Category

Citizen Behaviour

Behavioural Design applied to shaping citizen behavior

The SUE Influence Framework© Explained

The SUE Influence Framework© explained

By All, Behavioural Science Insights, Citizen Behaviour, Customer Behaviour, Employee behaviour, Personal Behaviour

The SUE | Influence Framework© is a powerful mental model we developed at SUE to analyse the forces that shape behaviour systematically. The framework will provide you with all the human insights you need to develop ideas for behavioural change. A deeper understanding of the forces that prevent people from change or boost behavioural change is essential to influence minds and shape behaviour. In this blog post, we explain the model step-by-step and illustrate it with lots of examples.

 

1. How does influence work?

For a complete overview of the essence of behavioural design, I want to urge you to read our blog “What is behavioural design“. For this blogpost, it suffices to understand that you need three ingredients for successful behavioural change: 

  1. Understand how people think and how they make decisions. (cognitive psychology)
  2. Know how you can analyse the forces that shape people’s behaviour (SUE | Influence Framework©)
  3. Learn how you can come up with ideas for behavioural change 

One of the biggest misconceptions of behavioural design is that it’s limited to this third ingredient. Think about all the persuasion techniques in the field of interface design and UX to boost online sales. Booking.com has turned these techniques into an art form. 

However, if you don’t consider what happens inside the human mind you try to influence, you can use as many persuasion tactics as you want; you’re not going to be successful. 

Let me illustrate this with an example: You can use all the scarcity, authority, social proof in the world to persuade me to make my next city trip with Flixbus. But as long as you haven’t addressed my (probably irrational) prejudice that travelling by bus coach will be a social nightmare, full of annoying people, my brain will stay locked for every attempt to change my behaviour.

Flixbus

 

2. The forces that shape behaviour

The best way to think of the SUE | Influence Framework© is to think of it as a tool that brings the dynamic forces to the surface that shape behaviour. With this framework:

 

You will understand why people do the things they do and what prevents them from changing their behaviour.

Understanding these forces helps you to spot opportunities for behavioural change. Only when you have armed yourself with these opportunities you can start to come up with ideas. 

To illustrate this with the example from above. Only when you consider that I have anxieties, doubts and prejudices that prevent me from travelling by coach will you have the proper insight to come up with ideas to influence my decision-making. You will ask yourself how we might take away the prejudice that cheap coach travel equals a social nightmare. 

If you want to design a successful strategy for behavioural change, you will have to work outside-in. You start with learning what happens inside people’s minds, and you adapt your intervention to this understanding. 

Would you like to power up your team or project with behavioural intelligence?

Feel free to contact us. We are happy to tell you more about our consultancy or academy. Helping you innovate, transform or grow levering insights from behavioural science in practice.

Contact us

No worries, no strings attached!

The SUE | Influence Framework© has three parts, with a total of seven elements. We will delve into these three parts below.

  1. Part 1: Current and Desired Behaviour 
  2. Part 2: The Job-to-be-Done
  3. Part 3: Pains, Gains, Comforts and Anxieties

3. Current and Desired Behaviour 

The best way to think of behavioural change is that you need to have someone (or yourself) switch from a current to desired behaviour. This sounds obvious but is actually quite challenging. Because people need to stop doing the things they do and start doing something new. Stopping is hard because your current behaviour is full of comforts. You don’t need to think about it, and your behaviour is more than often driven by habits that are difficult to control. 

Furthermore, there are several difficulties associated with new behaviour too: Am I able to do this? Do I want it? Do I trust it? Do I get it? Can I afford it? What will others think of me? 

You immediately sense that, if you want to get someone from A to B, you will have to deal with several forces at work that lock us in our current behaviour and prevent us from switching to the desired behaviour. The SUE | Influence Framework© is nothing more or less than a tool to uncover these forces.  

 

4. The Job-to-be-Done

If you want to understand why people do the things they do, then the Job-to-be-done framework by Clayton Christensen is essential. In a famous Harvard Business Review paper, Christensen argues that people “hire products and services” for a job that arises in their life. Understanding the “job” or “task” is the key to understanding what motivate people to do the things they do. If you want to know how to get more people to buy milkshakes in a fast-food restaurant, you need to understand the job-to-be-done for which people would come in and “hire” a milkshake. In the famous lecture below, Christensen argues that most people who buy milkshakes at a fast-food restaurant buy them because they have a long and tedious drive to work. They want something to fill their stomach while keeping the commute interesting. The milkshake does this job better than any other product. It keeps you busy for at least 10 minutes, it doesn’t crumble all over you, and you can easily keep it in your hand while steering the car. 

 

Job-to-be-Done thinking unlocks a deeper understanding of the human behind the customer.

A while ago, we discovered in a Behavioural Design Sprint we did for a health tech company that the real Job-to-be-done for people with diabetes is to live everyday life. They want to be reminded as little as possible by their disease. People with diabetes look at every product and service through the prism of this Job-to-be-done. The unconscious question they ask themselves is: Does this product help me to approach my Job-to-be-Done to live a care-free life in which I am bothered as little as possible by my disease? This insight was crucial because, until that point, our client always communicated to people as patients.

Case: Zoku Amsterdam

The founders of Zoku Amsterdam had given themselves more than two years to figure out how they could design the ultimate hospitality experience for people who needed to stay longer in a city because of their job.

 

Zoku Amsterdam - Hotel Room

 

The Job-to-be-done that Zoku took as the critical opportunity for their prototyping is that people want to feel at home. They want to feel part of the community of the city. And this experience is precisely what most hotels don’t offer you. Every hotel reminds you in everything of the fact that you’re just a passenger. Zoku designed the room with this Job-to-be-done in mind. The centrepiece of the room is a dining/working table, not the bed. Lunch and dinner at Zoku are to be consumed at a long communal table. You can invite your customers for meetings, and they have daily activities in which you can participate. More about Job-to-be-Done:

Want to learn how to design behaviour?

Join our two-day Fundamentals Course and master a hands-on method to use behavioural science to develop ideas that change minds and shape behaviour.

Check out the course

Join the 1.500 forward-thinking professionals who already graduated!

5. The forces diagram

We already argued above that the biggest challenge with designing for behavioural change is that people need to stop doing things. Furthermore, they have all kinds of insecurities and discomfort about the new behaviour we want them to perform. We have also argued that the best way to motivate them to embrace new behaviour is to connect with their deeper goals in their life (called Jobs-to-be-done). 

The third and final component of the SUE | Influence Framework© is four dynamic forces that push people towards or pull people away from the desired behaviour. The Influence Framework works with these four forces: 

  1. Pains of the current behaviour
  2. Gains of the desired behaviour
  3. Anxieties, doubts, and other barriers to the desired behaviour 
  4. Comforts of the current behaviour

Force 1: Pains

Pains are what people experience as shortcomings and frustrations related to their current behaviour.

Pains are often the problems to which a behavioural designer designs a solution. Pain and frustration trigger a propensity or willingness for change. The better you can connect with people’s pain, the higher the eagerness to change their behaviour.

In our behavioural design sprints, we often discover that they reward you with their trust if you can articulate people’s pain quite well. They appreciate that you understand their world. Every populist in the world knows that people are not interested in what you want to do. They want to feel instead that you get their pain. It’s a meme in every sales training that the best salesmen sell pain.


Force 2: Gains 

Gains are the positive consequences that people will experience when they perform the new desired behaviour.

Whenever I stay at Zoku, I can at least work in my room if I want. I can eat healthy without having to go out. I can enjoy hanging around in the big co-working living room with my laptop. I can impress my clients with the view, etcetera. These are all gains you will experience if you book at Zoku. 

However, these gains only make sense relative to the Job-to-be-Done. You appreciate the Gain of the design of your room, the shared breakfast table, the healthy food kitchen and the co-working living room because they all contribute to the Job-to-be-done of feeling at home in the city you have to stay in for work. 

Important to remember: Always connect the Pains and Gains with the Job -to-be-done

 

Case: Pains and Gains and travelling by train 

I often need to travel between Amsterdam and Belgium. I have stopped taking the car, and I only go by train these days. My Job-to-be-done is to spend my time as purposeful as possible. The Pain of driving my car is obvious: I can’t answer e-mails, write blogs, or finish reports. I’m utterly exhausted after a six-hour drive, of which I regularly spend two hours in traffic jams (Belgium is a traffic jam inferno). The Gain of travelling by train is also apparent: Travel time equals working time. I can read, write, or answer e-mails. For travellers like me, a power socket and a little table for my laptop are worth a lot.


