Ideas

Strategy

Behavioral Strategy

A business goal is an outcome. To reach it, someone has to do something: a customer has to buy, an employee has to adopt a new process, or a partner has to change how they work. Behavioral Strategy starts by making that connection explicit.

I developed Behavioral Strategy around three steps:

1. Start with the goal. Define the outcome you want to achieve.
2. Identify the stakeholder behaviors. Work out whose actions could produce that outcome, and generate several possible routes to it.
3. Select the best match. Compare those behaviors for their potential impact and their fit with the people who would perform them. Then design and test a way to support the behavior you select.

In 17 years of applied behavioral science, I’ve found behavior selection to be the most consequential part of this process. If you choose the wrong behavior, better messaging or stronger incentives may do little to help. Choosing well gives the rest of your work a much better chance of succeeding.

Behavior selection

Behavioral Matching

I developed Behavioral Matching to make the selection step explicit. Several behaviors can serve the same goal, but they can differ greatly in both their likely impact and what they require from people. The task is to find a behavior that fits the goal, the stakeholder, and the circumstances.

Suppose a company wants more customer referrals. It could ask customers to write a public review, send a personal introduction, or share an invitation link. Each action asks for a different amount of effort and social commitment. The easiest action may produce little value; the most valuable may ask too much. Comparing those tradeoffs helps the team choose what to test.

This is why I put behavior matching before persuasion. Before asking how to get people to act, examine whether you’re asking them to do the right thing.

Understanding behavior

The Behavioral State Model

When someone doesn’t do what we expect, it’s tempting to assume they lack motivation. But they may lack the ability, see the situation differently, or face an obstacle in their environment. Those are different problems, and they call for different responses.

I developed the Behavioral State Model to organize that investigation across eight components: personality, perception, emotions, abilities, social status or situation, motivations, the social environment, and the physical environment.

The model helps teams decide what to investigate before choosing an intervention. For example, an employee who wants to use a new tool but lacks access needs a different solution from one who has access but doesn’t trust it. The point is to find and test the specific constraint.

Personality model

The Six Systems

The Six Systems is a personality model I developed that brings cognitive ability into the Big Five framework. It combines openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism with cognition as a sixth, interacting factor.

The Big Five describes important differences in people’s tendencies, but it does not directly measure cognitive ability. Understanding someone’s behavior also requires considering how they reason, learn, and solve problems, especially when the task is complex.

The central idea is that cognition does more than add another score: it helps shape how the other five factors are expressed. Two people with similar personality profiles can approach the same problem differently because their cognitive abilities affect the options they see, the plans they can develop, and the complexity they can handle. The Six Systems brings those interactions into the model to connect personality with the demands of real situations.

Book

Real Change

Writing a book, learning a skill, and building a business require conscious thought. Repetition alone won’t make that work automatic. In Real Change, I distinguish Habits from Practices: deliberate, challenging activities that help you achieve meaningful goals.

The book explains how to create the conditions for those Practices, replace Habits that no longer serve you, and select behaviors that fit your goals and circumstances. Behavior matching is central: choose where to put your effort before trying to become more consistent.

Published research

Behavior Wizard

BJ Fogg and I co-authored Behavior Wizard: A Method for Matching Target Behaviors with Solutions (2010) while I was working in Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab. This was part of my early work helping develop the field of behavior design.

The paper classifies behavior-change goals into 15 types. Getting someone to try something once is a different problem from helping them sustain it or stop doing it. The classification connects these different goals with relevant approaches, giving practitioners a way to choose a method that fits the change they want.

That distinction helped shape my later work on behavior selection: first define the change, then choose how to pursue it.