Change management: what does a default option decide?
When an organisation introduces a new tool, it also decides what happens when nobody changes the proposed settings. The management question is precise: does retaining a default option justify concluding that teams prefer it?
What the literature establishes
William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser (1988, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty) show that presenting an option as the status quo can increase the likelihood of its being selected. Their experiments indicate that choice depends not only on the characteristics of the options, but also on whether they are presented as the existing situation. In an organisational transition, this calls for distinguishing an expressed preference from a configuration that has simply been retained.
When the initial setting becomes an anchor
Brigitte C. Madrian and Dennis F. Shea (2001, The Quarterly Journal of Economics) examine the introduction of automatic enrolment in a US employer-sponsored retirement savings plan. They observe increased participation as well as a concentration of choices around the default contribution rate and investment allocation. Their analysis suggests that these settings may be interpreted as an employer recommendation, beyond the effort required to change them.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that preselecting the desired behaviour is enough to make a change successful. These studies instead show that choice architecture can steer behaviour without establishing whether people understand or approve of the selected option. A setting may be useful, but its retention alone does not amount to collective endorsement. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
Decision experiments and a study of a savings plan do not demonstrate that default settings improve work quality in an organisation undergoing change. Their consequences depend, among other things, on how visible the setting is, whether it can genuinely be changed and what risks are involved. An option left to users' discretion must also be distinguished from a regulatory requirement or a security rule.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR's change management programme, an exercise applicable in Lugano is to examine a reversible internal setting with no compliance implications, such as the display format of a tracking dashboard, in a bank, a fashion or trading company, or an Italian-speaking family SME. Over a period defined in advance, record the proportion of users who retain the initial setting, then ask them, in Italian if that is their working language, to choose explicitly between options presented without preselection and with equivalent descriptions. Next, among those who retained the default, calculate the proportion who select a different option during this check. This difference does not measure overall support for the change, but it helps establish whether retaining the setting was a reliable indicator of preference. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Lugano
- change leadership
- Lugano
- research
- training lugano