Force 3: Comforts

Comforts are the routines and habits that get people to stick to their current undesired behaviour.

It’s not that I wouldn’t like to work out more often. And if I’m honest with myself, I do have the time to go to the gym in the morning. My only problem is that I have too many bad habits that stand in the way: I want to wake up slowly. I need to have breakfast. I need to bring my toddler to school (and she adores not cooperating). By the time I dropped her at school, my window of opportunity to go to the gym is closed. It’s already late, my stomach is full, and my mind is already at work. 

You could argue that everything is in place for me to start working out. I desire to have more energy and lose a couple of kilos (my JTBD). I feel the pain of not being fit. I know how much I enjoy the feeling of being healthy (gain), and I only have to walk 200 meters to my gym, so I can’t blame it on an inability to get there. As the co-founder of SUE, I’m pretty free to decide how I run my schedule (no anxieties). I can’t break through my comforts/ habits. What works for me is that my gym organises a 10-minute abs workout every hour. If I can make it in time to join this 10-minute class, I will probably stay a bit longer.


Force 4: Anxieties 

Anxieties are fears, doubts, prejudices and other barriers to the desired behaviour.

Anxieties could be all the things that prevent you from changing behaviour Anxieties could be related to: 

  • The desired behaviour: Too complicated, too hard, too socially uncomfortable, etc. 
  • The supplier: can I trust this supplier? 
  • My own capability: I’m not sure if I can do this or if it matches with my self-image. 
  • My environment: I don’t know what my significant others will think of this behaviour

Taking away Anxieties are often underestimated in a strategy for behavioural change. However, they form a crucial piece of the puzzle. Sometimes taking away anxiety is the last puzzle piece needed to turn an intervention into a success. Like in the Flixbus example I wrote about earlier: taking away my fears and prejudices towards coach travel and address the most critical force between me and the desired behaviour. 

Case: De Porsche Pitch

In The Perfect Pitch, a book by advertising legend Jon Steel about the art of pitching, the author shares the story of a pitch his agency won for the Porsche account. The killer insight that got them to win the agency competition was that advertising doesn’t need to persuade Porsche drivers. It needs te to convince non-drivers that Porsche drivers are not cars for men with a middle-crisis. They called it the “asshole factor” of a Porsche driver. Taking away these anxieties and prejudices towards the Porsche driver became the most genius advertising strategy ever for the brand.

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

Then our two-day Fundamentals Course is the perfect training for you. You will learn the latest insights from behavioural science and get easy-to-use tools and templates to apply these in practice right away!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

6. Working with the SUE | Influence Framework©

 The Influence Framework helps you to build empathy for your target audience. Our Behavioural Design Sprints always kick off with five or six interviews. If you interview five or six people from the target audience, you will be able to fill in your Influence Framework©. For a proper Behavioural Design interview, there’s only one simple rule of thumb:   

Past behaviour never lies

When we conduct interviews, we always try to map human journeys. What we’re looking for is how real humans think, feel and behave. How does a successful journey look like? What about a failed journey? Why did people fail? What made them feel uncertain or uncomfortable? Why didn’t they do the things they wanted to do?  

In 5 or 6 interviews, you’ll get a clear idea about the Jobs-to-be-Done, the Pains and Comforts of their current behaviour and the Gains en Anxieties of the desired behaviour. It can also be gratifying to interview extreme users. Experienced people can tell you a lot about Jobs-to-be-Dones and gains. People who are struggling can teach you a lot about pains, comforts and anxieties. When you have mapped out these forces, you can spot opportunities for behavioural change by asking yourself these five questions: 

  • How might we help people to achieve their goals? (Jobs-to-be-Done)
  • Can we come up with solutions that solve pains or frustrations that people experience (Pain) 
  • Can we break into an existing habit? Or do we need to change a problematic habit? (Comfort)
  • Which anxieties, doubts, prejudices, and other barriers do we need to take away? (Anxiety)
  • What could be the psychological value that we can create for people (Gain)

More about this topic: 

 

7. Examples

  • The best way to think about the success of Uber and Lyft – aside from a nearly unlimited supply of cheap investor capital – is that they successfully eliminated all the pain from the taxi experience. Not knowing when your car is going to arrive, not being confident about whether the cabbie will rip you off or having to negotiate about the price. They brilliantly help you to achieve your job-to-be-done to experience the city. An Uber-Gain is that you never have to worry when you go out: You order an Uber when you leave the club, and within 5 minutes, you’re back on your way home.
  • Airbnb is a much more gratifying way to experience new places. This is the ultimate traveller Job-to-be-done. The pain that is associated with hotels is that they’re anonymous. They make you feel like an outsider-tourist. The Gain of AirBnB on an emotional level is that you can feel at home abroad. This feeling gets even strengthened on a functional level: Since you do your cooking and supermarket shopping, you can feel what it is to live like a local. There are some anxieties Airbnb needs to take away, like whether the place is as good as advertised (that’s why they always demand professional pictures). A relatively new anxiety is the worry that the neighbourhood might be sick and tired of Airbnb tourists.

7. The ethics of Behavioural Design

We have argued above that a successful behavioural design strategy consists of three ingredients:

  1. A deeper understanding of human decision-making.
  2. Understanding the forces that shape behaviour.
  3. Using principles from the science of influence to come up with ideas and interventions for positive behavioural change.

The SUE | Influence Framework© is a powerful mental model for understanding why people do what they do and what prevents them from changing their behaviour. It is also the best guarantee that a strategy for behavioural change will be human-centered.

Behavioural Designers always ask themselves what they can do to help people become more successful at what they do or help them overcome their anxieties or help them break bad habits.

Suppose you take your time to build empathy with your target audience, and you use the Influence Framework to analyse their behaviour. In that case, you will always spot opportunities to design positive choices. 

PS: The mission of SUE is to unlock the potential of behavioural science to help people make better decisions in work, life and play. We use this mission as our guiding principle for everything we do. We’re very conscious that behavioural design can be a ‘dark wisdom’ and that those who master it are often the ones with the worst intentions. We don’t want to be naive that people will abuse this knowledge to manipulate people. Still, we firmly believe that the world would be much better off if we can inspire more people with a better understanding of how influence works and do positive things with this knowledge. Please check out our Behavioural Design Ethics Toolkit here.

BONUS: free cheat card 'The SUE | Influence Framework© explained'

Especially for you we've created a free cheat card 'The SUE | Influence Framework© explained'. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

Download cheat card

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
30/07/2021

Perspective is everything

By Citizen Behaviour, Personal Behaviour

My Belgian mother called. She was a bit worried about her son who lives in the Netherlands. Dickpics, hard lockdowns, COVID-riots, armed hostage situation, far-right creeps in parliament,… What the hell is wrong with the Netherlands?

The perspective of someone living in The Netherlands

I replied that nothing could be further from the truth.

I myself have experienced several miracles in the past weekends alone. I flew from Amsterdam to Berlin for less than € 200 in less than an hour on a plane that weighs 150 tons. I told her that to get to the airport, all I needed to do was to open an app on my phone, and less than 3 minutes later, a private driver in a new Tesla was in front of our apartment who took us to Schiphol Airport.

I said that we live in a time where science had discovered a vaccine for a pandemic in less than a year. And after two years, we had vaccinated almost the entire country 2 or 3 times. We have now actually reached a point where we don’t even have to force vaccine-hesitant people into vaccination anymore. How cool is that?


Disobedient protest or voicing concerns?

I added that here in Amsterdam, the nightclubs have decided to engage in public disobedience. They opened up the clubs again and called it a protest. I live in a country where they can just do that without the army or police closing their clubs. You should have seen those happy faces from all those young people in town.

I live in a country that was hyper-polarized five years ago on the issue of Black Pete, but where the vast majority now shrugs their shoulders, thinking, “Yeah sure, charcoal sweeps, chimneys, logical, right?”. And that we will probably experience exactly the same with dickpic-gate and “The Voice”-gate. Within a couple of years, we will all have a much better understanding of what is acceptable and unacceptable. Think of this era as the learning track for society to learn and internalize social norms around how men interact with women
When society revolts here in the Netherlands on moral issues, the debate won’t stop, and peace will only return until something has really changed.

