Designing for behaviour change
What to do when your comms team doesn't have behaviour change skills in-house.
It happens often - the executive team spend months on a new strategy. The board has approved it and it lives in a 40-page slide deck. Leadership are confident colleagues will get behind it once they've seen it. Launch is eight weeks away. Then the brief reaches internal comms: "We need people to start working differently. Can you run the behaviour change campaign?"
If you lead an internal comms team, you'll know this moment. Your team is small, skilled and already stretched. Nobody on it has trained in behavioural science. But the date is fixed and the expectation is clear, so you do what a good comms team does. Within a few weeks there's a plan: key messages, a CEO video, an intranet hub, a toolkit for line managers. And because the brief said "behaviour change", that's what the campaign gets called.
Just because you call something a behaviour change programme doesn't mean it is one.
That's no criticism of your team. Given the time and skills available, a campaign is the sensible response. It just can't do the whole job.
Communicating a behaviour vs designing for it
A comms campaign explains a desired behaviour. It tells people what's changing, why, and what's expected of them. And that work is needed.
But designing for a behaviour is a different job. It looks at the conditions in which the behaviour happens and asks what would make the new way easier than the old one.
Behind most campaigns is an assumption that once people understand the new way is better, they'll adopt it. People rarely work like that. Someone can know the old way is slow, even wrong, and carry on because it's familiar. Repeating a habit takes little mental effort. Breaking one takes a lot, and no message removes that effort on its own, however clear it is.
Example: Take an organisation moving from an old customer-management system to a faster, simpler platform. We think everyone should switch on day one - it makes sense and it's only logical. In practice, experienced staff can use the old system almost in their sleep. The new one asks them to stop, think and learn in the middle of a busy working day. A launch email can tell them the new system is better, but it can't make it the easier choice at 4pm on a Thursday.
Start with the journey
Before choosing channels or briefing assets, we need to map the behavioural journey: how the behaviour happens today, step by step, and where the new one needs to fit.
You're looking for two things. The first is friction, the points that keep people in the current behaviour. The second is flow, the points where you can make the new behaviour easier, more attractive, more social or better timed. Those four prompts come from the EAST framework, developed by the Behavioural Insights Team, and they make a useful checklist for any comms team.
In the system example, the friction might be practical. The old platform is still everyone's default bookmark. A weekly report can only be run from it. Team leaders still ask for updates in the old format. Each of those keeps the old habit going, and none of them is a communications problem. They're design problems, and comms is well placed to spot them.
What your team can do now
You don't need a behavioural scientist to start working this way.
Write the behaviours down. Be specific about what people should start doing, and what they should stop doing. Change often means removing something, not adding work.
Spend time with the people doing the work. Note where the old behaviour is triggered, and where it's rewarded.
Look for conflicting signals. The COM-B model asks whether people have the capability, opportunity and motivation to change. If targets and incentives still reward the old way, your messaging is competing with them.
Then choose your channels. Once you know where the friction sits, your campaign has a job to do at specific moments rather than everywhere at once.
This also gives you firmer footing with leadership. "Here's what's stopping people" is a more useful conversation than "here's our campaign plan".
None of this sidelines comms either. A clear narrative, ideally built with colleagues rather than written for them, gives people a reason to change and one story to align around. It works best as part of the intervention, not as a stand-in for it.
When to bring in an expert
Sometimes your team has the insight but not the capacity, or the programme needs dedicated behavioural expertise.
Clients sometimes ask whether we've worked with their exact platform or sector. Those are the verticals. Our expertise is the horizontal: human behaviour. Status quo bias, loss aversion and the comfort of a familiar routine appear whether the change is a new CRM or a new culture.
We work as an extension of internal comms teams, mapping current and desired behaviours with you, finding the friction and co-designing interventions that fit your organisation. Your team keeps ownership of the voice and the channels. We help make sure there's something solid underneath them.
The vertical changes across industries. Human behaviour doesn't.
Ready to bring in an expert? I’d love to help. Contact me for a no obligation chat.