Hi there, I’m Robert. I write about behavior change in organizations.
For more: aimforbehavior | Training | SHIFT Method

There’s a conversation that happens in almost every change project, which is why I wanted to write this piece, because it happened to me in the following way:

Our director asked us… how’s adoption going for the new tool?

Our manager immediately said something like…really well, we did the training, completion is high and the comms are all out!

However, we all know that this does not really mean adoption is high.. in fact six weeks after that meeting, I had to go down to finance to request a budget line for a project and I noticed they were still using spreadsheets, and not the really expensive tool the org had deployed earlier.

Now, there can be many issues here, but I want to focus this piece on measurement, because for that specific project we ended up realizing we were tracking the wrong things.. see, we thought the metrics looked good, but no one was focusing on the actual behavior, which was not really changing.

Has that happened to you before in a project?

What the numbers were actually telling us

Training completion was telling us that people were showing up, fair enough, they needed to be trained, and when we sent out the surveys, they all scored it high, they were satisfied… so why still the excel… I was really confused.

We fell into the trap most change teams fall under…those metrics are easy to collect, easy to present, and they look like actual progress and change is happening, however, they were a measure of perception, but not of behavior.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

• A training completion rate of 87% tells you 87% attended the session. What 87% of those people will actually do differently after the training… that’s a separate question entirely.

• A 4.1 satisfaction score tells you how people felt about the process, but not whether the process changed anything.

• 340 system logins in the first month tells you people accessed the platform, not whether any of them completed the workflow it was designed for.

Again, these metrics aren’t wrong…but they are not going to tell you if the behaviors are changing.

The story keeps repeating itself…

Let me tell you about a project I was brought into help… now as a consultant and not as an employee.

An FMCG had rolled out a new risk-flagging system, they wanted the relationship managers to log client risk flags within 24 hours of identifying them.. nothing too hard.

Adoption a few moths later was low and the program team was disappointed, as they had done everything right.. comms, training, manager briefings launch event and so on.. so why low engagement.

When I sat with the relationship managers, three completely different problems emerged depending on who I was talking to.. (hence why it important to understand the actors)

Issue 1: The people here didn’t believe the flags would be acted on, because in the old system, when they logged them nothing really happened, so why would the new system change the old response.

Issue 2: The people here wanted to do it, but the system itself made it nearly impossible, because they were never really included in the experience of the system, so it took them too many extra steps to log a single thing.

Issue 3: The people here were mostly senior relationship managers, who were not doing it because none of their peers were doing it.

One behavior, but very different barriers that needed to be addressed!

Where did barriers actually sit

When you have a change issue in an organization, there are usually three levels where you need to look… either its within the individual, between people, or in the system around them.

Individual Level is the one where most change programs focus on.. but as I have seen, the diagnostic layer here should not be only about comms and training. You should also look for signals like not believing the change will work, how they see themselves in the role and so on. The diagnostic questions here are simple: if you gave them knowledge and removed all pressure and consequence, could this person actually do the behavior today?

Social Level is what sits between people, so if nobody around them is doing it, why should they bother. Equally maybe the informal norm says this kind of thing isn’t really required. The diagnostic question here: what does this person think their colleagues actually do.. and what does that signal to them?

Material Level is about the environment, the system that makes doing the right things hard, but also the policies, the structures and so on. The diagnostic question: if someone wanted to do this behavior, what would the system make difficult?

In my experience, you should always start with and give more weight to the system issues.

The measurement gap this creates

If your metrics don’t tell you which of those three levels the barrier is at, you’re pretty much flying blind, you can’t see which type of issue it is, and so you can’t know what kind of solution you need to use.

And if you can’t see what’s driving it, you default to what you know.. because it is safe… more training, better comms, another stakeholder engagement round, but these are only individual-level interventions, they assume the problem is awareness, knowledge, or motivation.

However, if the issue is social or material, those interventions don’t touch it, so while they make the activity metrics look good, with the sessions attended, and the champions recruited… the old behavior stays the same.

What closes the gap is measuring the behavior directly, and making sure you are addressing the right issue at the right level.

14 metrics to track instead <save this>

Here is a nice table for you, to help you track better and not fall in the trap of perception over behavior. Please feel free to adapt the What To Track Instead to your own project.

What comes next

The table above helps with one part of the problem… tracking the behavior directly, once you know what to look for.

But most teams get stuck one step earlier than that, they can see adoption is weak yet they still can’t tell why, and the truth is that without a diagnosis, the default response is always the same.. more comms, more training, another push.. regardless of whether that matches the actual barrier.

That is really the bigger issue for me, and why I write pieces like these and share with you, because once you are measuring the wrong thing, you usually end up solving the wrong thing too.

As a change person, you have to get much clearer on what behavior you are trying to change, what is actually blocking it, and whether the metrics you are using can see that at all.

The question worth asking this week

Pick one behavior your current change program is trying to drive., it has to be a specific, observable action, not an outcome or a mindset.

Now ask: what metric are you using to track whether that behavior is happening?

If the answer is a training number or a comms stat.. you don’t have a behavioral metric, you have an activity metric dressed up as one.

It is also why I have been building a toolkit with practical tools for change, because this is where a lot of the work goes off track, if you are curious, join the wait list here

I write about organizational behavior change and advise companies on how to implement it.

if you’re working on a change program where the behavior isn’t changing, I’d be curious to hear more… reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn.

Very best, Robert

Hi there, I’m Robert. I write about behavior change in organizations.
For more: aimforbehavior | Training | SHIFT Method

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This is Part 2 of a series for people working on change and transformation in organizations. Part 1 covered Meaning — the sense-making mechanism that makes a change feel legitimate. If you haven’t read it, start there. The three conditions build on each other.

In Part 1, we ended with this: Meaning provides the ‘why,’ but for change to sustain, it must be supported by Mastery and Belonging. When either is missing, organizations compensate with pressure, monitoring, or incentives, and the change becomes less sustainable.

Now we’re picking up exactly where we left off.

We’re covering Mastery second because once people understand why a change matters, the next thing that determines whether they move from understanding to action is whether the system makes them feel capable of actually doing it.

To clarify, Mastery is the psychological state of feeling effective, capable and in a state of progress during organizational change. In Self-Determination Theory terms, it’s closely related to the need for competence.

Training isn’t the enemy here... it’s necessary but insufficient. If Mastery is weak, training becomes the messenger for incompetence.

Let’s start with simple example:

Two equally resourced teams receive the same training for a new workflow. One team starts experimenting within a week, asking practical questions, making mistakes, adjusting. The new behaviors start becoming part of the routine … the other team goes quiet, and while people attend trainings, they end up going back to doing things the old way… why does this happen?

It’s clear that many things are needed for change to sustain, one of the things that is very important after Meaning is established is Mastery, specifically, whether the environment makes the change feel achievable or whether it feels like something that will make it impossible.

That distinction matters because even when people understand and accept the why of the change (strong Meaning), they will not move to action if they don’t believe they can actually do it. Mastery is the thing that moves people from “I see why this matters” to “I can do this, and I’m getting better at it.” I always like to give a video game analogy here, if the game is too easy you get bored, if its too hard you get frustrated… in an organization, understanding without capability produces anxiety, not adoption.

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Your Mastery Tools (copy/paste)

If you want to use this as an actual playbook (not just an article), here are the things to take from it:

• Mastery roadblocks audit: the fastest way to stop competence frustration and prevent learned helplessness.

• Role-level capability map: the template that forces you past “we did the training” and into daily readiness.

• Learning check-in: a meeting structure that surfaces real capability gaps without turning into a complaints session.

• 45-minute Mastery session: a one-team working session that produces outputs you can act on.

• Feedback language swaps: scripts for informational feedback without judgment or surveillance.

You’ll find each tool in the sections below.

What I mean by Mastery

Mastery is the moment someone moves from following instructions to actually knowing what they’re doing to getting really goo at it, and it happens when the environment provides the right combination of challenge, support, feedback, and room to fail safely.

A key distinction here is to avoid The Training Trap, in which organizations frequently treat training as the entire competence strategy… the deliver a workshop, send some e-learning, tick the box, and move on… but training is just one input. If we are focusing on Mastery, then we can see it as the output Mastery… the gap between them is where most change projects end up losing people.

One important thing: Mastery during organizational change is not about deep expertise, because we are in a change process, our goal is functional confidence, what the behavior change literature calls self-efficacy: the belief that you can perform the new behavior well enough to get through the transition. You don’t need people to become experts on day one, instead you need them to believe they can get from here to there, and that the system will support them while they do.

Quick note on the system

Same as in as Part 1. This isn’t a recipe, and change is never linear…. Organizational systems may take interventions, normalize workarounds, and create the appearance of adoption while people quietly go back to old behaviors. Treat what follows as foundations and experiments: try one play with one team, see what the response is, and adjust…remember Mastery isn’t something you deliver, instead It’s something you keep to sustain change.

Diagnosing Mastery Quickly

If you’re unsure whether Mastery is missing you can start by answering the 6 questions below:

Six questions you can ask

1. Can people describe what they need to do differently in their actual role (not in theory, at their desk)?

2. Do they know what “good enough” looks like during the first few weeks, or are they measuring themselves against the end-state?

3. Is there protected time and space to practice the new behavior without real consequences?

4. When someone makes a mistake with the new way of working, what happens next? Learning conversation or escalation?

5. Help-seeking frequency: are people asking how-to questions openly, or going silent?

6. Unprompted experimentation: is anyone trying the new behavior without being monitored, incentivized, or told to?

Capability confidence

When the environment around Mastery is weak, the system defaults to avoidance as its primary coping mechanism.

If people are saying things like:

• Nobody showed us how this actually works.

• I’ll just keep doing it the old way until someone forces me.

• I tried it once and it didn’t work.

Then Mastery is unstable.

However, if what you’re hearing is more operational:

• I’m still slow but I can feel it getting easier.

• I got stuck here… can someone walk me through this part?

• I figured out an upgrade that might help the team.

Then Mastery is starting to form.

Tool: Mastery audit

Ask two questions for each item below: (1) Are we doing this? (2) Where is it showing up (exact meeting / policy / system / timeline)?

High-risk Mastery-blockers:

· No protected practice time: expecting people to learn the new system while maintaining full output on the old one.

· Unrealistic performance expectations: measuring people against end-state standards during the learning curve.

· Shame after early mistakes: treating errors during transition as performance failures rather than expected learning.

· Training-then-abandonment: delivering training weeks before go-live, or with no follow-up support afterward.

· Surveillance-as-competence-strategy: monitoring adoption metrics without providing feedback or removing barriers.

· Everything-at-once rollout: launching all components simultaneously instead of sequencing what people need to learn first.

The Mastery playbook

Most change programs try to build Mastery by adding more training, more documentation, more e-learning modules… when Mastery is actually a dual job: what happens when the system supports competence, and what happens when it frustrates it.

This is the same “dual process” point from Part 1: the psychological conditions that build capability and the conditions that undermine it operate in parallel. If you invest in training but leave the Mastery-blockers in place, you’ll see some adoption, but it will be fragile. People will perform when being supervised and go back when nobody’s looking, because the system tell them that mistakes aren’t safe.

When there is Mastery frustration in organizations, it usually shows up as going to old tools (hi excel) and processes (hi many extra unneeded steps), doing the minimum to appear compliant, avoiding situations where the new behavior would be tested, and going quiet in meetings about the change.

Below are 7 plays you can use right away, like Part 1: they are not steps. They are plays you need to contextualize, test, iterate, and when validated, scale.

Play: Surface and address barriers at the role level

A lot of change plans assume barriers are obvious, but that is not usually the case… and I have written about the diagnostic problem here.

In any case… you need to ask at role level:

1. What’s the first thing that got harder when you tried the new way?

2. What did you need that wasn’t available?

3. What are you still doing the old way, and why?

The reason it works is simple: when people name their obstacles, the obstacles change from invisible threats to solvable problems and that change is itself a competence-building move.

One tip: revisit barriers at different points in the change, because the barriers at week 2 won’t be the same as the barriers at week 8.

Play: Set realistic expectations for the learning curve

Many change implicitly promise that things will feel normal immediately, but we know they won’t… this leaves open a gap between expectation and experience, as people attribute the difficulty to their own incompetence rather than to the normal reality of learning something new.

Name the learning curve explicitly:

“For the first 2–3 weeks, this is going to feel slower, that’s not because you’re doing it wrong. That’s because you’re learning..by week 4–6, most people report it starts feeling more natural. We’re not expecting end-state performance during the learning period, and if you need support we are here to help.”

This prevents false competence frustration: people feeling incompetent when they’re actually progressing normally.

Make sure you separate process expectations from outcome expectation…

-Process: You’ll feel clumsy with the new tool for two weeks.
-Outcome: Improvements usually show up around week 6–8. If you only talk about the outcome timeline, people spend weeks feeling like failures before results happen.

Play: Adjust the pace to what teams can absorb

Not every team starts from the same place, so making sure you are matching difficulty to current capability, is one of the strongest predictors of sustained engagement…as with my video game example… too easy and people disengage, too hard and they feel overwhelmed. The goal is the zone where effort produces visible progress.

In practice, this means:

• Sequence what people need to learn. Don’t launch everything at once. What’s the minimum viable behavior change for week one?

• Let teams choose their rollout pace within defined boundaries: These three components need to be live by month-end, you decide the order and the weekly targets.

• Base progression on success rate, not the calendar: You’ve stabilized on Phase 1, ready to add Phase 2? is better than…It’s week 3, time for Phase 2.

Tool: the role-level capability map

Write one version per key role… if you can’t fill the role line, training isn’t ready.

· What changes for this role: the specific behaviors, tools, or processes that are different.

· What stays the same: the things that don’t change (people need anchors).

· First thing to learn: the single most important new capability for week one.

· What “good enough” looks like during transition: the realistic standard, not the end-state.

· Where you’ll get stuck: the known friction points and who to go to for help.

· What support exists: practice time, coaching, peers, documentation, and for how long.

One worked example for you to see how it works:

What: A new project management tool replacing spreadsheet-based tracking.

• What changes: daily task updates move from the shared spreadsheet to the new tool, weekly status reports auto-generate instead of being manually compiled.

• What stays the same: the project scope, the team structure, the reporting cadence, client communication channels.

• First thing to learn: how to log a task update (5-minute walkthrough, one screen).

• Good enough during transition: Tasks are logged in the new tool by end of day. Formatting and tags can wait until week 3.

• Where you’ll get stuck: the integration with the invoicing system isn’t live until month 2, so you’ll need to double-enter billing tasks for now. That’s a known workaround, not a failure.

• Support: 30 minutes of protected practice time daily in week 1. A Slack channel with two trained champions who respond within 2 hours. Weekly 15-minute troubleshooting drop-ins.

Play: Build feedback loops that inform without judging

Feedback is how people understand their progress. Without it, they’re flying blind, and worse, with bad feedback, they’re flying scared.

The critical distinction here should be between informational feedback and controlling feedback. Informational feedback tells people where they stand and what to try next, while controlling feedback tells people they’re being watched and scored.

Same data, different framing:

• Controlling: Your team’s adoption rate is 43%…the target is 80%.

• Informational: Your team has 43% of workflows in the new system, the most common issue across teams is the approval routing, here’s a 2-minute fix.

Research on feedback and competence is clear: feedback that provides specific, actionable information about what to do next builds self-efficacy, but feedback that simply reports a score without direction creates anxiety, and feedback delivered at unexpected moments (the new process worked exactly as designed) feels like genuine recognition rather than surveillance.

Every piece of feedback during a change should include a next step, because data without direction is just pressure.