 

Want to look at the world from a different perspective?

Join our two-day Fundamentals Course to change the way you look at behaviour and decision making. You will learn the latest insights from behavioural science and get easy-to-use tools and templates to apply these in practice right away!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

It is all about perspective

I hastened to add that I live in a country where the supermarket around the corner has everything, really everything fresh and affordable on the shelves, so I get an amazing dinner from my love every night. And that if we don’t feel like cooking, we can get a warm meal delivered by a nice person on an electric bike, from every cuisine we can imagine in less than half an hour after ordering it.

We live in an extraordinary time, surrounded by magic and miracles.
You only need to allow yourself to see them.
The story above reminds me of this brilliant rant by Louis CK: Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
18/02/2022
How To Convince More People To Get Vaccinated

How to debunk false claims about climate change?

By All, Citizen Behaviour

This is a talk I gave at the EuropCom Conference, organized by the European Institutions. I was asked to talk about how to debunk misinformation and false claims about climate change. My take on this subject is that we shouln’t fight facts with facts. Instead we should make climate action more desireable. Here’s the transcript of my talk.


Confirmation bias

In this brief talk I want to make the argument that facts don’t matter when it comes to influencing minds and changing behaviour. Our brain is hardwired to actively search the facts that match with our beliefs about ourselves and the world, as much as it’s hardwired to reject the facts that don’t match with our beliefs, our identity, or our tribe. In the behavioural science this phenomenon is called confirmation bias. We have written about Confirmation Bias before.

I want to argue instead that the challenge is not to fight biased facts, but to re-frame climate action and turn it into something people feel they are part of.

The problem with the current climate narrative 

The climate narrative, as being told by environmentalists and people on the green-left political spectrum is full of ingredients that people love to reject:

  1. It’s a story of guilt: according to activists, it is all our fault, and we are doing everything wrong. Consumerism has doomed us, and we should be ashamed we don’t take action to preserve the earth.
  2. It’s a story of fear: We are being bombared with climate panic, through a never ending stream of stories about melting ice caps, rising sea levels, high temperatures, natural disasters, and so on. Fear freezes action.
  3. It’s a story of sacrifice: the message is quite clear. If we want to reverse the effects of climate change, we all need to sacrifice some of our comforts: Leaving the car at home, taking the bike more often, separating our waste,…

 

(more below the banner)

Would you like to leverage behavioural science to crack your thorny strategic challenges?

You can do this in our fast-paced and evidence-based Behavioural Design Sprint. We have created a brochure telling you all about the details of this approach. Such as the added value, the deliverables, the set up, and more. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

How our brain works

Everything about this climate narrative is  threatening. Our brain has a simple and brilliant strategy to deal with facts that don’t match with how we think about ourselves and the world: it rejects them. We have many techniques at our disposal to do just that:

  • We vilify the bringers of the facts we don’t like: Most people think Greta Thunberg is a child that needs psychological treatment. Same thing with Green Parties. They have become the favorite object of far-right bullying.
  • We eagerly shop for narratives that provide us with arguments to keep living our lives the way we do. The right and far-right frame climate action as bonkers, leftist-eco fundamentalism by people who are rich enough to by a Tesla. They claim that the costs for ‘climate panic’ be imposed on the poor hardworking class, who’s already working day and night to be able to make ends meet.

The solution: Stop persuading, start seducing

We should stop persuading people into climate action and start seducing them instead. Once people have the feeling that climate action is something that will improve their lives and their communities, they will start to embrace the facts that match with these believes.

Here are a couple of ideas:

  1. We should stop selling dystopias, and start selling green utopias instead. The images of climate apocalypse don’t motivate action at all. Why can’t we use our imagination to dream up green cities, vibrant communities, delicious food, spectacular landscapes, etc.
  2. Make the sustainable option the most desirable. People don’t buy Tesla’s because of the environment, but because they’re the coolest cars around. People don’t buy a Beyond Burger because it’s plant based, but because it’s the most delicious and juiciest burger out there. People don’t take the night train to Vienna because of flight shaming, but because it’s a magical experience. What if we sell new houses with solar panels on the roof and tell people they will drive their electric cars for free forever with the electricity that they produced themselves from their own roof?

Want to learn how to use behavioural science to tackle societal challenges?

The Fundamentals Course is perfect for you. You will master a hands-on method to tackle even wicked challenges using applied behavioural science. Mind-shifting know-how that is made 100% practical.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

Summary

What I have tried to argue is that all information is biased. We only embrace the information that matches with our identity and our tribe and reject the truths that are associated with the beliefs of other tribes.

So instead of worrying about the biased information, let’s instead make the ideas, beliefs, missions, and visions about the outcomes of climate action more desirable.

Just like you can’t (and shouldn’t) persuade someone into having sex with you, you shouldn’t try to persuade someone into changing their beliefs about climate.

One more thing:

If Covid has thaught us one thing, it’s that in the face of existential threat, humanity can join forces at unprecedented scale and create breakthrough after breakthrough. Despite everything that went wrong, it was optimism and ingenuity that got us out of this crisis.

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
12/11/2021
How To Convince More People To Get Vaccinated

How to convince more people to get vaccinated

By All, Citizen Behaviour

Suppose that the national government comes to you and asks you to devise a campaign to encourage unvaccinated people to get their jab: How would you go about it? For many agencies, this would be a dream job. I think the current “I’m doing it for” campaign is fine: “I’m doing it so we can party again”, “I’m doing it so I can visit my grandmother again”. The campaign tries to provide people with arguments to overcome their doubts about the jab by replacing the abstract long-term effect of vaccination with a practical and relevant short-term benefit. Textbook behavioural economics.

Persuading someone is not rational

But what do you do with the last group that we cannot persuade to cross the finish line? I have interviewed several people over the past few weeks. A first striking observation is that most of these people have perfectly reasonable arguments not to do it. They have made a choice not to trust the vaccine for now. They do not deny the danger of COVID-19, but they are quite confident that the chances of them getting very ill themselves are small. Each of them has their concerns about the possible adverse effects of the vaccine.

What they are not interested in are people who try to convince them with counter-arguments. Attacking their arguments feels like a personal attack against them. And since so many people have already tried, they have had plenty of practice setting up a line of defence to explain and defend their choices. The harder you push them, the more they become defensive. This, by the way, is the most important lesson in the psychology of behavioural change.

You cannot convince someone with rational arguments if they have not yet decided to be convinced.

BONUS: free ebook 'How to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to convince someone who believes the opposite'. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Context can justify decision making

Another golden rule in behavioural change is that motivation follows convenience. I eat vegetarian, but I make exceptions very easily at restaurants because the vegetarian options sometimes require too much sacrifice in terms of culinary enjoyment. Put me in this choice context, and I can justify my behavioural change without blinking an eye.

We see the same thing happening everywhere concerning vaccination. More and more people who were very sceptical about the jab have ended up taking it because they no longer want to deal with the hassle involving travelling, going out and everything else that makes life fun. Did that change their minds? Not at all. They still have grave doubts. But all the hassle has altered the question they unconsciously answer: Are my objections worth that much that I am willing to make my life that difficult? For some people, the answer is a resounding yes. They are prepared to bear the consequences of their choices, and we must respect that. But for many others, this change of context is reason enough to gamble with their objections and have the jab.

To conclude, there are different reasons why certain people will not get vaccinated. However, the way we approach these individuals should not be with rational arguments to change their minds. Those who are sceptical should not be motivated to change their point of view. But perhaps the hassle of upcoming restrictions for those who are not vaccinated can be motivation enough for people to get their jab.

Tom De Bruyne

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
23/09/2021
What Is Behavioural Design

What is Behavioural Design

By All, Behavioural Science Insights, Citizen Behaviour, Customer Behaviour, Employee behaviour, Personal Behaviour

This blog post is an extended introduction to Behavioural Design. You will get a clear idea about what it is, how you can use it in your professional and personal life to influence minds and shape behaviour, and what you could do to learn more about it. Moreover, this blog post is the perfect entry to most other blogposts we published on the SUE Behavioural Design website.

