In the blog post How to develop lasting behaviour change interventions in organisations? I talked with Sonja Graham, Managing Partner of Global Action Plan UK about a successful sustainable behaviour change program they ran in a hospital. Since 2017 GAP UK has a new focus on sustainable consumption with the bold aim of changing the mainstream consumption pattern of youth while helping them finding fulfilling ways of living.
To make sustainable consumption mainstream engage the Generation Y
Majka: What is your new focus and why did you choose it?
Sonja: Our focus is on running programs that help people to improve their well-being and happiness, but also understand and reduce their consumption. We are focussing primarily on happiness and “what you want in life?” to then using it to help people change their lifestyles to become more environmentally conscious.
We moved our focus on excessive consumption as the waste that comes from continually buying stuff, that you don’t need, is a really massive environmental issue that people just don’t like to talk about, as often it contravenes current economic paradigms and business models of growth. And also, if it is done in the wrong way, it can make people feel very uncomfortable to say they “should not” make themselves happy by being more stuff.
We are focussing on sustainable consumption as it is a mental health issue as well. Young people in particular are much less happy than their parents were: their rates of depression, anxiety and unhappiness have risen by 70% compared to 30 years ago. Additionally we’ve seen that among people with very materialistic values are less happy use more stuff. But more stuff does not make you happy.
Majka: Your aim is to make sustainable consumption mainstream. Who is your main target audience and why?
Sonja: We are going to focus on youth, the 16-30 years old ones. The main reason we are going to address the millenials is that people of this age group have a different value set. Also, they grew up very differently in terms of technology, define career and success in other terms compared to their parent’s age group and want to experience and share things rather than own them. We also see them as a pivotal group because they are the largest generation in the world.
Ignite a youth movement with positive peer-to-peer narratives
Majka: Which approach are you going to adopt in order to engage youth on sustainable consumption?
Sonja: To promote sustainable consumption we are trying to create a movement, where we bring people together, get them to share stories, to show that it is normal, desirable and not niche to consume in a sustainable way.
Rather than motivating people in changing singular behaviours, like “switching off the lights”, we are going to focus on supporting people to change themselves in accordance with their values. A campaign will focus more on questions like: “How do we lead? How do we have meaningful relationships, without having a lot of debt and buying a lot of stuff?”.
We are going to use positive narratives, about exciting lifestyles and experiences. A big thing we are seeing is that young people want to aspire to something and don’t want to be told not to do something, so we are going to use a lot of peer storytelling. We have a youth panel and are building a youth network. Within this youth network, we are going to help young people to try things and share their stories of change, to show how people changed and why they are excited by it. As an organisation, we are going to provide the tools and abilities to other people to follow them and do the same.
Step back, question and build self-change skills
Majka: Are you mainly focussing on the communication or are you also having a behaviour change component?
Sonja: The programs will all have behaviour change elements. For example one program we are running at the moment in Hungary and in the UK is for college graduates that are having their first jobs in large companies. We support them to explore their values and learn practical behaviour change tactics. We developed a workshop with academics in which participants look at their ambitions of live and how these ambitions are going to make them really happy and give them a sense of meaning.
Next we support them to set goals, identify behaviours they want to change and support them learning how to change them. This program will have a one month period in which they will set themselves challenges, which they will complete. They will then come back to the group to share their experiences. In those challenges they will all use a set of standard behaviour change tactics like public visible commitments, incentives, structure, reminders to avoid forgetting, thinking about how to make it as simple as possible and so on.
Often people don’t take time to step back and question things like: Do I really want this? Is this actually really important to me to have a five days a week job and X amount of money? If what makes me most happy is actually to have time to see my family? I maybe need to think at what kind of job I want. After that, it is about learning how to achieve their own ambitions.
Major life changes are open doors for changing mindsets
Majka: Do you think it is possible to strengthen values of adults?
Sonja: This program focussing on young adults – 16 to 30 years old – is our attempt to help people when they are most likely to be interested in forming or strengthening particular value sets. When you are forming your identity, between 18 and 24, get your first job, potentially are with your first partner, have new friends, it makes you much more likely to want to exhibit certain behaviours shared by your peers and makes you open to strengthening specific values. When you are 60 years old, have got your friends, children, house, and your life is sort of set it becomes much much harder.
I don’t say it is impossible, we still see some change, and there is a certain amount of evidence that for example, children can have some effects on their parents, but we think that it is probably much more successful to focus on age groups were we know we can make changes more easily, rather than spend a lot of time on older generations that will not be here as long and will be much harder to change.
Letting people choose to change is more effective than cohere through nudges, rewards or choice settings
Majka: Seems like starting with a reflection, introspection, about personal values is a central piece of your approach.
Sonja: This is one of our big learnings coming from the past 25 years: you can motivate people to do something, but unless they really choose to do it themselves they don’t necessarily keep doing it.
And yes there is a theory showing that if you motivate people to do something one time, they start thinking that they are the sort of person doing this, then they think “I’m a green person” and then they do some more things. But it’s much more effective to get people to think about what they want and let them choose to change, rather than cohere through nudges likes rewards or choice settings. These are successful in changing behaviour in the short term but are not successful in changing values or attitudes leading to long-term change.
Values set in childhood but adults can still strengthen them
Majka: Do you think that it is possible to change values?
Sonja: I think that it is a big challenge to change the values especially of older people. Research suggests that by in average the age of 8 you have almost formulated all your values and that there is not a huge amount of change afterwards. So you cannot fundamentally change values.
But what you can do is to strengthen particular values and if you strengthen specific values, that strengthens other values, that are linked to them, which leads to increase the likelihood of adopting particular behaviours. It would be unrealistic from us to think that we are changing values of people, but what we are trying to do is at least to help people to understand and explore things at a much more fundamental level than just the final behaviour.
If people only think of plastic bags for instance – or “I’m not taking a plastic bag” – but they don’t understand “why” then they end up taking a flight to the Bermudas while thinking of themselves as environmentally conscious. People need to connect things at a much bigger level.
Using gratitude and value exploration instead of meditation
Majka: Research shows that through practices of meditation, people can change their values. Are you as well working with it?
Sonja: The problem with mindfulness is that you really need intense time with the people to help them to understand and practice mindfulness properly. For this reason, we use some slightly more accessible tactics like gratitude and value exploration. A quite successful way of having an impact is to help people to think about values, understand what values are, then to think in what world they want to live in, and then help them to think about what these values look like in terms of behaviours. Usually this process requires in-depth conversations, in a small group, and cannot be done with a mass campaign. We are anyway going to use a lot of the tactics that we know work well in small groups to find how we can have an impact on values through some of our larger campaigns.
Majka: It would be very impactful if you find a way to successfully apply some of the techniques that work in small groups in larger campaigns.
Sonja: Yes, that would be great. The point is that when you do behaviour change programs you always have this challenge: if you do something in depth with a small group of people, we know that we can have a very large impact on values and behaviours; if you do something large scale you won’t have as much depth, but you reach more people.
It is always a trade-off, there is not a better approach. We try to do a bit of both by working with people in depth and then sharing their stories with the mainstream and giving them tools to start with smaller steps on their journeys.
Check out the first part of the interview with Sonja on changing specific behaviours in a given environment. In the next blog, Sonja will share some insights and tips for changemakers designing for behaviour change as well as common pitfalls.