Play: Create protected space to practice and experiment

Competence is built through doing, not through understanding, yet most organizations over-invest in instruction and under-invest in practice.

Protected practice means:

• Time carved out specifically for trying the new behavior, where mistakes don’t count against performance.

• Graded tasks which start with the simplest version of the new behavior and add complexity as confidence builds.

• Permission to experiment with how the new process works in their specific context, not just follow the playbook exactly.

One practical move: pilot the change with a volunteer team before rolling it out, the pilot team builds competence first, generates real examples of what works, and becomes a source of vicarious learning for the teams that follow. When people see peers, not consultants, not leadership, but people in the same role succeed with the new way of working, it directly boosts their own self-efficacy.

Tool: a simple learning check-in (try it in a team meeting)

· 5 min: Where are you with the new [tool/process/workflow]? Quick round - one sentence each.

· 10 min: What’s working? What’s confusing? Where are you stuck? (Focus on specifics)

· 10 min: Pick the single biggest barrier, problem-solve it together and assign one action to remove or reduce it before next week.

Keep it small, keep it practical. This is not a feedback session for leadership, but a learning session for the team.

Play: Sharpen the Feedback Language

Mastery isn’t about lowering the bar, it’s about giving people clear information about where they are and what to do next, without making them feel surveilled or judged.

One way to do this is with the language of your feedback systems, because if feedback sounds like evaluation, people optimize for safety rather than learning.

Tool: feedback language swaps

Replace controlling feedback with informational, growth-oriented feedback:

• Replace: Your adoption rate is 43% with - Here’s where you are and here’s the specific thing to try next.

• Replace: You’re behind schedule with - The most common issue point is X here’s a 2-minute fix.

• Replace: This team hasn’t completed training with What questions came up after the session? Let’s address them.

The goal is feedback that builds self-efficacy rather than triggering learned helplessness, which occurs when people feel that no amount of effort will lead to competence.

Play: Recognize effort and progress, not just end-state compliance

Most adoption tracking celebrates the finish line: 100% of teams migrated, but Mastery is built through the journey, not the destination. If you only recognize completion, you leave the entire learning period unacknowledged, which is exactly the period when people need the most reinforcement.

Recognize:

• Effort during the learning curve: This team ran three experiments with the new process this week.

• Progress relative to starting point: You’ve gone from 2 workflows in the new system to 8 in three weeks.

• Help-seeking: This team asked the most questions in the first week, that’s a leading indicator of fast adoption.

• Recovery: This team struggled in week 2, troubleshot it, and got back on track, that’s harder than getting it right the first time.

Remember that relying too heavily on tangible rewards for change adoption can undermine the internalization process. Recognition that highlights growing capability (you’re getting better at this) is more durable than recognition that highlights compliance (you did what was asked).

What to track (leading indicators)

Don’t wait for adoption dashboards, instead track competence signals.

· Unprompted experimentation: people trying the new behavior without incentives, surveillance, or instruction to do so.

· Realistic self-assessment: people can accurately name what they can and can’t do yet (not overconfident, not helpless).

· Help-seeking without fear: people ask questions openly, in meetings, in shared channels, not just privately or not at all.

· Error recovery speed: when someone makes a mistake with the new way of working, how quickly do they try again versus reverting permanently?

· Capability narrative shift: the story moves from I don’t know what I’m doing toward I’m still learning but I can see it getting easier.

One thing to try next week

Run a Mastery session with one team.

Agenda (copy/paste)

· 5 min: The change in one sentence, what’s actually different for this team?

· 10 min: Role-level capability map: what changes, what stays, first thing to learn, what good enough looks like now.

· 10 min: Surface barriers: what broke, what’s missing, what are people still doing the old way and why?

· 10 min: Learning check-in: what’s working, what’s confusing, where are people stuck?

· 5 min: Pick one barrier to remove this week and one experiment to run.

· 5 min: Name the support that exists (time, coaching, peers, documentation) and if it doesn’t exist, name what’s needed.

What to capture (so it doesn’t become another meeting)

· The capability map per role (what changes, first thing to learn, good enough standard).

· The top barrier and the action to remove it.

· The one experiment the team will run next week.

· The support gap, what’s needed that isn’t there yet.

You’ll learn more from that than another round of training.

While we focused on Mastery, remember that the three conditions are interdependent. Meaning provides the why, and gives you the autonomy to act, Mastery provides the can I, but for change to truly sustain, it must be supported by Belonging, the social fabric that makes new behaviors normative and gives people models, feedback, and the safety to keep going when things get hard.

Next up in the series: Belonging.

I write about behavioral science for organisational change and advise companies on how to diagnose and design for behavior change.

if you’re working on a change program where the behavior isn’t changing, I’d be curious to hear what you’re seeing… reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn.

Very best, Robert

I’ve spent the last decade working inside organisations that are trying to change how people work…from tech rollouts, restructures, culture programs and process overhauls. It’s funny to think that while the contexts are always different, the pattern is somewhat the same.

These changes usually start when leadership signs off on the change, then a project team makes a plan, things start happening, the comms go out… and three months after all the excitement (or not) the change that the org was working towards is a bit stuck and nobody can formally explain why.

If you ask the change/transformation team, they will tell you did everything the methodology told them to do… which makes it even more frustrating for them, because they followed the playbook and it didn’t quite work.

My goal has been to understand why this is, and after reviewing many toolkits for change and being in the trenches… the answer is almost always the same: nobody diagnosed why people weren’t changing their behavior in the first place… they went straight from ‘people aren’t doing the thing’ to ‘let’s communicate harder’.

I decided to write this piece to highlight that missing step, so that teams and organization working on change can not only be aware of it, but can do something about it. Specifically, I want to show you where the gap is, what it’s costing, and introduce a methodology I’ve built called SHIFT that’s designed to close it. In a follow-up article I’ll walk you through the full process step by step.

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The premise problem

The dominant practice in change management tends to default to a familiar cluster: vision, messaging, stakeholder engagement, and resistance management…even when the real barriers may sit in the workflow, systems, or norms.

This has been evident and as I mentioned earlier when looking at frameworks spanning public sector, corporate, international development, professional certification, and academia. The toolkits differ in “packaging” sure, however they converge on the same premise… communicate the change well enough, align enough people, build enough readiness, and the behavior will follow.

That premise isn’t wrong… but it’s incomplete for how change happens in work as done scenarios… the ones we all experience basically.

The contact centre that trained people who already knew the process

A government contact centre was rolling out a new compliance system, and for some reason the adoption was very low… what did we hear? That the reason people were resistant was because we needed to provide them with more training… which to me sounded a bit incomplete as a reason.

Nevertheless, the director asked for the training materials to be redesigned and for someone to run all the trainings… so… after checking and seeing the numbers quite low still, we validated that was not the issue.

Thankfully I was able to convince the director to let us do a deeper diagnosis to see what was actually happening…and low and behold… the new system required 14 clicks to log a single customer interaction… who wanted to go through 14 steps… they workaround took only 3.

It goes to show you that the people were not resisting because they didnt want the change, or because they were acting irrationally, it was the system that made the old way better than then new one.

See, no amount of training or comms was going to fix that issue..and this is why knowing the actual barriers helps you focus on the right solution.. in this case it was redesigning the workflow interface.

This kind of misdiagnosis happens constantly.. because the dominant frameworks for change don’t have a diagnostic layer. they have a communication layer, a readiness layer, a stakeholder management layer… and assume the diagnosis has already happened.

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What diagnosis actually means in a change context

In medicine, you don’t prescribe treatment before identifying the condition, because the same symptom can point to dozens of different causes, each needing a different approach.

Organisational change should work the same way…the symptom is almost always identical, people aren’t doing the new thing… but the root cause varies enormously, and the right approach depends entirely on which root cause you’re dealing with.

Behavioral science gives us three diagnostic questions here…. they draw on well-established research into what drives and blocks human behavior, particularly the work of Susan Michie and colleagues at UCL. The core insight is simple… every behaviour has three preconditions, and when any one is missing, the behaviour won’t happen.

1. Does the system support the change? Do people have the time, tools, resources, and support they need? Someone whose system takes 14 clicks when the old one took 3 doesn’t have a mindset problem. They have a system problem and the fix is redesigning the environment, not running another training session.

2. Do the people know how to do it? Do they have the knowledge, skills, and cognitive capacity to actually do the thing under real working conditions? Not in a training room, but at their desk, under pressure, on a Tuesday afternoon. If they can’t, that’s a knowledge and ability barrier and training might actually be the right call here.

3. Do they want to do it? Do they see why it matters to them personally? Does the change conflict with their identity, their beliefs, or what their peers expect? Someone who has the tools and the skills but can’t see how the change connects to anything they care about has a willingness barrier…and that needs a completely different conversation than training or comms.

Here’s the thing you need to know: the fix for each question is completely different.

-Training doesn’t fix a system problem

-Communication doesn’t fix a knowledge gap

-Incentives don’t fix broken environmental design

Many orgs aren’t able to make this distinction and end up defaulting to asking for “more training and more comms” from the change and transformation teams regardless of what’s actually blocking people.

Why the field is skipping diagnosis

It’s worth asking why the dominant methodologies skip this step.. it’s not because the people who built them are careless.. I think it is because they’re solving a different problem.

Kotter’s 8 Steps solves for leadership alignment and momentum, while ADKAR for example solves for individual readiness… and yes, each of these is useful for something, but none of them is designed to answer: what specific behavior needs to happen, what’s blocking it, and what mechanism actually addresses that block?

They work at the level of the programme, while diagnosis works at the level of the behavior…those are very different altitudes.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking… well ADKAR does separate Knowledge from Ability. That’s fair, however, there’s a real difference between putting a label on a gap and diagnosing its mechanism. When ADKAR says there’s a “Desire” gap, it gives you engagement tactics, but It doesn’t tell you whether that gap is missing purpose, identity threat, or social isolation. And those are very different problems that need very different fixes. “Desire is low” is a label, not a diagnosis. A label tells you where the problem is, but a diagnosis tells you what to do about it.

The field has a diagnostic gap. Existing frameworks are strong at mobilising a programme, but they’re weaker at diagnosing behavior-level barriers and matching them to interventions. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation about where the next layer of value sits.

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SHIFT: a different premise for change

SHIFT stands for Specify, Hypothesise, Intervene, Facilitate, Test. It’s my behavioral/implementation science methodology for organisational change that starts from a different place than the traditional ones it asks:

What specific behaviors need to happen?

What’s preventing them?

What mechanism addresses that barrier?

In what sequence should we apply the interventions?

That’s a fundamentally different starting point.. which is more about engineering a system of interventions matched to specific barriers.

Really, this is why I made SHIFT in the first place and why I have been training teams on it and brining into consulting work.

I didn’t make SHIFT to replace what you’re already using, instead it sits underneath your existing methodology, not in competition with it. When Kotter’s coalition is built but adoption isnt there, SHIFT diagnoses why. When ADKAR identifies a gap, SHIFT unpacks what kind of gap it is and routes it to a matched intervention… as people who have been using it in their companies have told me, It’s the diagnostic layer that the other frameworks assume has already been done.

Here’s what each phase does…I’ll walk through the full process with worked examples in the next post.

Specify the target behavior using our ABC Tool (Actor/Behavior/Context) We make sure we go away from “improve safety culture”, which is vague, to something you can actually see and diagnose…Most change programs go light on this step or may skip it, which is not a good place to start your program.

Hypothesise the barriers by asking the three diagnostic questions. Does the system support it? Do they know how to do it? Do they want to do it? But go deeper than just the three questions. Within the wanting to question alone, “low buy-in” could mean missing purpose, identity threat, or social isolation… and each one needs a different fix. Another thing practitioners may miss: barriers travel in clusters…a skills deficit almost always shows up alongside a confidence gap, which means If you only address one, the other keeps the behavior from moving.

Intervene with strategies matched to the specific barrier you’ve found. If they don’t know how, structured learning. If the system doesn’t support it, redesign the defaults. If they don’t see why it matters, connect the change to something they already care about — not the org’s vision deck. Sequencing matters too: build the ability before you try to shift the meaning, fix the system before you try to change attitudes. I keep seeing this — what looks like a willingness problem just disappears once you remove the structural barrier. People who seemed “resistant” were making a rational choice given a badly designed system.

Facilitate stakeholder engagement when you have a diagnosed barrier and a matched strategy, the conversation with stakeholders becomes concrete: “Here’s what we found, here’s what we’re proposing, here’s why.,” that’s a much easier conversation than “we need your support for the change programme.”

Test, Sustain, Adapt for sustainability before you go live and after you have launched, because if you can’t picture the behavior sustaining in six months when nobody’s watching, your plan has a gap.

Objections I hear about diagnosing…

“This is too slow, and we need to move fast.”

Diagnosis doesn’t slow you down.. what does is misdiagnosis. a team that spends two weeks diagnosing the barrier and then deploys a matched intervention will outperform a team that skips it and spends six months iterating on the wrong one.

“We already know what the problem is.”

Maybe you do know the problem…but why is it that teams are running their program for months without the results they expected, if you already knew the problem, the interventions would be working.

“Our people just don’t like change.”

This is the one I hear most, and it’s almost never accurate… people change all the time, they change jobs, move cities, learn new tech and so on. They do new behaviors when those behaviors solve a problem they actually care about…. what people don’t like is being asked to do something harder than the current way, with no clear personal benefit, while the people asking them to change haven’t changed anything about their own behavior. We can’t keep calling this resistance, because what it is, is a rational response to a poorly designed system.

“We’re already using proven change models, so why do we need this?”

You don’t need to replace what you’re using., but you do need the layer that’s missing underneath it, the diagnostic one that is so often underused.

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Five things you can do this week

You don’t need to use my full methodology… but you should use it to help you think critically and build your mental model of diagnosis.

Write your behavioral statement. Pick the single most important behavior your change program requires and write it as Actor-Behavior-Context. If you can’t make it observable, keep refining until you can. Make sure you spend the time here as everything downstream depends on it.

Run the 3-question diagnostic. For that behavior: Does the system support it? Do they know how to do it? Do they want to do it? Write down your insights for each.

Check your strategy-barrier match. Look at whatever interventions/initiatives you’ve already got planned, and for each one, ask: which specific barrier does this address? If the answer is “all of them” or “general resistance” you will have a match problem, because an intervention that addresses everything addresses nothing.

Talk to five people who aren’t changing. Not their managers, not the project team, but the actual people whose behavior needs to change. I used to go up and down in my office to talk to people and understand why the CRM wasn’t being used… this is where they showed me the excel that was being used as a workaround and told me why. I listen for the difference between I don’t know how (knowledge gap), the system makes it difficult (system barrier), and I don’t see why this matters (belief barrier). These conversations will tell you things the dashboards can’t

Test one intervention for conflict. Pick your most important planned initiative and ask: does this contradict anything else we’re doing? If you’re asking people to take ownership while mandating exactly how they do it, you have a conflict. These contradictions are invisible from the project plan and obvious from the front line.

What comes next

The organizational change field isn’t broken… It’s just incomplete as it is being practiced.

The communication and stakeholder work that existing methodologies provide is genuinely useful, its the map, but it is not always going to work as the navigation system, because it’s not diagnostic.

SHIFT adds that diagnostic layer underneath, and you can start using the thinking behind it this week. Write the ABC, ask the three questions, sit down with the people who aren’t changing…the answers are usually right there, waiting for someone to ask.

In a future post: I’ll walk through each phase of SHIFT in detail, including a full CRM scenario from a project I worked on.

I write about behavioural science for organisational change every week...subscribe to get the next one.

