Changing the behaviour of highly trained and experienced professionals in aviation and maritime

How can you help airline captains and ship masters and chief engineers to save over $25 million in fuel costs and 100,000 mt of CO2 emissions in their daily work?

The answer is behaviour change techniques – specifically, Signol’s behaviour change techniques.

You might be more familiar with the related term nudge, which entered the mainstream vernacular with the publication of the book Nudge – Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein. They define nudges as easy and cheap behavioural interventions that change people’s behaviour in a predictable way, for instance, by making healthier food more visible than junk food in a supermarket. Nudges do not involve offering people significant economic incentives or mandating that people change their behaviour – nudges are inherently gentle and suggestive rather than forceful. Nudges are one example of a behavioural science method designed to change people’s decisions and actions, but there are other techniques which differ from nudges. At Signol, we use the broader term of behaviour change techniques to describe the key features of our service because they are not all easy—some of our techniques rely upon fairly sophisticated data science models—and they may involve economic incentives, such as bonuses for employees, when appropriate for the industry and company.

Behaviour change techniques in action

Organisations have applied behaviour change techniques and nudges to significant effect in areas outside of aviation and maritime. For instance, the Behavioural Insights Team and the UK Government tested postal letters informing people how many others in their local area had paid their tax on time. This works by highlighting what the social norm is – a technique referred to as social proof. Since we’re social creatures, upon learning of a social norm, we tend to conform to the norm and follow suit. These social proofs helped the UK government bring forward £210 million in tax payments during the 2012/13 financial year.

The Oracle Utilities’ solution Opower offers another example of successfully applying behaviour change techniques. By sending households reports about their energy usage compared to the social norm for similar houses in their area, Oracle’s Opower engaged people to reduce their energy use at home. Specifically, the company saved “enough energy to power San Francisco households for a decade or three million Tesla Model 3s traversing the length of the equator” by 2018.

At Signol, we use 18 (and counting) behaviour change techniques throughout our service for airline pilots and seafarers. Crucially, we don’t just lift and shift behaviour change techniques that have worked in other industries. These techniques might not be appropriate for the professionals we’re working with or the behavioural barriers they face in their specific environments.

For instance, the language learning app Duolingo tests a variety of techniques – with a particular focus on gamification elements such as league tables, rankings, and badges. These techniques may be appropriate for individuals who want to practise a new language in their personal time. Still, they’re highly inappropriate for senior professionals, such as airline captains, ship masters and chief engineers, who operate in an environment where safety is of the utmost importance. Moreover, ranking employees on their performance can backfire and demotivate them, depending on the company culture.

Applying behaviour change techniques in context

At Signol, we tailor the behaviour change techniques to airline pilots’ and seafarers’ specific barriers to implementing fuel-saving behaviours and the latest psychological research.

The graphic above highlights a few of our behaviour change techniques: Personalised SMART goals and feedback, social proofs, and impact reframing.

Goals

Setting fair and achievable goals can be a highly effective motivational technique. In fact, goal-setting theory is supported by decades of psychological research involving thousands of participants in different countries and a diverse range of tasks. When goals are set correctly, people pay more attention to relevant information, put in more effort, persist for extended periods, and seek out knowledge and strategies relevant to the goals.

Signol’s goals are presented in a user-friendly and accessible format. Still, behind the scenes, they are generated with sophisticated models that consider what’s within reach for each individual, given their historical performance and current circumstances (such as vehicle type, routes, and environmental conditions). In other words, Signol’s goals are highly personalised to each individual and adjusted to ensure they match the genuine opportunities the individual has to perform a desired behaviour. We are also very cautious about continuously increasing someone’s goals as they make progress because we want to avoid rewarding individuals’ hard work by changing the target – this is a top concern for pilots and seafarers. We pair each goal with dynamic and positive feedback that recognises the individual’s efforts – regardless of their goal result. This ethos of positive reinforcement runs throughout the Signol service and ensures pilots and seafarers receive the recognition and support that employers can’t always provide on an individual basis.

Social proof

Signol’s social proof technique offers airline pilots and seafarers relevant and actionable insights into what social norms exist around fuel-saving behaviour among their peers. Signol’s social proofs, however, are quite distinct from the previous examples in tax letters and household energy reports. Simply highlighting what most other pilots or seafarers do with regard to fuel-saving practices is not particularly relevant, as the other pilots and seafarers may have faced very different operating conditions. While the tax letters and household energy reports limited the social norm to the area in which people lived to ensure some relevancy – Signol’s social proofs account for multiple operational factors based on what’s relevant to each fuel-saving behaviour, such as route, airport, or aircraft type. In this way, our social proof insights highlight what most other professionals did under the same or similar operating conditions – encouraging pilots and seafarers to follow suit if possible.

Impact reframing

Finally, Signol’s impact reframing is a behaviour change technique that brings to life pilots’ and seafarers’ achievements – e.g. CO2 savings – in real-world, tangible terms to give them a further sense of pride and motivation about their fuel-saving efforts. Rather than using generic examples of what their CO2 savings equate to, for instance, in terms of trees planted, we have developed a custom set of real-world equivalencies for each industry – in collaboration with airline pilots and seafarers, to ensure these examples are interesting and rewarding for them. For instance, reframing CO2 savings in terms of the emissions from common flights pilots have flown or common routes seafarers have sailed. These insights can be a lot more engaging than purely presenting tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided, which can feel quite abstract.

In conclusion, we use a variety of behaviour change techniques throughout Signol’s product and service—including personalised goals, social proofs, and impact reframing—which build on our deep understanding of what drives pilot and seafarer behaviour in the first place and cutting-edge psychological research. Of course, behaviour change is rarely simple or straightforward. In the final article of this series, we’ll dig into the complexities of successfully applying behaviour change techniques.