 

1. Behavioural Design is about influence

How do you influence minds and shape behaviours? How do you change other people’s, as well as your behaviours? How do you help people to make better decisions? Isn’t it strange that the majority of all of our behaviours and communication aims at influencing other people? Yet, at the same time, we have no clue about the principles and laws that govern influence?

 

Behavioural Design is a systematic understanding of how people think and how they make decisions. This understanding forms the basis of thinking about interventions that lead to behavioural change. Maybe you want to influence the behaviour of your partner or children. You might want to influence your colleagues or managers. Some people like to develop a healthy habit for themselves or want to live a more sustainable life. Maybe you want to influence customer behaviour or win elections. No matter what the subject is, you can all think of them as a behavioural design challenge.

 

So what is Behavioural Design? The most pragmatic definition of Behavioural Design we came up with so far is the following:

 

Behavioural Designers combine Psychology, Design, Technology, and Creative Methods to find out why people do the things they do and to figure out through experimentation how to activate them to change their behaviour.

 

2. Behavioural Design is a method

The best way to think about Behavioural Design is to think of it as the combination of Design Thinking with the Science of Influence. Design Thinking is the method through which designers solve problems. Designers start with empathy. Through interviews and observations, they try to “fall in love with the problem”: Why do people do what they do and where could we spot opportunities for improvement? This insight phase forms the groundwork for creativity. First, designers develop as many ideas as possible, and then they prototype the most promising ones. They take the prototypes back to the real world and test them with real people to learn and observe how the prototype influences the targeted behaviour. Design Consultancy Ideo, the godfathers of Design Thinking, explain the process like this:

When you combine the method of design thinking with behavioural science, you will get design thinking on steroids or Behavioural Design Thinking. Because a better understanding of human psychology you will get:

1) Better insights into why people do what they do;
2) Better ideas on where to look for solutions;
3) Better prototypes, because you will have a much sharper understanding of what specific behavioural outcome you’re designing for.

At SUE the essence of what we do is to train the Behavioural Design Method© at our Behavioural Design Academy and at in-company training and we run the Behavioural Design Method© in Behavioural Design Sprints together with our clients.

More about Behavioural Design as method:

Would you like to power up your team or project with behavioural intelligence?

Feel free to contact us. We are happy to tell you more about our consultancy or academy. Helping you innovate, transform or grow levering insights from behavioural science in practice.

Contact us

No worries, no strings attached!

3. The ethics of Behavioural Design

Behavioural Design is dark wisdom. The difference between positive influence and manipulation is a very fragile line. In the end, we have to be aware that Behavioural Design is about using deliberate action and techniques to influence the behaviour of the other in the direction you want.

The problem is that those who want to design for good quite often feel bad about using dark forces. Whereas those who use this dark wisdom to manipulate and mislead are usually much more motivated, advanced, and have fewer scruples about its application. Think about how extreme-right populists exploit fear and uncertainty, or think about how technology companies use our vanities and our desire for social recognition and belonging to the extent that it leads to (social media) addiction.

The world of interaction design is full of “dark patterns“, which are manipulative ways to present choices to us in such a way that they manipulate us into making a specific decision, whether we want it or not.

 

Doctor Evil

At SUE, we are very sensitive to this ethical component. We even encoded it in our mission. The SUE mission is “to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life and play”. Our point of departure for designing interventions for behavioural change always starts with the question, “How might we help people to make better choices? Moreover, how could we create products, services, and experiences to contribute to helping people achieve their goals or dreams? Our commitment to this mission is sacred, even to the point that we refuse to accept work that doesn’t match this mission. You can find more about this way of thinking below at “5. Outside-in Thinking“.

More on the ethical side of Behavioural Design:

4. Behavioural Design is about designing choices

Multiple levels of influence
In a certain sense, the term ‘Behavioural Design’ is a little bit misleading. Behavioural change is the outcome we aim for when we design an intervention. When we want to achieve this outcome, we need to create interventions on multiple levels at the same time:

  1. Design attention: How do you make sure something catches people’s attention?
  2. Trigger curiosity: How do you get people to invest time and mental energy to learn more about what you want from them?
  3. Change the perception: how do you get something to stand out as the attractive option between other choices? How do you design the desired perception?
  4. Design the experience: How do you get someone to have a positive feeling? How can you reduce stress or uncertainty?
  5. Trigger the behaviour: How do you trigger the desired behaviour? How can you increase the chance of success that people act upon your trigger?
  6. Change habits: How can you get people to sustain the behaviour? Most behaviours require much more than a one-time action. Think about saving, living healthy, exercising, recycling, collaborating, etc.

Thinking fast and slow

This simple list of influence levels teaches us that:

Behavioural Design is all about how we design choices and how we present those choices.

Behavioural Design has everything to do with human decision-making and how the brain works. The cornerstone of human decision-making is the masterpiece “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Kahneman and Tversky. This book – awarded with the Noble Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 – is the fascinating journey of the collaboration between two Israeli psychologists and their discoveries of how the mind works. This book is the ultimate work on thinking about thinking.

Kahneman and Tversky discovered that about 96% of our thinking is automatic and unconscious. Our brain is making most of the decisions for us by taking shortcuts – which they call heuristics -, with the goal of not having to invoke the 4% bandwidth of our slow, rational brain. In a way:

Influencing behaviour comes down to helping people to decide without having to think. Because the more we need to think about something, the more stress we get, the less we end up making choices.

Since 2018, we now have a second psychologist in the ranks of noble prize winners. Richard Thaler built upon the work of Kahneman and Tversky and zoomed in on how to make use of System 1-System2 thinking to nudge people into better decision-making in wealth, health, and happiness.

 

Our hard-wired tendency to persuade

When it comes to our attempts to influence minds and shape behaviours, our biggest fallacy is that we always tend to persuade the other with rational arguments. The problem with persuasion is two-fold:

  1. Persuasion evokes system 2-thinking, and we don’t like that. When you try to persuade someone, you want them to think about your argument. Thinking complicates things.
  2. System 2 is the little slave of system 1: we only accept rational arguments or facts when they align with how we already think about matters. You can only persuade someone who’s already convinced.

The real challenge is to make a decision making extremely easy. More about designing choices:

Want to learn how to design behaviour?

Join our two-day Fundamentals Course and master a hands-on method to use behavioural science to develop ideas that change minds and shape behaviour.

Check out the course

Join the 1.500 forward-thinking professionals who already graduated!

5. Behavioural Designers think ‘outside-in’

When we try to influence minds and shape behaviour, the most common mistake we make is to think inside-out. We take the benefits of our product or service as our point of departure, and we try to figure out how we could pitch those benefits so that people would realize the value of what we have to offer. Behavioural Designers work the other way around.

We take the human behind the customer as our focal point, and we try to figure out what this human needs to be successful.

Which anxieties, doubts, prejudices or bad habits he holds stand in the way of embracing the desired behaviour or which pains or frustrations we could solve for him.

The SUE | Influence Framework©

We developed the SUE | Influence Framework© as a tool to do outside-in thinking systematically,. This model brings all the forces to the surface that influence the behaviour of the people for whom we need to design interventions. The Influence Framework© consists of five questions we need to answer to understand why people do what they do and how to get them to act:

  1. Job-To-Be-Done: What is the underlying goal for which people would have to embrace the new behaviour? How might we align the desired behaviour with goals that matter to them?
  2. Pains: What are possible frustrations and pains in their current behaviour, for which we need to come up with a solution?
  3. Gains: What are the benefits we have, compared with their current solutions?
  4. Anxieties: What are anxieties, doubts, prejudices or other barriers that prevent someone from embracing the new behaviour?
  5. Habits: Which habits keep them locked in their current behaviour?

Finding the answers to these questions will provide you with a blueprint of where to spot opportunities for behavioural change. In this video, you can find a brief explainer of the SUE | Influence Framework©.

