Hello!

This week's featured article digs deep to uncover how to most effectively change behaviour by determining what predictors of behaviour are the best ‘bang for your buck’ to target with interventions to create change. Pretty big one, right?

The Findings: Targeting habits and behavioural attitudes—someone’s attitude toward a particular behaviour—proves to be the most effective way to inspire change. Targeting knowledge, skills and general attitudes, on the other hand, proved to not change much.

Why It Matters for You: 

• Unlike general attitudes, which are tied to someone’s mental model of the world and tend to be stable over time, behavioural attitudes are discrete and highly malleable constructs that can be easily defined and measured, are program or product specific, and perhaps most importantly, can be bound to a particular context in time and space.
  
  For example, a general attitude could be client satisfaction is important while a behavioural attitude could be responding to client emails need to happen within 24 hours. One is broad, the other is concrete, discrete, and easy to design for.
  

• As a leader, translating your strategic goals into a suite of behavioural attitudes to target can supercharge goal achievement.

What you can do about it: Try out the exercise below!

Explore what behavioural attitudes underlie your strategy by pasting the prompts below into your preferred generative AI platform. Share with your team, and in your next strategic planning session, go through an ideation and prioritization exercise on the interventions that arise from your prompts (and all the others that come to mind, too!)—in the end, you’ll have a change roadmap that will generate momentum toward your strategic goals.

• My team’s strategy is ### and our goal is to ###. Provide a list of example behavioural attitudes we should target to achieve our strategy.

• For each behavioural attitude, provide an action plan broken down into three components: the target behavioural attitude, example interventions we could implement to enforce the behavioural attitude, and how we can reinforce the behavioural attitude.

• Note to the user: Don’t just take the generative ai output as the final word—poke and prod the outputs by providing more context about your team, the dynamics of your business, and the barriers that may stand in the way of interventions. Then put the cheery on top with the bright and beautiful minds of your team.

Have fun!

M

PS If you’re interested in learning more about translating strategy into one that is behaviourally-informed, you can check out my ‘The Future of Strategy is Behavioural’ Nudgestock talk here.

PS We value your input! Share your thoughts on this week's briefing, ask questions, or suggest topics for future issues by replying to this email. Would also love to hear how the prompts made you think differently about your day-to-day.

PSS Know someone who would benefit from our insights? Use this link to invite them to our community.