Managing Change Through a Work Environment Which Promotes Forgetting

Abstract

Changing established business processes poses many obstacles. Employees falling back into old routines is one problem, change-managers have to cope with. This paper investigates the reasons of this fall-back actions and gives insight into how this behavior can be avoided and how newly learned actions are stabilized. From a psychological perspective we propose that the presence of retrieval cues triggers old and hampers new routines. By controlling the work environment and eliminating or manipulating these cues, it is possible to ease learning. We demonstrate the cue manipulation in an experimental setting and present the preliminary results from our first experiments.