 

More about outside-in thinking:

6. Behavioural Designers work with principles from the science of influence

The next step in the Behavioural Design Method© is about turning a deep understanding of the forces that explain people’s behaviours, into ideas for behavioural change.  These are two different games. Whereas the SUE | Influence Framework© uncovers the unconsciousness of people, is this part about applying principles from the science of influence to come up with solutions on how to change behaviour. We have developed a helpful tool for this: the SUE | SWAC Tool©:

It is foremost a very easy-to-use tool. It explains which four pieces of the puzzle you need to solve to create a context that will persuade someone into doing something and to have them keep doing it. What makes the tool so easy to use in practice, is that anytime you want to design for behavioural change, all you have to do is ask yourself four simple questions:

  1. How can we make sure someone WANTS to perform the new behaviour?
  2. How can we make sure someone CAN perform the new behaviour?
  3. How can we SPARK new behaviour at the moments that matter?
  4. How can we activate this new behaviour AGAIN and again?

 

When the new behaviour does not happen, at least one of those four elements is missing. The most important implication of this is that by using the SUE | SWAC Tool© as a guide you can quickly identify what stops people from performing the behaviours that you seek.

If a sufficient degree of capability (CAN) to perform a behaviour is matched with the willingness (WANT) to engage in that behaviour, all that is then needed for the behaviour to occur is to set someone into action (SPARK) at the Moments that Matter.

Maybe you notice that in the tool it says moments that matter. Not one moment, but moments. As we learned, behavioural change doesn’t happen overnight. Most of the times someone needs to be reminded of the desired behaviour more than once for it to happen in the first place. Furthermore, behaviour becomes easier when repeated. Therefore, we have to make sure we SPARK someone AGAIN and again to activate the desired behaviour. So, you need to design several interventions at multiple moments that matter. In practice your intervention strategy will look something like this:

The objective of most intervention strategies is to not only to change behaviour, but to change this new behaviour into a routine behaviour (a habit), so the new behaviour will stick.

Often your desired behaviour is new behaviour for people and that’s why it is important to spark behaviour AGAIN and again. Only then the behaviour will take place, as illustrated above as the BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE THRESHOLD. When your objective is to design repeat behaviour, it almost goes without saying that you have to make sure the desired behaviour is performed repeatedly. If you can make someone perform new behaviour over and over AGAIN, it can become automatic.

7. Behavioural Designers research, prototype, test

The more familiar you get with how the brain works and how influence works, the more you become aware that human behaviour obeys a different kind of logic than formal logic. Rory Sutherland calls this “psycho-logic” in his brilliant book Alchemy.

The way people make decisions is highly context-sensitive. These decisions are full of stories they tell themselves and full of irrational beliefs they hold. Furthermore, even the slightest difference in how something is framed can dramatically affect how people perceive the meaning. When an English native speaker says they think something is “interesting”, it usually means precisely the opposite. Whereas a non-native Dutch audience would think “interesting” means what they think it means.

The importance of doing the research yourself

That’s why research and prototyping are so important. Before you come up with an idea for behavioural change, you first need to fall in love with the problem. You observe or interview humans and try to put yourself in their shoes. You’ll be surprised about how many thoughts and beliefs you hold are projections of your limited worldview onto the world of the target audience you want to influence.

Prototyping and testing are all about finding out which variation of your intervention has the highest potential to design perception, attention, curiosity, experience, behaviour or habit. Even with the clearest of insights, you can still develop an intervention that ultimately misses its desired effect. What you thought your intervention was supposed to trigger sometimes triggers the exact opposite.

More about prototyping and testing:

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

Then our two-day Fundamentals Course is the perfect training for you. You will learn the latest insights from behavioural science and get easy-to-use tools and templates to apply these in practice right away!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

8. Domains of Behavioural Design

The number of applications for Behavioural Design is endless. Because in the end, most of the things we do as humans aim at influencing the behaviour of others. You can apply it from managing teams to the design of products. Or from getting people to buy products to changing the way they perceive a service or experience. And from the creation of financial habits, personal habits and healthy habits till the raising of children. At SUE, we’re particularly fascinated by six specific domains for behavioural change:

  • customer behaviour (product, marketing, sales)
  • citizen behaviour (government/society)
  • financial behaviour (financial independence)
  • voter behaviour (politics and government)
  • self-improvement (personal development)
  • team-behaviour (organisational design)

Most of our blogs and our weekly newsletter “Behavioural Design Digest” is about one of these topics.

 

9. Start to learn more about Behavioural Design

Now you have a deeper understanding about what Behavioural Design and how you can apply the Behavioural Design Method to influence minds and shape behaviour, there’s a couple of next steps you can take to learn more about the method:

  1. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter Behavioural Design Digest, in which we take a closer look at how influence works in daily life.
  2. Subscribe to one of the upcoming editions of our Behavioural Design Academy courses and master the SUE | Behavioural Design Method© to create next-generation, people-centred products, services, campaigns or policies.
  3. Book in-company training for your team and learn the method while applying it to a critical business challenge for your organisation.
  4. Hire SUE to run a Behavioural Design Sprint to fast-track your innovation, transformation or growth by leveraging behavioural science to develop people-centred products, services, campaign or policies with an evidence-based approach.
  5. Book SUE for a keynote or workshop (contact us).
  6. Check or frequently asked questions and discover answers to questions you didn’t even know you had.

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
31/07/2021
Case Study: How To Get People To Separate Their Organic Waste?

Case Study: How to get people to separate their organic waste?

By All, Citizen Behaviour

In this guest blog, our Behavioural Design Academy alumnus Ron Ghijssen, founder of ANDC Design shares a fascinating and very well executed intervention strategy he worked on in the Dutch City of Amersfoort. The target of the intervention was to get people to start separating their organic waste. The case demonstrates of the power of behavioural design thinking combined with creativity for designing sustainable behavioural change.

 

The Human Insight

The research phase (i.a. questioning a group of citizens of Amersfoort) led to several exciting insights which formed the base for the campaign strategy. The core of this strategy contained two central elements:

  • Emphasize separating organic waste is normal; it’s a common thing
  • Facilitate citizens in separating organic waste

With this strategy as an essential guideline, we focused a bit more on insights from the research phase. It triggered us that the majority of citizens consider separating waste as an annoying task because it implies effort (this applies not only to people in Amersfoort, former research shows that this applies to the majority of people in the Netherlands). 

And you know what? People are right. It’s so much easier to throw the organic waste in the ‘normal’ household trash can. For separating organic waste the right and efficient way, you need a small organic waste bin that you can place on the kitchen countertop (which people often regard as a stand in the way). People who are motivated to separate organic waste have this kind of bin. But the majority isn’t motivated enough to buy such a bin and place it consequently on their kitchen countertop. So despite the good intentions people have (which they overall really have), these elements form significant barriers to separate organic waste for most people.

 

Do you also want to learn how to apply behavioural science in practice?

We have created a brochure that explains all the ins and outs of the Fundamentals Course. From the program to the former participants. From the investment to the people behind the Academy: it's all in there.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

The solution: Reframe the Organic Waste Bin

We felt we were on the right track with the ‘bin issue’. By discussing this issue more deeply in brainstorms, by physically analyzing our own kitchens and by adding some common sense (where would you be without), we concluded that every kitchen has só many potential organic waste ‘bins’: a pot used during cooking, an empty little mushroom box, an empty salad bowl. In other words, simply every kitchen object where you can put organic waste in will do (I don’t recommend using a little girl’s lunchbox, my daughter didn’t appreciate it).

So we realized that asking ‘Do you have a little bin?’ wasn’t the right question. The right question was: ‘What’s your little bin?’ (in Dutch: ‘Wat is jouw bakkie?’)

 

Behavioural Design In Action

This question reframes almost every cooking object in a little organic waste bin. And it contains a facilitating message to all citizens. After all, suddenly, they see little waste bins all around them in their kitchen. And the best part is: people have freedom of choice and can pick the one they find most suitable. So we just helped people make the first step in desired behaviour by making it easy. Where’s that resistance now?

Another great advantage of this message is that people are being facilitated by this question instead of investing in tangible physical goods. After all, there was no budget to give all citizens their little bin. But why should you, when everyone has more than enough by themselves? So there was no needless time and money wasted (sorry) for getting everyone a particular organic waste bin.

Finally, the question also contains the desired social norm we wanted the campaign to express: everyone has a little bin, what’s yours? 

Campaign Execution

Furthermore, we designed and developed several interventions to stimulate the desired behaviour to reach the target group. We created visuals for an Amersfoort wide (poster) campaign. We asked citizens of Amersfoort to be our ‘models’ because we wanted the question (What’s your little bin?) the target group to ask the question themselves. 

