How To Change Behaviour And Improve Performance With Contingency Management
We often face challenges when trying to improve our performance by altering our own behaviour. This can include professional behaviours in how we clinch sales, deliver promises and install a project; or personally, in wanting to stay fit or achieve other self-development goals.
We start out well, with good intentions. But when the situation gets tough, we tend to revert to old behaviours because of familiarity and low cognitive burden. Performance then does not improve.
Many have used contingency management to counter this.
What Is Contingency Management?
Contingency management is form of a behavioral therapy that uses motivational incentives and tangible rewards to help a person change their behaviour over time. It is based on the principle that if a good behaviour is rewarded, it is more likely to be repeated. It is most commonly used for the treatment of drug and alcohol abuse, but have also been adopted widely in classrooms and offices around the world.
Other terms for contingency management include token economy, behavioural reinforcement and contingency contracting.
How Will Contingency Management Help Me Change?
Essentially, the things we like are dependent on the behaviours we want. Therefore, once a list of new behaviours has been created, the idea is to also list the simple things one likes to do.
So, after we’ve accomplished a behaviour, we can ‘reward’ ourselves with doing something we like to do, such as drinking coffee or watching Netflix. Now we are working towards something, reinforcing the journey, which provides more motivation and a more rewarding feeling once we do achieve it.
But the suggested process is incomplete because by listing the positive consequences (contingencies), we might get too excited and create a lot of difficult goals. This may cause many failures, and the process thus feels very punishing.
This is called a ‘Crash and Burn’ solution, because it appears to violate the very need it was created to protect. Unfortunately, the common alternative also violates an important need: If we try to plan to increase the frequency of the behaviour, even with contingency, we find that when the pressure rises, we naturally revert to our old behaviour patterns because we feel comfortable, and we’re getting things done. Thus, there is no compulsion to change behaviour.
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To enable the pivot behaviour to work correctly, we must add one more change to the process:
Create Small Chunks Of Tasks To Complete And Get Rewarded Quickly
Whenever there is something that must be done that we find particularly exciting, the task must be broken down into small chunks. Small chunks reduce the perception of a large cognitive burden and make bigger tasks appear less daunting. Progress and achievement becomes measurable and provides a clear sense of direction.
Small chunks also appear more obtainable; easier to work hard in short bursts than work hard for a long period of time (which often leads to becoming worn out and eventually slowing/stopping).
Smaller chunks are easier to tie to reinforceable behaviours and completing small chunks provides a continuous sense of achievement as we are reaching each milestone, rather than a continuous feeling of failure of not having completed the entire thing.
An important factor for effective reinforcement is that it too must be relatively small and immediate. Sometimes a larger reward is appropriate, using tokens.
For example, a menu of two to three super fun things you might want to do, like go on a ski trip or having dinner at that Michelin-star restaurant. At each achievement, you collect a ‘token’ (points value). Once you have collected enough points, you spend them on something from the menu. Tokens can be a quick method of reinforcement and motivation, but are only effective if you have something you are collecting for (e.g. the power to choose), and you do actually spend them.
So, in short, by chunking and making positive contingent reinforcement upon completing these chunks, we are better able to control and increase our performance, while maintaining our motivation and having fun in the process.
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