What is Behaviour Thinking?
A working discipline for seeing, testing and changing the behaviour that products, services, strategies and business models depend on.
What exactly must people do?
What proof do we have that they will?
What must shift so action becomes more likely?
The short answer
Behaviour Thinking is a method for judging and improving work by the behaviour it depends on.
It works on anything with a person inside it. Products, services, strategies, policies, business models.
What behaviour does this depend on?
Where good work fails
Walk across any park and you will find two paths. The paved one, laid by people who planned the park. And the worn line across the grass, made by thousands of feet that had somewhere to be. Planners call these desire paths. They are what happens when a design meets real behaviour, and real behaviour wins.
Every organisation has desire paths. The old spreadsheet doing the actual work. The redesigned service customers quietly avoid. The training everyone enjoyed and nobody applied.
Behaviour is the test
Desirable, feasible and viable are useful questions, and teams have become genuinely skilled at answering them. Behaviour Thinking adds one more: is it behaviourally fit? Can this work survive contact with what people actually do?
The plan may pass the visible tests and still fail at the behavioural one.
Where it came from
Behaviour Thinking was coined in 2014 and built the other way round from most methods: from live work, backwards into principles. It grew through practice rather than publication.
The name
Coined in live project work, where good plans kept failing at the point where someone had to act.
The equipment
Became tools through BehaviourKit: canvases, prompts and methods for working teams.
The classroom
Entered education through courses and university teaching.
The instrument
Now anchored by the Invisible Business Model Canvas for people make decisions early and BehaviourKit for people working on projects to influence behaviour.
Behaviour Thinking and Design Thinking
Design Thinking asks what people need. Behaviour Thinking asks what people must do. They work best side by side. Needs are states. Behaviours are events. The seam is the moment an idea becomes dependent on real action.
| Design Thinking | Behaviour Thinking |
|---|---|
| Starts with needs | Starts with behavioural dependencies |
| Explores what is worth making | Tests what the work relies on |
| Prototypes ideas | Pressure-tests behavioural bets |
| Helps teams create | Helps teams decide and adjust |
Behaviour Thinking and behavioural science
Behavioural science is the evidence base. Behaviour Thinking is the working method built on it. Kept apart, the science fails in two ways: as a library of tricks bolted onto finished work, or as theory with no place to land inside a working week.