Behavioural Design Week: Matt Wallaert

Behavioural Design Week: Matt Wallaert

The first speaker on Behavioural Design Week was most certainly not the least. If you are looking for an hour filled with inspiration on applying behavioural science within your organisation, this is the keynote you don’t want to miss. In a wave of unstoppable energy, Matt shares the four steps needed for running a successful behavioural change project. He shares the don’t and don’ts combined with lots of humour—Matt shares how you can genuinely apply behavioural science. Learn from Matt’s experiences and get practical guidelines to get into the action yourself.

Matt Wallaert: Our key take-aways

Matt explains there are four steps in a behavioural change project:

Behavioural strategy
What is the desired behaviour? What do you want people to do? Translate this into a Behavioural Statement with clear OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), so you can make people accountable; it is not one person’s task to run a successful behavioural change project. Everyone’s job is behaviour; everything can be linked to behaviour.

Behavioural Insight
Our job is to build a bridge between a world that is and a world that isn’t. We need to understand which bridge to build. Why is this a desirable outcome? Why don’t we already have this outcome (bottlenecks)? You need to look for emerging patterns and need cross-validation. I see this in qualitative research; do you also see this through your quantitative lens.

Behavioural Design
We start imagining interventions. All we do is changing the pressures or the environment and making behaviour easier or harder to do.

Behavioural Impact Evaluation
You need to measure the impact of your interventions. However, we are in applied behavioural science, not academic, behavioural science. You have to have some basic fluidity about the probability. In academia, p can be less than .5. This holds not true in business. If we can find a solution that can save some people’s lives, well, that’s a win. Maybe not scientifically significant, but essential.

Matt Wallaert: Quotes to remember

Science is a process, behaviour is an outcome.

Everyone’s job is behaviour, everything can be linked to behaviour.

Accountability allows for autonomy.

Our job is to build a a bridge between a world that is and a world that isn’t.

You need cross validation. Take a qualitative belief and validate it quantative.

We are not in academic behavioural science but in applied behavioural science.

Matt Wallaert: Further reading

If Matt’s talk inspired you, please make sure to pick up his book ‘Start at the End: How to build products that create change’. We finished reading it in one fellow swoop, and it has become one of our favourite readings.

Hungry for more Behavioural Design Fest?

Please make sure to check out our other videos of other 2021 Keynote speakers on Behavioural Design Week: Tim Versnel on designing behaviour for sustainability and Baptiste Tougeron on using behavioural science for more effective advertising.

Or, check out our upcoming edition of Behavioural Design Fest.

Also, you can find all the videos of the keynotes of Behavioural Design Fest 2018 and Behavioural Design Fest 2019; watch and re-watch here to upgrade your Behavioural Design know-how and boost your inspiration.