Rather than pulling behavioural insights together into a tasty, cohesive recipe, behavioural economics has offered myriad tasty morsels and left it up to the audience to reconcile them. People want choice. People get overwhelmed by choice. People follow what others do. People don’t like to be seen to follow others. People act impulsively. People stick with the status quo. People are lazy. People like challenge. Agghhhh! To be useful behavioural economics needs to evolve from a series of interesting anecdotes to a framework that can help analyse and resolve behavioural challenges. The Williams Behaviour Change Model So that’s what I’ve cooked up. I’ve created your very own behavioural framework that is as tasty as a non-deconstructed sticky date pudding. This model gets beyond behavioural economics for its own sake and provides a structured way for you to interrogate your behavioural challenge and design how to get people to take the action you want.

A key finding of this study was that the young women used a series of visual cues to self-identify if they had drunk too much. “You start losing, like, your eyesight and stuff. Stuff goes blurry.” ICE has designed a series of behavioural nudges (e.g. blurred images in toilet mirrors) that will be employed in situ at pubs and clubs to use young women’s unconscious thoughts and nudge them to self-identify that they may be approaching their limit, thus enabling them to apply drink protective behavioural strategies more proactively.

the power of the default

behavioural scientists are as biased as anyone

Here’s one way to deal with things : show them a clip from the film Apollo 13. Specifically, the bit where the crew on board the lunar module are facing imminent suffocation due to a faulty air filter, so the scientists on the ground are forced to make a ‘square peg fit a round hole’ with whatever is available to the astronauts. I showed the clip to one client team I was working with, who were all blockers and no action. Before watching the clip the team was fatalistically resigned to business as usual. They didn’t like it, but they accepted it. Business as usual was a six month requirement gathering phase leading to a £1.5m bet on an unproven concept. After watching the clip, they built a working proof of concept within two hours, a fully fledged beta test within 6 weeks and ended up with an award-winning product that delights customers and is incredibly valuable to the business.

Cognitive bias wall chart

Though nudge-economics remains seductive, what once seemed like a panacea has come to look a bit more like a series of sticking plasters. Earlier this year the nudge unit was removed from direct government control, partly sold to the Nesta innovation charity run by New Labour guru Geoff Mulgan, a move which seemed to suggest the prime minister no longer viewed it as quite so central to his philosophy. That move has coincided with a backlash, or at least a critical analysis, of some of the tenets on which its brand of behavioural economics is based.

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Behavioral scientists have been studying these quirks of the mind for decades and have identified three main barriers that can lead clients astray. To summarize, clients need to: Believe what you’re saying Choose what to do Actually do it Each of these steps presents unique challenges.

Note free appendix in Supplemental section provides examples of how this works. "A key insight is that these behaviours are not predominantly driven by deliberative conscious decisions, but occur directly in response to environmental cues and without necessary representation of their consequences. Consequently, interventions that target non-conscious rather than conscious processes to change health behaviour may have significant potential... We propose a framework for describing or categorising interventions to change health behaviour by the degree to which their effects may be considered non-conscious. "

"So the big question is: How can health systems be made safer when success means changing the attitudes and habits of health care professionals at a time when many are overwhelmed and deeply frustrated by all of the demands being made on them? What does it take to get them to embrace, with urgency, new ways of working?"