About New Organizational Insights

It’s not as if there is a shortage of blogs dealing with Organization Development or Change Management. So why yet another one?

Kurt Lewin was one of the pioneers of the systematic application of psychology in organizations, now well over half a century ago. Since then it has been gaining traction as a social science for management practitioners. Yet Organizational Psychology is still a little obscure as a discipline, even though it can be a powerful instrument, for example

• to understand what makes organizations effective,
• to diagnose and resolve organizational problems, and
• to bring about lasting organizational change.

More recently, psychology has also combined with economics to produce Behavioural Economics. (Matt Ridley would call this ideas having sex.) The insights from this domain are increasingly being applied to affect people’s behaviour. Companies use it in consumer marketing and product design. And close to 20 governmental ‘nudge units’ worldwide illustrate its growing use in public policy making.

But that is not the only area where they can help change behaviour.

We make choices and decisions within organizations just like we do as consumers or as citizens. These can be understood, explained, predicted — and influenced — using the same behavioural economics insights. The reason is simple: we are all economic beings. We have preferences, and we have to allocate scarce resources to many competing demands. Sometimes we use conscious reasoning to do this. But sometimes we are subject to heuristics, cognitive biases and fallacies, or based on beliefs. Most importantly, we are economic beings not only when we interact with stores and brands, or with the government and our fellow citizens. We also are economic beings when we interact with our colleagues at work.

So this blog is the place where the ideas from Organizational Psychology and those from Behavioural Economics have sex.

We hope that the New Organizational Insights that result will help you build better places of work.

The main dudes behind this blog are Paul Thoresen and Koen Smets, but in time you will find guest posts from a growing bunch of Organization Development and Change Management practitioners (in the widest sense of the term) who share our aims.

Follow New Organizational Thinking here on Medium, and on Twitter.