Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change (Abridged Excerpt)

Many behavioural models exist. Behavioural science draws from a wide range of fields like psychology, behavioural economics, public health, safety, finance, human factors engineering, and persuasive technology (to identify just a few). Each of these domains has principles and models that frequently overlap with similar material from other domains.

So how do you pick?  [In this article] I’m focusing on the model I use most often for my own practice. But I acknowledge that many other models exist that likely overlap with this one, and another model may ultimately be more useful for your own practice.

The Behaviour Change Wheel

Several years ago, a colleague who worked in digital behaviour-change design introduced me to the COM-B Model, which is part of the Behaviour Change Wheel. This model came out of an effort to reconcile many different behaviour-change models from a variety of domains. Susan Michie and her colleagues from University College London’s Centre for Behaviour Change reviewed 19 different models and brought common elements into a single model called the Behaviour Change Wheel.

The Behaviour Change Wheel is used courtesy of S. Michie, L. Atkins, and R. West (The Behaviour Change Wheel: A Guide to Designing Interventions. London: Silverback Publishing, 2014, www.behaviourchangewheel.com).

Understanding the Goal

Hopefully, your stakeholders have brought you a problem to solve or an outcome to achieve rather than a solution they want you to implement (I say that with more optimism than confidence).

Ever gotten the kind of request that asks for a solution? You know what it sounds like:

We need customer service training.

The next part of the sentence that you hope to hear starts with “because,” so you know what problem stakeholders are trying to solve with customer service training.

Ideally, they would be specific: “We need customer service training because”

• We are getting too many customer complaints.

• Our competitor is stealing clients based on their supposedly super customer service.

• Our customers report having to call multiple times to resolve an issue.

Whatever the reason might be, it can give you a clue to define a desired outcome, which could be something like this:

Desired outcome: Customer satisfaction scores above 90%.

Defining “A Behaviour”

For the purposes of this excerpt, I define a behaviour as:

An (observable) action or set of actions done in response to internal and/or external stimuli.

The simplest question I use when I’m talking to stakeholders and they say things like, “We want retail staff to be more customer-focused,” or “We want people to be self-directed learners,” is

“If I took a picture or a video of someone being [customer-focused], what would I be filming?”

Many behaviours support retail staff being more customer-focused:

• Greeting customers when then come into the store

• Checking in with customers to see if they need anything

• Offering to get other items for customers

• Calling to find an item at a different store

And so on.

COM-B

A foundational part of the Behaviour Change Wheel is the COM-B model, which stands for capability, opportunity, motivation-behaviour. This outlines the necessary conditions for any behaviour to be enacted.

Once you have behaviours selected, you can analyze them using the COM-B categories (Michie et al., 2011). The next sections look at each one.

NOTE: Each of the COM-B categories I cover in the following sections are used courtesy of S. Michie, L. Atkins, and R. West (The Behaviour Change Wheel: A Guide to Designing Interventions. London: Silverback Publishing, 2014, www.behaviourchangewheel.com).

Capability

Is the person capable of performing the behaviour? Do they know what to do and have the physical capability to do it?

This breaks down into two categories:

Physical capability, which is defined as “physical skill, strength, or stamina.”

Psychological capability, which is defined as “knowledge or psychological skills, to engage in the behaviour.”

Psychological capability can be knowledge or cognitive skills. It can also be the stamina to stay focused on a task.

Opportunity

Opportunity also breaks down into two categories:

Physical opportunity, which is defined as the opportunity afforded by the environment involving time, resources, locations, cues, and physical “affordance(s).”

For example, estimates of handwashing hand hygiene compliance in healthcare settings dramatically improved with the introduction of alcohol-based hand rubs. The improvement was less about persuading healthcare workers to change their behaviour and more about the introduction of an alternative that was quicker and easier to use and could be placed in clinic settings more easily than added plumbing.

Social opportunity, which is defined as the opportunity afforded by interpersonal influences, social cues, and cultural norms that influence the way that we think about things.

Motivation

Motivation is broken down into reflective motivation and automatic motivation.

Reflective motivation, which is processes involving identity, values, and beliefs, as well as goals and planning.

Reflective motivation is motivation that you can talk about and reflect on. It’s the motivation that is related to goals you might set or values you might have.

Automatic motivation, which is automatic processes involving emotions, drives, and habits.

Automatic motivation might be the draggy feeling around finishing your expense report, the excitement that causes you to be a bit inattentive the last hour before you’ll be on vacation for a week, or the reluctance to check a voicemail from a client for reasons you can’t quite explain but later realize is because that particular client only calls when they are unhappy about something.

Using COM-B to Analyze Behaviours

Let’s take a behaviour and consider which COM-B elements might be involved.

EXAMPLE: WORKER SAFETY

The particular behaviour that [is] identified is:

Workers need to identify and log working-at-heights safety hazards.

Sources you should consider investigating include the following:

• Interviewing workers: Talk to an assortment of people in your target audience.

• Observing them doing the behaviour: Watch workers doing the behaviour now.

• Consulting subject matter experts: See how safety experts can enlighten your understanding of the behaviour.

• Reviewing the research literature: Read studies from academic researchers looking at questions around safety behaviours.

The COM-B analysis can be broken down into observations:

I discuss how to match these to solutions in later chapters, but several of the items are blatantly “not a training problem” but are part of the environment or the system, such as difficulty logging problems or access to safety equipment.

Once you have the diagnosis, you can explore which aspects will have implications for your learning design, and you may need to make decisions about which items are in scope or out of scope for your project. A few items that could have implications for learning design are the following:

• The workers need to be able to recognize that hazards could be something to be addressed in training. In particular, the ability to “eyeball” the height is probably something that workers overestimate; it might be really useful to create an opportunity for them to practice and find out just how not-accurate their guesses are.

• Part of the learning experience could be a more visceral or experience-based understanding of the danger of even low-height hazards and could leverage stories about people falling from relatively low heights.

• Workers don’t have a strong sense of proficiency or professional identity around this job skill, so a learning activity could help make that connection for them.

Resources

Devine, Patricia G., Patrick S. Forscher, Anthony J. Austin, and William TL Cox. “Long-Term Reduction in Implicit Race Bias: A Prejudice Habit-Breaking Intervention,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 6 (2012): 1267–1278.

Michie, Susan, Lou Atkins, and Robert West. “The Behaviour Change Wheel.” A Guide to Designing Interventions, 1st ed. (Sutton, UK: Silverback Publishing, 2014). www.behaviourchangewheel.com.

Michie, Susan, Maartje M. Van Stralen, and Robert West. “The Behaviour Change Wheel: A New Method for Characterising and Designing Behaviour Change Interventions.” Implementation Science 6, no. 1 (2011): 1–12.

Public Health England. Achieving Behaviour Change: A Guide for Local Government and Partners, PHE publications gateway number: GW-834, November 2019, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/behaviour-change-guide-for-local-government-and-partners.

Written for OEB Global 2024 by Julie Dirksen.