by Wim Soens

It doesn’t happen very often unfortunately, but driving back last Thursday night from the Design for Persuasion conference in Brussels– the biggest persuasion conference in the world so far - I really felt satisfied, inspired and enriched. I’ll remember this conference because it made me realize that B.J. Fogg’s field of study on persuasive technology is extremely relevant for our research on collaborative innovation here at CogniStreamer®.

In a nutshell, persuasive technology is about using digital media to influence and change people’s behavior, attitudes and emotions. People interested in this topic can check out the book by B.J. Fogg (Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do).  It’s rather funny actually, because this book had been lying around on my desk for weeks until this conference on Persuasive Technology persuaded me to read it. Writing this I realize that in fact, this perfectly illustrates the concept of Persuasion Windows, one of the key insights presented by B.J. Fogg and several other speakers such as Amy Shuen (author of Web 2.0:  A Strategy Guide), Dan Lockton (Brunel University, London) and Richard Sedley (cScape). Persuasion windows are key-moments when people are more open to being persuaded, arising when personal motivation and ability coincide with a trigger or a call to action. Being able to identify, open and use persuasion windows is central to achieve behavioral change. (See BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model to learn more about this.) But even more crucial for an effective persuasion strategy is to think clearly about the target behavior or the type of behavior you seek. Because not all behavior is the same, BJ Fogg developed the Behavior Grid framework to show what types of behavior change might most easily be achieved through certain persuasive strategies and techniques.

Facing the challenge of collaborative innovation and crowd sourcing, companies increasingly make use of web 2.0 technology and tools to carry out and coordinate the fuzzy frontend of the innovation process. However, there are a number of issues in taking web 2.0 tools that have succeeded in an open web environment and applying them to the enterprise, one of them concerning how to motivate, enable and activate enterprise community members. For this reason, the CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal is equipped with process design features based on enablement, interaction and self-organization, in addition to standard conventional process modeling techniques that are biased towards predetermined task sequences and data structures. Persuasive technology is highly relevant in this context, because it focuses on attitude or behavior change resulting from human-computer interaction.

I believe that a collaborative tool should above all be suggestive, offering guidance and warning, more than high-level control and regulation provided to keep things on the straight and narrow. For this reason, the use of persuasive technology aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among groups of people is such an interesting area of research for us.

Big thanks to the event organizers Christel de Maeyer (Howest, plugMedia) and Dr. BJ Fogg (Stanford University) for putting this together! I’m looking forward to next year’s edition.