General principles don’t change behaviour
General principles don’t change behaviour: giving people the opportunity, capability and motivation do.
During my tenure as Behaviour and Culture Change Manager at University College London (UCL), a key project that we undertook was developing a partnership with the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change. During this partnership, we identified a number of ways that we could use behavioural science to address and prevent unacceptable behaviours including bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct.
With a number of 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. Sending a colleague or a team on a training course has become the norm when considering interventions to address behaviour and poor culture. Such training programmes may be effective at introducing general principles about definitions and frameworks for how to address these issues, but very few develop skill.
Arguably, this reactive or even tick box approach of relying on training needs to be reconsidered.
After partnering with the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, as a primary-prevention practitioner and EDI consultant, I stopped to think about how often we are quick to recommend the training to ‘problem areas' and to address unacceptable behaviours. But does it work?
It was during training on understanding and applying the behaviour change wheel - a wheel designed from 17 different disciplines including psychology, sociology and law, which identifies nine possible interventions to change behaviours - applying the COM-B analysis framework. This framework recognises that capability, opportunity and motivation all play a key role in behavioural change. The nine interventions include education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, training, enablement, modelling, environmental restructuring, and restrictions.
Capability is about providing people with the necessary skills to engage in the desired behaviour, for example being an active bystander, an ally, or providing feedback to an individual in challenging circumstances. Opportunity explores the existing opportunities on a day to day basis, but also across the organisation for people to engage in the desired behaviour: is this encouraged? Or has it been discouraged through organisational process and patterns over time? And motivation: often we can make assumptions about what is the driving force for people to engage or disengage in particular behaviours, and we also need to assess the broader environment and potential risk factors. COM-B analysis provides us with a framework to explore these in relation to particular organisational challenges, for example, managers not providing feedback on behaviour to individuals. This was one of the key questions we asked: what capability, opportunity and motivation are needed for managers to provide such feedback as early as possible?
The application of this framework challenged what colleagues and I were referring to as ‘training’. Education looks at raising awareness, whereas training focuses on developing skills - or the capability to engage in particular behaviours (either positive or negative). When considering the ‘training’ in place for our staff and senior leadership to address bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct was the focus on developing and embedding skill, or on raising awareness? The answer was the latter.
As part of the training, we conducted a rapid assessment and application of the COM-B framework to existing training and soon identified that there were slight tweaks to the existing framework that could significantly enhance our offering, but also increase the number of interventions from the behaviour change wheel from one intervention to five. Dr. Paul Chadwick and I provide further analysis in a blog post originally published on the Centre for Behaviour Change website.
This exercise became an invaluable tool for how I have learnt to approach organisational strategy development and implementation, and it has formed a key role in how I consult with organisations. If you are interested in exploring how behavioural science may improve your workplace initiatives, or if you are looking for support in developing a prevention-based strategy, get in touch today.
