BEHAVIOUR
& CHANGE
Human behaviour has been at the centre of my work for more than two decades. I have studied it through behavioural science, organisational transformation, culture and systems, and increasingly through the experiences and relationships that shape our lives outside work.
That work has given me the opportunity to observe behaviour at very different scales, from individual leaders and teams through to workforce and enterprise transformation across organisations with tens of thousands of people. The contexts have varied considerably, but one question has remained remarkably consistent: what is shaping the behaviour we are seeing, and what in the environment around people might be contributing to it?
One of the things I have learned is that behaviour rarely makes sense when we look at the person alone. We have a tendency to locate behaviour inside people and explain what we see through motivation, attitude, capability, personality, values or commitment. All of those things can matter, but they are only part of the picture. I am just as interested in what is happening around the person.
What does their environment make easy or difficult? What gets rewarded or reinforced? What do the systems around them require them to do? What happens when they take a risk, make a mistake, challenge something or behave differently from everyone else?
This is a thread that runs through much of my work. If we want to understand behaviour, we need to understand the person and the conditions in which that behaviour occurs. That matters because so many attempts to change behaviour begin with the assumption that people simply need to know what they should do. If human behaviour were that straightforward, most of us would behave very differently.
What shapes human behaviour?
There is rarely one explanation for why someone behaves the way they do. Our behaviour can be influenced by what we know and believe, what we have experienced before, what feels familiar, what other people are doing, what we think they expect from us, how much effort something requires, what we think will happen afterwards and what options are genuinely available to us.
The environment matters as well. Processes, systems, relationships, physical surroundings and social conditions can make one behaviour easy and another considerably harder. This is why I am wary of explanations that locate a behaviour entirely within the individual. What looks like a motivation problem might be an environment that makes the desired behaviour unnecessarily difficult. What gets described as resistance might be uncertainty, competing priorities, previous experience or a perfectly rational response to the consequences someone expects.
When I am trying to understand a behaviour, one of the questions I find useful is: what around this person is making this behaviour make sense?
It changes the starting point. Instead of immediately deciding what needs to be fixed in the person, we become curious about the conditions in which their behaviour is occurring.
The question I ask before deciding what needs to change
Over the years, I have found that some of the language we use to describe behaviour can lead us towards an intervention before we have properly understood the problem. When I hear these explanations, I tend to ask a different question first.
| When I hear… | I want to understand… |
|---|---|
| People need more training. | What do they already know, and what is preventing that knowledge becoming action? |
| People are resistant to the change. | What still makes the old behaviour make sense? |
| We need to change the culture. | What conditions are producing and reinforcing the behaviours we currently see? |
| Leaders need to communicate more. | Is information actually the constraint? |
| People need to be more accountable. | What would we actually see people doing differently? |
| We’ve implemented the change. | Has the way people actually work changed? |
None of these questions assumes the original diagnosis is wrong. Training may be needed. Communication may be poor. There may genuinely be resistance. The point is to understand the behaviour before deciding what will change it, because otherwise we risk implementing a perfectly reasonable solution to the wrong problem.
Why doesn't knowing what to do mean we'll do it?
We often treat knowledge as though it should automatically produce behaviour. We tell people that exercise is good for them, explain the importance of saving money, teach managers how to have difficult conversations or train employees in a new process. When the behaviour does not follow, it is tempting to conclude that the person lacks motivation, discipline or commitment.
The problem is that information is only one influence on behaviour. I can know exactly what I should do and still avoid doing it because it feels difficult, uncomfortable or inconvenient. The alternative might provide a more immediate reward, my environment might make the old behaviour easier, or the people around me might continue behaving differently. I can genuinely intend to change and still find myself doing exactly what I have always done when I am tired, stressed or distracted.
Knowledge matters, but there is a considerable distance between understanding something and consistently acting on it. Experimental evidence supports that distinction: a meta-analysis of 47 experimental tests found that substantial changes in behavioural intentions produced smaller changes in behaviour.1 That gap between knowing and doing is one of the reasons I find behavioural science so useful. Rather than stopping at whether someone understands what they should do, it gives us a much richer set of questions about what is influencing what they actually do.
Explore this further: Why Knowing What to Do Doesn’t Mean We’ll Do It →
Why can behaviour change be so difficult?
Changing behaviour often means interrupting something that already works in some way. That does not mean the existing behaviour is necessarily good for us. It might simply serve a function, feel familiar, require less effort or produce an outcome that matters in the moment.
A new behaviour has to compete with all of that. It might require more thought because we have not practised it yet, or ask us to tolerate discomfort or uncertainty. It might also require us to behave differently while the people, systems or environment around us continue reinforcing the old way.
This is why I don’t think difficulty changing is necessarily evidence that somebody doesn’t want to change. I would rather understand what the existing behaviour is doing for them, what continues to sustain it and what would need to be different for another behaviour to become a realistic alternative. That gives us somewhere much more useful to begin.
How does our environment influence behaviour?
