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blood clot prevention protocols turned a 50 per cent disparity in
the treatment of men versus women into an even playing field.
By simply externalizing personal judgment, treatment became
far more equitable.
Streamlining processes to remove even small points of fric-
tion has also proven fruitful, especially with low-frequency, low-
motivation tasks like filing taxes. The UK-based Behavioural
Insights Team nudged better tax filing behaviour by sending a
form directly to participants rather than sending them to a web-
site to download the form. Removing this one click increased use
of the form from 19 to 23 per cent, at virtually no cost.
CREATE NEW SOLUTIONS. The insurance product Lemonade flips
traditional business models and customer experience on their
head by realigning incentives for action. With flat fees, quick
payouts and unused premiums going to the social cause of one’s
choice, solutions like this suggest an exciting direction for prod-
ucts and services that incorporate behavioural insights into their
design, rather than creating interventions to address strictly
behavioural challenges. Other familiar examples include Uber
and Amazon Prime’s One-Click. These leverage behavioural
insights within broader offerings by reducing user uncertainty,
providing immediate feedback and simplifying actions to make
their services almost too easy to not use.
In a public-policy vein, recent experiments in universal basic
income provide an illustration of the potential for new systems-
level solutions that could have profound effects on health and
well-being, financial stability, entrepreneurship and even social
inclusion. As our colleagues Johnny Hugill and Matija Franklin
have noted, embracing a universal basic income could dimin-
ish the social stigma that makes people less likely to use other
income-benefits programs.
Putting the Model to Use
Expanding the terrain of behavioural problems to solve is not
the same as advocating to only swing for the fences. On the con-
trary, its intent is to broaden our view of what is possible rather
than declaring what is in or out, good or bad. So-called ‘small’
interventions can be enormously powerful in their own right,
and in some cases a cluster of individual efforts can create the
conditions for large-scale impact and long-term change.
In fact, Nagji and Tuff ’s article suggested that only 10 per
cent of innovation efforts should aim for transformation, com-
pared to a whopping 70 per cent in the core and 20 per cent to-
wards adjacent efforts in between. Nudges that focus on inputs
and target individual behaviours, like process improvement
efforts, are and will continue to be critically important tools in
public policy. Our argument is that, in the same way that many
individual adjustments to the hotel experience would never
have yielded Airbnb, expanding room for behavioural design
to inform new policy may yield other benefits, and a focus on
aggregated small wins may be insufficient if it is the only model
we rely on.
A recently published book [Detonate: Why - And How - Cor-
porations Must Blow Up Best Practices (And Bring a Beginner’s
Mind) To Survive] co-authored by Geoff Tuff, bolsters the case
for stretching beyond ‘core’ behavioural interventions. His up-
dated model parallels the structure of our proposed bottom-left
and top-right triangles, labelling them ‘known/knowable op-
portunities’ and ‘unknown/unknowable opportunities’, respec-
tively. The former is the terrain of ‘identified challenges’, which
can be addressed with known insights and tools. This is largely
where behavioural science has played so far. The latter, by con-
trast, requires new approaches to identify those challenges, let
alone solve for them and gauge the success of solutions — ex-
actly the conditions that play to the strengths of design.
It’s also worth noting that the 70-20-10 ratio offered in Nagji
and Tuff ’s initial model has been updated to 50-30-20 today,
with the recommendation of using 50 per cent of innovation bud-
gets for core improvements, 30 per cent towards adjacent areas,
and 20 per cent towards transformation. While the worlds of in-
novation and behavioural design are not precisely equivalent, we
can’t help but agree that it’s valuable to look beyond traditional
problem-solving boundaries when it comes to behaviour.In closing
Framing the power of behavioural insights within a design-led
perspective amplifies our ability to navigate complexity and un-
certainty and create effective and adaptive public policy at scale
with the future, as well as the present, in mind. Of course, theBehavioural science is uniquely qualified to shine
a light on designing for the future.