Also, we designed a so-called ‘wheelie bin bingo’. All citizens of Amersfoort with a green wheelie bin (for organic waste) received a brochure in their postbox. This brochure contained, amongst other things, information about the importance of separating waste and tips & tricks regarding the right way to do it. But it also included a sticker upon which people had to write down their house number. By pasting their sticker on their green wheelie bin, all citizens were automatically enrolled in the periodic ‘green wheelie bingo’ (having a chance to win modest but fabulous prizes).

Again, the stickers carry out the social norm when visible on the sidewalks and serve as prompts or reminders for the desired behaviour.

The campaign launched in May 2021, and the city council will monitor the results through an annual analysis of the share of organic waste in residual household waste. One of the most critical desired outcomes is a significant decrease of the organic part in household waste. We hope that our combination of behavioural design and creativity will contribute to this vital goal.

I hope the case of Amersfoort showed you how using insights from solid research, selecting the correct behavioural design principles and techniques ánd adding some creativity can lead to a positive, appealing and hopefully effective campaign.

 

Ron Ghijssen is a SUE Behavioural Design Academy alumnus. He is the founder of  creative agency ANDC.

 

Cover visual by: Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash.

 

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
22/07/2021
How To Convince More People To Get Vaccinated

Why motivating people for climate action is problematic.

By All, Citizen Behaviour

Of all ‘wicked design problems’, motivating people for climate action and designing for sustainable behavioural change are topics many people at SUE are passionate about. When Tom recently suggested Futerra’s paper Sizzle to me, I dove right in, eager to find additions to our toolbox. It’s an excellent read and it makes a persuasive case for a new way of ‘selling’ climate action: instead of selling the negative necessity, we have to sell the positive results of action. Not the hunger, not even the sausage, but the sizzle. Being half-German it invoked lots of appealing memories of grilling bratwurst, so I was all aboard.

We know what dystopias look like, but we lack images of a green utopia.

Lame jokes aside (it’s a cultural thing), it reminded us of a podcast we made some time last year (sorry, Dutch only), in which we discussed climate inaction and stumbled upon the realization that we badly lack utopian visions of the future in popular culture for behavioural change in sustainability. I really don’t know of any book, film, game or piece of art from the last couple of decades that plays out in a positive future. Albeit in many different variations, it’s pretty much all cyberpunk or otherwise dystopian and apocalyptic visions and the message is simple: one way or another, in the not-to-distant future we’re gonna fuck it up. Big time.

That is a symptom of a lack of positive imagination within our cultural avant-garde and a serious problem for the rest of us. Why invest in a future that’s doomed? Why take part in process of change if you don’t have any mental pictures of the exciting and bright future that it could lead to? It’s hardly a surprise that indeed many people simply don’t: compared to where they fear change will lead them, they like where they are just fine, and inaction or worse is the result. So yes: I think Futerra makes a meritorious point. Climate action must be framed in a far more positive way if we are to motivate people for behavioural change.

Yet, for some reason it didn’t sit with me well.

Aren’t we just yet again preaching to the choir?

Isn’t this all a – granted, greatly – improved version of a still fundamentally flawed approach, which is that through communication we should try to achieve a level of aspirational motivation among the population to contribute to a sustainable way of life, and that behavioural change will follow from that? And won’t it, when that inevitably yields limited results, still turn out as a way of preaching to the converted, but with a nicer preach? Isn’t it therefore essentially still focused on fulfilling the emotional and social jobs-to-be-done of the activist, rather than purposefully designing large scale behavioural change? In other words, use behavioural psychology to drive real behavioural change?

Now, I don’t mean this to feel harsh. In fact, the authors explicitly invite a behavioural perspective on their approach. Here it comes.

Would you like to leverage behavioural science to crack your thorny strategic challenges?

You can do this in our fast-paced and evidence-based Behavioural Design Sprint. We have created a brochure telling you all about the details of this approach. Such as the added value, the deliverables, the set up, and more. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

Intention is a bad recipe for motivating people for climate action.

One concept from behavioural psychology that’s particularly interesting in this regard to behavioural change is the intention-action gap. As a rule, people have a hard time acting up on their intentions. More than often, people even behave in a way that directly contradicts them. This happens at the level of individual behaviour (just think back to everything you’ve intended to do to live more healthily and reflect on how much of it you’ve actually accomplished), and definitely at the level of collective behaviour as well.

We love our local shops, but with every purchase on Amazon, we give them the finger.

A good example is the struggle that local retailers have in their competition with the big webshops. Both individually and collectively, we all want flourishing city and town centers, with lots of locally owned shops and cozy restaurants and such, but with every passing day we buy more of our stuff at a small number of big webshops. With every purchase at Amazon, BOL or Zalando, we’re tightening the rope around those local entrepreneur’s necks, and yet we keep doing it – even employees of the local shops.

Why? Because it’s simply easier and cheaper. Individually it’s the better decision.

Even when motivation to support local entrepreneurs peaked during the first COVID-lockdown, Dutch online giants BOL and Coolblue did better than ever and Amazon managed to very successfully enter the Dutch market. We heedlessly make choices that completely contradict our intentions, let alone our larger aspirations. Behavioural psychology at work?

In other words, even when exactly the right messaging manages to build up peoples’ intention to contribute to climate action, it’s not at all likely that this will lead to matching behaviour. That’s a sobering insight which, especially when it comes to climate action, we must be very clear-eyed about. The stakes are too big.

How might we break this behavioural pattern?

Apparently, many behaviours emerge, even if they lead to an outcome that people aren’t motivated to achieve – in fact even if it’s an outcome they’re motivated to prevent. Current consumer behaviour will lead to a web-only retail sector, dominated by a handful of giants. Nobody wants it, but it’s the outcome of our daily choices, which are heavily determined by convenience and costs.

This can work to our advantage.

Many of the most fundamental changes in our way of life have occurred over time, without people having some clear end goal in mind, or even an expectation of what the end result of the road they were on could be, or even a desire to look further than the immediate short-term. When steam machines and electric light bulbs were first put to use, nobody had the ermergence of the industrialised welfare state in mind. When people ordered their first modem, nobody had their sights on the cyborg-like relationship we have with our smartphones a couple decades later. What kind of a way of life these first behaviours would eventually lead simply to didn’t matter. What mattered was that that machine, that lightbulb, that modem, and every small steps that followed, made those peoples’ lifes a little bit easier, more convenient, or in another way humanly more pleasing, in that moment.

Developing a climate neutral way of life is a fundamental change of a similar order, and for the population at large, climate neutrality will similarly be an emerging property: the outcome of their choices, rather than the goal of their choices. This is the only way forward is to influence group behaviour for climate change.

Want to learn how to use behavioural science to tackle societal challenges?

The Fundamentals Course is perfect for you. You will master a hands-on method to tackle even wicked challenges using applied behavioural science. Mind-shifting know-how that is made 100% practical.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

The solution: Make sustainable choices more desirable.

Hence to motivate people for climate action, we shouldn’t put too much of our collective creative energy into convincing people of the larger goal and building up their motivation to contribute to climate action, and put nearly all of it into simply designing those incrementally better everyday choices. If we want to design for genuine behaviour change, it means innovating on sustainable products, services and behaviours, so that they’re increasingly convenient or in many other possible ways the more fulfilling choice.

Tesla doesn’t want you to drive electric for the environment, but because they offer an exciting driving experience. Beyond Meat doesn’t want you to go vegan on your hamburgers, they want you to eat the juiciest hamburger in the world, which happen to be vegan.

That requires above all ruthless, methodical empathy for those humans whose behaviours and choices we want to change. Don’t wash away their anxieties, comforts, pains and deep-rooted human needs and desires in service of climate neutrality – start with them. In fact, I’d put it even stronger:

The only way to achieve climate neutrality in time is to be ruthlessly empathetic with the people whose behaviour we need to change.

Tim Versnel

Tim is a Behavioural Design Lead at SUE. In his spare time, he’s a councillor for the Dutch Liberal Party at the City of Rotterdam
He recently co-authored a book with Klaas Dijkhoff, Group Chairman of the Dutch Liberal, in which they plead for an optimistic renaissance based on the fresh liberal concept.

