Behavioural Change Toolkit · Frameworks

EAST — Easy Attractive Social Timely

You've diagnosed the barrier and need practical tactics fast

From the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team (“the Nudge Unit”). Four principles, and its whole virtue is that a room of non-specialists can use it in twenty minutes. Where COM-B and the Behaviour Change Wheel gives you diagnosis, EAST gives you tactics.

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E — Make it Easy

The most powerful and most neglected. Effort is a far bigger deterrent than people believe.

• Harness defaults. The pre-set option wins, overwhelmingly. If the new process isn’t the default, you have already lost. This is the highest-leverage move in almost every tech rollout.
• Reduce friction. Every extra click, form field, approval or login costs you adoption. Count them. Remove three.
• Simplify the message. One action, stated plainly. “Log the call before you leave the car park,” not a 600-word policy update.

Ask in every design session: “What would we have to do to make the wrong behaviour harder than the right one?”

A — Make it Attractive

• Attract attention. Personalisation, novelty, images, the person’s own name. Generic all-staff emails are wallpaper.
• Design rewards and sanctions for maximum effect. Small, immediate and certain beats large, distant and probable. A same-day thank-you outperforms an annual bonus for habit formation.
• Frame around what they get, not what the organisation gets. “Saves you the Friday report” beats “improves data quality.”

S — Make it Social

The lever most under-used in corporate change, and the cheapest.

• Show that most people perform the desired behaviour. Descriptive norms are potent — “78% of your region logged every call last week”. See Social Norms and Influence.
• Use the power of networks. Peers, not hierarchy. See Champion Network Playbook.
• Encourage commitments to others. A public, specific, written commitment to named colleagues dramatically outperforms a private intention.

T — Make it Timely

• Prompt people when they are most receptive. Moments of disruption — a new role, a team move, a system change, returning from leave — are when habits are already loose. A rollout is itself such a moment: use it, don’t waste it.
• Consider immediate costs and benefits. People heavily discount the future. Bring one benefit forward into week one, even a small one.
• Help people plan their response. Implementation intentions — “when X happens, I will do Y” — are one of the most robust findings in the field. Get people to write the sentence down. It takes 90 seconds and materially raises follow-through.

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The 20-minute EAST sprint

Run this whenever a group is stuck. Time-boxed, four rounds of five minutes.

Round	Prompt	Output
1	“How could we make this so easy it’s almost automatic?”	5+ ideas
2	“What’s in it for the person doing it, right now, this week?”	3+ ideas
3	“Who do they look to? How do we make the right thing visibly normal?”	3+ ideas
4	“What’s the exact moment this behaviour has to happen? What’s already happening then?”	The cue

Then filter with APEASE from COM-B and the Behaviour Change Wheel and log the survivors in Nudge Library.

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The honest limits of EAST

Say these out loud before an exec over-applies it:

1. Nudges have modest effect sizes. They are real but small. A well-designed nudge might move a behaviour a few percentage points — genuinely worth having, and nowhere near enough on its own for a major transformation.
2. A nudge cannot fix a broken design. If the new process is genuinely worse for the user, no amount of clever framing rescues it. Resistance to a bad system is the correct response — see Resistance Decoder.
3. It doesn’t address power, politics or grief. Restructures need Bridges Transition Model, not better emails.
4. Manipulation is noticed. Corporate populations are cynical and well-networked. Anything that feels like a trick costs you trust that you will need later. Nudge in the open.

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Links

→ Nudge Library — 40+ tactics organised by barrier → Social Norms and Influence → Workshop — Design the Nudges (2 hr)

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