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.

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.