And if you’re working on a change program where the behaviour isn’t changing, I’d be curious to hear what you’re seeing… reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn.

Have a great day,

Robert

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This is a series for people working on change and transformation in organizations. It’s a collection of the lessons, tools, and plays I’ve learned over 10+ years working in the messy reality of change, especially the last few years, where my work has focused on bringing behavioral science into transformation.

We’ll cover culture, engagement, operating systems, behavior change, adoption, and the patterns that make change hard to implement.

The first part of this series will covers three conditions that determine whether change becomes self-maintaining: Meaning, Mastery, and Belonging.

We’re starting with Meaning because when Meaning does not get supported, almost everything that happens next, training, comms, incentives, and measurements, ends up getting interpreted as pressure.

To clarify, Meaning is the sense-making mechanism that makes a change feel legitimate and self-endorsed in someone’s real context. In Self Determination Theory terms, it strengthens under autonomy satisfaction and collapses under autonomy frustration, which is why the same change can produce internalization in one system and reactance in another.

Comms isn’t the enemy here… it’s necessary but insufficient. If Meaning is weak, comms becomes the messenger for pressure.

Lets start with a short example:

Let’s say two equally resourced change programs launch inside two similarly capable organizations. One leads to steady adoption… people in the org ask practical questions, adjust workflows, and the new behaviors become normal. The other leads to half-compliance, workarounds, and slowly fades the moment leadership attention moves to the next thing.

While there are many things needed for change to happen, one of the things that is very important in change is Meaning… and specifically, whether the environment makes the change in the organization feel legitimate or whether it feels like something being imposed.

That distinction matters because while pressure or persuasion can absolutely produce behavior change in the short term, it produces the kind of change that does not last. Meaning is the mechanism that moves people from externally controlled action (“this is being done to us”) to internalized action (“this is something we are doing, for reasons we endorse”).

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Your Meaning Tools (copy/paste)

If you want to use this as an actual playbook (not just an article), here are the things to take from it:

• Meaning-killer audit (the subtraction move): the fastest way to stop autonomy frustration and prevent reactance.

• Role-level rationale worksheet: the template that forces you past abstraction and into daily friction.

• 25-minute sense-making loop: a meeting structure that creates shared interpretation without turning into debate.

• 45-minute Meaning session: a one-team working session that produces outputs you can act on.

• Language swaps: scripts for firm direction without coercion.

You’ll find each tool in the sections below.

What I mean by Meaning

Meaning is sense-making under constraints. It’s the moment someone decides, in their own context, whether this change makes sense for their reality.... A key distinction here is to avoid the Intrinsic Trap. In organizations, we rarely expect employees to have intrinsic motivation (acting out of pure enjoyment) for uninteresting or arduous tasks.

One nuance: don’t only chase intrinsic motivation at work. For most change behaviors, the goal is autonomous extrinsic motivation… ideally integrated regulation, where the behavior fits professional standards and identity.

Quick caveat on the system

This isn’t a recipe, and it’s not linear. Organizational systems are adaptive: they absorb interventions, route around initiatives, and normalize workarounds that make initiatives look successful right up until you check what’s actually happening. So treat what follows as architecture + experiments, try one play in one workflow, see what the response is, and adjust, because Meaning isn’t something you “achieve,” it’s something you keep from disappearing.

Diagnosing Meaning Quickly

If you’re unsure whether Meaning is missing, or is very low, don’t start with a survey. Instead, start with some sense-making so you can understand what people can say, what they can’t say, and what the system is pushing as its default.

Six questions you can ask

1) Can people explain the change in one sentence?

2) Do they believe the rationale applies to their work, or only “the business”?

3) Can they name the specific friction removed for their role?

4) Do they have any agency (within constraints)?

5) Trade-off literacy: can they name what gets harder short-term without spiraling?

6) Voluntary uptake: does any adoption occur without incentives*, surveillance, or escalation? Contingent incentives can buy short-term action but often reduce internalization when they become the main adoption strategy.

*Research shows that contingent incentives can buy short-term action but often reduce internalization when they become the main adoption strategy.

Sense-making equilibrium (informal narrative / rumor load)

When the formal architecture of Meaning is weak, the system defaults to informal narrative as its primary sense-making mechanism.

If people are asking the questions below, it makes Meaning unstable:

• “Why is this happening to us?”

• “Who decided this?”

• “What are they not telling us?”

However, If questions are more around operational integration

• “How do we make this work with our current tools?”

• “What do we stop doing to make space?”

• “Who owns what?”

Then Meaning is starting to form.

Tool: Meaning-killer audit (How you subtract)

Ask two questions for each item below: (1) Are we doing this? (2) Where is it showing up (exact meeting / message / policy / metric)?

High-risk Meaning-killers:

· Pressure denial: pretending the change doesn’t add workload or cognitive load.

· Consultation theatre: asking for input when key decisions are already fixed.

· Surveillance-heavy rollout: monitoring and escalation as the primary adoption strategy.

· Controlling language: “must / have to / no excuses” framing.

· Fake agency: options that aren’t real, or choices that get overridden.

· Public status threats: shaming, ranking, calling out non-adopters.

If you want a rule of thumb: the moment people start optimizing for self-protection, Meaning is already unstable.

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The Meaning playbook

Most change programs try to build Meaning by adding more; more comms, more decks, more town halls…when Meaning is actually a dual job: what happens when leaders support agency, and what happens when they frustrates it?

This is the “dual process” point that gets missed: motivation is shaped by need-satisfaction conditions and need-frustration conditions in parallel. If you add satisfaction conditions but keep the frustration conditions, you’ll still get some progress, but it will be driven by pressure, and pressure tends to trigger psychological reactance.

Reactance doesn’t always show up as a big bang. In organizations it’s usually more subtle: delaying things, less compliance, gaming the metrics, and workarounds that preserve peoples autonomy while keeping up appearances in the short term for leadership sake.

Below are 7 plays you can use right away, remember, they are not steps. They are plays you need to contextualize, test, iterate, and when validated scale.

Play: Strengthen the Rationale

A lot of rationales sound more like preferences:

• “We want to be more agile”

• “We want to standardize”

• “We want to be customer-centric”

That’s not a rationale, it’s an aspiration. Meaning becomes credible when the rationale is evidence-informed and built from multiple sources rather than purely external sources like executive intuition. When a rationale feels made up in a boardroom, it creates an external locus of causality; for internalization to occur, the rationale must show the change is demanded by reality, making the behavior feel personally meaningful rather than coerced.

Use these three areas:

1) External constraints: market shifts, regulations, customer outcomes.

2) Internal signals: quality data, rework, incidents, attrition, delays.

3) Frontline reality: specific handoffs, tool pain, time pressure.

You’re not trying to overwhelm people with data. You’re trying to show legitimacy: this was demanded by reality, not invented in a boardroom.

Play: Write the rationale at three levels (company, team, role)

Most rationales are written at the wrong level. Write three versions of the why.

1. Company-level (external reality / direction)

2. Team-level (coordination / quality / throughput)

3. Role-level (what gets easier, what risk reduces, what friction goes away)

One refinement that works in practice: make the team-level rationale explicitly relational. In interdependent work, Meaning increases when the rationale makes coordination benefits concrete (i.e., how we stop letting each other down at handoffs, how we reduce rework that hits other teams, how we make dependencies visible). Role-level is where Meaning takes shape, because it’s where daily tasks can become easier.

Tool: the role-level rationale worksheet (copy/paste)

Write one version per key role. If you can’t fill the role line, you’re not ready.

· Company-level: This exists because ___ (external reality).

· Team-level: This helps because ___ (coordination/quality/throughput).

· Role-level: For your role, this removes ___ (daily friction/risk).

· Trade-off: What gets harder short-term is ___ (opportunity cost).

· Support: What we’ll change in the system to make it doable is ___ (time/tools/permissions/workflow).

One worked example (generic, but realistic)

Change: new CRM workflow.

• Role-level (sales): “Fewer Friday data chases because updates are captured once, in the moment, and pipeline reviews stop being archaeology.”

• Trade-off: “For the first 2–3 weeks, calls will feel slower while you learn the flow.”

• Support: “We’re killing duplicate spreadsheets, simplifying required fields, and protecting 30 mins/day for practice in week 1.”

Note: if the system is already at 110% capacity, your rationale will sound like a threat unless you name what you’re taking off their plate.

Play: Make trade-offs open

Sometimes leaders hide the tradeoff costs because they think it protects motivation, however It usually does the opposite because people can feel the cost anyway, and if you don’t name it, they can assume it’s manipulation. So name it for what it is…

What gets harder short-term is…………” and then make the support equally concrete.

This isn’t about being negative… It’s actually helping to prevent reactance.

Play: Replace broadcasting with sense-making loops

Broadcast creates awareness, we know that, but dialogue creates Meaning. The goal in change may not be consensus, instead it’s shared interpretation, and it’s addressing those hard truths now that will help your initiative succeed.

This is a prompt that could work: “On one hand, you can see the reasons for change; on the other, you can see the pitfalls…. talk me through both.”

One additional play that makes this sharper (and reduces performative agreement) is to explicitly surface sources of pressure… where you can separate constraints from choices.

Quick check: if people can’t speak honestly in front of their manager, then “dialogue” is still just a broadcast.

Tool: a simple 25-minute sense-making loop (try it in a team meeting)

· 5 min: State the change in one sentence.

· 10 min: “On one hand / on the other hand” (find pros and cons).

· 10 min: Name the sources of pressure and risks (deadlines, oversight, workload, status risk) and agree what is negotiable vs not.

Keep it small… it’s all about shared interpretation, not agreement.

Play: Active participation

Treat participation as a design requirement, where you are giving people a real role in shaping the what/how in the change.

Examples of what “participation” can look like without taking away control:

• Co-design the workflow at the point of work (what happens first/next, who owns what)

• Decide the local rollout sequence (which teams go first, what gets paused)

• Choose the minimum viable standard vs local flexibility

• Define the handoff rules and escalation paths

Participation is not about making everyone happy…it’s about increasing agency and reducing the need to route autonomy through workarounds.

Play: Sharpen the Language

Meaning isn’t about being soft… it’s about providing clear direction without coercion.

One way to do this is with the language you use, because if the language sounds like a threat, people are going to optimize for safety.

Tool: language swaps

Replace controlling directives with informational, non-controlling language:

• Replace 'You must' with 'The standard is...' (and here’s why it matters… )

• Replace “We need you to” for “Here is what we are aiming for and why…”.

• Replace 'No excuses' with 'Here are the constraints we are removing to make this doable.

The goal is to provide clear direction without triggering psychological reactance, which occurs when people feel their behavioral freedom is threatened.

Play: Refine Identity Anchoring

If Meaning stops at “I see the value,” you’ll get short-term adoption. The hardest part of a change initiative is sustaining it. This happens when the change becomes consistent with someones professional identity.. basically how someone wants to show up at work.

Ask:

• What standards do you refuse to compromise on?

• What does good look like in your role when things are working?

• What would you be proud to be known for six months from now?

Linking the change to professional identity facilitates integrated regulation, the most autonomous form of motivation. This occurs when the change is no longer just a 'task' but is fully assimilated into how the person sees themselves and their professional values, leading to greater persistence and higher quality performance

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What to track (leading indicators)

Don’t wait for lagging adoption metrics, instead track internalization signals.

· Voluntary uptake: adoption without incentives, surveillance, or escalation.

· Trade-off literacy: people can name costs accurately.

· Sense-making equilibrium: defensive justification questions go down; operational integration questions go up.

· Role-level rationale quality: people can state the “why” in their own words at the point of work.

· Perceived locus of causality: the lived narrative switches from “they are making us do this” toward “we are doing this to solve X.”

One thing to try next week

Run a 45-minute Meaning session with one team.

Agenda (copy/paste)

· 5 min: The change in one sentence.

· 10 min: Three-level rationale draft (company/team/role).

· 10 min: Name friction removed per role + name the trade-off.

· 10 min: Sense-making loop (“Pros / cons”) to surface risks early.

· 5 min: Non-negotiables vs negotiables.

· 5 min: Pick one bounded choice to test this month.

What to capture (so it doesn’t become another meeting)

· The role-level rationale line per role.

· The trade-off line (what gets worse short-term).

· The one system change you will make (time/tools/permissions/workflow).

· The one experiment you will run next week.

You’ll learn more from that than another month of comms.

The Power of Interdependence: While we focused on Meaning, research emphasizes that the three basic needs are interdependent. Meaning provides the 'why,' but for change to sustain, it must be supported by Mastery and Belonging.

When either is missing, organizations compensate with pressure, monitoring, or incentives, and the change becomes less sustainable.

Next up in the series we will explore Mastery.

I help your company leverage the science of behavior change. I offer behavioral science consulting, training and tools for transformation | culture change | leadership | products.

If you’re finding these insights valuable, share them with a colleague, and maybe subscribe to them if you haven’t done so already.

Very best, Robert

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Years ago, I set up an innovation lab that was supposed to break things and move fast.

We had the startup aesthetic down cold, the whiteboards everywhere, sticky notes in every color. We bought the fanciest software, ran design sprints, delivered some genuinely good customer experiences.

But here's what I didn't expect: we were succeeding and failing at the same time.

The lab was hitting metrics, our business owners and customers liked what we built, and leadership was happy with our output.

Yet I could feel something was wrong.

My real goal wasn't just to build good experiences, it was to change how the organization worked. I wanted to get others involved, enable them to make better decisions, and ultimately make the lab and myself redundant.

That didn't happen. Not even close….

While we were "innovating" in our beautiful bubble, the rest of the organization kept working exactly as they always had. Our fancy processes stayed in our fancy room.

The behavioral patterns that created the need for an innovation lab in the first place?

Completely untouched.

In my search to understand what happened...

I started investing more of my time to truly understanding people, psychology, decision making and ultimately applying behavioral science in my work (and life), which is what led me to start my consultancy Aim For Behavior.

These are 3 lessons I learned (by no means the only ones):

1. Intrinsic motivation beats startup aesthetics

You can make the rooms in organizations as "startupy" as you want, and buy the fanciest software, however, if the people aren't more intrinsically motivated to new ways of working, it won't in the end drive the change you are looking for.

Tip: Know where your colleagues are in the motivation continuum, and go from there.

I had assumed that creating an appealing environment and demonstrating better outcomes would naturally motivate adoption. What I learned is that motivation is way more complex.

Some people were genuinely curious about our methods. Others felt threatened. Still others were simply too overwhelmed to take on anything new, no matter how beneficial. (If I only knew then, what I know know about the drivers

2. Understand the real outcomes/needs of the employees

What "job" are they trying to get done, how do they do it today, in what context.

Tip: Don't impose your solutions on them, because you think they are better, as you probably don't know enough.

Just because people don't adopt what you make, doesn't mean they are wrong in doing so, you have probably missed something.

Our design sprints felt inefficient to people already behind on deliverables. and looked chaotic to managers who needed predictable timelines.

We were solving problems that mattered to us, not problems that mattered to them. (or at least this is not what they understood or believed.)

3. Design with behavior in mind

To help enable people to make better choices, you have to understand what they are doing today, what behaviors matter, and what is stopping them.

At work, it might be skills or knowledge, or it could be a lack of time, resources, or lack of confidence in doing something.

If you don't know, you won't address the right barriers, and your solutions will fall flat.

Tip: Build logically to connect actors, context, system, behaviors, barriers, and solutions.

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So I built a diagnostic workshop to help you diagnose behaviroal friction and take action

Although my above experience is about how things change in an organization, you can adapt this to other settings - just like we have at my consultancy for our clients.

