Catalytic Mechanisms to Drive Behavior

Recently I was talking to an entrepreneur that had rolled out a new technology product to her team members. The challenge was that the adoption was weak and they weren’t seeing a return for the significant investment made in the custom technology.

Catalytic mechanisms are processes and procedures that drive change through the very way things operate. You can think of it as ways to explicitly align interests or make one thing more tightly dependent on another. Instead of asking for a behavior change one approach is to rearrange something else that forces the behavior change.

For the entrepreneur, I offered up a simple suggestion: pay the team members (independent contractors) based on data present in the new system. If they don’t put it in the software, they don’t get paid. It seems so simple but it can make a profound impact (I know of companies that don’t pay commissions to sales reps unless the deals are in the CRM).

What else? What are some other catalytic mechanisms that drive human behavior?