BEHAVIOR CHANGE
some basic principles.
Change – impact – comes from behavior, from people doing something different, taking action. If nobody takes action, nothing happens. Given your mission and your idea, the question you need to ask is this:
“Who must do what differently?
Do this: Make an behavior map. Put the ultimate outcome you want to achieve at the bottom of the page, then list the most salient actions that must happen to achieve that outcome. For each, include the actor – the who – and the specific action – the what. Make sure you connect the dots all the way to impact. If there isn’t at least one action you hadn’t previously thought of, you may not be connecting the dots: there might be some behavior you didn’t think you had anything to do with you but absolutely needs to happen. See if you can arrange them as a flow diagram that leads to the outcome:
A good behavior map:
Sets out who does what all the way to the outcome
It’s about what they (people you can’t fire) do, not you
Includes the 3-6 most essential behaviors
Connects the dots all the way to the outcome
Is about actions, not thoughts, attitudes, desires, feelings
moms do A
↓
kids do B
↓
community does C
↓
moms (again) do D
↓
the wonderful outcome we hoped for
EXAMPLE
Behavior
Not behavior
Mom seeks out community health worker
Fisherman follows local management plan
Senator votes for a bill
Kids attend school regularly
Patient takes correct TB meds at right time
Children wash their hands
Kids watch educational show
Parents send their girls to school
Farmers stop poaching animals
Customers buy product for $20
Mother understands danger signs of illness
Fishers realize that conservation is necessary
Senator changes his mind
Parents say they’ll make sure kid attends school*
Patient knows TB meds and regimen
Children say handwashing is important
Kids say they like educational show
Parents value girls’ education
Farmers say poaching is bad
Customers say they’ll buy product for $20
*saying something is a kind of “pseudo-action” - easy to do and often not acted upon.
Action is behavior, to establish a new action is to change behavior. There’s a huge and growing science of behavior change. You can go down that rabbit hole later - it’s usually the case that the more you learn, the more you want to know - but we’re going to lay out the quick n’ dirty basics. The first principle is that for a behavior to happen, people have to be both willing to adopt it and able to do it successfully. Imagine that you have two sliders: One represents the spectrum from “unwilling” to “willing” and the other “unable” to “able:”
Behavior change
willing
eager
unwilling
unable
able
easy
Whomever you work with starts somewhere on each of the two axes. Your job is to get them as far as you can to the right ; in fact you want to get beyond able and willing to “eager and effortless.” For any behavior, if all you do is brainstorm with your team on how to get as far as you can to “eager and easy,” you’ve taken a huge first step toward designing for behavior change.
MOTIVATION
ABILITY
PROMPT
With that basic principle in mind, we can get a bit more sophisticated. BJ Fogg, a Stanford psychologist, came up with this elegant approach to behavior change. Motivation = make the change as desirable as possible. Ability = make the change as easy as possible. Prompt = people can be motivated and able and still not move. They often need some kind of prompt to take action - but prompts are useless if people aren’t motivated and able. The point of the graphic here is people can do hard stuff if motivated enough, and they can do easy stuff without being that motivated. Stack the deck: Go for eager and easy.
MOTIVATION 1
Motivation is the result of emotion and calculation: how we feel and how we think. Emotion is by far the most important driver, and in fact, it is impossible to decouple thinking and feeling. Decisions are mostly made emotionally and rationalized in a calculated way. Without real effort, we don’t make a coolly rational calculation of costs and benefits, risks and rewards. In fact, motivation happens along an effort continuum:
delight
coercion
satisfaction
compensation
more effort to maintain
less effort to maintain
Our emotions arise mostly from the fact that we are social creatures. We want to belong to the group, we want status and look to high-status people for direction, we want to be liked, we practice reciprocity, we do what the people around us do, we feel guilt and shame when out of line, we like to do things in groups. There’s so much more to our sociality, but the point is that there is so much that we can accomplish simply by thinking deeply about what it means to be social, what we feel that helps us thrive in a group.
more calculation
more emotion
MOTIVATION 2
Another big driver of emotion is safety, or fear of loss. Loss is painful; the pain from a loss lingers far longer than the joy from a gain. We are on balance conservative; so much can be explained by the notion of loss aversion, the discovery of which essentially led to Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel prize. And safety doesn’t only mean physical; fear of loss extends to social, financial, cultural and virtually every other domain that matters.
Calculation - the rational consideration of costs vs benefits - matters. Spreadsheets and algorithms work, but real people in real life make calculations that are tweaked by emotions. People need tools and time to think rationally; mostly we take emotionally driven decision-making shortcuts that collectively are known as cognitive biases. There’s a huge literature on cognitive biases, but essentially it boils down to this:
Confirmation of your beliefs feels good.
Challenges to your beliefs feel bad.
It feels good to get along with your group.
Thinking is hard work.
Loss is painful and scary.
ABILITY
There is an enormous literature and any number of specific methodologies focused on making things as easy as possible. it’s way too much to go into here, but the single most salient principle (and this applies to this whole Mulago design-for-impact approach) is this: Design in the midst of those you are designing for. The most successful approaches are human-centered design and the more specific user-centered design. This isn’t the right place to try to teach them, but every organization should adopt and master an effective approach. And the most important overarching principles are these: 1) design in the midst of those you serve; 2) draw from their knowledge; 3) make sure there people with deep domain and local knowledge on your team, and 4) iterate, iterate, iterate.
In the spirit of this deck, here’s is one simple tool that anyone can use: The “Customer Journey” (some people don’t like customer; use whatever you want: user, client, beneficiary - however you like to characterize those you’ve set out to serve). Do this: describe an archetype of your central customer. Now imagine in granular detail what it means for her to travel all that she needs to do to realize the benefit you hope to make possible. Carefully list the barriers that she might encounter. Figure out how to remove them, help her go around them, or empower her to get right over them.
Example: Mom takes her sick child to clinic
Mom
sees
danger
signs
Mom
finds
CHW
Mom
travels to clinic
Mom
gets in
to see
nurse
Mom
gets prescribed medicine from pharmacy
Mom
travels back
home
Mom
follows treatment
instructions
A lot can go wrong; a lot has to go right: your job is to design for a successful journey.
Once you’ve optimized motivation and ability, you often still need a prompt to make things happen. Text reminders, pop-up windows, deadlines, picking a date, establishing a ritual, all those phone notifications they’re all prompts. Done wrong, they’re an annoyance; done right, they maximize the chance motivation and ability will turn into action.
Here’s a really nice blog on MAP
PROMPTS
Here’s a bunch examples of prompts
There’s a huge literature out there on this stuff. Here’s some of the best accessible things we’ve read:
And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole this is a beautifully presented list of the top 100 books on behavior change. And this is a good list of the best behavior change books of 2021.
FURTHER READING