Dan Ariely on change in government: why is it so hard?

One thing remains constant in our political discourse: talk of how much we need to change. Every four years, candidates for office make their pitch to voters, including a laundry list of things they promise to change once elected.

Yet no matter who’s in the Oval Office, procedures in government stay pretty much the same.

According to Dan Ariely, James. B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, resistance to change is hard-wired into human nature.

“There is this tremendous ability to criticize and also to feel regret if you do something differently,” Ariely said. “If you don’t do anything differently, it’s much, much harder to criticize, and therefore harder to feel regret as well.”

Ariely noted that humans have a natural tendency to avoid regret by following the path of least resistance.

“If you don’t want to say, ever, ‘I made a mistake,’ then you don’t do anything that exposes you to some risk,” he said.

Behavioral economists and in-house innovation labs are making it easier for government to change, Ariely said, because they understand why humans behave the way they do.

Bryan Sivak is the founder of one such innovation lab in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He was also the the country’s first public-sector Chief Innovation Officer, working for Governor Martin O’Malley in Maryland.

He described his job as listening to government workers who have new ideas, then advising and supporting them as they try to make those ideas reality. For example, his office at the Department of Health and Human Services helped resolve an issue with long wait times in the Indian Health Service system, the federal program that provides healthcare to Native Americans.

“The wait times for emergency rooms in the Indian Health Service system are twice the national average,” he said.

Many people living on reservations go to the ER for everything, including prescription refills, which leads to long wait times as well as a large number of people leaving without being seen.

In fact, close to 20 percent of people who went to Indian Health Service ERs were not being seen. Nationally, that number is around 2 percent.

Sivak’s innovation lab worked with staff members at an Indian Health Service facility near Flagstaff, Arizona, to help resolve the issue.

They tried two different solutions — an electronic kiosk that would allow patients to self-triage, and a receptionist who would collect information from patients as they entered. Both ideas failed, Sivak said.

The team pivoted, deciding to test a physical change to the entrance of the hospital that would direct people with different needs to different places, he said. After the layout change, the people who left the emergency room without being seen dropped to 1 percent.

“They estimated conservatively that for the $100,000 investment to reconfigure the ER, they could realize $6 million a year in increased revenue, in addition to the obvious health benefits,” Sivak said.

He attributes his team’s success to the innovation lab removing the fear of failure.

“We were gonna try stuff, and things might not work. If they didn’t work, we’d either kill it or tweak it, and come up with new ideas.”

Stephanie Wade, director of the Innovation Lab at the Office of Personnel Management, told another success story of government innovation. The innovation lab at OPM is the first of its kind in the federal government, she said.

Wade said her office was recently asked to address a problem with the National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to 30 million low-income children. The U.S. Department of Agriculture wanted to solve an issue with payments for the program.

Wade wanted to observe the process firsthand.

“Let’s not go diving into the improper payment issue,” she said. “Let’s go understand what the kids’ experience is with this in schools.”

Her team went to a school and watched every step of the process, she said. They began to notice issues when they sat with parents as they first signed up for the program.

By observing the process and talking to parents, Wade’s team identified that the problem was not in the lunch line itself, it was the sign-up form. They made a new form and tested it multiple times.

“The USDA actually projects that as a result of the project, by the school year 2019, they will see a reduction in improper payments by $600 million,” Wade said.

Sivak and Wade both provide examples of success in government innovation, made possible through the support of innovation labs which helped remove the fear of failure, blame, and regret.

Ariely equated the model employed by innovation labs to computer hacking It’s a more realistic method of innovation, he said.

“Sometimes we have this idea of innovation of sitting in the chair and dreaming big ideas and coming up with a completely new approach to something, and it’s possible to do it this way, but it’s hard and infrequent. The hacking approach is to say, let’s look at what we have already, and let’s try to understand the details of where this is not working, and try to think about how do we take each of the friction points and try to improve them.”

There’s quite a bit more from Dan Ariely—and Bryan Sivak and Stephanie Wade—in the season 2 premiere of the Ways & Means podcast. Ways & Means explores bright ideas for how to improve human society.

Ways & Means is hosted by Emily Hanford, an Education Correspondent for American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit for American Public Media.