Culture is and should be something we include when designing for behavior change.
This great book by Erin Meyer called The Culture Map can help you get your mindset right on culture.
Culture matters because it helps us get more context on how our solutions are going to work in different places, the norms and culture in one place may not work in the next.
I learned this not only by reading books like these but by first-hand experience, as I have lived in 10+ cities including Singapore, Dubai, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid… and every place taught me something different about how people make decisions, communicate, and respond to change.
The same message, design, or behavioral intervention can land completely differently depending on the context.
What you may think is motivating or respectful in one culture can feel confusing or even off-putting in another, so never copy paste generic strategies.
Culture shapes what people pay attention to, how they evaluate information, and how they build trust, all things that matter when we’re trying to influence behavior or design for adoption.
Here are 4 areas you can think about and include in your archetypes or change frameworks:
1) Communication: low vs high context 2) Evaluation: direct vs indirect negative feedback 3)Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first Scheduling: flexible vs linear time
These may sound simple, but they influence everything from how feedback is given, to how quickly teams make decisions, to how people experience time pressure or structure.
When we bring culture in early, not as an afterthought, but as part of our behavioral framing.... we design with more realism, it also helps us anticipate friction, design around norms, and build strategies that actually fit the environments they’re meant for.
This is how we approach culture and change projects in our advisory and consulting work.
Have you read this book, and implemented some of the learnings?