Behavioural Change Toolkit

A working toolkit for landing behaviour change in an organisation — built for the person who has to advise senior leaders, not just hold the plan.

It’s designed for the situation most organisations are actually in: a new system, a new way of working, and a culture shift, all at once. These aren’t three programmes. They’re one behaviour problem wearing three hats. The system fails if nobody uses it properly. The process fails if people route around it. The culture never shifts if the first two contradict it.

The one idea this is built on

Stop asking “how do we get buy-in?” Start asking “who needs to do what differently, on Tuesday morning, and what’s stopping them?”

Buy-in is an attitude — slow, invisible, hard to move. Behaviour is observable, specific and changeable, and attitudes tend to follow behaviour rather than precede it. Every tool here forces the conversation down to the level of a named person doing a named thing.

Start with your situation

If you are… Go to
Right at the beginning, nothing decided Behavioural Diagnosis Canvas
Being asked “what’s the plan?” on Friday Change on a Page
Watching a sponsor drift or go quiet Sponsor Briefing Pack
Hitting resistance you don’t understand Resistance Decoder
Told to “do some comms” as the solution Myths and Traps
Ready to design actual interventions Intervention Design Worksheet
Post-go-live and adoption is sliding Drift Check — 30/60/90
Needing to tell a leader something they won’t like Challenging Upward

The five moves, in order

flowchart LR A[1. Diagnose] --> B[2. Target] B --> C[3. Design] C --> D[4. Deliver] D --> E[5. Sustain] click A "/behavioural-change/behavioural-diagnosis-canvas/" "Behavioural Diagnosis Canvas" click B "/behavioural-change/target-behaviour-definition/" "Target Behaviour Definition" click C "/behavioural-change/intervention-design-worksheet/" "Intervention Design Worksheet" click D "/behavioural-change/pilot-design-and-experiment-card/" "Pilot Design and Experiment Card" click E "/behavioural-change/embedding-and-reinforcement/" "Embedding and Reinforcement" classDef blue fill:#108BB9,stroke:none,color:#fff class A,B,C,D,E blue

Each step links to the tool that starts it.

Move What it means Start with
1. Diagnose What behaviour, by whom, and what’s actually blocking it? Behavioural Diagnosis Canvas
2. Target Pick the vital few behaviours. Reject the rest out loud. Target Behaviour Definition
3. Design Match interventions to the real barrier, not the assumed one. Intervention Design Worksheet
4. Deliver Run it small, learn, then scale. Managers do the heavy lifting. Pilot Design and Experiment Card
5. Sustain Assume drift. Design for the moment attention leaves. Embedding and Reinforcement

Most failed change skips 1 and 3, and does a great deal of 4.

Download

The whole toolkit is also an Obsidian vault — 47 cross-linked notes, templates included. Unzip into any vault folder.

Every tool

Start Here

Orientation, a decision tree, and a default running order.

Frameworks

The models — and a note on when each one is the wrong tool.

Diagnose

Find out what’s actually going on before you design anything.

Plan

Turn a diagnosis into designed interventions.

Deliver

Run it, including facilitation run-sheets.

Sustain

Stop it sliding back.

Advising Senior Leaders

Sponsorship, executive failure modes, and challenging upward.

Templates

Fill-in templates for tracking behaviours, stakeholders and experiments.

Reference

Glossary and sources.

Before you brief anyone senior

The “70% of change programmes fail” statistic has no reliable empirical basis and you shouldn’t repeat it. See Myths and Traps in Change Management.

Content regularly reviewed