The World Health Organization has a guide for setting up Behavioral Science units with 8 considerations...
As the WHO points out "Behavioural and cultural factors play a key role in reducing both life expectancy and years in good health... Despite this, health policies, health services and health communication are often designed and delivered without an indepth understanding of the barriers and drivers people face in their daily lives and their uptake of health services. This can lead to policies and programmes not achieving their full potential"
The context in which the WHO talks about could just as well fit into so many other areas - change management and transformation, finance, cyber security, the circular economy, etc..
The Key here is a lack of understanding of the barriers and drivers people face in their daily lives.
I talk about this often, We need depth of analysis in our research to code and classify drivers, so we can be more precise with our solutions. (If you want to learn more about the drivers, we teach/apply them at Aim For Behavior, but also you can learn with COM-B and the TDF)
So what could a Behavioral unit do?
-Run projects -Give policy advice -Rapid feedback and assistance on products, services and processes -Raise awareness -Training and upskilling
So here are the 8 considerations:
1. Ensure buy-in and involve stakeholders 2. Determine location 3.
Identify funding 4. Develop a strategy 5. Plan staffing and upskilling of team members 6.
Identify focus areas of health 7. Plan projects 8. Manage ethical questions
In the image, we can see step #4 - developing a strategy, which if you have ever set up an innovation lab or other units, you can surely recognize the steps.
Ideally, you want the unit to be as cross-functional and mixed within the organization as possible, and not a siloed unit, as you will struggle to work with other teams - eventually you want to enable as much of the organization to use behavioral Science as a lens and it's tools.
Let me know if you would like to read the link - can leave it in comments :)