Behavioral friction can manifest in many ways:

• Clinicians who won't use the new decision-making tool.

• Employees who ignore the AI insights.

• Staff who skip feedback sessions.

• Citizens who don't show up for screenings.

The usual response? "They just need more training." Or "They're not motivated."

But usually the real barriers are hiding in places you haven't looked?

Instead of guessing why adoption is low in your organization, here's a simple 75-90 minute workshop that maps the real friction across three areas*:

• Do they actually know how to do it?

• Does their environment make it possible?

• Do they want to do it ?

*Based on the COM-B model (Michie and colleagues), adapted for real-world planning.

What you'll need:

• A clear behavior you want to target

• Sticky notes

• A wall or shared online canvas like Miro with two zones: "Helps" and "Gets in the Way"

• Someone to facilitate

The Workshop:

Step 1: Define the Behavior (10 minutes)

Pick one real behavior you want to understand and improve. Write it clearly so everyone can see it.

Examples:

• "Clinicians use shared decision-making tools during patient consultations"

• "Employees apply AI-generated insights to client recommendations each week"

• "Staff participate in monthly team feedback sessions"

Step 2: Introduce the Three Areas (5 minutes)

Explain: "We'll explore this behavior from three angles: what people are capable of , what their environment makes possible, and what drives or blocks their action."

Step 3: Work Through Each Area (45–60 minutes)

For each section (15–20 minutes each), use these prompts:

Can They Do It?

• Do they know how to do it?

• Have they learned it or had a chance to practice?

• Do they have the skills and knowledge needed?

• How easy or difficult is it for them physically or mentally?

• How much attention or mental energy does it require?

• Can they remember to do it without being prompted?

Does the Environment Support It?

• Do they have what they need: tools, systems, time?

• Are there practical or process constraints?

• Is the setup or workflow making it easier, or harder?

• Do they have systems or reminders that help?

• Do people around them support it or discourage it?

• Are there norms or unspoken rules that shape how often it happens?

• Is it different when they're doing it alone vs. with others?

A Note: Doing this part of the diagnosis, will also help you understand what levers you have for change in the organization, and where you can and can’t influence. This can help you discuss with your stakeholders and see if you can have them help you unlock these to achieve change.

Do They Want to Do It?

• How do they feel about doing it, or while doing it?

• Is it something they're already doing regularly, or would it be new?

• Have they decided to do it intentionally?

• Is it aligned with their goals, values, or professional standards?

• What do they believe will happen if they do - or don't - do it?

• Are there incentives or consequences tied to doing it?

For each prompt, ask participants to reflect on what they know about the audience and write insights on sticky notes (1 idea per note). Place them under either "Helps" or "Gets in the Way."

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Step 4: Spot Patterns (15 minutes)

Once all prompts are explored, group related notes by theme and look for:

• Skill gaps (they don't know how)

• System barriers (tools, time, or process blocks)

• Social friction (conflicting norms or roles)

• Motivation mismatches (conflicting beliefs, low perceived value, unclear relevance)

Circle areas where blockers cluster heavily. Mark potential quick wins (easy fixes that could remove friction).

Optional Step 5: Sketch Change Ideas (10 minutes)

Ask: "What's one small experiment we could run to shift this?" Or, "What would a systems-level fix look like here?", here too you will need to use a bit of science and art to ensure you are matching evidence based solutions to the right barriers.

What this actually reveals

When you run this diagnostic, you'll stop making assumptions about why people aren't changing and start seeing the real barriers.

You might discover that your brilliant new process requires three different logins during the busiest part of someone's day.

Or that the "resistance" you're seeing is actually people protecting their ability to serve customers well.

Or that the behavior you want requires skills nobody has had a chance to develop.

These insights change everything about how you design solutions.

Ultimately:

Think less in solutions and more in outcomes.

Think less in technology and more in psychology.

Think less in terms of "fixing people" and more in enabling them to succeed.

Have you noticed behavioral friction in your work? What patterns are you seeing? Hit reply and tell me about it, I'd love to hear what you discover.

I’m Robert Meza the founder of a behavior change consultancy called Aim For Behavior. We help drive change for transformation, product, and marketing teams and help them remove barriers slowing adoption, execution, and engagement.

Have a great day, Robert

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Frustrated with the frameworks and tools that were out there for designing and developing digital products focused on behavior change, I decided to create a model called ACTOR - one that I will be sharing with you in this guide.

ACTOR explains why smart users abandon products they love (it's psychological, not logical) and gives you the exact process to design for how motivation actually works instead of how you think it should work.

I created the model after years of working on digital products and services. I started working on my first app back in 2011 (a few years after the app store had opened). It was a rewards app.

When I started working on it, I thought the product made logical sense. The onboarding was easy, I was obsessed with the experience (apologies to all the designers and engineers I kept pushing relentlessly - from the agency building it for us - to ruthlessly fixing every single detail).

It was an exciting ride, in the end we even managed to get the app to #1 in the app store, just to see users abandon it.

Nearly 14 years later, organizations are still facing product issues like:

• Downloads growing for AI tools, but daily active users start falling after a few weeks

• Teams getting excited about new software but reverting to old tools under pressure

• Customers understanding a digital health app's value but not changing their behavior

I believe the issue isn't your product. It's that you’ve been told to design for how we think people should behave, not for how they actually make decisions.

How Motivation Actually Works

If you have been working on behavior change, you may have heard of PRIME Theory, though I suspect most people have not used it. I became a bigger fan of it because Maria Arbiter from my team had been using it for a while in digital health and because we have done projects together applying it.

For the rest of you who have not heard about it, it basically shows that every user action emerges from five psychological components interacting in real-time: (this is not an academic insights hub, so I won’t go into all the details on PRIME).

Those 5 components are:

Plans: Consciously articulated specific plans to carry out behaviors ("I'll use this AI tool to be more productive")

Responses: Hardwired or physiological tendencies shaping behavior at an unconscious level ("Reverted to manual process under pressure")

Impulses: The forces driving behavior - emotions, habits, human drives ("Just use the familiar tool for now")

Motives: What does the person want and need to do ("Need to deliver this quickly")

Evaluations: Evaluations are beliefs about whether one should do the behavior. ("This AI tool is probably helpful")

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The key insight

At any given moment we have lots of different drives that can override motivation.

We can use PRIME theory to help us design something that is tailored to this:

✓ Reducing distraction

✓ Making the behavior rewarding

✓ Building in ways to make the behavior very easy for when someone is tired, hungry, distracted.

Why Not Just COM-B?

You can use COM-B (also by Michie and colleagues) to do your diagnosis and then layer on PRIME Theory when you are specifically targeting a motivation. Both tools are very useful for their specific uses, but I still needed something for designing against motivational failure in practice.

That is where the ACTOR model appeared. It strengthens the downstream motivational support structures that PRIME and COM-B identify, without assuming control over core motivational impulses. A tool for testing and optimizing motivational system design, not just UI or generic copy changes.

PRIME is your theory. COM-B is your diagnosis. ACTOR is your method.

Need a Diagnosis?

ACTOR: A Better Way for Motivation Design

ACTOR is meant to be applied when you've addressed structural barriers - i.e, users have skills, access, organizational support etc. and not instead of it or before it.

The Acronym stand for:

• Aspire: Aligns with long-term goals and personal relevance

• Convince: Reinforces belief and identity-driven motivation

• Trigger: Activates emotionally-driven desire to engage

• Overcome: Offsets internal blockers, distraction, and competing impulses

• Reduce: Makes action easy, fast, and intuitive

ACTOR is meant for people working daily to get results in their organizations and who need a better approach to design for motivation. (While there are other theories that make up ACTOR, I won’t refer to them here)

Below you will find a LITE version of how you could apply ACTOR in your work.

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ACTOR - Implementation Guide (LITE)

Step 1: Diagnose Your Motivational Challenge

Map Competing Alternatives

List 3-5 alternatives your users choose instead of your product:

Identify Your Dominant Failure Pattern

Rate each area (1-10) to find your weakest point:

• Identity Alignment (Aspire)
  “Does this feel like something someone like me would use?”

• Credibility Strength (Convince)
  “Do I believe this will work for me, in my context?”

• Emotional Activation (Trigger)
  “Is there a compelling reason to engage now instead of later?”

• Competing Priorities (Overcome)
  “What consistently beats this when I could be using it?”

• Execution Friction (Reduce)

  “How many steps, decisions, or hurdles are in the way?”

Your primary focus: The lowest-scoring areas become your priority.

Red Flag Phrases That Signal ACTOR Issues

• "This isn't really for someone like me" → Aspire problem

• "I've tried similar things and they didn't work" → Convince problem

• "I know I should use it but never think about it" → Trigger problem

• "I start to use it but other things come up" → Overcome problem

• "It's too complicated/takes too long" → Reduce problem

Step 2: Implementation Protocol Lite

Component Integration Strategy

For each failure pattern, combine 2 ACTOR components:

• Identity misalignment: Aspire + Convince (identity connection + peer proof)

• Credibility gaps: Convince + Reduce (rebuild trust + effortless trial)

• Motivational dormancy: Trigger + Aspire (emotional activation + identity reinforcement)

• Competing priorities: Overcome + Reduce (address barriers + eliminate friction)

• Execution friction: Reduce + Trigger (simplify experience + optimal timing)

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Step 3: Use ACTOR Component Examples To Guide Your Solutions

Aspire - Identity Connection

Use when: "This AI tool doesn't feel like something for someone like me"

Product Applications:

• Onboarding: "You're already a strategic communicator, this AI handles first drafts so you can focus on messaging strategy"

• Feature intro: "Data-driven leaders like you need AI insights that match how you think, here's your command center"

• Re-engagement: "Strategic thinkers are using AI to stay ahead, see what you've been missing"

Note: Identity framing should match your users' actual self-perception. Test different identity anchors (technical expert, efficiency-focused, innovation leader) to find what resonates.

Convince - Credibility Building

Use when: "I've tried similar apps before and they didn't work"

Product Applications:

• Social proof: "Engineering teams similar to yours find 8 out of 10 AI code suggestions save meaningful development time"

• Feature validation: "See how development teams with your challenges cut deployment time in half using our automated testing suite"

• Onboarding: "Product teams at companies like yours report 40% faster feature validation using our AI-powered research platform"

Trigger - Emotional Activation

Use when: "I know this software is useful but never think about it"

Product Applications:

• Smart notifications: "Your sprint is behind schedule, see which features could get you back on track in the next 2 hours"

• Contextual prompts: "Your AI just caught a pattern that could save your team 3 hours of debugging, want to see it?"

• In-app triggers: "Feeling the code review bottleneck again? Here's the 2-minute solution that just worked for another team"

Overcome - Resistance Management

Use when: "I start to use the new tool but always go back to the old one under pressure"

Product Applications:

• Impulse interruption: "About to switch back to manual? This automated check takes 30 seconds vs. the 20 minutes you're about to spend"

• Competing urge acknowledgment: "When deadlines hit, familiar feels safer, but this tool is designed for exactly these pressure moments"

• Recovery from lapses: "Went back to the old workflow? No problem, here's what changed while you were away, pick up in 1 click"

Reduce - Friction Elimination

Use when: "This platform is too complicated/takes too long to use"

Product Applications:

• Smart onboarding: "Connect your GitHub repo, our AI will analyze your codebase and set up monitoring automatically"

• Automated setup: "Connect your project management tool, we'll map your workflows and suggest optimizations"

• Simplified activation: "Here's what development teams like yours find most useful, one click to activate AI insights"

I included some digital examples and even prototyped some with an AI tool in my Behavior Change Course

Step 4: Testing and Integration Lite

Testing Framework

ACTOR Lite Testing (for quick validation):

1. Choose your primary failure pattern

2. Design intervention for 2 ACTOR components

3. A/B test

4. Measure: activation rate, feature adoption, weekly retention

5. Iterate based on which psychological approach drives behavior

Integration with Product Development

Product Managers:

• Add ACTOR assessment to feature planning: "Which PRIME component is most likely to fail?"

UX Designers:

• Annotate wireframes with ACTOR components

• Test motivational resonance of copy, not just usability

• Design for psychological states alongside task flows

Engineers:

• Choose defaults that align with user identity (Aspire)

• Design error states as recovery paths (Overcome)

• Consider behavioral impact of technical decisions

Step 5: Measurement and Optimization

Behavioral Metrics

Track the full engagement cycle:

• Activation: % who take first meaningful action after onboarding

• Depth: Do they use core features or just peripheral ones?

• Frequency: Weekly active usage patterns

• Recovery: Return rate after dropping off

• Advocacy: Willingness to recommend to similar users

Motivational Diagnostics

Monitor psychological indicators:

• Identity alignment: "This feels like something someone like me would naturally use" (1-7 scale)

• Credibility perception: "I believe this will actually work in my situation" (1-7 scale)

• Emotional engagement: Usage during high-stress vs. low-stress periods

• Friction perception: Time-to-value and abandonment points

Optimization Protocol

• Analyze user behavior patterns and identify drop-off points

• Implement targeted ACTOR improvements based on data

• Measure impact and plan scaling strategy

Step 6: Scale and Systematize

Ongoing

Build your components library, your systems etc.. so you know what has worked and what it’s addressing and keep going.

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Quick Implementation Checklist

Week 1: Diagnosis

• [ ] List 3-5 competing alternatives users choose instead

• [ ] Rate your product on 5 ACTOR components (1-10 scale)

• [ ] Identify lowest-scoring area as primary intervention focus

Week 2: Design

• [ ] Create targeted messaging for 2 ACTOR components

• [ ] Design A/B test comparing psychological approaches

• [ ] Set up measurement for behavioral outcomes

Week 3-4: Test and Iterate

• [ ] Launch test

• [ ] Monitor activation, engagement, and retention metrics

• [ ] Refine intervention based on what actually drives behavior

Week 5-8: Optimize and Scale

• [ ] Analyze user patterns and psychological indicators

• [ ] Implement improvements across full user base

• [ ] Build systematic capability for ongoing optimization

Your Next Steps

1. Choose one user behavior critical to your product's success

2. Complete the ACTOR diagnostic to identify your primary motivation friction type

3. Design targeted solutions focusing on 2 ACTOR components

4. Test with a small user group and measure behavioral outcomes

5. Scale successful approaches systematically across your user base

The products that consistently drive user behavior aren't just well-designed, they're psychologically intelligent.

What user behavior will you redesign first?

In closing, I want to re-iterate that the organizations that consistently drive behavior change aren't hoping their products work, they're systematically and holistically designing for behavior.

ACTOR provides one tool for diagnosing exactly why users abandon great products and designing interventions that work with psychological reality and when the focus in motivation

Robert Meza develops systematic approaches to human behavior change for technology companies, healthcare systems, and government agencies and is the founder of Aim For Behavior

What’s Included?

150+ books (and growing) covering behavioral science, design, innovation, communications, strategy, foresight and complementary disciplines.

These are all personally owned books.

The list will be updated often so check back for the latest additions!

All Books have links to make it easy for your to browse and purchase

Share Architecting Behavior

Anti-fragile
By Nassim Nicolas Taleb

Paperback edition of the latest groundbreaking book from the author of ‘The Black Swan’ and ‘Fooled By Randomnes’. The book explains how to live in a world that is unpredictable, chaotic and full of shocks, and how to thrive during periods of disaster. What Taleb calls the 'antifragile' is beyond the merely robust; it benefits from shocks, uncertainty and stressors.

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Empathy
By Harvard Business Review et al

Empathy is credited as a factor in improved relationships and even better product development. But while it’s easy to say “just put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” the reality is that understanding the motivations and emotions of others often proves elusive.

