Review

You should know what human behaviour you’re trying to change before you do any meaningful product development work. It creates clarity for the team and can give the team a leading tractable metric to get after. This book outlines a simple and seemingly bulletproof approach to behaviour change.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Nearly everything we create is designed to shape behaviour, yet we rarely acknowledge this; start with a clear behavioural goal for your creation.
• Behaviour is influenced by promoting pressures (motivations making behaviour more likely) and inhibiting pressures (factors making behaviour less likely); designing interventions involves altering these pressures.
• The Intervention Design Process (IDP) involves:
• Observing and validating a behavioural insight—a gap between current and desired behaviours.
• Crafting a behavioural statement to define the desired outcome.
• Mapping pressures influencing the behaviour.
• Designing interventions to modify pressures.
• Evaluating interventions through pilots, tests, and scaling.
• A behavioural statement outlines the desired behaviour change: When [population] wants to [motivation], and they [limitations], they will [behaviour] (as measured by [data]).
• Pressure mapping identifies promoting and inhibiting pressures affecting behaviour, serving as levers for intervention design.
• Generate numerous intervention ideas without constraints, then select promising ones based on effectiveness and feasibility.
• Conduct an ethical check before piloting interventions, focusing on:
• What behaviour you're changing.
• How you're changing it.
• Ensuring alignment with the population's motivations and values.
• Differentiate between the intention-action gap (people intend but fail to act) and the intention-goal gap (people have a goal but reject the behaviour to achieve it).
• Ethical interventions align with existing motivations and do not impose costs that outweigh benefits or conflict with other motivations.
• Transparency and responsibility are crucial; openly communicate your intentions and be accountable for the outcomes of your interventions.
• Pilots are small-scale, operationally "dirty" interventions expected not to work, aimed at minimising resources and impact while testing for behaviour change.
• Pilot validation uses qualitative and quantitative data to assess if an intervention shows promise, accepting higher p-values due to small sample sizes.
• Tests are larger-scale interventions with greater operational diligence, assessing whether scaling is worthwhile based on effect size and operational cost.
• Scaling decisions are summarised as: We are [confidence] that [intervention] will [direction] [behaviour] (as measured by [data]). Scaling this requires [effort] and will result in [change].
• Documenting failures and continuous measurement are essential to avoid repeating mistakes and to ensure interventions remain effective over time.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Introduction

• Nearly everything we interact with constructed to shape behaviour - yet we rarely connect our desire to create with the goal of behaviour change. Why not start at the end? With a clearly described behaviour change that is the explicit goal of your creation.
• For any behaviour there are promoting or inhibiting pressures. Identifying and consciously influencing the strength of those pressures is the basis of designing for behaviour change.
• Promoting Pressures: Why would people want to do that in the first place? Motivations and factors that make behaviour more likely.
• Inhibiting pressures: Why aren’t they doing it already? The factors that make the behaviour less likely.
• Interventions are the things we build to change the pressures and thus the resultant behaviours. The Intervention Design Process (IDP) is the authors approach to just that.
• Building habit forming products that circumvent our intentions by exploiting the brains need to save cognitive resources is unethical.
• BUT there’s plenty of work to do in ethical behaviour change - where we create the conditions that allows us to act on our original motivations.
• Behaviour change is best done with a transparent goal that is clear and shared by both you and those whose behaviours you seek to change.
• In behaviour change - most pressures that can be used to make behaviour more likely can also be used to make it less likely when reversed.