Cover Photo by Markus Spiske

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
17/03/2021

Behavioural Design Advice for Environmentalists

By All, Citizen Behaviour

This blog summarises a lecture I gave at a social innovation conference a little while ago in Belgium. Governments, NGOs, and Environmentalists worldwide are trying to get people and companies to change their behaviours sustainably. To achieve these goals, they use a mix of interventions and strategies: they urge for stricter policies, campaign for greener buying decisions and name and shame companies that benefit from polluting ecosystems. A combination of all of these tactics is needed to influence minds and to change behaviour. Here are a couple of thoughts on what behavioural design thinking can teach us to be more effective at achieving long term sustainable behavioural change.

Four classic mistakes in campaigning for sustainable change

To design for sustainable behavioural change is a pretty tough challenge.

First of all, there’s the problem of hyperbolic discounting.

Humans find it very difficult to align their current behaviour with abstract rewards in the future. We find it much easier to align our actions for smaller tangible rewards in the near future. People are also very good at providing themselves with all kinds of post-rationalisations to justify their behaviour to themselves and others. (See our blog on System 1 – System 2 thinking). Climate activists need to be aware that you can’t achieve behavioural change for abstract rewards in the far future. 

A second mistake is the desire to persuade people.

Facts only matter if they confirm what people already believe. Activists, therefore, only tend to convince other activists. They’re preaching to the choir. If you’re a Trump fan, you will dismiss all lies and accusations as fake news, or deep state undermining. If you’re a hard-working ordinary guy who can barely make ends meet, you’ll get very upset by green fanatics who want to tax your old diesel. Like you should never try to persuade someone with facts to have sex with you, you shouldn’t try to convince someone into sustainable behavioural change. 

A third mistake: If I ask you not to think an elephant, you can’t help but think of an elephant.

By pointing your attention to the elephant, I activated your brain to think about it. Climate activists and environmentalists ignite thoughts and images of fear, danger, suffering, guilt and hopelessness. These thoughts are highly unproductive for action, because they paralyse people at best, or get people to feel too small and irrelevant at worst. If you insist that we’re not doing enough as a society, you strengthen the belief that it makes no sense to act, because nobody else isn’t doing anything neither. 

A fourth mistake is the fascinating world of perverse incentives.

Quite often an intervention that was designed with the best intentions trigger the exact opposite behaviour. When you increase the fines for texting while driving, people don’t stop the behaviour but lower their phone between their legs. When you clean up people’s mess after they littered, you give them a free pass for littering. 

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

Then our two-day Fundamentals Course is the perfect training for you. You will learn the latest insights from behavioural science and get easy-to-use tools and templates to apply these in practice right away!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Five Behavioural Design Principles for better campaigning.

Principle 1: Think outside-in.

Find the deeper needs and drivers in people’s lives and try to connect with those. Donald Trump discovered that a deep sense of not being recognised and respected is an emotional goldmine. Translated to environmentalist campaigning: Never expect the masses to change their behaviour for the climate. But do expect them to change their behaviour if it’s in their self-interest. Turn climate-activism into a right-win theme and appeal to self-centred motives: local jobs, national pride, more quality of life, lower costs of living. Tell a story of how the small guy takes back control against big corporations with deep pockets. Don’t talk about costs; talk about investments. Link abstract ideas to words and images that people can relate to. Littering is abstract, but not when you talk about little kids on the beach, putting cigarette buds in their mouth. 

Principle 2: People want to follow exciting leaders.

The problem with environmentalists is that they always lose the battle for public appreciation. They are either too kind (hippy tree-huggers) or too irritating (stubborn activists). Figure out how to make environmentalism more bad-ass. You want the tough kids and the cool kids to be on your side. Don’t get me wrong: You also need the Greta’s, but you need other persona’s to take activism from the fringes to the masses. 

Principle 3: Framing is war.

Our brain is hard-wired to interpret the world in terms of battles and enemies. Environmentalists need to create better narratives with in-groups (us) versus out-groups (them). Every populist in the world can only thrive by stirring the anger of the masses against their enemies. The right-wing populist provokes their rage against the liberal elites. The left-wing populists stir anger against the billionaire class. Frame the environmental challenges in terms of a battle between ordinary people and all the evil forces that make their lives more difficult. For an ‘us-story’ to catch on, we need to start telling a vivid ‘them-story’.

Principle 4: Social Proof.

Social proof is the most powerful principle in the universe. Humans are highly social animals. We are continually looking at what other people do to calibrate our own beliefs and behaviours. As long as I have the feeling that majority is not moving the needle, then I’m not going to be the lonely sucker who does. Conversely, when a critical mass for behavioural change is reached, things can change very fast. Environmentalists need to create the feeling that everyone’s on board, to make people feel more comfortable to join the change. 

Principle 5: Ability.

Ability is the dark horse of behavioural change. Many people shifted to solar in the Netherlands when iChoosr organised a group-buying scheme. Norway is the world leader in the percentage of electric cars buying sold, by allowing toll-free passage for EVs and turning parking in Oslo free. Meatless Monday has been a worldwide success to trigger trial behaviour for eating vegetarian. You can’t change people’s eating habits if you can’t activate them to try it first. 

Conclusion

  • Environmentalists and climate activists need to embrace the science of influence to become more effective at achieving their goals. 
  • Sometimes this requires to act against their impulses to persuade and convince people for the need for action. In the end, the outcome is all that matters. 
  • If you want to create lasting sustainable behavioural change:
    • Make the desired behaviour selfish
    • Make the desired behaviour easy (and don’t give a damn if people don’t give it a thought) 
    • Frame the desired behaviour in terms of a surplus in joy and happiness, instead of a decrease. 

One more thing: Activists still matter. They set the agenda and move the needle. They create awareness for problems and take the issue from the fringes towards the critical mass. But the tactics that brought them there stand in the way of mass adoption. 

 

Tom De Bruyne
Co-founder SUE Behavioural Design

Cover Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
25/01/2021
Leading Distributed Teams Report

Leading Distributed Teams – Behavioural Research Report

By All, Citizen Behaviour, Employee behaviour

Today we published a report called “Leading Distributed Teams”. The report is the output of a behavioural research project did in April 2020. We wanted to learn how working as distributed teams affect team behaviour in terms of productivity, creativity and wellbeing. From a scientific point of view, the COVID-19 crisis is a god gift. It’s nothing more than a gigantic A/B test that offers us a unique opportunity to learn how office-work and home-work have an impact on team behaviour.

Leading Distributed Teams Report

What the Covid crisis can teach us

The Corona-Crisis provides us with a unique learning opportunity for designing the ultimate gratifying work, combined with the perfect work-life balance. This report offers a deep understanding of how distributed working contributes to this. More importantly, it gives managers and leaders lots of practical insights into how they can coach their team to benefit the most from distributed working. 

The essential idea from the report is that if you want to understand team behaviour, you need to take the human behind the professional or manager as your point of departure.

If you want to understand the humans in professional teams, you need to understand their deeper needs and desires they wish to see fulfilled and their more deep-seated fears and anxieties they want to be tackled. 

That’s why the question “Is working from home better than working in the office?” is not the right question. It’s much more interesting to turn this question outside-in and ask ourselves:

How might ‘distant working’ or ‘working in the office’ help people to

  • Be more successful in achieving their goals?
  • Overcome bad habits like being distracted?
  • Take away fears and uncertainty about their performance?

The answer to this question can pave the path to a very near future in which we can experience the joy of being part of a high-performance team. At the same time, having more than enough time left to pursue our personal goals, instead of wasting too much time in our lives on traffic jams, pointless meetings, highly distracting office spaces and patronising managers.

What you will learn in the report

The big challenge for the managers and leaders who need to manage their teams will be to promote the positive behaviours that contribute to high-performance output and wellbeing while suppressing the behaviours and habits that stand in the way of achieving these outcomes. 

This research paper will give you a deep understanding of: 

  • The behavioural forces that make or break team success.
  • How offices both promote and kill high-performance team behaviour.
  • How working from home solves some negative office dynamics.
  • How working from home create new challenges that need to be solved.
  • How managers can lead distributed teams successfully.