This book helps you understand what empathy is, why it’s important, how to surmount the hurdles that make you less empathetic—and when too much empathy is just too much.

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The Culture Map
By Erin Meyer

In this fun and instructive book, international business expert Erin Meyer offers key tactics and strategies to help businesspeople overcome cultural obstacles and obtain success. .
Whether you work in a home office or abroad, business success in our ever more globalized and virtual world requires the skills to navigate through cultural differences and decode cultures foreign to your own.

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Social Chemistry
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Yale professor Marissa King shows how anyone can build more meaningful and productive relationships based on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and network analytics. Conventional wisdom says it's the size of your network that matters, but social science research has proven there is more to it. King explains that the quality and structure of our relationships has the greatest impact on our personal and professional lives.

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Remember: The science of memory and the art of forgetting
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In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day).

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The Leading Brain
By Friederike Fabritius & Hans W.Hagemann

There's a revolution taking place that most businesses are still unaware of. The understanding of how our brains work has radically shifted, exploding long-held myths about our everyday cognitive performance and fundamentally changing the way we engage and succeed in the workplace.

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The Power Of Regret
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The Psychology Of Stupidity
By Jean-Francois Marmion

Stupidity is all around us, from the coworker who won't stop hitting "reply all" to the former high school classmate posting conspiracy theories on Facebook. But in order to vanquish it, we must first understand it. In The Psychology of Stupidity, some of the world's leading psychologists and thinkers--including a Nobel Prize winner and bestselling authors--will show you...

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WHEN The Scientific Secrets Of Perfect Timing By Daniel H.Pink

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science.

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The Fun Habit
By Mike Rucker

Doesn’t it seem that the more we seek happiness, the more elusive it becomes?

There is an easy fix: fun is an action you can take here and now, practically anywhere, anytime. Through research and science, we know fun is enormously beneficial to our physical and psychological well-being, yet fun’s absence from our modern lives is striking.

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Leading Change
By John P.Kotter

John Kotter’s now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.

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Dopamine Nation
By Dr.Anna Lembke

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check.

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The Body Keeps The Score
By Bessel Van Der Kolk

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

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The Human Brain Coloring Book
By Marian C Diamond & Arnold B Scheibel

The Human Brain Coloring Book provides a means of learning about the structure and function of the human brain through a process of coloring-by-directions. It was developed by internationally recognized neuroscientists and teachers Marian C. Diamond and Arnold B. Scheibel in association with highly acclaimed teacher and anatomist Lawrence M. Elson, creator of Coloring Concepts.

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Competing In The New World Of Work
By Keith Ferrazzi

New York Times best-selling author Keith Ferrazzi offers a bold new vision for what the organization of the future looks like - digital, distributed, inclusive, resilient, empathic - and the emerging best leadership practices that will redefine success in the ever-evolving world of work.

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Start At The End
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This is an essential roadmap for building products that matter--and changing behavior for the better.

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Designing For Behavior Change
By Stephen Wendel

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Behavioral Insights
By Michael Hallsworth and Elspeth Kirkman

The definitive introduction to the behavioral insights approach, which applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems. Our behavior is strongly influenced by factors that lie outside our conscious awareness, although we tend to underestimate the power of this “automatic” side of our behavior. problems.

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Engaged
By Amy Bucher

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The Behaviour Change Wheel
By Susan Michie et al

This is a practical guide to designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions and policies. It is based on the Behaviour Change Wheel, a synthesis of 19 behaviour change frameworks that draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches.

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Design For How People Think
By John Whalen

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Behave
By Robert Sapolsky

From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do? Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there.

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Science And Human Behavior
By B.F Skinner

The psychology classic--a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled--from one of the most influential behaviorists of the twentieth century and the author of Walden Two."This is an important book, exceptionally well written, and logically consistent with the basic premise of the unitary nature of science.

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How Emotions Are Made
By Lisa Feldman Barrett

Emotions aren't hardwired into you - you create them. A world-leading neuroscientist argues that understanding the origin and nature of emotions has huge implications for our future.

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Unwinding Anxiety
By Judson Brewer

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Training To change Practice
By Jo Hart et al

Behavioural science to develop effective health professional education serves as a practical guide in the cutting-edge area of health professional education and behavioural science. This textbook will provide practical evidence-based guidance to enhance the real world impact of your health professional training.

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The Brain Friendly Workplace
By Friederike Fabritius

In The Brain-Friendly Workplace, Friederike Fabritius offers a science-based and field-tested blueprint for tomorrow’s workplace. Leaders capable of enacting change or individuals searching for ways to work smarter will discover that even small and inexpensive changes can lead to advantages like better employee performance, higher job satisfaction, and stronger talent retention. If you have been longing for a better way of working where you and your people are both happy and productive, The Brain-Friendly Workplace can make that vision a reality.

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Unf#ck Your Brain
By Dr.Faith G Harper

Our brains are doing our best to help us out, but they can be real assholes sometimes. Sometimes it seems like your own brain is out to get you—melting down in the middle of the grocery store, picking fights with your date, getting you addicted to something, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments. You already told your brain firmly that it isn't good to do these things. But your brain has a mind of its own. That's where this book comes in. With humor, patience, and lots of swearing, Dr. Faith shows you the science behind what's going on in your skull and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately to the non-emergencies of everyday life.

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How To Think More Effectively
By The School Of Life

A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking.

We know that our minds are capable of great things. But they are also unpredictable. Our thoughts tend to wander and our minds are either distracted or idle. This book teaches us how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential.

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On Making Smart Decisions
By Harvard Business Review et al

Learn why bad decisions happen to good managers—and how to make better ones.

If you read nothing else on decision making, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you and your organization make better choices and avoid common traps.

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The Experience Machine
By Andy Clark

Widely acclaimed cognitive scientist Andy Clark unpacks this provocative new theory that the brain is a powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our experience of both body and world. Exploring its fascinating mechanics and remarkable implications for our lives, mental health, and society, Clark nimbly illustrates how the predictive brain sculpts all human experience.

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Neuroscience For Organizational Change
By Hilary Scralett

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The Geography Of Thought
By Richard E Nisbett

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Breath - The New Science Of A Lost Art
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Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management For Mortals
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Mixed Signals - How Incentives Really Work
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Grit
By Angela Duckworth

The daughter of a scientist who frequently noted her lack of “genius,” Angela Duckworth is now a celebrated researcher and professor. It was her early eye-opening stints in teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience that led to her hypothesis about what really drives success: not genius, but a unique combination of passion and long-term perseverance. In Grit, she takes us into the field to visit cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, teachers working in some of the toughest schools.

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Made To Stick
By Chip & Dan Heath

In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds (from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship, to a new-product vision at Sony) draw their power from the same six traits. Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It includes a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures).

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Rebel Ideas
By Matthew Syed

Ideas are everywhere, but those with the greatest problem-solving, business-transforming, and life-changing potential are often hard to identify. Even when we recognize good ideas, applying them to everyday obstacles - whether in the workplace, our homes, or our civic institutions - can seem insurmountable. According to Matthew Syed, it doesn't have to be this way.

In Rebel Ideas, Syed argues that our brainpower as individuals isn't enough.

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Switch
By Chip & Dan Heath

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

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The Voltage Effect
By John A.List

In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains.

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Inclusion Nudges Guidebook
By Lisa Kepinski & Tinna C.Nielsen

The Inclusion Nudges Guidebook gives you more than 100 examples of how you can reduce the influence of cognitive bias and increase inclusive decision making, collaboration, development, technology, leadership, innovation, and leverage the full potential of all people. Inclusion Nudges are a proven change approach and design methodology based on insights from behavioral and social sciences, and the authors’ many years of experience.

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The Psychology Book
By DK

Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Psychology in this overview guide to the subject, great for beginners looking to learn and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Psychology Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in.

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Super Thinking
By Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann

The world's greatest problem-solvers, forecasters, and decision-makers all rely on a set of frameworks and shortcuts that help them cut through complexity and separate good ideas from bad ones. They're called mental models, and you can find them in dense textbooks on psychology, physics, economics, and more.

Or, you can just listen to Super Thinking, a fun, illustrated guide to every mental model you could possibly need. How can mental models help you?

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The Great Mental Models
By Shane Parrish

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world. You will discover what forces govern the universe and how to focus your efforts so you can harness them to your advantage, rather than fight with them or, worse yet, ignore them.

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How To Change
By Katy Milkman

Drawing on Milkman's original research and the work of her world-renowned scientific collaborators, How to Change shares strategic methods for identifying and overcoming common barriers to change, such as impulsivity, procrastination, and forgetfulness. Through case studies and engaging stories, you’ll learn: Why timing can be everything when it comes to making a change? How to turn temptation and inertia into assets?

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Decoding The Why
By Nate Andorsky

In Decoding The Why, Nate helps readers find the answers to such questions as: What are the social, cognitive and emotional factors that drive human behavior? How can I integrate behavioral science to build more effective tech products? An untapped opportunity lies in the fusion of technological innovation and psychological insights. If we unleash this opportunity, could the software that helps individuals lose weight, exercise more, save money, or learn a new skill have a greater impact?

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Mindsight
By Daniel J.Siegel

From a pioneer in the field of mental health comes a groundbreaking book on the healing power of "mindsight", the potent skill that allows you to make positive changes in your brain - and in your life. Through his synthesis of a broad range of scientific research with applications to everyday life, Dr. Siegel has developed novel approaches that have helped hundreds of patients. And now he has written the first book that will help all of us understand the potential we have to create our own lives.

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The Little Psychology Book
By Emily Ralls & Caroline Riggs

This illuminating little book will introduce you to the key thinkers, themes, and theories you need to know to understand how the study of mind and behavior has sculpted the world we live in and the way we think today.

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Ripple
By Jez Groom & April Vellacott

Ripple is about how small behaviour changes can have wide-reaching effects in the real world. By applying behavioural science in your working life, you can have positive ripple effects on the world around you.

While nudging is now commonplace in politics, most of our daily interactions with companies, products, and services have not yet been transformed with behavioural science. Doing so is often a messy process but, armed with this book, you’ll have the practical toolkit to get started.

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Super-forecasting The Art & Science Of Prediction
By Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner

From one of the world's most highly regarded social scientists, a transformative book on the habits of mind that lead to the best predictions. In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people - including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer.

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Hooked
By Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover

Hooked is a guide to building products people use because they want to, not because they have to. Written for product managers, designers, marketers, startup founders, and people eager to learn more about the things that control our behaviors. Nir Eyal distilled years of research, consulting, and practical experience to write a manual for creating habit-forming products. Nir has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

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Actionable Gamification
By Yu-Kai Chou

The new era of Gamification and Human-Focused Design optimizes for motivation and engagement over traditional Function-Focused Design. Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferate.Gamification Pioneer Yu-kai Chou takes reader on a journey to learn his twelve years of obsessive research in creating the Octalysis Framework, and how to apply the framework to create engaging and successful experiences in their product, marketing, and lives.

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The Choice Factory
By Richard Shotton

The Choice Factory is an essential read for anyone who wants to learn. Taking us through a typical day of decisions, from trivial food choices to life-changing career moves, The Choice Factory explores how our behaviour is shaped by psychological shortcuts. The focus throughout is the marketing potential of knowing what makes us tick. Shotton draws not only on academia, but also on analysis of ad campaigns and his own original research, supporting his discussion with insights from some of the smartest thinkers in advertising.

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What Your Customer Wants And Can’t Tel You
By Melina Palmer

What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You explains the neuroscience of consumer behavior. Learn exactly why people buy—and how to use that knowledge to improve pricing, increase sales, create better “brain-friendly” brand messaging, and be a more effective leader.

Business owner, consultant, and behavioral economics expert Melina Palmer helps leaders like you use the psychology of the consumer, innovation, and truly impactful branding to achieve real, bottom-line benefits.

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Choice Hacking
By Jennifer L.Clinehens

Customer and user behaviors can seem irrational. Shaped by mental shortcuts and psychological biases, their actions often appear random on the surface. In Choice Hacking, we'll learn to predict these irrational behaviors and apply the science of decision-making to create unforgettable customer experiences.

Discover a framework for designing experiences that doesn't just show you what principles to apply, but introduces a new way of thinking about customer behavior. You'll finish Choice Hacking feeling confident and ready to transform your experience with science.

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Influence Is Your Superpower
By Zoe Chance

You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life. Influence Is Your Superpower will teach you how to transform your life, your organization, and perhaps even the course of history. It’s an ethical approach to influence that will make life better for everyone, starting with you.

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Making Ideas Happen
By Scott Belsky

According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be developed by anyone willing to develop their organizational habits and leadership capability. That's why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills.
Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of creative people and teams that are especially productive-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again.

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Thinking In Systems
By Donella H.Meadows

Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

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Winning At New Products
By Robert G.Cooper

Winning at New Products has served as the bible for product developers everywhere. Robert G. Cooper demonstrates why consistent product development is vital to corporate growth and how to maximize your chances of success. Citing the author's most recent research, it showcases innovative practices by industry leaders to present a field-tested game plan for achieving product leadership. Cooper outlines specific strategies for making sound business decisions at every step-from idea generation to launch.

The Checklist How To Get Things Right
By Atul Gawande

In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds.

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Misbehaving
By Richard H.Thaler

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans―predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth―and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

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Applying Behavioural Science To the Private Sector
By Helena Rubenstein

This book demonstrates how applying behavioural science to commercial problems can effectively help businesses to understand and achieve the best outcomes for their customers. Bringing together theory and practice the author describes how approaches underpinning behavioural science can be adapted to the fast-moving environment of the private sector.

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The Behaviour Business
By Richard Chataway

Richard Chataway works for the BVA Nudge Unit, a global consultancy specializing in behavioural change, and has experience in everything from getting people to join the armed forces, drink spirits rather than wine, and buy flatpack furniture – to developing the world’s most successful stop-smoking mobile app. Richard guides readers through the hidden influences, biases and fallacies that influence the behaviour of customers, employees, and business leaders alike.

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Organisational Behaviour For Dummies
By Cary Cooper et al

Organisational Behaviour (OB) is the study of how people, individuals, and groups act in organisations. Whether you're studying OB, or you just want a better understanding of people at work, Organisational Behaviour For Dummies gives you all the essentials for understanding this fascinating subject.

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Influence The Psychology Of Persuasion
By Robert B. Cialdini

In the new edition of this highly acclaimed bestseller, Robert Cialdini—New York Times bestselling author of Pre-Suasion and the seminal expert in the fields of influence and persuasion—explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these insights ethically in business and everyday settings. Using memorable stories and relatable examples, Cialdini makes this crucially important subject surprisingly easy. With Cialdini as a guide, you don’t have to be a scientist to learn how to use this science.

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Evolutionary Ideas
By Sam Tatam

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake?

In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioural science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways.

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Indistractable
By Nir Eyal with Julie Li

International bestselling author, former Stanford lecturer, and behavioral design expert, Nir Eyal, wrote Silicon Valley's handbook for making technology habit-forming. Five years after publishing Hooked, Eyal reveals distraction's Achilles' heel in his groundbreaking new book.

In Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices: Abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more.

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Long Story Short
By Margot Leitman

Using a fun, irreverent, and infographic approach, Margot Leitman breaks storytelling into concrete components. Whether you want to write a great wedding toast, deliver a compelling keynote speech, or simply entertain friends and family, comedian and Moth 5-time champion storyeller Margot Leitman provides a clear and engaging roadmap to telling your own personal stories in this approachable storytelling guide.

