How Hidden Obstacles Block Change — and What to Do About It
Researching behavior change and embracing human-centered design can make philanthropy more effective
A Chicago furniture company targeted millennials with fully customizable sofas and got a wildly enthusiastic response: Shoppers spent hours creating their ideal pieces of furniture. The company anticipated a flood of orders. But then came a puzzling development: Many of these potential customers didn’t buy.
As NPR’s “Hidden Brain” podcast tells the story, the C-suite was mystified. Did they need to reduce prices? Invest more in refining the customer experience? Add higher-quality fabrics and materials? They brought in an analyst and discovered an unexpected problem: Customers didn’t know how to get rid of the sofa they already had. As soon as the company began offering haul-away service for old sofas, its cart-abandonment problem disappeared.
This story struck me because the philanthropic sector frequently faces the same challenge: hidden obstacles that are blocking key behavior changes.
Organizations of all kinds often aim to change people’s behavior via incentives or consequences instead of by searching out and removing sources of friction. As a result, traditional grantmaking processes and nonprofit strategies sometimes fail to get the results we want because we don’t understand the motivations of the people we’re trying to engage well enough — that is, we don’t see the hidden obstacles. Yet understanding what is holding back success is a necessary precondition to meaningful behavior change. To accelerate progress on addressing big problems, we need to identify the barriers to behavior change before launching or funding a program and committing to a theory of change.
What is the problem?
In pursuing the outcomes they seek, foundations, governments and NGOs often rely on lessons learned from programmatic reports or interventions that worked in similar circumstances. But these approaches may fail to address factors that are preventing behavior change in a particular community or situation.
Take, for example, a situation in which high rates of household water consumption were depleting local water supplies in Belén, Costa Rica. The municipal government raised prices significantly, believing the natural response from residents would be to use less water. But usage barely budged. Baffled, the government funded behavior change research. The researchers found that residents believed water should be conserved but didn’t think their own water use was excessive and didn’t know how much water they were using. The solution was to send residents postcards showing their water use compared with their neighbors’ use. The hidden obstacle was lack of knowledge, not high prices.
The challenges of inspiring behavior change get even trickier with efforts to address systemic issues. Initiatives that succeed initially may stall later on because they introduce new, hidden obstacles to change. For example, research on using small-bore steps — “nudges” — to reduce carbon emissions found that while nudges may result in small improvements, they ultimately decrease support for higher-impact solutions, like a carbon tax, by leading people to believe there’s a quick and easy fix.
Adopting and measuring human-centered design
Human behavior is well researched, but the question of how to create permanent behavior change for specific impacts is understudied. Funders tend to favor incentives to generate behavior change, an approach that may work temporarily but often results in the unwanted behavior resuming when incentives stop. The way to figure out which methods of changing behavior will have staying power is to use a human-centered design approach, which takes the perspectives, habits and needs of the people who need to act — the end users — into account when designing products or solutions.
The Multiplier project Root Solutions recently published a book on this topic, Making Shift Happen: Designing for Successful Environmental Behavior Change, which brought the need for human-centered design into focus for me. This book illuminates the idea that many programmatic initiatives build assumptions about end users’ needs into their design. The program design typically relies on a theory of change, but the invisible nature of our assumptions and biases means nonprofits and funders often fail to consider that their theory of change could be wrong.
Foundations want to fund condition change — initiatives that can move us from where we are today to a better future state. Getting there requires a theory built on the hierarchy of change, with behavior change near the top. And behavior change is where initiatives tend to stall, in part because the theory of change doesn’t identify research-validated ways to make it happen.
As a small-scale example, when I co-ran an organization called Animal Balance, we were working to encourage people in island communities to walk their pets on leashes. When we arrived to conduct our first leash training class in the Galápagos Islands, we found a bunch of dogs tied to trees and no people. The people thought the training was for the dogs, not for the owners. This illuminated our assumption that pet owners are responsible for training pets to act in certain ways, which was not the assumption of the pet owners in the culture in which we were working. It took a specialized education campaign to convey to our audience that the training was for pet owners, and then we were able to achieve some success.
A human-centered design approach can reveal assumptions and biases — like ours about pet owners — that could substantially affect a program’s outcome. Ideally those setting up and funding programs will conduct behavior change studies prior to creating theories of change. Building this new dimension into evidence-based grantmaking should lead to more effective program design as well as make program evaluation easier and more accurate by defining success metrics at the outset.
The social sector is starting to take action
Funders are starting to see the need to account for behavior change dynamics in theories of change. That recognition has sparked research on systematic approaches to designing behavior-savvy programs as well as grants for projects incorporating human-centered design.
Wellcome (formerly the Wellcome Trust), for example, is funding the Human Behaviour-Change Project, which is using artificial intelligence to search publication databases for reports on behavioral interventions, analyze the findings and draw out lessons about behavior change. The goal is to provide answers to the questions “What intervention(s) work? Compared with what? How well? With what exposure? With what behaviors? For how long, for whom, in what settings and why?”
Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded research that produced the CUBES framework. This toolkit is intended to help programs across sectors streamline the process of conceptualizing, designing and optimizing behavioral interventions.
In the field, The Atlantic Philanthropies funded research that identified a hidden obstacle to road safety in Vietnam: Motorcyclists resisted wearing helmets because they were hot and uncomfortable. Atlantic then funded a project to design a lighter, more comfortable helmet for tropical climates. Another example is the Savings and Fertilizer Initiative in Kenya, which found that farmers’ underuse of fertilizer was due more to timing than to price — farmers often weren’t motivated to buy fertilizers at harvest times, which is when they had the cash on hand. This revelation led SAFI to provide ways to save harvest income for future purchases, which helped increase fertilizer use.
Condition change requires changed behaviors
Funders that support grassroots movements and other potentially high-impact initiatives are seeking condition change, but achieving that goal likely requires behavioral change on multiple levels. That’s why investing in behavior change research and human-centered design is essential.
There are many ways to support evidence-based behavior change. Here are a few that could greatly improve philanthropy’s effectiveness:
Design with behavior change in mind. Larger NGOs and foundations can address hidden obstacles and achieve goals more reliably by revamping their process to investigate barriers to behavior change before designing programs.
Give grassroots groups the tools to apply their knowledge. Grassroots movements may already have key insights into what makes people in their communities do what they do, but many don’t have the capacity or the right expertise to fully integrate behavior change strategies into their work. Funders can help by hiring in-house teams of behavioral scientists to work alongside grantees on program designs. That would help them apply their cultural knowledge and uncover obstacles to behavior change that are hidden even to them.
Collaborate on behavior change design and research. One of the quickest paths to greater success with social change initiatives might be a funder collaborative focused on behavior change. That collaborative effort could identify research gaps, fund behavior change studies, and share results and case studies widely throughout the social sector. With a diverse group of collaborators, the effort could incorporate a range of perspectives and issue areas with the aim of helping all kinds of nonprofits break through the behavior change barrier.
As “Hidden Brain” host Shankar Vedantam put it, “Most organizations focus on the things that can move them forward instead of the things that hold them back, and think about them in terms of carrots and sticks. Maybe it’s neither a carrot nor a stick.”
The only way to know is to do the research.