When I talk about environment, I mean much more than the physical space around us. It includes the systems we use, the choices available to us, the information we can see, the processes we have to follow, what gets rewarded, what other people model, the expectations within our relationships and the formal and informal rules that teach us how things actually work.
Those conditions influence behaviour whether we have deliberately designed them or not.
An organisation might ask people to collaborate while rewarding individual performance. It might introduce a new process while leaving an old workaround that is faster and easier to use. Leaders might tell employees they want them to speak openly, while everybody watches what happens to the first person who challenges a senior decision. In each case, what the organisation says it wants and what the environment encourages people to do are different things.
This is also why I have always been sceptical of organisational culture change that begins with a new set of values and a training program designed to teach people the behaviours that sit underneath them.
“I’m 50. It has taken me 50 years to develop some of my beliefs and behaviours. If you think you’re going to change them in a one-hour training course, as a behavioural scientist, that hurts my feelings.”
There is a serious point underneath that joke. An organisation has considerable influence over the environment in which I work. It can change a process, system or decision right. It can change the information available to me, what gets measured and rewarded, what leaders consistently reinforce and how easy or difficult a particular action is to perform.
If those conditions change, what I repeatedly do may change with them. With repetition in a consistent context, behaviour can become more automatic, although the time this takes varies substantially between people and behaviours.2 When different ways of working become established across enough people, patterns begin to emerge in how work gets done, and over time those collective patterns contribute to what we describe as organisational culture.
So when I think about culture change, I am interested in the behaviours an organisation wants, but I am equally interested in whether the organisation has created the conditions that make those behaviours likely.
The relationship I see between systems, behaviour and culture
SYSTEMS + ORGANISATIONAL ENVIRONMENT
influence what people are required, encouraged and enabled to do
↓
ACTIONS AND EXPERIENCES
are repeated through everyday work
↓
PATTERNS BECOME ESTABLISHED
as ways of working become more familiar and expected
↓
COLLECTIVE PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOUR
influence how work gets done across groups
↓
ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE
both emerges from and begins to reinforce those patterns
This is deliberately shown as a relationship rather than a simple one-way chain. Once established, cultural expectations become part of the environment influencing future behaviour.
What role do habits and effort play in behaviour?
Much of what we do does not involve consciously deciding what to do every time we encounter a familiar situation. We develop routines, respond to cues and repeat things that have worked before. That efficiency is useful because it would be exhausting to reconsider every behaviour every time we performed it.
It also helps explain why an established behaviour can be easier to continue than to change. A new behaviour may require us to notice the moment when our usual response would occur, interrupt it and choose something else. Until the new response becomes familiar, that takes attention and effort. Research on habit formation in everyday life has shown that repeated performance in a consistent context is associated with increasing automaticity, with considerable individual variation in how quickly that occurs.2
This is why I pay attention to friction. If we want a behaviour to happen more often, I want to know how easy we have made it to perform. If we want a behaviour to happen less often, I want to know why it remains the easiest or most obvious option.
Those questions often give us something much more practical to work with than repeatedly reminding somebody what they should be doing.
How do other people influence our behaviour?
Human behaviour is social. We look to other people for information about what is normal, acceptable and expected, particularly when we are uncertain ourselves. Research on social influence and social norms has long documented the role other people play in shaping behaviour.3 As a result, what people around us actually do can be considerably more influential than what we are formally told they should do.
An organisation can publish values about respect, openness or accountability, but employees will pay close attention to what leaders actually do when somebody disagrees with them, makes a mistake or fails to deliver. A team can be told that asking for help is encouraged, but if nobody ever asks for help, doing so can still feel risky.
The same thing happens outside work. Families, friendships and intimate relationships develop patterns around what gets discussed, what gets avoided, who takes responsibility for what and how people respond to one another. Over time, those patterns become part of the environment in which the next interaction takes place.
It is one reason changing an individual behaviour can be difficult when everything surrounding that behaviour remains the same.
Why do organisations mistake communication for behaviour change?
I have seen organisations invest enormous amounts of effort explaining a change and then become frustrated when people continue working in the old way. The assumption is understandable. If people know what is changing, understand why and have been trained in the new way of working, surely the change should follow.
Sometimes it does. There are also plenty of situations where it doesn’t, because communication can create awareness and training can build capability without changing the conditions that produce everyday behaviour.
If systems still support the old process, leaders tolerate workarounds, measures reward different priorities, responsibilities remain unclear or the new way of working requires considerably more effort, continuing with the old behaviour can make complete sense.
This is where organisational transformation and behavioural science intersect for me. Implementing something new and changing how an organisation operates are related, but they are not the same thing. I become much more interested in whether the way people actually work has changed, and whether the organisational environment supports that change when the project team is no longer standing beside it.
One of the questions I tend to ask is: what in the organisation still makes the old behaviour make sense?
That question takes us into process, technology, data, governance, decision rights, leadership, measures, incentives and the informal workarounds people have developed to get their jobs done. It also challenges the assumption that resistance necessarily sits within the employee. There are times when the people labelled resistant are behaving entirely rationally within the system the organisation has given them.
Related Insight: Why Transformation Fails When We Focus on the Change Instead of the Behaviour →
What helps behaviour change stick?
