Behavioural Change Toolkit · Plan

Nudge Library

Ready tactics, organised by the barrier they address. Find your barrier, pick two or three, filter with APEASE.

⚠️ Nudges have real but modest effect sizes and cannot rescue a badly designed process. Use them to amplify a sound design, not to compensate for a broken one. See the limits section in EAST — Easy Attractive Social Timely.

🔧 Physical Opportunity — “there isn’t time / access / kit”

The highest-yield category, and the most ignored.

1. Make it the default. Pre-selected option, pre-populated form, auto-created record. The strongest single lever available.
2. Count the clicks and remove three. Literally count. Every step costs adoption.
3. Cut the form. Halve the fields. Then ask which of the remainder anyone ever reads.
4. Auto-populate from what’s already known — calendar, previous entry, the record it’s linked to.
5. Switch off the old route. With a hard date and a named owner. Parallel running kills adoption.
6. Move the task to where the person already is — phone rather than desktop, in the meeting rather than after it.
7. Take something away. Remove a report, a meeting, an approval. Publicise what you removed — it buys enormous goodwill.
8. Protect the time explicitly. A calendar block that a manager defends is worth more than an instruction.
9. Pre-fill the hard part and let people edit rather than create.
10. Put the tool in the workflow, not in a separate system. Every context switch loses people.

📚 Capability — “I don’t know how”

1. One-page job aid at the point of use — not a 40-page manual, not a portal.
2. Two-minute video showing one task, filmed on a phone by a peer, not a studio.
3. Floorwalkers in the first two weeks. Physically present, not a ticket queue.
4. Practice on real work, not sample data. Transfer from training environments is poor.
5. A named human to ask. Named, not a mailbox. “Ask Priya” beats a helpdesk.
6. Checklist for the complex path, so nobody has to hold it in their head.
7. Teach one thing at a time, in the week it’s needed — not everything in one session six weeks early.
8. Peer teaching. People learn faster from someone one step ahead than from an expert.

👥 Social Opportunity — “nobody round here does this”

1. Publish descriptive norms — “78% of your team did this last week.” Only when the number is good; otherwise use a trend. See Social Norms and Influence.
2. Local comparison — team vs site average, not individual vs company.
3. Name real people doing it well, with what they got out of it.
4. Public specific commitment made to named colleagues, with a date.
5. Visible champions distributed across teams, not centralised. Champion Network Playbook
6. Leaders visibly doing it — the single strongest social signal available. Leader Behaviour Contract
7. Make the work visible — shared boards, open queues. Invisible behaviour can’t become normal.
8. Peer review as routine, so the behaviour has an audience.
9. Stop accepting the old format. A manager who accepts the old spreadsheet “just this once” undoes weeks of work.

🧠 Reflective Motivation — “I don’t think it’s worth it”

1. Reframe from organisational benefit to personal benefit. “Saves you the Friday reconciliation” beats “improves data quality.”
2. Show the real cost of the current way in hours, in their own numbers, collected by them.
3. Involve them in design. The most reliable commitment generator there is.
4. One vivid story beats a deck of charts. A recording, a customer complaint, a real Tuesday.
5. Answer “why now” honestly. If the honest answer is a regulatory deadline, say so. Invented urgency is detected.
6. Concede the downside first. “This adds four minutes per call” said by you is credibility; said by them, it’s an ambush.
7. Let them articulate the case in their own words. Two minutes of them explaining it beats an hour of being told.

⚡ Automatic Motivation — “I do the old thing without thinking”

1. Attach to an existing cue. End of a call, closing a ticket, start of stand-up. Never invent a new cue. Habit Loop and Behavioural Drift
2. Implementation intentions — get people to write “when X, I will Y.” 90 seconds, robust effect.
3. Prompt at the exact moment, in the tool, not by email the day before.
4. Remove the old cue. If the old spreadsheet still opens on login, the old habit still fires.
5. Immediate feedback. Something visibly happens within seconds of doing it right.
6. Same-day recognition beats quarterly awards for habit formation. Small, fast, certain.
7. Make the first instance trivially small. “Just log one call this week.”
8. Streaks and visible continuity — but only where they won’t create dishonest reporting.

🕐 Timing

1. Use the disruption window. A rollout, a move, a new role, a return from leave — habits are already loose. Land the new behaviour then.
2. Bring one benefit into week one, however small. Future benefits are heavily discounted.
3. Plan a deliberate week-8 re-intervention. That’s where drift bites and where everyone has stopped paying attention.

Choosing

Pick one from the barrier category you diagnosed, plus one environmental (make it easy), plus one social. Three well-chosen and well-executed beats twelve announced.

→ Intervention Design Worksheet · Workshop — Design the Nudges (2 hr) · T — Intervention Note

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