Think small to reach big
All of us – from prime ministers, to parents, to public servants – often find ourselves in situations in which we are trying to help someone achieve something. It may be our friends and colleagues, our kids or our clients. Sometimes it’s ourselves.
It’s a curious and wonderful thing about the human condition that we are often a mystery to ourselves. We really do intend to live more healthily, to not get irritable with those we love and to achieve the goals that we set for ourselves. But the world is full of temptations, distractions and other pressures. Furthermore, our heads and our lives are already full of well-worn pathways and habits. As soon as our minds are distracted, as they inevitably will be, we find ourselves back on a path we had meant to leave, our alternative goal receding into the distance.
The Behavioural Insights Team, or Nudge Unit as many soon called it, was established by the UK government in 2010. Its soft motto was formed by the words in the Coalition Agreement that brought it into being: ‘Shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves.’1
Whatever you think of the success or failure of that particular project, and the role of the Behavioural Insights Team within it,2 it is hard to disagree with the basic idea that, in principle, it’s good to ‘encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves’. As parents, friends and colleagues, we do it all the time. The question is, could we do it better? In particular, could we use the insights from the last fifty years of behavioural science to arm ourselves, and those around us, with a better set of techniques and skills to follow through on choices made, and achieve the things we want to?
I think the answer is ‘yes’ – and this is exactly what this book sets out to do. I also think that putting these tools into the hands of everyone is important. I have always felt strongly that the work of the Behavioural Insights Team, and psychology more generally, should be open. This is not just in the interests of institutional transparency, but because this is a body of knowledge that should be ‘democratized’, or open to all.
Behavioural scaffolding
Building new skills and habits, or achieving our (behavioural) goals in life, involves very much the same art and logic that is required for building a structure. From a simple arch to the Statue of Liberty, building structures requires much planning and careful construction. When it’s all complete it’s easy to forget the delicate stages and phases it went through to get there.
If any structure is to survive, be it behavioural or physical, it needs strong foundations, and to be wisely placed, to take the weight and stresses it will be subject to. As you start to build, its cement and structure will be weak. To succeed, you will need scaffolding to support its initially delicate joints and links. You will need to keep on building the scaffolding too, protecting your structure from the wind and rain as you go. But do it right, and the time will come when the scaffolding and covers can be dismantled. Your building will stand tall and strong on its own, serving its purpose, whatever that may be.
In this book, Owain and Rory have taken the lessons of the wider psychological literature, and of the Behavioural Insights Team itself, and turned them into the steel poles and joints that you will need to build ‘behavioural scaffolding’ of your own. Just like steel scaffolding, it takes a certain skill and plan to put it together. Look at scaffolding when you pass it next and admire the techniques used to make it strong enough to support the mightiest of structures. It is braced and connected with a quiet beauty and certainly not randomly scrambled together. This book seeks to give you those same skills, as well as the components you need for your project.
One of things I hope you’ll find as you read Think Small is not just that you’ll succeed in some goal that is important to you – or someone you are trying to help – but also that you will acquire a set of skills that you will subsequently find helpful in many areas of your life. This is certainly what the psychological literature suggests.3
It’s sometimes remarked that our kids don’t come with manuals – neither do we. It’s a part of the human condition that our minds and behaviours are complex and multifaceted. Our ‘instincts’ only take us so far in trying to figure out what drives what we do, how best to shape it, or how our best-made plans can be blown off course by forces and habits within ourselves as much as around us. Hopefully this book will help you to succeed in something that is important to you, or someone close to you.
I also hope it will help the many people in public services and other professions whose job it is to help others achieve their goals. Teachers, doctors, social workers – you are the army of good-natured ‘nudgers’ whose skills and hard work help the rest of us learn more and live better. If this book, and the research that stands behind it, can help you to do your work even a little better, then it is among the most important things the Behavioural Insights Team has yet done.
Good luck – nudge well and wisely!
David Halpern
Chief Executive, Behavioural Insights Team