How great would it be to have a magic wand that makes people change how they behave? I would have used it to switch people to biking from driving cars; to buying consciously rather than based on sexist advertisements, or to voting based on long-term wins for everybody rather than short-term fears. Many of our social and environmental challenges would be solved in a blink with such a magic wand!

Unluckily, I haven’t found this awesome magic wand, yet. While working as a social entrepreneur committed to engaging people for sustainability, over the years I realized that it is impossible to “change people’s behaviour”. Actually, there is only one person we can change – ourselves.

We can only support people to change themselves

So how can we drive change, which requires people to change how they make decisions and behave? As Changemakers committed to addressing today’s social and environmental challenges, we can learn about how to shape an environment that supports specific changes through our services, products and campaigns.

In the book “A Changemakers Guide to Designing for Behaviour Change”, which you can download for FREE by scaling4good, I break down some amazing results from behavioural sciences and combine them with hands-on methods from design thinking and lean-development.

6 steps to design for behaviour change

To support people to change their own behaviours, our journey will include:

1. Clarifying the project frame and impact
2. Selecting the target audience
3. Defining the target behaviour
4. Designing to support behaviour change
5. Planning & experimenting
6. Learning

Scientists are learning more and more about how our minds work, and how to design strategies that lead to behaviour change. I outline the main four below, however, to implement these design strategies, first Changemakers must learn about some characteristics of our minds. They are:

Lazy: our mind, like every other organ, tries to save as much energy as possible. As taking decisions uses quite some energy and we take thousands of decisions every day, our minds will opt for the easiest, most energy efficient, way to decide.

Fast & slow: As highlighted by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, our mind is composed by a fast and a slow “thinking system”.

The “fast system” is what we perceive as our unconscious mind, our gut feeling, which makes us take decisions in a blink. It drives our emotional, fear-driven and short-term focused responses, especially when we need to take many decisions at the same time or when we are tired.

The “slow system” is active when we are consciously thinking – for example, making future plans. It is logical, structured and loves abstract questions. Our “slow thinking system” thinks it is in control most of the time, but actually it is the “fast system” that makes most of the decisions in our daily life.

Lovers & slaves of habits: Habits are like “decision making highways” our minds use in order to save energy. When executing habits, we repeat the same sequence of actions each time. This allows the mind to make a decision just once, like taking the entry ramp to a highway, instead of having to decide each step of the sequence of actions. Habits are great energy savers ensuring our survival, but can also be “in the way” when we want to change ourselves.

4 strategies to design for behaviour change

Once we have a clear objective for our work, feel that we can deeply relate to our target audience and defined the behaviour change we want to support we can start using the “designing for behaviour change” lens to look at the change. Depending on the type of change we want to support, we can use one or several of the following four strategies.

1. Make it easy: Can we make the execution of the action easier?

The easiest strategy is to shape the environment of people in a way that they take a new behaviour, almost by accident, without noticing. The “fast system” is in control and is nudged in one direction. For instance, a Swiss canteen noticed that 50-60% of people take the “Menu 1”. They started proposing a vegetarian menu as “Menu 1” (instead of calling it “Veggie Menu”) and the number of vegetarian meals sold increased drastically.

People just took the Menu 1 as it was, what they did most of the time, it was their default choice. With this strategy, people will eat more vegetarian meals, which may accomplish your objective of saving CO2 emissions. The downside is that once people’s environment changes again,  they will fall back to their default option.

2. CREATE action funnel: How can we support conscious decision-making?

The next, more challenging strategy is to support a conscious decision. In this case, both the slow and fast “thinking systems” will have to embrace the execution of the new option. CREATE is an acronym standing for a sequence of questions developed by Stephen Wendel.

• CUE: With a cue, we attract the attention of both the emotional and rational part of our minds to our service.
• REACTION: To have a positive “first impression” on the emotional level we can appeal to the senses through an experience (imagine to smell a good smell when you enter a shop), show short-term emotional wins and make use of social components.
• EVALUATION: In order to have a positive evaluation of the slow thinking system, our rational part, we highlight the pros of taking the decision and downsize the cons.
• ABILITY: To make sure that the slow thinking system is confident in being able to execute the action, we display the goal and the path.
• TIMING: We create a feeling of urgency for executing the action now, by displaying the limited availability of products or services.
• EXECUTION: If we manage to keep engaged the target audience along these 5 levels, the chance that they will execute the action is pretty high.

3. Change habits: How can we support new habits?

We can aim at supporting our target audience to develop new habits such as using our services regularly or changing existing unbeneficial habits. Habits, ones built, are very powerful and changing them requires a mix of observation, experimentation and quite some perseverance. Charles Duhigg’s book “Habit” breaks down the mechanics of a habit loop:

1. Cue / Trigger: What triggers the execution of the habit? Is it a time, another habit, a place, the presence of specific people?
2. Action: Which actions are executed during the habit, as well before and after the main action? Is there any interaction?
3. Reward: How does the person feel after having executed the habit?
4. Craving: When thinking of the habit, what is the person looking for? Which wished emotional state is motivating the person to execute the habit?

For instance, imagine that I want to reduce the number of coffees I drink. The results of the habit loop may look something like:

• Cue: Every day at 4 pm I drink a coffee
• Action: I stand up, walk to the cafeteria, chat with the colleagues, drink a coffee, get back to the desk
• Reward: After having had a coffee I think “This was great.”
• Craving: What did I look for? Was I looking for a social interaction, a way to wake up when feeling sleepy or a distraction from a challenging task?
• Solution: I could start trying out different behaviours to discover what do I really crave for, maybe standing up and talking with colleagues would also give me the “This was great.” feeling.

4. Empowerment: How to drive long-term self-propagating change?

Instead of changing the environment in which people make decisions, the focus can be put on coaching people to develop new ways of making decisions based on their own will and motivations. Instead of changing the environment, you train your target audience to themselves changing their environment.

Empowering people to change is a circular process combining a mix of strategies supporting change and providing different “entry points” to initiate change. Marilyn Mehlmann developed the empowerment spiral to highlight entry points empowering solutions can use.

Some of the most effective change making movements and initiatives applied several of these elements in their solutions:

• Build communities: build communities of people practising the new behaviours in order to create a sense of belonging and make peer to peer learning and support easy.
• Ask the big questions of life: support individuals in questioning and searching for the own life purpose, what provides true joy and a sense of meaning to them. By doing so, people uncover their inner values, voice and guidance.
• Embrace a growth mindset: helping people to see themselves on a life-long learning journey, rather than as unchangeable individuals allows to let go old stories and develop the ability to embracing change and proactively drive change.
• Cultivate the mind: by providing access to practices, like meditation and mindfulness exercises, individuals learn to observe the tension between short-term emotional wishes and value-based long-term aspirations, which allows them to gain more freedom to decide which one to follow in a specific decision.  

When designing for behaviour change there is no ultimate answer on which strategy will work more effectively. Different approaches need to be tried out by experimenting. Developing a learning culture in your organization will make sure to progress, on each iteration, towards more effective solutions.  

In “A Changemakers Guide to Designing for Behaviour Change” you will find many design canvases and exercises you can use in your projects. You can also join workshops and events with Majka Baur & scaling4good.