Nudging consumers to deliver focused change

The World Economic Forum post link below is a fascinating article about "How digital technology can accelerate food sustainability" and it is well worth a read.  With estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting that between 21% and 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from our food system, it is clear that the food industry and we, as consumers, have a real responsibility to address this opportunity to do the right thing and take action.

In additional to the broader interest in the topic, there is one comment in the article that particularly resonated with a corporate hat on, which was the reference to 'nudging consumer behaviour'.

Companies are developing rafts of new solutions to support the sustainability objectives and it's great to see articles like this, that remind us that the solutions need to be more than just process and tool change, i.e. that the magic in delivering the result will be if we can get the people who use our services to change their behaviours.  

Any company going through a system change internally knows that they need a change management agenda to help their internal teams understand and adapt.  And using social media, gamification and personalisation inside work, which we see has a huge consumer behaviour impact outside of work, is common sense.  Taking it further still is how we use these digital capabilities to influence our wider organisation - i.e. the individual people in our supply chain outside of the company as well as our directly employed people inside it.   

These digital approaches are showing great success in ensuring our corporate goals are not just understood by suppliers but also helping introduce the emotional want to change their behaviour and finally encourage and "nudge" them to actually act on that want and help us all deliver the changes each of our companies are striving for on the sustainability journey.

Whether it is the food industry as in the WEF article below or any sustainability objectives the magic ingredient (!) can be the technologies and digital tools that help us communicate with and engage the supply chain individuals in their behaviour change, and hence increase the probability of the subsequent change in desired outputs.  

We are seeing some great success with the inclusion of Intertek's Wisetail learning and supply chain engagement capabilities within our Inlight Supply Chain Assurance platform.  This changes the game from the core assessment of suppliers to being able to engage and support the people within those supply chains to achieve the customers goals.  

The added bonus is that technologists are no longer back office but are at the leading edge of how we bring human behaviour and influence alive and help us all nudge each other to the better and more sustainable future we are stiving for,