How to introduce behavioural science into your business.

Published by Nick Murphy on June 6, 2022June 6, 2022

How to introduce behavioural science into your business

If you’re intimidated by the thought of introducing behavioural science into your business. Don’t be. We’ve got a few hints and tips that will help you introduce it in a manageable, and scalable way.

1. Take your time

Introducing a new way of thinking takes time. Start by identifying the easier opportunities to introduce it. Reference key behavioural science literature or take aways in your communication or when you’re discussing change in your business.

Behavioural science in business isn’t a magic bullet, it’s a set of practical tools that make up a discipline. You should observe your organisation, understand where change happens and how behavioural science can support that change by offering discipline and structure to the way you research a problem, test ideas, gather evidence and ultimately roll out change programmes.

2. Employ a specialist

There’s no one better to introduce behavioural science into your organisation than behavioural scientists themselves. There are Undergraduates, Masters, Doctoral, and Post-Doctoral students out there who are looking to broaden their expertise and practice by working in forward looking, progressive organisations.

3. Get to know your frameworks

Change is easier to manage when you utilise an existing behavioural science framework. There are a lot of them out there, from Theoretical Domains to B=MAP to COM-B to Habit Formation. Frameworks help to distil the methodological process of behavioural science into a rigorous discipline in specific contexts. Some of them are broader than others but getting to know the one’s closest to your problem type or business context will help you see better results sooner.

4. There’s behavioural science and then there’s Behavioural Science

We
identify behavioural science as applying knowledge and principles from the
Behavioural Sciences to your specific business problem, the objective being
to get a better understanding of your problem and the suite of possible
solutions.

Contrast this with Behavioural Science, a broad academic field and
discipline with peer reviewed journal articles, randomised control trials and a
variety of toolsets and data analytics that simply may not be feasible at the
level in which you work. In our view lessons can be learned from the approaches
of Behavioural Science and applied in new contexts but this doesn’t mean
necessarily that the same evidential criteria are always met.

5. Have fun, test, learn and try again

As with anything the introduction of something new to an organisation, especially where the organisation has less maturity in the behavioural sciences, can be fraught with challenges, errors, failures and questions. These are all part of the mix of change and should be embraced. Consider challenges as cyclical – always try to take forward lessons from where things haven’t worked to improve the next cycle.

If you’ve found these principles useful then speak to us today to find out more about how we can help you introduce behavioural science into your business.

Time to change…

Why do we behave the way we do? It can be hard to change our less desirable behaviours when they are highly ingrained and have become habits we perform automatically without thinking.

Richenda Sabine April 15, 2024