There are two ways to download the report

We understand that reading this report requires a bit of a time investment (probably 30-45 minutes). But I promise you will learn a lot if you do. You will have a more profound understanding of the problem if you take the time to read the quotes that people gave to express their feelings and thoughts.

behavioural design - illustration birdeyes

Executive Summary

Read the executive summary if you want to pick up the most critical insights and recommendations.
Take me there

Full Report

Study the full report If you want a deeper behavioural understanding of the forces that boost or inhibit high-performance output.
Take me there

Interested in turning these insights into action?

There are several ways in which you leverage Behavioural Design to boost your team’s performance and your talent’s personal development. Contact us for more information or click on the links below to find out more right away.

ONE-DAY TEAM WORKSHOP

We can help boost your team’s collaboration, motivation and development. Our one-day in-company ‘Habits of High-Performance Teams’ workshop is a great opportunity to get you team together again and have them reinvent working together.

BEHAVIOURAL DESIGN SPRINT

We can help you innovate and grow your team in a Behavioural Design Sprint: a fast-paced, evidence-based approach to leverage behavioural science to achieve operational excellence.

BEHAVIOURAL INSIGHT SPRINT

We can help you unlock the behavioural barriers and boosters that can help transform your team to a high-performance team in a Behavioural Insight Sprint.

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

 

Cover image by: Alex Rosario on Unsplash.

sue behavioural design
sue behavioural design
26/10/2020

We are the product of the stories we inhabit

By All, Citizen Behaviour

In previous posts, I wrote about Identity, Growth-KPI, and economic policies as examples of macro-forces for behavioural change. They have a profound impact on how people behave in society. Today I want to introduce a fourth macro-force for behavioural change: Stories. I want to explain the central role of stories in how we think about ourself and the world. And I want to argue that stories are perhaps the essential ingredient of a strategy for behavioural change on a massive scale. As always, I hope you enjoy reading Behavioural Design Digest. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts, suggestions or remarks at [email protected].

We are nothing more than actors in other people’s stories. 

A couple of days ago, as we were enjoying one of the first warm sunny days in July at our family’s summer house, I noticed a couple sitting outside at the nearby bungalow. They were sitting next to each other for more than 3 hours, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, staring into the abyss. They must have decided that, since it was summer, the smartest thing they could think of was to rent a bungalow on a bungalow park.

The whole scene struck me. It felt like this couple were actors in a story that went nowhere. And since there was no story left for them to participate in, they were sitting there, side by side. Numb and paralyzed. I imagined that probably 20-30 years ago, a different story must have structured their lives and their relationship. A story filled with dreams and plans. A story of what they wanted to become and the hero journeys they would embark upon to achieve those outcomes.

Would you like to power up your team with Behavioural Design?

If you wirsj to add behavioural intelligence to your team, be sure to check out our in-company training. Bringing your talent up-to-speed with the latest in behavioural science and teaching them hands-on methods and tools to apply this in practice right away. Tailormade to your organisation.

Check out in-company training

PS. We've trained many teams already! From leadership to project teams.

Who we are is produced mainly by the stories we inhabit

The whole scene reminded me of why Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis fascinates me so much. What the French Psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (see image above) highlighted in his re-reading of the work of Freud, was Freuds struggle to understand the essence of the concepts that define humans: Our identity, our desires, our unconsciousness, and our relationship with lust, authority and death.

Lacan argued that what Freud discovered was that there is no such thing as a self. The words I produce are not initiated by a core self that is running the show deep inside our brain. In contrast, Lacan argues that the ‘self’ is instead an emerging property. It emerges out of the words and stories that we inhabit.

You can think of your identity as a web of positions that are assigned to you. Your first position in life is your place as a child to two parents. They teach you over and over again how they expect you to behave. Then, during adolescence, you have to start searching for your own position. You borrow a lot from role models and friends, and in that process a new identity gradually takes shape. Then you find a partner. Your relationship with that partner is very much bounded by the rules that your culture offers for your role: You need to be loyal, faithful, produce a family, create a stable life, raise kids, etc. The moment you utter the words: I am your husband, and you are my wife, your thoughts and behaviours are being shaped by the hidden rules of what it means to be someone’s husband or wife.

Gradually, as you grow older, more and more storylines emerge and force you to play an ever more growing set of roles. Meanwhile, you try to figure out whom you need to be, to be recognized and appreciated by your friends, your team, your boss, your clients, your neighbours?

 

Being human is exhausting.

If you think about it: Being a human is pretty exhausting. We’re acting in a never-ending play that consists of multiple storylines. And this is exhausting for several reasons:

  1. The roles we have to play are often in profound conflict. If we want to develop an interesting character in our professional story, we need to show ambition. If we would like to make progress in the professional story, we need to invest in our skills, our network, and our relationship with our colleagues. We need to hunt for promotions, and we need to put up fights with our competitors. But this often conflicts with another demanding storey: The relationship story. Our relationship story demands that we act according to the rules of the script: be a loving, caring lover, father, and friend at the same time.
  2. We’re fundamentally insecure about what others are thinking of us. So we waste our time and money to set up all kinds of performances to signal the desired image to others. Comedian Will Rogers famously said, “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.”.
  3. We have the tendencies to lose ourselves in these stories. Successful people are as much a victim of being lost in stories. I have had the privilege to work with many successful entrepreneurs, and they all reach a point where they suddenly realize that the leading role in the “success story” that they bought into, actually sucks. They got addicted to the part, and it brought them success and recognition, but they end up being bored and feeling lonely. If you think about it: The presidency of Donald Trump is nothing more than a never-ending obsessive desperate role-play to be seen as a successful businessman.

 

Why the current story sucks. 

Remember, the value of stories is that they produce our identities. Your identity is the product of the stories you inhabit. As I argued in my previous posts, the most important reason for the growing discontent in society is that people have lost confidence that the economy will produce an exciting future for them. What is there to dream for, if society has reduced you to a consumer of goods? If you’re robbed of the ability to secure a stable life and maintain that same level of living after retirement. How would you feel if you would be acting in a play in which a tiny elite re-writes the script to produce ever more wealth for themselves and burden society with all the costs, while climate catastrophe is looming on the horizon?

Unless you are part of the lucky few for which this storyline creates social status, prosperity and access to exclusive places and very cool friends, more and more people haven’t got that much to strive for, unless avoiding the stress of getting into trouble.

The story is broken.

Stijn Siekelink – a well known Dutch researcher on radicalization – argues that we should think of radicalization as an identity crisis that went wrong. Time and again, radicalized youngsters say that the Jihad Recruiters were the first people who gave them a perspective to be part of something that society wasn’t going to provide them with: status, purpose, pride, and identity. Jihadist recruiters understand perfectly well that their praying on a sense of being a loser. They offer a much more thrilling answer than regular societies.

 

What the new stories should look like. 

Why do we love movies or series? The simple reason is that we love exciting narratives. A well-crafted story has it all: a tension, a hero journey, a goal to strive for, and lots of obstacles that need to be overcome. Every movie in the history of the world follows this recipe. We, humans, crave for stories like these.

No think about your own life: When was the last time you had the feeling you were living the plot of an exciting movie? What was the last time you felt you were part of an epic journey? When did you think that the life you’re living was fueled with a desire to achieve something bigger than yourself?

There are so many major problems to be solved: Humanity can fix hunger, poverty, inequality, climate change, rewilding nature etc… but we’re no longer part of the solution anymore. We can all make individual choices, like driving electric, eating plant-based, travelling less, but these are all choices we make as a consumer. Everything else, we have outsourced to governments and international organizations.

The central thesis of my blogpost is the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic concept that our identities are being produced by the stories we inhabit. If we don’t change the script, we’ll end up as bored and annoyed actors in a sad storyline. A boring narrative of success and social status. Meanwhile, there are so many epic adventures ahead of us to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

While the world is gradually turning into Instagram, we should live it more like Minecraft, a game in which people are encourage to join forces to create beautiful new worlds.

Tom De Bruyne
Co-founder SUE Behavioural Design

Image Courtesy: Joshua Rawson Harris via Unsplash

BONUS: free ebook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?'. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
08/08/2020
×

Want to get started using Behavioural Design for free?

Sign-up for our email and we will send you free training, tips, and tools.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.
No thanks, I'm good.
×

Ok. Are you 100% sure?

You will miss out on receiving free training.
Tips you can start using right away.
To change minds and nudge behaviour.
Always practical, we promise!
Ok you've convinced me
Sign me up anyways