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Presuasion, A Revolutionary Way To Influence And Persuade
By Robert Cialdini

ANamed a “Best Business Books of 2016” by the Financial Times, and “compelling” by The Wall Street Journal, Cialdini’s Pre-Suasion draws on his extensive experience as the most cited social psychologist of our time and explains the techniques a person should implement to become a master persuader. Altering a listener’s attitudes, beliefs, or experiences isn’t necessary, says Cialdini—all that’s required is for a communicator to redirect the audience’s focus of attention before a relevant action.

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Heuristics
By Gerd Gigerenzer et al

Based on the work of Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and with the help of colleagues around the world, the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has developed a research program on simple heuristics, also known as fast and frugal heuristics. In the social sciences, heuristics have been believed to be generally inferior to complex methods for inference, or even irrational.

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Cynefin
By Dave Snowden & Friends

The Cynefin® sense-making Framework, brainchild of innovative thinker Dave Snowden, has never been more needed. The Framework empowers leaders across organizations, governments, and local communities, to work with uncertainty – to navigate complexity, create resilience, and thrive. As Snowden says, “The Framework guides us to make sense of the world, so that we can skillfully act in it.”

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Marketing To Mindstates
By Will Leach

In Marketing to Mindstates, Will Leach, founder of The Mindstate Group, a leading behavior research and marketing consultancy, demystifies this nonconscious filter and explains how to bypass it, introducing readers to temporary moments of influence called mindstates. Using his Mindstate Behavioral Model, he shows you specifically how to create behaviorally optimized messaging designed to activate these mindstates and trigger real emotional engagement.

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The Workshop Book
By Pamela Hamilton

Based on methods developed - and proven – in business, this highly visual and practical book will show readers how to design, lead and run effective workshops.

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Write Useful Books
By Rob Fitzpatrick

This guide proposes a different way of planning, writing, & refining nonfiction, drawn from the hard-won lessons of product designers & entrepreneurs. Applied properly, it leads to books that can grow organically via reader recommendations for many years, without relying on either heavy marketing or a large author platform. The preconceptions about "writing a book" are so deeply entrenched that most authors don't even ask themselves whether a better way exists.

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How To Research Trends
By Els Dragt

Richard Chataway works for the BVA Nudge Unit, a global consultancy specializing in behavioural change, and has experience in everything from getting people to join the armed forces, drink spirits rather than wine, and buy flatpack furniture – to developing the world’s most successful stop-smoking mobile app. Richard guides readers through the hidden influences, biases and fallacies that influence the behaviour of customers, employees, and business leaders alike.

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The Fifth Discipline
By Peter M.Sange

In this revised edition of the bestselling classic is based on fifteen years of experience in putting Peter Senge’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas of the Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices.

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The War Of Art
By Steven Pressfield

Bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success.

The War of Art emphasizes the resolve needed to recognize and overcome the obstacles of ambition and then effectively shows how to reach the highest level of creative discipline.

Think of it as tough love . . . for yourself.

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Range
By David Epstein

Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

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Good Strategy Bad Strategy
By Richard P.Rumelt

When Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy was published in 2011, it immediately struck a chord, calling out as bad strategy the mish-mash of pop culture, motivational slogans and business buzz speak so often and misleadingly masquerading as the real thing.

Since then, his original and pragmatic ideas have won fans around the world and continue to help readers to recognize and avoid the elements of bad strategy and adopt good, action-oriented strategies

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Reinventing Organizations
By Frederic Laloux

In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness in the past, it has invented a whole new way to structure and run organizations, each time bringing extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a radically more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals?

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Testing Business Ideas
By David J.Bland & Alex Osterwalder

Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments.

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Design A Better Business
By Patrick Van Der Pijl et al

This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you’ve likely never seen before, guiding readers (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world.

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The Invincible Company
By Alexander Osterwalder et al

Alex Osterwalders’ Business Model Canvas changed the way the world creates and plans new business models. It has been used by corporations and startups and consultants around the world and is taught in hundreds of universities. After years of researching how the world’s best companies develop, test, and scale new business models, the authors have produced their definitive work. The Invincible Company explains what organizations can learn from the business models of the world’s most exciting companies.

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The Experience-Centric Company
By Simon Clatworthy

Author Simon Clatworthy shows you how to transform your organization into one that aligns your customers’ experiential journey with platforms, organizational structures, and strategic alliances. Rather than treat customer experience as an add-on to product and service design, you’ll discover how experience-centricity can drive the whole organization.

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The Lean Startup
By Eric Ries

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility.

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The Design Thinking Playbook
By Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link & Larry Leifer

The Design Thinking Playbook is an actionable guide to the future of business. By stepping back and questioning the current mindset, the faults of the status quo stand out in stark relief―and this guide gives you the tools and frameworks you need to kick off a digital transformation. Design Thinking is about approaching things differently with a strong user orientation and fast iterations with multidisciplinary teams to solve wicked problems.

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The Design Thinking Toolbox
By Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link & Larry Leifer

The Design Thinking Toolbox explains the most important tools and methods to put Design Thinking into action. Based on the largest international survey on the use of design thinking, the most popular methods are described in four pages each by an expert from the global Design Thinking community. If you are involved in innovation, leadership, or design, these are tools you need. Simple instructions, expert tips, templates, and images help you implement each tool or method.

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The Service Innovation Handbook
By Lucy Kimbell

This is an action-oriented book for managers and entrepreneurs who want new ways to tackle the issues they face in terms of developing and delivering services. The book focuses on service organizations, but has a broad interpretation of what services are. This is because these days, even jet engines and cars are bundled into services that create value by bringing people and resources together in different ways.

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The Journey Mapping Playbook
By Jerry Angrave

The Journey Mapping Playbook: A practical guide to preparing, facilitating and unlocking the value of customer journey mapping. A valuable guide in helping you build stronger customer experience programmes by developing effective customer experience strategies. The journey map is crucial in understanding and managing the customer's perception of your service or brand at critical touchpoints and prioritizing how to improve that experience.

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This Is Service Design Doing
By Marc Stickdorn, Adam Lawrence, Markus Hormess, Jakob Schneider

How can you establish a customer-centric culture in an organization? This is the first comprehensive book on how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers. You’ll learn specific facilitation guidelines on how to run workshops, perform all of the main service design methods, implement concepts in reality, and embed service design successfully in an organization.

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Mapping Experiences
By Jim Kalbach

Designers, product and brand managers, marketing specialists, and business owners will discover how experience diagramming helps you determine where business goals and customer perspectives intersect. Armed with this insight, you can provide the people you serve with real value. Mapping experiences isn't just about product and service design; it's about understanding the human condition.

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Service Design
By Andy Polaine et al

Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

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Business Model Shifts
By Patrick Van Der Pijl et al

Never before has the business world seen so much radical change. This change is accelerating, casting a spotlight on the economy and pointing out the businesses and business models that must adapt or die trying. As business leaders, decision makers, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and change agents, it's up to you to redesign and shift your organizations' business models to ensure your organization lives on and thrives in the future. Business Model Shifts shows you how to do all this, and much more.

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The Designing For Growth Field Book
By Jeanee Liedtka, Tim Ogilvie & Rachel Brozenske

Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers (D4G) showed how organizations can use design thinking to boost innovation and drive growth. This updated and expanded companion guide is a stand-alone project workbook that provides a step-by-step framework for applying the D4G tool kit and process to a particular project, systematically explaining how to address the four key questions of the design thinking approach.

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Strategic Design
By Giulia Calabretta, Gerda Gemser & Ingo Karpen

This book introduces eight strategic design practices. These practices help the design professionals become familiar with effective tools for strategic innovation projects and give them a set of guidelines for easily and quickly applying these practices and tools.

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Rethinking Users
By Michael Youngblood & Benjamin Chesluk

Rethinking Users introduces a radical new approach that questions some of our most fundamental ideas about the nature of user experience. It points to new opportunities to create products and services that help users in new ways. The book includes a deck of user archetype cards and step-by-step team activities for unlocking new user-centered thinking and design inspiration.

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Stories That Stick
By Kindra Hall

Stories That Stick provides a clear framework of ideals and a concise set of actions for you to take complete control of your own story, utilizing the principles behind the world’s most effective business storytelling strategies.

Professional storyteller and nationally-known speaker Kindra Hall reveals the four unique stories you can use to differentiate, captivate, and elevate.

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Innovation & Entrepreneurship
By Peter F.Drucker

Peter Drucker's classic book on innovation and entrepreneurship

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline that explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Superbly practical, Innovation and Entrepreneurship explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures need to know and do to succeed in today's economy.

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The Innovator’s Dilemma
By Clayton M.Christensen

Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.
Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.

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Think Like a UX Researcher
By David Travis & Philip Hodgson

Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience.

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Sketching User Experiences
By Saul Greenberg et al

Sketching Working Experience: The Workbook provides information about the step-by-step process of the different sketching techniques. It offers methods called design thinking, as a way to think as a user, and sketching, a way to think as a designer. User-experience designers are designers who sketch based on their actions, interactions, and experiences. The book discusses the differences between the normal ways to sketch and sketching used by user-experience designers.

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Laws Of UX
By Jon Yablonski

An understanding of psychology—specifically the psychology behind how users behave and interact with digital interfaces—is perhaps the single most valuable nondesign skill a designer can have. The most elegant design can fail if it forces users to conform to the design rather than working within the "blueprint" of how humans perceive and process the world around them.

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UX Research
By Brad Nunnally & David Farkas

This book contains four sections, including a brief introduction to UX research, planning and preparation, facilitating research, and analysis and reporting. Each chapter includes a short exercise so you can quickly apply what you’ve learned.

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UX Strategy
By Jaime Levy

User experience (UX) strategy lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy, but until now, there hasn't been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight product strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team devise innovative digital solutions that people want.

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The User Experience Team Of One
By Leah Buley

The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.

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Visual Thinking
By Willemien Brand

Visual thinking and drawing are both becoming increasingly important in today's business settings. A picture really can tell a thousand words. Visualization is a crucial part of the journey for companies seeking to boost enterprise agility, break down silos and increase employee and customer engagement. This book will help brush aside misconceptions that may have prevented you using these techniques in your workplace.

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Visual Doing
By Willemien Brand

After the success of 2017's Visual Thinking, the author noticed that people enjoy discovering how easy it is to use drawings in business communication. But they still have no guide to satisfy their desire to tell a visual story in a very simple way. That is why the author has now written Visual Doing. This book will fulfil this desire, not by drilling deeper into the advice in the first book, but by "undeepening" Chapters 3 and 4. These chapters, both about drawing in visual business settings, are now broken down into ready-to-implement skills and tools.

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UX For Dummies
By Donald Chestnut et al

UX For Dummies is a hands-on guide to developing and implementing user experience strategy. Written by globally-recognized UX consultants, this essential resource provides expert insight and guidance on using the tools and techniques that create a great user experience, along with practical advice on implementing a UX strategy that aligns with your organisation's business goals and philosophy.

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The Literature Review
By Diana Ridley

This Second Edition of Diana Ridley′s bestselling guide to the literature review outlines practical strategies for reading and note taking, and guides the reader on how to conduct a systematic search of the available literature, and uses cases and examples throughout to demonstrate best practice in writing and presenting the review.

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How To Read A Paper
By Trisha Greenhalgh

Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and Required reading in many medical and healthcare institutions, How to Read a Paper is a clear and wide-ranging introduction to evidence-based medicine and healthcare, helping readers to understand its central principles, critically evaluate published data, and implement the results in practical settings.

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The Literature Review
By Lawrence A.Machi & Brenda T.Mcevoy

This pioneering book has provided countless graduate students and researchers with a road map to a quality literature review. Using its six-step model, you’ll narrow your research topic, focus your literature search, negotiate the myriad of books, periodicals, and reports about your topic―and, of course, write the review.

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The Sketchnote Handbook
By Mike Rohde

This gorgeous, fully illustrated handbook tells the story of sketchnotes--why and how you can use them to capture your thinking visually, remember key information more clearly, and share what you've captured with others. Author Mike Rohde shows you how to incorporate sketchnoting techniques into your note-taking process--regardless of your artistic abilities--to help you better process the information that you are hearing and seeing through drawing.

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New Books Uploaded Soon…

If we haven’t met yet, I’m Robert Meza – a behavioral systems strategist and founder of Aim for Behavior. I work with leaders and teams worldwide and help them drive change for transformation, product, and marketing by removing barriers slowing adoption, execution, and engagement.

Have a great day, and enjoy the reading
Robert

P.S let me know in the comments which books you will read next!

Introduction: Strategy Doesn’t Fail on Paper

Most leaders assume that execution problems come from communication gaps, weak leadership, or a lack of buy-in. But even the best strategies, backed by leadership, dedicated teams, and strong operational plans can fail to live up to their potential.

You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it:

• Months into a rollout, the adoption starts to look like a faded memory.

• Change programs delivering workshops, but in practice things stay the same.

• New digital tools start collecting “digital dust” and excel is back with a vengeance.

What’s happening is Behavioral friction.

The invisible forces deeply ingrained into your systems, processes, norms and beliefs that make the desired behavior harder than the default one.

This playbook gives you a system to map, diagnose, and eliminate those forces, so your change work actually changes works.

Inside this playbook, you’ll get:

-> A 4-step framework for identifying what’s blocking adoption

-> How to score and map behavioral friction

-> What most change models miss (and how to fix it)

-> Real-world strategies to turn insight into implementation

Why Traditional Change Models Aren’t Cutting it

Traditional change models tend to:

• Focus on individual mindsets

• Overemphasise communication, training, and leadership vision.

• Ignore how workflows, tools, and incentives constrain behavior.

We need a new way, one that I call Behavioral Systems Architecture™ which shifts the focus from solely “changing people” to redesigning the conditions in which people operate.

In this model, resistance is a diagnostic tool, not a problem to solve.

Why Smart Strategies Fail at the Behavioral Level

Let me tell you about Ross, a transformation director I worked with. The company spent eighteen months implementing a unified digital platform to improve coordination across different sites. The conditions were there, there was buy in from leadership, the business case was clear and the training was thorough.

Nine months post-launch, I walked down to the finance department and saw that the team was still using the old spreadsheet system "just for this one project." I scratched my head and asked the team lead - Why? Once she explained that the new platform required fourteen clicks to do what took four in Excel, I got it. During the implementation no one thought to take the time to map the processes between sites and departments to understand how each team worked and how the journey was connected.

The technology wasn't failing because the people resisted change, on the contrary, it was failing because the behavioral system, tools, processes, social dynamics and beliefs, made the old way easier than the new and “improved” way.

This was a classic case of behavioral friction, and trust me, once you see it you can't unsee it - in fact, it made such an impression on me, that it made me shift my whole focus into learning more about it and seeing how we could account and solve for it.

We need to move on from the traditional change approaches, which assume people resist change because they don't understand how to or don't want to.

The Behavioral Systems Architecture™ Approach by Aim For Behavior

Rather than guessing where resistance comes from, you can use a systematic approach that combines three perspectives:

Behavioral Science gives you frameworks to understand what actually drives behavior. No more hoping and guessing, you can systematically identify what's preventing people from doing what the strategy requires.

Human-Centered Design ensures you’re designing around how people actually work, not how organizations think they should work. If someone has to do seventeen extra steps to use your new system, that's a design problem, not a people problem.

Systems Thinking helps you see how changing one thing affects everything else. Behaviors don't exist in isolation, they're part of interconnected systems where your solution in one area can create problems somewhere else.

Here's what makes this different from traditional change approaches:

Old Way: Focus on changing minds through communication. Treat resistance as individual problem to overcome. Assume people will change once they understand rationale. Address culture, process, and technology separately.

