Markus Schuller
The Knowing-Doing Gap in Behavioral Finance
Markus Schuller, Founder Panthera Solutions Foto: Panthera Solutions
Why do professional investors talk about behavioral finance more than they apply its insights to achieve more rational decision making?
Starting Points for Interventions
The change management literature approaches changing the individual through interventions from a cultural or technological perspective.
The change management literature approaches changing the individual through interventions from a cultural or technological perspective.
©Panthera Solutions
Cultural change is the result of individual behavior, not its starting point. Starting with technological change emphasizes assimilation not adaptation.
In a relatively static environment, with traditional forms of leadership — autocratic style, hierarchical top-down delegation, non-inclusive choice architecture...
Märkte bewegen Aktien, Zinsen, Politik. Und Menschen. Deshalb präsentieren wir dir hier die bedeutendsten Analysen und Thesen von Top-Ökonomen - gebündelt und übersichtlich. Führende Volkswirte und Unternehmensstrategen gehen den wichtigen wirtschaftlichen Entwicklungen clever und zuweilen kontrovers auf den Grund.
Da diese Artikel nur für Profis gedacht sind, bitten wir Sie, sich einmalig anzumelden und einige berufliche Angaben zu machen. Geht ganz schnell und ist selbstverständlich kostenlos.
Starting Points for Interventions
The change management literature approaches changing the individual through interventions from a cultural or technological perspective.
The change management literature approaches changing the individual through interventions from a cultural or technological perspective.
©Panthera Solutions
Cultural change is the result of individual behavior, not its starting point. Starting with technological change emphasizes assimilation not adaptation.
In a relatively static environment, with traditional forms of leadership — autocratic style, hierarchical top-down delegation, non-inclusive choice architecture — technological change could lead to behavioral change but not to empowerment. It doesn’t pass the test of what Heinz von Förster calls the ethical imperative: “I always act so as to increase the number of choices.”
Both the cultural and technological angles are invalid starting points to induce lasting change because they don’t target the individuals’ response elasticity. Both try to invert the cause-effect logic in change management, trying to avoid the most challenging and thus the most yielding trigger for change: the individual.
Empowerment creates more adaptable individuals and, as a consequence, more adaptable organizational behavior. Tolerance of ambiguity and complexity helps create a more reflexive set of heuristics through which an individual perceives the world. Thus, when the world changes, heuristics can be adapted, whether they are replaced, reweighted, or complemented by new heuristics that are added to the individual’s adaptive toolbox. The toolbox itself provides a framework for non-optimizing visions of bounded rationality, emphasizing psychological plausibility, domain specificity and ecological rationality.
©Panthera Solutions
To empower individuals, emphasizing leadership traits is ineffective. The field of leadership development has overfocused on leadership and underfocused on development. Libraries are full of literature exploring the most important leadership traits and how to acquire them. But without a better understanding of human development, one that applies to all members of an organization, leadership development is just leadership learning or training.
Both represent superficial perspectives. Empowerment enables the individual to a more fundamental adaptation in making meaning. Cognitive neuroscience research shows that the adult development dimension in organizational learning theory represents the key success factor and that qualitative changes in our mental equipment after adolescence are achievable.
John Kotter of Harvard Business School summed these concepts up well:
Conclusion
Organizational resistance increases the more personal the matter. If lasting change is the goal, start by empowering the individual, thereby making it personal.
Wie hat Ihnen der Artikel gefallen?
Über den Autor