Beware of anyone who tells you they have 10 proven strategies to change behavior.
The problem is not that those strategies never worked anywhere, the problem is that they are usually presented as if they can be lifted out of one context and dropped into another without doing the harder work first.
That is where orgs get taken when given advice and where things can go wrong, because every challenge has its own context.
You have different actor groups facing different barriers... some problems sit with individuals or teams, but others sit in workflows, incentives, leadership signals, norms, tools, governance, or the wider system around the work.
If you think holistically, then most sit across both.
So the question is not
What are the 10 strategies that always work!!! no...the real questions are instead:
-What is the behavioral problem, exactly? -What needs to change in practice? -For whom? -In what context? -What is shaping the current pattern?
That is why at Aim for Behavior we do not start with a fixed list of interventions we are trying to force onto the problem.
Instead we start with our Behavioral Problem Framing sessions, understanding the challenge, the cultural context, the possible candidate behaviors, the actors involved, what has been tried and so on... (we run these also as half day workshops for orgs that just need this)
This gives us the foundation to build our precision hypothesis, which would then follow a diagnostic and only then do we look at what kinds of strategies are actually likely to fit.
Remember, finding strategies is easy, but finding the right strategy for this problem, in this organization, with these constraints, is the hard part.
Behavioral science I have found, is most useful when it is used as a thinking tool, not as a bag of tactics, as many want to position it as...
As I said, don't start with...which intervention should we copy... but instead what is really driving the pattern here, and what kind of response does that point us toward?”
I found Dilip Soman’s book What Works, What Doesn’t (and When) refreshing, because it does not treat applied behavioral science as a collection of universal wins or always working nudges.
It treats it requiring judgment, translation, and context.
The book lays out four useful ways to think about drawing from prior evidence:
-Replication: use the original intervention again in a similar context -Translation: adapt findings from one setting into another -Horizontal scaling: apply an intervention from one domain to a different one -Vertical scaling: take something tested at a smaller level and scale it to a larger population or geography
It also includes both successes and failures, which matters, because that is what real work needs to draw from when it comes to behavior... not magic strategies nor what always works,
Just better hypotheses, better diagnosis, better design, and better decisions about what to try next... which for many years we have been doing...