New Way: Focus on changing systems to enable desired behaviors. Treat resistance as data about what's not working. Assume context shapes behavior more than individual characteristics. Address people, systems, and environment together. Align with the organization on the levers they have and what they can and can’t change.

Understanding What Really Drives Behavior

After years of working to understand why people do what they do, both as an employee and now an owner of a consultancy, I've learned that behavior gets shaped by way more factors than most change efforts consider.

• The environmental dynamics.

• How they make decisions.

• What they're capable of doing.

• Their motivations and needs.

• Personal beliefs and attitudes.

• How they evaluate risk and value.

• Unconscious motives they don't even realize.

• What they see others doing.

• What they think others expect them to do.

These drivers interact in complex ways. It's what we call a web of change, where you move one thing and five other things shift. That's why simple solutions usually don't work. (and what most consultants don’t want to tell you).

When you diagnose behavioral friction, you should pay extra attention to three levels where things can go wrong:

Level 1: People Can't Do It (Even When They Want To)

• Tools that create more work instead of less.

• Information scattered across systems that don't talk to each other.

• Processes that require workarounds to be effective.

• Skills training that doesn't transfer to real work situations.

Imagine working with a healthcare system that implemented electronic health records to improve patient care coordination. Sounds great, right? Except doctors end up spending an extra 90 minutes per day on documentation because the system wasn't designed around how clinical work actually flows. Despite wanting better patient outcomes, the friction makes compliance nearly impossible.

Level 2: The Environment Punishes New Behaviors

You hear leaders say they want more openness, more collaboration, more experimentation..but….

• The real praise still goes to those who play it safe.

• Meetings stay quiet because no one wants to go first and early adopters get eye-rolls.

• If you are the one who challenge the status quo you get labeled difficult.

I saw this at company wanting to shift from individual excellence to collaborative innovation. Socially it was still risky to share unfinished work or ask for help because the more senior stakeholders subtly reinforced the old model by spotlighting solo wins and brushing off collective efforts.

Level 3: The Belief Feels Too True to Question

Some behaviors don’t change because the belief behind them feels too solid to doubt.

These beliefs aren’t based on training slides or campaigns. They come from experience, what’s worked, what’s been rewarded, what’s kept people safe or respected.

So when a new behavior pushes against one of those, people hesitate. They are not resisting for the sake of it. It’s that the change doesn’t make sense inside the logic they’ve relied on for years.

They may agree in meetings and may try for a while, but under pressure, they’ll return to what feels right - because it’s familiar, and familiar still feels correct.

You can’t shift that with reminders or incentives. You have to name the belief, understand how strong or weak it is and apply the right approach to it.

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The Behavioral Playbook

The Four Step Methodology

Here's how you systematically identify and eliminate behavioral friction:

Step 1: Focus

In this phase you want to get specific about what opportunity or challenges you can wok on and the capabilities needed to execute them.

Start by Defining Your Opportunity (or Challenge)

You should validate opportunities/challenges with a more systematic approach, so you can keep them more realistic and aligned to both value and complexity.

This is one possible scoring method you could use or adapt to your organizations needed.

Make Sure to Map Actors and Stakeholders

Mapping actors and stakeholders help you understand the most important groups in respect to the behavior and influence they have on the opportunities or challenges you are working on. Place important actors in the middle, less important ones more to the outside.

Define Your Desired Outcomes

Use this template:

• Outcome: What business result do you want?

• Assumptions: What has to be true for this outcome to happen?

• Measurement: How will you know you're making progress?

Example from a health app project:

• Outcome: Increase employee wellbeing.

• Assumptions: Users are motivated to improve their health. The app provides accurate and actionable information. Users will download and use the app regularly.

• Measurement: App analytics (usage, time spent), wellbeing surveys, engagement metrics.

  ---

Build Your Behavioral Portfolio

Your Focus phase will give you many potential behaviors to work with. Don't try to change everything at once. Score them systematically:

• Impact of Behavior Change: How much business value if this becomes widespread (1-3 scale)

• Ease of Change: How difficult given current constraints (1-3 scale)

• Ease of Measurement: How clearly you can track progress (1-3 scale)

Start with behaviors scoring highest on total points (but make sure you discuss with your team to get context).

Strategic Behavior Definition

Get really specific about the behavior you chose, and use these context questions to help you:

• Who are we targeting directly?

• What do they need to do?

• When do they need to do it?

• Where does it need to happen?

• How often?

• With whom?

Example: "Colleagues engage in 10 minutes of mindfulness exercises from the health and wellbeing app 3 days a week during their wellbeing break in the park, or the wellbeing space, either alone or with colleagues who also use the app."

Other examples for you can use and add more context to if needed:

Sales managers conduct weekly pipeline reviews using the new CRM data views.

Product teams run user testing sessions before feature development sprints.

Supply chain coordinators update inventory status in real-time across all systems.

Note: You should also make sure that you are accounting for the needs and not only the behaviors.

Build Your Logic Model (Roadmap)

Start building your logic model to track how your opportuntiy/challenge connects to your desired outcome through specific behaviors. This becomes your roadmap and evaluation framework.

The logic model can flow like this:

OVERCOME (address the challenge) → MAKE (create the solution) → EVALUATE (target the right drivers) → DO (achieve the target behavior) → GET (reach the outcome).

Step 2: Diagnose

In this step you want to figure out what's actually preventing the behavior your strategy wants to achieve.

The goal of working in this way is to avoid guessing. You can use many different models to understand behavior, and really as a leader, this knowledge will help you build a better mental model of why behavior occurs (or does not).

Map the System

Behaviors don't occur in isolation. Map how different actors, behaviors, and drivers interact in your system.

Start with your target behavior and work outward:

• What other behaviors does this connect to?

• Who else is involved in this system?

• What drives those people's behaviors?

• How do these relationships reinforce or conflict with your target behavior?

Use simple notation:

• + relationships: "the more of this, the more of that"

• - relationships: "the more of this, the less of that"

This helps you see where ripple effects might occur.

Diagnose the Friction: The Three Things That Make or Break Any Behavior Change

In this playbook I am using the COM-B model, because it is straightforward and is used by many practitioners. (It’s simple, but it does not mean you should use it simplistically)

1. Can They Actually Do It?

Before anything else, check if people have what they need to succeed.

Do they understand what's expected? Have the right skills? Access to the information they need? Can they make good decisions quickly, even when things get stressful?

If people don't feel equipped to succeed, they won't even try. It's like asking someone to cook dinner but not telling them what's in the kitchen.

This is about Capability in the COM-B Model

2. Does the Environment Help or Hurt?

Even capable, motivated people will give up if the environment works against them.

Is there actually time to do this new behavior? Are the tools easy to use or a nightmare? Do the processes make sense? Are leaders doing it themselves, or just talking about it? Does the reward system encourage the old way or the new way?

If your environment makes the right thing hard and the wrong thing easy, guess what people will choose.

This is about Opportunity in COM-B

3. Do They Actually Want To?

Finally, does this behavior feel worth it to them personally?

Does it align with how they see their job and themselves? Does it feel meaningful or just like more work? Is it emotionally satisfying or draining?

People sustain behaviors that feel like "who they are," not just "what they have to do."

This is about Motivation in COM-B

The key insight: All three have to work together. Fix capability without addressing opportunity, and the system will defeat you. Fix opportunity without addressing motivation, and people will find ways around it. Address motivation without fixing capability, and you'll just frustrate people.

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Map Your Drivers - Find Your Friction

From your insights, classify identified friction according to COM-B. Here's an example from a mindfulness app project:

Physical Capability: "The breathing exercises in the app aren't too strenuous for me." (enabler)

Psychological Capability: "I attended a mindfulness workshop once. It looked useful, however I didn't understand the techniques." (friction)

Physical Opportunity: "The app is available on my phone, and it's free." (friction)

Social Opportunity: "I've seen a few colleagues mocking these kinds of apps during lunch." (friction)

Automatic Motivation: "When the app sends me reminders, I feel annoyed and tend to ignore them." (friction)

Reflective Motivation: "I've tried so many stress management methods and none have worked; why would this be any different?" (friction)

Score Your Drivers

Use evidence from literature or your own data to score each driver:

• Evidence: Strength of research supporting this barrier (1-3)

• Frequency: How often this barrier appears (1-3)

• Impact: Degree to which this prevents target behavior (1-3)

• Influence: How changeable this barrier is with your resources (1-3)

Focus on drivers with the highest scores for conversations and decision making.

Create Journey Maps with Behavioral Lens

Map your current user journey and add behavioral layers:

• Stages: What phases do people go through?

• Steps/Actions: What do they actually do?

• Touchpoints: Where do they interact with systems/people?

• Emotional Journey: How do they feel at each stage?

• Capability: Can they accomplish the behavior at each stage?

• Opportunity: Does the environment support the behavior?

• Motivation: Do they want to do the behavior?

This shows you exactly where friction occurs in the real experience.

Step 3: Drive

Intervention Strategy Design

Design strategies that address the actual friction you found. There are many ways to do this, including the ways you already design strategies. What you should take away from this section is possible new approaches to design that are more scientific and systematic.

Behavior Change Techniques Selection

The BCT taxonomy gives you 93 specific techniques organized into 16 categories. Don't try to use them all—select 3-5 techniques that directly address your highest-scoring drivers.

Choose specific techniques based on:

• Behavioral friction identified

• Evidence of effectiveness for your context

• Practical constraints and capabilities

  ---

Turn Techniques Into Real Features

Insight:

“We’re being asked to do this, but honestly, I don’t know if it’s making any difference. It feels like extra effort without any visible payoff.”

Diagnosed Friction:

Motivation –> Reflective
(Beliefs about Consequences)

People are unconvinced the behavior delivers tangible results. Without visible progress or outcome signals, effort feels wasted leading to disengagement.

Technique:

2.7 – Feedback on Outcome(s) of Behavior

Real Features:

• Wearable Feedback Loop

  Smartwatches that monitor health indicators (e.g., heart rate, sleep, glucose) and provide real-time feedback on how specific behaviors like taking medication, are impacting those metrics.
  → Bridges the gap between effort and outcome. Especially effective in healthcare adherence, where payoff isn’t always felt.

• Integrated Wearables in Occupational Health

  In high-stress or physically demanding jobs, wearable devices track health metrics (e.g., stress, sleep, heart rate) and correlate them with new routines like structured breaks or ergonomic practices.
  → Employees receive feedback like:

  “After implementing the new break routine, your heart rate variability and sleep scores have improved.”

Design for Engagement

If you want to ensure long lasting engagement, make sure your strategies and designs support:

Autonomy - Let people make meaningful choices about how they engage

At work, autonomy isn't about doing whatever you want—it's about having genuine input into how you accomplish what needs to be done. This means control over your methods, timing, and approach within clear boundaries. When people feel their preferences and expertise shape how work gets done, they invest more deeply in outcomes. During organizational change, autonomy becomes crucial because it's the difference between feeling like change is happening to you versus feeling like you're actively participating in creating something better.

Progress - Help people feel they're mastering new challenges

Progress at work is about building competence and seeing tangible advancement in your capabilities. It's not just completing tasks—it's the satisfaction of getting better at something that matters. People need to feel they're developing skills, solving increasingly complex problems, and contributing in ways that stretch their abilities. During change initiatives, this becomes essential because learning new systems or processes can initially make competent people feel incompetent. Progress indicators help people see they're moving forward, not just struggling.

Connection - Foster connection and shared purpose

Connection in workplace contexts means feeling part of something larger than individual tasks. It's about understanding how your work contributes to collective goals and feeling genuine relationships with colleagues based on shared challenges and successes. This isn't forced team-building—it's organic bonds that form when people work together toward meaningful outcomes. During organizational change, connection becomes a stabilizing force when everything else feels uncertain. People need to feel they're navigating the transition together, not isolated in their own confusion or resistance.

Validate Your Strategies

Score each on:

• Reach: How many people will this affect?

• Business Impact: How much will this move business metrics?

• Business Value: What's the strategic value?

• Internal Capabilities: Can we build this?

• External Support: Do we have the right partners/vendors?

Use 1-3 scale for each dimension.

Keep It Simple

Use EAST as a checklist:

• Easy: Reduce effort, steps, choices

• Attractive: Make it noticeable and appealing

• Social: Show others are doing this too

• Timely: Prompt action when people are most receptive

  ---

Step 4: Validate

Measure what actually happened and prepare for scaling.

Testing Framework

Use systematic testing rather than hoping for the best:

Test Card - Document your hypothesis, test method, success criteria, measurement approach

Learning Card - Capture observations, insights, decisions for next steps

Confidence Level - Rate evidence quality, data points, strength of conclusions

This Test Card, Learning Card and Confidence Level Card are adapted from strategyzer.

Pilot Smart

Phase 1: Controlled Pilots

• Select 2-3 pilot groups representing different contexts

• Implement with clear success metrics

• Build in rapid feedback loops

Phase 2: Refined Testing

• Iterate based on pilot results

• Test scalability requirements

• Measure intended and unintended consequences

Behavioral Impact Measurement

Track three things:

• Behavior Frequency: Are people doing the target behaviors more often?

• Behavior Quality: Are they doing them well and consistently?

• Behavior Sustainability: Do changes persist without ongoing intervention?

Business Outcomes Assessment

Measure business results linked to behavioral changes, but remember business outcomes lag behavioral changes by weeks or months.

Scalability Assessment

• Which interventions are ready for broader deployment?

• What organizational capabilities are required?

• What would need to change to implement across the organization?

  ---

The Career Impact of Behavioral Friction

What happens when change is not happening? who gets blamed?

It is usually the change leader.

You're the one explaining to your stakeholders why adoption is low after so many months. You're the one defending budget requests for "more change initiatives." You're the one whose performance review includes "struggled to drive change and adoption of strategic initiatives."

You hold certain truths: The strategy is sound, the technology works, the people aren't lazy. But still, you can't articulate why this smart group of people keep doing things the old way.

Behavioral friction makes leaders look ineffective because they're fighting the wrong battle with the wrong tools.

What Change Leaders Actually Need

Diagnostic clarity. Instead of guessing why adoption is not working, you need systematic ways to identify the specific friction preventing strategic behaviors.

Tactical confidence. Rather than trying random change tactics, you need evidence-based approaches that address root causes of behavioral friction.

Implementation support. Beyond frameworks and theory, you need practical guidance for navigating the messy reality of behavior change.

Measurement systems. You need ways to track behavioral change that give you early warning signs and course-correction opportunities before you're explaining failures to leadership.

Learn the System Behind This

Getting Started: Your Toolkit

Immediate Actions

1. Rapid Friction Assessment

Take one behavior critical to your current change challenge or opportunity. Use this 15-minute assessment based on COM-B: (adapt for your context, be it pharma, digital products, policies etc…)

Capability

Do people have what’s required to perform this behavior effectively?

• What knowledge or skills are people missing?

• What aspects of the behavior are mentally demanding, confusing, or error-prone?

• Are there physical requirements (e.g., stamina, dexterity, coordination) that create friction?

Opportunity

Does the environment support or block the behavior?

• What in the work environment (time, systems, tools) makes this behavior harder than necessary?

• Are there competing priorities, metrics, or incentives that undermine it?

• What unspoken norms, leadership behaviors, or team dynamics create resistance?

Motivation

Do people see this behavior as valuable and worth their effort?

• How does this behavior align (or clash) with how people see themselves professionally?

• What emotions are triggered by this behavior—positive or negative?

• Do people believe the outcomes are worth the effort or risk?

