the authors penned it in the first place – a “just in time” answer to a question that’s been nagging me: What’s the best way to introduce design thinking in government? Brown and Martin’s answer? Take a design thinking approach! At first, I squee-clapped in giddy recognition of the super-meta solution. Thankfully, as Brown and Martin write, I am not alone in the newness in the use of design thinking to manage organizational culture and process. [t]his is the classic path of intellectual progress. So what have we learned that we can apply now to the problem framed earlier: What’s the best way to introduce design thinking in government?
Deep engagement with the user. Rapid prototyping. Like this: Like Loading... How a government can "nudge" behavior - CNN Video. Use behavioural "nudging" to tackle gender, health challenges - experts. By Reuters Published: 13:15 GMT, 3 September 2015 | Updated: 13:15 GMT, 3 September 2015 By Joseph D'Urso LONDON, Sept 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Many of the world's biggest challenges, such as encouraging people to buy life-saving drugs or unpicking deeply rooted sexism, can be tackled by using subtle psychological cues to change the way people behave, according to experts in London. Behavioural economics, also known as "nudging", is about making people more likely to make desirable decisions without directly forcing them to, by incorporating evidence of how people actually behave into policy, advocates told a conference on the subject on Wednesday.
For example, the Behavioural Insights Team, or "Nudge Unit", set up by the British government in 2010, found that letters encouraging people to pay their taxes had vastly different response rates depending on how they were worded. She estimates deworming pills have a lifetime benefit of $142 in increased earnings and better health. Use behavioural "nudging" to tackle gender, health challenges - experts. Using the Gamification User Types in the Real World. Reading Time: 3 minutes (ish) One of the main questions I get about my User Types, is how do you actually make use of them? What I have provided is a simple framework to look at basic motivations of users who are using your system. However, if it was just an analytical tool, it would not be all that much use really! The main reason I developed the user types was to help you in the planning and design phase – not just with analytics and improvements!
There are two main ways to go about using the user types in the early phases of your design. Survey the populous The first and the one that most people want to ask me about, is a survey of potential users. Whilst this is a reasonable thing to do, it does have a couple of drawbacks. The final and actually most important drawback is the nature of people themselves. So the user type you are when you first start using a system, may not stay the same.
Build it for the people you want So, the alternative is to come at it from another direction. Kahneman turns attention to 'noise' in organisations. Nobel prize-winning economist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, was interviewed by Professor Richard Thaler, University of Chicago, in the closing session of the first day of the Behavioural Exchange London 2015 conference yesterday. Thaler’s interview with Kahneman took the audience through his latest work as well as his thoughts and opinions on a number of issues affecting behavioural economists currently. Q: What makes a good academic collaboration? “A lot of luck; you’ve got to like the people you collaborate with and they’ve got to like you. It is a slow way to work and it can be frustrating but if you enjoy social interaction it’s wonderful. If you get the magic two are superior to either one alone.” Q: You’re now doing private sector consulting work in noise reduction, tell us about that.
“In many organisations lots of people are doing similar jobs e.g. approving loans, picking stocks. “By breaking up problems into elements. “I believe in loss-aversion. Economic policy based on behaviour assumptions. “The edifice of economic policy was built on an assumption of how people behave. It became a description of how policy-makers thought people ought to behave rather than how they actually do behave,” said Matthew Hancock, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, at the opening of the Behavioural Exchange London 2015 conference yesterday. Photography by Sean Ebsworth Barnes “The truth is life is hard and turning theory into practice is difficult,” he added, as he went on to explain that this was one of the reasons why the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) was set up. “It shouldn’t be controversial to say we should base policy on how people actually behave but sadly it is.
“The point of the team wasn’t to tell parts of government what to do – it’s the nudge unit, not the shove unit – it was by showing them, not telling them how to improve services,” said Hancock. “We need to be honest with ourselves and admit that sometimes we try things that will fail. Follow us on.