Part 1: The Basics of Behaviour Change

Chapter 1. The Intervention Design Process

The Intervention Design Process:

1. Observe, define and validate a behavioural insight - a gap between how people behave now and how we want them to
2. Flesh out the insight into a behavioural statement - and map the pressures that create the current state of behaviour (which provide levers for change)
3. Design interventions to modify behaviour by altering the most powerful pressures - select the most promising ethical interventions.
4. Evaluate and refine interventions through progressively larger-scale experimentation phases (Pilot, Test, Scale)
5. Put in place continuous monitoring to measure impact of interventions over time

• When validating an insight - don’t rely on data alone try to to observe qualitatively what also appears to be true quantitatively. Do different forms of research and aim for convergent validity: evidence that’s greater than the sum of its parts - when disparate sources support the same conclusion.
• Progressively larger-scale experimentation means you don’t have to be right all the time - you just need to make small mistakes instead of big ones.
• Expect the competition to fast follow your work but they may not understand the pressures you’re altering, which can be a significant handicap.
• On timings:
• 1 week to understand the insight
• 2 weeks to validate and explore potential pressures
• 1 week to design and select interventions
• 2 weeks to get pilots up and running
• 2 weeks to get back some early quantitative and qualitative signals for validation

Chapter 2: Potential Insights and Insight Validation

• A potential insight expresses the distance between how people behave now and how we want them to. Once validated they allow us to start understanding the gap and how to design interventions that bridge it.
• There are four major types of potential insights: quantitative, qualitative, apocryphal (common knowledge not directly observed in your organisation), and external (e.g. research papers).
• Finding novel potential insights is about noticing something that hasn’t been noticed before. Let the data guide you.
• Once a potential insight is surfaced, it must be validated through insight validation. Look for convergent validity: evidence from diverse sources that supports the same conclusion. Think of it like building a table—you want multiple legs to hold up your conclusion. The more varied your sources of convergent validity, the harder it is to fall victim to confirmation bias. By triangulating from data and observation and structurally resisting groupthink, we can eliminate risks and increase our chances of a successful, scaled outcome.
• Focus on what you’re validating - don’t fall into the trap of using research to post hoc affirm whatever you already think you know.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. There is no such thing as wasted time in validation.

Better intervention design happens when you have as many potential insights as possible at the beginning of the process—a big, wide funnel of opportunities for behaviour change that slowly gets narrower as we hone in on pressures we’re able to successfully design interventions around.

• Focus those insights on behaviours, not on how we create them. You have to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Chapter 3: Behavioural Statement

• To put behaviour change at the centre of our creation process we need to clearly express the behavioural outcome that we want to achieve. We have to start at the end.
• A behavioural statement is an articulation of the world we are trying to create, from a behavioural perspective. It lays the foundation for our next steps (pressure mapping and intervention design).
• Most organisations are biased toward focusing on processes and immediate actions and how we’re doing them, rather than on their outcomes.
• A behavioural statement is a set of conditions that can either be satisfied or not and come together in a single sentence:
• Make sure you write a behavioural statement not a vision statement.
• Make sure you focus on a real behaviour
• Make it absolute and brave (e.g. use always, everyone). It increases the likelihood you’ll achieve something big.
• Evolve it as you need.
• Put it up on the wall where everyone can see it.
• Use it to make decisions making - you can explicitly compare available options against the behaviours they are likely to produce.
• You can scale behavioural statements down as needed, creating a clear link between individual accountability and the organisation's overall behavioural goal. This ensures everyone understands the importance of their role and has a defined area of responsibility. It also establishes a clear accountability structure.
• Finding the right size of behavioural statement comes back to autonomy and accountability. It should be as large as possible but small enough that the person could be held individually accountable for its success or failure.
• A behavioural statement is similar to an objective and key result (OKR). “As measured by data” is really just the KR and the rest is just the O, but phrased in such a way as to be observably descriptive of the world you’re trying to create. If you’re already doing OKRs for your planning process, you’re already ready to simply sub in behavioural statements and reorient entirely toward behaviour.

Chapter 4. Pressure Mapping and Pressure Validation

• Behaviour change is about interventions that move us from the world as it is (Point A) to the world as we want it to be (Point B). Our insights describe Point A and our behavioural statement describes point B. Next map the pressures that create the distance between the two, so you know what it is that needs to change.

When we talk about designing for behavior change, we are actually talking about changing the pressures that determine the behavior, rather than directly changing the behavior itself.