Ogilvy UK head of strategy, advertising, Matt Waksman, illustrates and interprets the role of the strategist within advertising and wider society

If you’re trying to think and act more creatively and more critically, focus on asking better, more interesting questions of the briefs you’re tasked with answering. What we teach children can and should be applied to our own professional lives, too. A focus on problems and solutions first, promotes consistent, ‘safe’ answers, but won’t move the work on. Spending time on asking and answering better questions will help refine the understanding of a problem and will create the conditions for new, interesting and challenging solutions.

Getting the question right is the most important component in information design, and it’s the most common point where information design goes wrong. This is because information is always relative. Always. Before you can undertake any kind of visualization exercise, you need to know what question you want to answer, and for whom. So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity: 1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next. 2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation. 3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.

“One of the greatest gifts strategists can give themselves is the humility to appreciate that tactical ideas are neither their strength nor their responsibility. Setting up goals and scoring them are two very different things. To do one well you usually need to ignore the other. ...Strategy is not lesser than creativity, because it pre-empts and prepares it for victory. A brand must travel through the confusing forests of targeting, positioning and objectives before it can set up camp on the fertile field of creativity.“

Hi, I'm Robert I hope this concept card is useful for you and helps you add a new tool to your toolbox. As someone who helps teams develop products, services and experiences, I did not see many open resources out there that combine behavioral science with other strategy and design processes, so I decided to take my experience and create frameworks and boards to share for free. If you have questions on the framework you can connect with me on Linkedin or see my website.

A unique compendium of the latest behavioural insights, distilled, applied and combined to strengthen your ideas

BC patterns are a collection of reoccurring solutions used in Behavioural Design to change people’s behaviour. They are patterns that designers, change makers and problem solvers can consider when solving people problems and designing behaviour change.

This toolkit has been designed by the Research and Evaluation Unit (RIMU) at Auckland Council to be useful to those wishing to improve public programmes or services, policy development, or team decision-making. It draws on a range of existing resources produced by the Behavioural Insights Team, the OECD and others (see ‘other resources’ on the next page). This toolkit has two components that can be used either separately or together. The first component is a step-by-step process for developing a behavioural intervention. It guides the user through understanding existing behaviours, identifying a desired behaviour, brainstorming ideas for promoting the desired behaviour, and robustly testing the best ideas. The user should follow the steps in the order they are numbered. It is focused on key questions to ask at each step. It is not a complete guide to how to answer these questions, however, and the user may need to rely on other research and evaluation resources to help with each step. The second component of the toolkit is a series of ‘brainstorming’ cards. The cards cover many important behavioural principles to keep in mind when looking to improve programmes, policies, or decision-making. Each card includes a description of the behavioural principle, some examples, and suggestions for how to apply the principle. They can be used on their own or to brainstorm ideas as in the step-by-step process above. To help with navigation, the card set has been organised into a series for better services and a series for better decisionmaking, although there is overlap in the use of the cards. The former is marked with a red dot in the top left corner and the latter with a green dot.

Method:Three participatory workshops were held with the independent Welsh residential decarbonisation advisory group(‘the Advisory Group’)to (1)maprelationships betweenactors, behavioursand influences onbehaviourwithin thehome retrofitsystem,(2)provide training in the Behaviour Change Wheel framework(3)use these to developpolicy recommendationsfor interventions. Recommendations were analysed usingthe COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation) model of behaviourtoassesswhether they addressed these factors. Results:Twobehavioural systems mapswere produced,representing privately rented and owner-occupied housing tenures. The main causal pathways and feedback loops in each map are described.

The issue is: We try to solve every single box in the problem tree. If people don’t know about something, then we solve it by raising awareness. If people don’t care about something, then we solve it by getting them to care more. If people are doing illegal behaviors because of a lack of enforcement, then we solve it by increasing enforcement. We go through the whole set of problem tree causes in this manner, writing objectives with a one-to-one match per problem. Not only does this result in a long list of objectives, which will quickly overwhelm us, it also traps us into solving behavioral problems using logic-based approaches.

We argue that the reason so little progress has been made against obesity and type 2 diabetes is because the field has been laboring, quite literally, in the sense intended by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, under the wrong paradigm. This energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel-partitioning. Because these hormonal responses are dominated by the insulin signaling system, which in turn responds primarily (although not entirely) to the carbohydrate content of the diet, this thinking is now known as the carbohydrate-insulin model. Its implications are simple and profound: People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.