The implications are that if you want people to behave in a certain way, you need to make it intuitive and easy for their System 1 thinking to decide on the desired behaviour rather than rely on their System 2 thinking to make a deliberate decision about what action to take. This is also the governing thought behind nudging strategies.
Create a KPI translation guide
Based on the dual process theory, we must design our performance management system in a way that allows our employees to use System 1 thinking to intuitively translate the strategic objectives and associated performance metrics into desirable behaviour.
This implies that the process of designing a performance management framework should not stop with the definition of good KPIs. The selection of proper performance metrics must be accompanied by relevant targets and examples of how to affect the KPI through concrete actions, i.e. behavioural translation.
Consider the following example from Morten Münster’s best-selling book on behavioural design of how the world-class football team FC Barcelona outlined clear performance metrics and decomposed each performance indicator into SMART targets associated with clear, actionable behaviour for the players to follow. By doing so, it was made obvious to everyone on the team what they needed to do to achieve the underlying strategic objective (winning) at critical points in time throughout the match.