2. Create Your Behavior Portfolio

List all behaviors your change requires and score them:

• Impact of Behavior Change (1-3)

• Ease of Change (1-3)

• Ease of Measurement (1-3)

Start with behaviors scoring highest on total points.

3. Define Your Target Behavior

Use the systematic questions to get specific about your priority behavior:

• Who is the target actor?

• What do they need to do?

• When do they need to do it?

• Where does it need to happen?

• How often do they need to do it?

• With whom do they need to do it?

  ---

Share Architecting Behavior

Building Momentum

4. Run a Behavioral Systems Pilot

Choose one area where change is not working as expected and apply the four-step process:

Week 1-3: Focus

• Select 1-2 specific behaviors for immediate testing

• Complete behavior portfolio analysis

• Define target behavior with full context

Week 4-6: Diagnose

• Conduct COM-B interviews with 8-12 pilot participants or do surveys (or use existing data)

• Observe behaviors in natural work contexts

• Map and score identified drivers

Week 7-10: Drive

• Select intervention strategies

• Choose specific techniques and turn into real features

• Implement with pilot groups using test cards

Week 11-12: Validate

• Measure behavioral changes using learning cards

• Assess business outcomes and scalability readiness

• Update roadmap with validated approach

5. Build Internal Capability

Train your transformation team on systematic friction identification:

Essential Skills:

• COM-B diagnostic interview techniques

• Behavioral observation and pattern recognition

• Evidence-based intervention design

• Behavioral measurement and tracking

Training Approach:

• Workshop on COM-B framework application

• Practice diagnostic interviews with real change challenges

• Create standardized assessment tools based on the templates

• Establish behavioral metrics dashboard

6. Redesign Transformation Metrics

Add behavioral indicators to your transformation dashboard:

Leading Indicators (What People Do):

• Frequency of target behaviors by role and context

• Quality of target behaviors (not just frequency)

• Driver resolution tracking using the scoring system

Lagging Indicators (Business Results):

• Outcomes driven by target behaviors

• Sustained behavior change over time

• Unintended consequences of interventions

Scaling the Approach

7. Integrate into Change Process

Make behavioral friction assessment standard practice:

• Require COM-B analysis before major transformation initiatives

• Include behavioral success criteria in project planning using the logic model

• Train change managers in the systematic diagnostic approach

8. Develop Change Learning System

Create capability to capture and apply behavioral insights:

• Friction Pattern Library: Common friction and proven solutions

• Intervention Effectiveness Database: What techniques work in which contexts

• Behavioral Success Stories: Scaling case studies and best practices

• Predictive Indicators: Early warning signs for transformation success/failure

  ---

The Strategic Advantage

Organizations that master how to remove systematic friction gain four sustainable competitive advantages:

Execution Excellence: They implement strategies faster than competitors relying on traditional change approaches.

Adaptation Capability: They respond to market changes more quickly because their systems are optimized for behavioral flexibility rather than behavioral control.

Innovation Enablement: They adopt new technologies and processes more successfully because they systematically address the behavioral barriers that cause innovation initiatives to stall.

Talent Attraction and Retention: High performers choose organizations where their work is enabled rather than hindered by systematic friction. They stay longer and perform better.

Your Next Move

The reality is clear: behavioral friction is hurting your change efforts. The question is whether you'll address it systematically or continue trying to overcome it through un-targeted communication, training, and willpower.

Most organizations are still approaching change like it's the early 2000. They're using change techniques designed for simpler challenges. Meanwhile, those who are thriving have developed systematic approaches for identifying and removing the friction that make good strategies fail.

You have three choices:

1. Keep doing what you're doing and accept that most of your transformation initiatives will not live up to their potential

2. Try behavioral approaches randomly and get inconsistent results

3. Build systematic behavioral friction removal capability and join the growing group of organizations that consistently execute strategic change

If you choose option three, start with the toolkit in this guide. Pick one change that's really worth focusing on.

Apply our four-step Behavioral Systems Architecture™ process. Measure the results.

• The methodology is there

• The tools are proven and available

• The competitive advantage is waiting
  
  What change will you work on first?

I work with change leaders who are tired of explaining why smart people won't adopt strategic changes. If you're facing behavioral friction in your change work, I'd be interested to hear what patterns you're seeing.

Robert Meza

The emails are getting opened and people are clicking through. The creative is performing above your set benchmark and your dashboards are looking great across the board…. but here's the thing nobody wants to talk about: the actual behavior you said you would drive isn't moving.

What do I mean by this? Patients aren't refilling prescriptions, employees aren't enrolling in benefits and customers aren't upgrading their accounts. The gap between "message delivered" and "action taken" is wider than anyone wants to admit.

Most teams respond by tweaking the copy, testing new subject lines, or increasing frequency, and yes, sometimes that works… but when engagement metrics look good and behavior stays the same, you're not dealing with a creative problem.

You're dealing with behavioral friction.

If You're Seeing This Now

Before we go deeper, here's something I made that you can use right now. Take one message that looks like it should be working, but isn't and use this quick map to find the friction.

Share

Look for the psychological interpretation, not just the technical function.

→Where does the message assume something that the recipient doesn't accept? →Where might the tone, sequence, or timing create resistance?

You don't need a full behavioral team to start seeing these patterns (though if you need one we can always help you). You just need a structured way to look for them.

That's why we created the BOOST Framework, which I am sharing with you.

The BOOST Framework

BOOST is made to systematically identify where communication breaks down:

We like to say that BOOST is Behavioral Outcome-Oriented Strategic Targeting, which has the following 5 stages:

Behavior - Define the specific action you want
Observe - Diagnose where psychological friction occurs
Organize - Map system requirements against behavioral barriers
Shape - Redesign message hierarchy to reduce friction
Test - Measure actual behavior change, not just engagement

Remember, most friction happens at the intersection of what your organization needs to say and what your audience needs to hear. Things like legal language designed to protect the company accidentally threatens user autonomy or compliance messaging treats people as incapable when they want to feel competent.

BOOST helps you map these conflicts so you can get better outcomes.

Where Friction Hides

Though there can be friction in many places, here are four that constantly come up:

Identity Conflict: Language that talks down to people undermines capability. "You must complete..." triggers more resistance than "You're ready to complete..."

Effort Misrepresentation: Messages accidentally signal big commitments. "Complete your annual benefits enrollment" sounds like homework. "Choose your health plan" sounds like self-care.

Timing Mismatch: System-driven scheduling conflicts with behavioral readiness. Productivity reminders during vacation or complex decisions when people are rushed.

Channel Misfit: High-urgency content delivered through low-urgency channels. Personal information via impersonal systems.

Each pattern is fixable, and you don't need to eliminate legal language or rebuild infrastructure. You need to understand how system requirements interact with psychology and design around that intersection.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Lets explore three scenarios:

Scenario 1: Software company struggling with feature adoption despite strong onboarding metrics

Their messaging focuses on "unlocking premium features" → accidentally positioning advanced features as additional work rather than natural capability development. Reframe it as "You've mastered the basics, here's what you can do next".

Scenario 2: HR team with high email engagement but low benefits enrollment

The friction might live in language like "Don't miss the deadline to select your coverage." That frames benefits as a compliance task rather than a self-care decision. "Choose your coverage for next year" removes the threat while maintaining urgency.

Scenario 3: Health system that needs to send medication reminders

Legal requires language like "Failure to adhere to your prescribed treatment plan may result in serious health complications." Accurate, necessary, yet psychologically not great.

Using BOOST, you could restructure the message hierarchy. Instead of leading with "Ensure consistent medication adherence," you'd start with "Stay in control of your health." Same legal language, different psychological frame. The compliance text stays but no longer dominates perception.

In scenarios like these, behavior is enabled and so is change… because you reduced friction between what the system needed to communicate and what people needed to hear.

The Real Work

Most teams assume reducing friction requires major overhauls. The BOOST framework shows that its less complicated that you think. You can usually fix the problem through message re-sequencing rather than message rewriting.

For example, look at the message design on your worst-performing campaign. Map every piece of required language against basic psychological needs: autonomy (choice and control), competence (capability and effectiveness), and relatedness (connection and belonging).

Where does the language accidentally suggest people can't be trusted to make good decisions? That's autonomy friction.

Where does it imply the behavior is complicated or requires special expertise? That's competence friction.

Where does it position the organization as authority and the audience as subjects? That's relatedness friction.

Once you identify the conflicts, you can fix them through careful re-sequencing. Lead with autonomy supporting language, then include required disclaimers. Frame effort accurately rather than accidentally overselling complexity. Position your organization as supportive rather than supervisory. (of course everything with context.. these are illustrative examples, not copy paste ones)

I’ve learnt that the most powerful changes are often the smallest ones. The difference between "You must complete..." and "You're ready to complete..." The choice between "Failure to..." and "Here's what happens next..." The decision to lead with motivation rather than obligation.

These aren't creative decisions. They're behavioral design decisions.

What to Do Next

If your campaign is working but behavior isn't moving, here's your diagnostic checklist:

Share

Audit your opening lines. Do they affirm capability ("You're ready to...") or signal mistrust ("You must...")? Identity conflicts kill conversion faster than bad creative.

Map your required language. Where do compliance needs clash with psychological needs? Lead with autonomy-supporting language, then include the disclaimers. Sequence matters more than wordsmithing.

Check your timing. Are you asking for complex decisions when people are rushed? Sending productivity tips during vacation? Timing misalignment creates resistance you'll never overcome with better copy.

Match channel to content. Does your medium support the intimacy your message requires? High-urgency content through low-urgency channels confuses rather than converts.

Teams that consistently drive behavior change stop optimizing messages and start mapping friction. They understand that every communication lands in a system shaped by organizational requirements, technical constraints, and human psychology. When those align, behavior follows naturally. When they conflict, even brilliant execution fails.

BOOST gives you a systematic way to diagnose these conflicts before they kill your conversion. Because the question isn't whether your message is good, it's whether it works within the behavioral reality where your audience will encounter it.

I will be sharing more about BOOST and how we use it in future posts, to inspire you to take a behavioral approach to your comms.

If we haven’t met yet, I’m Robert Meza – a behavioral systems strategist and founder of Aim for Behavior. I work with leaders and teams worldwide to uncover the friction points that quietly stall progress. If this resonates with you, leave a comment – I read every response. Have a great day, Robert

Your transformation initiative is on the brink. You're seeing progress on the dashboard: project milestones met, training sessions completed, compliance checks enforced. Yet adoption is stalled, operational drag is mounting, and execution costs are going up.

The real problem isn't a skill gaps. It's a systemic imbalance in your organization's change architecture. You're leaning too hard on formal control levers (compliance, oversight, directives) while neglecting the informal influence levers that drive sustainable behavior change. This creates friction that drags down strategic outcomes, making your organization vulnerable to competitors who execute faster.

A framework from the UK Government Policy Lab shows this blind spot clearly. It maps out numerous levers from soft influence to hard control, revealing how organizations typically cluster their efforts in the formal control quadrant. Regulatory compliance and policy enforcement might force behaviors in the short term, but rarely create the commitment needed for lasting change.

The Lever Imbalance: A Strategic Risk

Let’s consider a global logistics company integrating a new procurement system. Leadership rolls out:

• New procurement protocols (Control)

• Multi-day compliance training (Educate)

• Regular policy audits (Enforce)

• Multiple approval layers for transactions (Govern)

Six months in, adoption remains low. Teams follow procedures only under supervision. Managers become bottlenecks, slowing procurement cycles. Departments retreat into silos, prioritizing local metrics over shared objectives.

Leadership responds with more training, more checks, more control, thinking this will change the result, however…friction increases as staff develop workarounds that undermine data integrity and strategic alignment. (I’ve seen many workarounds for very expensive implementations in my years)

What's missing? The influence levers that build momentum:

• Forums where people identify friction points and propose solutions (Convene)

• Networks bridging legacy and new systems (Connect)

• Executives visibly using new systems (Role Model)

• Peer sessions sharing practical implementation tips (Engage)

Why This Creates Strategic Vulnerabilities

In major initiatives like mergers, technology rollouts, and transformations, over-reliance on control creates predictable problems:

Compliance Without Internalization. People follow protocols during monitoring but revert when oversight fades. The transformation appears successful on paper while failing in practice.

Shadow Systems. Staff create unofficial workarounds to maintain productivity. These parallel systems waste resources, complicate reporting, and fragment data.

Control Spiral. Leaders respond to stalled adoption by tightening control, inadvertently generating more resistance.

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Strategic Repositioning: From Control to Influence

Organizations should treat lever balancing as a strategic priority, not just a tactical concern. Take a tech firm facing CRM adoption challenges:

Initial Approach (Control-Heavy):

• Mandatory training sessions (Educate)

• Compliance monitoring (Enforce)

• Performance metrics tied to system usage (Control)

Results: Low adoption, fragmented customer data, reporting delays. Sales teams comply during reviews but maintain separate spreadsheets for daily work.

Revised Approach (Balanced):

• Learning circles where top performers share practical shortcuts (Engage)

• Cross-functional teams aligning CRM with existing workflows (Connect)

• Leadership visibly adopting the system with clients (Role Model)

• Regular sessions to surface and address friction points (Convene)

After rebalancing, CRM adoption increases substantially. Reporting improves and data quality strengthens across the organization.

The Cost of Ignoring Influence Levers

Lever imbalances create serious financial and strategic consequences. Organizations with excessive control in their processes often face:

• Substantial losses from approval bottlenecks and execution delays ( I once mapped a procurement process that had 47 steps)

• Missed opportunities when frontline teams bypass systems perceived as cumbersome

• Declining compliance as staff create shadow systems to maintain productivity

These aren't just operational inconveniences. They directly impact market position, time-to-value, and execution costs.

Take Action: Map Your Levers

Before your next strategic review, conduct a quick lever assessment:

• Where are control mechanisms creating operational friction?

• Which influence levers remain untapped?

• What would change if you reduced control by 10% and increased influence mechanisms?

This straightforward diagnostic often reveals hidden friction points that quietly undermine your transformation efforts.

Closing

Finding the right balance between control and influence isn't just about process optimization. It's about reclaiming strategic momentum. Organizations that master this balance accelerate adoption, reduce resistance, and align execution with strategic objectives more effectively.

If we haven’t met yet, I’m Robert Meza – a behavioral systems strategist and founder of Aim for Behavior. I work with leaders and teams worldwide to uncover the friction points that quietly stall progress. If this resonates with you, leave a comment – I read every response. Have a great day, Robert

I've spent the last decade watching great strategies fail to reach their potential once they get put into reality.

Not because the plans were not good, they looked really good on paper and had great people working on them.

It also was’t because the people didn't get it, my colleagues or teams I worked with - they all agreed in the meetings, they were all open to the change… but once that reality hit and the systems started creating friction the changes just did not move forward.

A few years back, I was working as part of a transformation team in a large government project, a full digitalisation of everything for a whole city. We had some very strict deadlines, as one has in these types of projects and leaders were asking why people were not changing. They kept saying "We've done the town halls, spent a fortune on training and communicated what to do, but still…’’

When we mapped what was really happening, we realised that among other things, department targets directly clashed with these big transformation goals, and the structure we had was not made for the kind of decision making we needed. Equally, those endless alignment meetings, which I am sure most of you have had, just kept eating up all the time we needed for actual implementation.

It was then, that I started to keep track of what I was seeing and kept refining the learnings as I moved on and started my own consultancy Aim for Behavior. While the contexts have beed different across retail, healthcare, finance, and government projects, there are some patterns that keep coming up, which are costing organizations millions in failed change efforts.