The Power of Intermittent Reinforcement

 

In an article called "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage", Amy Sutherland describes her attempt to train her husband by using a technique used in animal training: intermittent reinforcement. If you see desired behavior, you reward this. That's it. You don't respond to behavior you don't want. No punishment.

What works for Shamu the whale also works for humans.

I read about this article in the book "Switch. How To Change Things When Change Is Hard" by Chip and Dan Heath. They explain why this technique is very powerful. You don't need to know anything about the other person. No need to do a background check, dive into his childhood, inform about his wants and needs. None of that.

Chip and Dan argue in "Switch" that behavior is largely determined by the situation people are in and not so much on some fundamental personal properties. They call this the Fundamental Attribution Error. In intermittent reinforcement, a term originating from the the famous behaviorist B.F. Skinner, fundamentals don't count, just the current situation and the current behavior.

Reward and acknowledge desired behavior.

Mattias Hällström, founder and director of R&D at Stockholm based Projectplace, was the first to coin the term to me in the context of Project Management. We were discussing Social Project Management and he mentioned this specific type of reinforcement as one of the fundamentals for Social PM. Just reward or acknowledge desired behavior.

Simple.

Powerful.

Even in our digital world.

The Facebook "Like" button is intermittent reinforcement in action. You can only acknowledge that you like something, that it is a desired piece of information. There is no "dislike" button. There never will be. It is only about emphasizing that what is desired.

I am not suggesting you should hand out squid to your temporary tribe when they perform a trick well. You don't have to "like" every single word they write on the online discussion board. And of course, tapping everybody on the head just because they filed their timesheets on time ("Good boy! Yes! Yes you are!") gets annoying.

But when this mechanism is used with care … wow!

Perfect for temporary tribes. Groups that don't know each other very well. People that work for the first time together and have no background knowledge of each other. None needed.

Reward and acknowledge desired behavior.

That's it. That's all.

Bas de Baar is a writer who draws about people in transition. He loves to make visual maps and travel guides for the collaborators of our brave new world.