leasimpson

Greengaged

In I gave a talk on September 19, 2008 at 2:48 pm

On Tuesday I was delighted to be invited to speak at The Design Council as part of Greengaged. Joining me in our session were More AssociatesLuke Nicholson, IDEO London’s Andrea Koerselman and Fiona Bennie from Forum for the Future

Greengaged is the sustainability hub of the London Design Festival, organised by fellow London United members Sophie Thomas and Juhi Shareef.

We were invited to talk about Behaviour Change and thought it would be nice to share the contents of my presentation with you all.

The title of my presentation was “Behaviour change is easy and I can prove it”. My evidence was a film clip that my friend Sam posted to Facebook a couple of weeks ago. It’s really fun, but makes a great point.

I wanted to share the three principles of behaviour change that we use every day with Unchained:

Behaviour change requires behaviour - social proof is the easiest and fastest way to get ideas and behaviour to spread. The behaviour of the people around us is far more convincing than advertising will ever be. Do you think the dude in the video would have changed his position if there was a poster inviting him to do so? Yeah, me neither.

Behaviour and motivation are two different things and one of them is easier to change – if you understand, respect and work with other people’s motivations it’ll be easier to change their behaviours. Getting people to do as you want is much easier than getting them to think what you want. Even if you’re right.

Desire is all very good and well, but it’s not enough - how many people do you know that want to be famous? Or thin? Are they? Well, same goes for other kinds of behaviour change. If you want the change you have to make it easy for them.

If you’d like to know more about the speech or the lovely people that spoke in the session with me then get in touch.
I wanted to share the three principles of behaviour change that we use every day with Unchained:

  1. Love your comment about the difference between behaviour and motivation. Very wise! And the new blog s very smart too…

  2. [...] points all reminded me of the talk I gave at Greengaged, especially the point about changing behaviour and not motivation. Too many greens want everyone in [...]