How do people and communities change their behavior?  We can do all the inventing we want, but if we don’t anticipate how people receive new ideas then we are probably doomed to failure.  As soon as we leave, the innovations we brought with us to a community are out the door as well.   Aid organizations and engineers working on problems have limited resources – both money and time are scarce – but the problems are innumerable so we don’t have the patience to work on things that don’t work.  If we want more successes we have to develop better implementation plans, taking into account everything we can learn about what makes people tick.

For lack of a better term I call this thought process “change engineering”, or designing and implementing new products and innovations very deliberately so that they stick when applied to a new community or market. This requires equal parts anthropology and social engineering, as well as the harder sciences to address the technology (and some things we have to make up as we go along)?  Too often our teams going to the field are made up of traditional engineers only – people trained to appreciate new products for the sake of newness only, forgetting that not everyone is like us.  But what if others value innovation differently than we do?  Our (first world) culture is famous for innovation.  I find this to be a defining characteristic of life in these modern times, but it’s different in more traditional cultures.  Imagine our distant forefathers eeking out an existence on the savannah; do we really think the serial risk taker was the one who got the most genes in the pool at the end of the day?  The more I travel I find that it is more likely that they were the ones written off as a menace to the community well being – a crackpot with the least desirable habits.

Perhaps we need to try and correlate risk averse behavior with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.   Maslow speculates that people strive to meet basic needs, like feeding their families, before they move on to tackle more complex ones (like saving the environment).  The ability to tolerate risk is correlated with security – represented by higher levels on the pyramid – which is distributed differently around the world.  What if people with little disposable income don’t approach risk the same way we do?   In our case we will borrow to the hilt on credit cards for consumer electronics we don’t need, then still take out a for-the-rest-of-our-life 30-year mortgage on a house. However in most other countries, borrowing is from families and spending beyond means is not taken to the extreme lengths that we see in the US.  It is widely known that people save money differently around the world, with poorer people tending to save more, but what does that mean?  Financial literature speculates that saving money is a virtuous activity and theorizes “risk averse consumers set resources aside as a precaution against possible adverse changes in income”; meanwhile our culture incorrectly assumes that our present level of income will always be there.

People may be unwilling to spend their savings on the things we think are valuable assets for them because purchasing such unfamiliar goods represents an unacceptable risk.  We have to consider the implications of this mentality when we want to introduce “new things” like an improved cooking stove (perhaps saving them time and money, and improving health) that compete with the status quo – often just a simple ground stove fueled with free biomass.  The “new thing” is sometimes just too strange.  If you factor in the differences in the way people value their time – free time may not be such a luxury in much of the world– we find that even giving away useful goods for free is problematic!   Of course the key to engineering change better is in more observation.  Become an expert in your community’s problems and live life in their shoes.  Collect some firewood, start a fire with wet wood, cook a meal over a traditional three stone fire… and definitely listen.