There isn’t one mechanism that makes behaviour change stick because there isn’t one reason behaviours occur in the first place. That is why I think diagnosis matters.
Before deciding what intervention is needed, I want to understand what is currently influencing the behaviour. There might be a genuine knowledge or capability gap. The desired behaviour might be unnecessarily difficult, while the existing system makes another behaviour easier. Social norms might be reinforcing what happens now. People might be uncertain about the consequences of behaving differently, or the existing behaviour might be meeting a need we have failed to recognise.
Once we understand that, the intervention becomes much easier to think about. Information might genuinely be what is missing, but the answer could just as easily involve redesigning an environment, removing friction, changing consequences, providing opportunities to practise, giving better feedback or making a different behaviour visible through what other people do.
There are also occasions when a behaviour that initially seems inexplicable becomes quite logical once we understand the conditions surrounding it. I think that possibility deserves far more attention than it often gets.
How should leaders diagnose a behaviour problem?
I would start by becoming much more precise about the behaviour itself. Saying that people need to be more accountable, collaborative, innovative or adaptable tells us very little about what needs to change. I would rather ask what we would actually see people doing differently if greater accountability or collaboration existed.
From there, I want to understand what happens now. Where and when does the behaviour occur? What tends to happen immediately before it and afterwards? What makes the current behaviour easier? What makes the desired behaviour harder? What are the systems, processes, incentives and people around it reinforcing?
Then there is another question I think leaders need to be prepared to ask: what are we doing that might be helping to create the behaviour we’re trying to change?
That can be uncomfortable because it prevents us from explaining the problem entirely through employee motivation or attitude. It asks us to examine the environment we have created, deliberately or otherwise, and the signals people receive from it.
I also think it is a more hopeful question, because once we can see the conditions contributing to a behaviour, we have more places where we can do something about it.
How I approach a behaviour problem
When I am trying to understand a behaviour somebody wants to change, I don’t begin with the intervention. I begin by trying to understand why the existing behaviour makes sense in the conditions in which it occurs.
1. Define the behaviour
What are people actually doing now, and what would we see them doing differently?
2. Understand the context
When and where does the behaviour occur, and what tends to happen immediately before and afterwards?
3. Understand why the current behaviour makes sense
What makes it easier, safer, more familiar, more rewarding or more useful than the alternative?
4. Examine the environment around it
What are the systems, processes, information, leadership, incentives, social expectations or other conditions reinforcing?
5. Change what is shaping the behaviour
What can we change in those conditions that makes the desired behaviour more possible?
6. Observe what actually changes
Did behaviour change, or did we simply implement an intervention?
This isn’t intended to be a new theory of behaviour. It is the practical sequence of questions I have learned to work through before deciding what kind of intervention makes sense. Depending on the problem, the answers may take me into established behavioural science, organisational systems, leadership, process design, capability, social dynamics or several of those things at once.
Explore Behaviour & Change
What behavioural science can teach us about the gap between knowing and doing.
Knowing what we should do is very different from actually doing it. This Insight explores why information alone so often fails to change behaviour and what we can learn by looking beyond knowledge to the conditions surrounding the behaviour.
Why implementing something new and changing the way people work are not the same thing.
Organisations can successfully implement new systems, structures and processes without fundamentally changing how people work. This Insight explores what happens when we use behaviour, rather than implementation alone, as one of the ways we judge whether transformation has actually occurred.
Behavioural science in practice
My interest in behavioural science has always been applied. I want to know what happens when we take what we understand about human behaviour and use it to make sense of real problems: why organisational transformations stall, why people repeat patterns they genuinely want to change, why environments make some behaviours easier than others, and why our intentions and actions do not always line up.
Across more than two decades of organisational transformation work, I have seen the limitations of designing change around what we think people should do without spending enough time understanding what actually shapes what they do. That experience has included enterprise organisational change, workforce and cultural transformation, behavioural reform and the design of systems and ways of working in large, complex organisations, so my interest in behavioural science has always been as much about application as explanation.
Increasingly, I find myself taking the same curiosity beyond organisations and into my writing about relationships, decisions, identity and the experiences that shape us.
Those contexts are different, and I don’t assume the answers in one automatically apply to another. The question I keep finding useful, however, is remarkably similar: what is shaping the behaviour we see?
Understanding that does not guarantee that we can change it, nor does it mean every constraint sits within our control. It does give us a much better place from which to understand what might be possible.
Evidence and further reading
- Webb, T. L. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 249–268. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.132.2.249.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 998–1009.
- Cialdini, R. B. & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621.
- Legros, S. & Cislaghi, B. (2020). Mapping the Social-Norms Literature: An Overview of Reviews. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 62–80.
These sources are included to support the established behavioural-science concepts discussed on this page. The interpretations and applied questions throughout the page reflect how I use those ideas in practice.
About Dr Liz Wilson
Dr Liz Wilson is a behavioural scientist, organisational transformation expert, author and keynote speaker. Her work explores how behaviour, systems, environments and lived experience shape what becomes possible for people and organisations.