Enabling meaningful change using behavioural science
Now I've always been a believer in the principle ‘give a man a fish – feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.’ So, when I started working in prevention of gender-based violence, including awareness raising and encouraging others to play an active role in tackling violence, this educational metaphor was essential.
However, as I’ve recently discovered, there is a need to move beyond sharing general principles, to developing and embedding skill. This is true for all possible audiences from Everett Roger’s innovation adoption model – from the sceptics, to the innovators.
During my tenure at UCL, we fostered a key partnership with the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change to apply behavioural science to the prevention of unacceptable behaviours. This partnership involved two key collaborations:
Increasing the capacity of professional services colleagues in understanding and applying behavioural science and the behaviour change wheel to developing interventions,
Applying systems mapping to the institution to identify key pain points and opportunities to strengthen prevention efforts.
It was during training on understanding and applying the behaviour change wheel - a synthesis of 19 behaviour change frameworks that draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches – that colleagues and I were prompted to stop and think about what behaviour we wanted to address, and to consider how quickly and frequently we were to recommend training as a solution to a behavioural problem. But does it work?
The behavioural change wheel incorporates the COM-B analysis framework which recognises that the key to changing behaviour is to ensure there is the capability, opportunity and motivation to do so and the interventions need to change one or more of them. The nine interventions include: education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, training, enablement, modelling, environmental restructuring and restrictions.
While on initial assessment, colleagues and I assumed that we were engaging in a number of these – however understanding that education and training were relied on heavily. However, it was in the in-depth application of the wheel that we distinguished between education (awareness raising) and training (developing skills).
It was here where colleagues and I reflected on the trainings we had in place and conducted a rapid assessment and application of the COM-B framework to existing training and soon identified that we were only harnessing one of the possible nine interventions to change behaviour. As a result of this assessment, we identified a further four interventions through minor tweaks to the content and delivery that would maximise the opportunity to shift behaviour – in this case, developing the skills of an active bystander.
With many organisations revising sexual harassment policies in the wake of me too, and even more exploring how they can become anti-racist, training is often a tool that is relied on to demonstrate a commitment to addressing workplace culture. However, how many organisations do not stop to evaluate this training in terms of its impact, or indeed if it is the correct intervention.
So, coming back to the fish analogy, how we teach the person to fish is critical. Rather than just throwing training at a problem, consider does the person have the capability required? Are they given the opportunity to do so in the right environmental conditions? What will motivate them to engage in that behaviour?
While there is no silver bullet to addressing unacceptable behaviours in the workplace, there are a number of framework and prevention methods that can be applied to strengthen and expand existing programmes, including applying behavioural science.
Read the full blog from the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change.
