Conversations in behavioural strategy

Lauren Kelly

Most days, my calendar brimming. On the rare occasion it’s not, I usually take it as a sign: grab the dog, find the hills, and vanish into the countryside. But this time, I tried something different.

A quick invite went out:
Twenty-minute conversations. One-to-one. Open to anyone.
Topic? Behavioural strategy, design, or change.

By the afternoon, every slot had gone.
I woke on Tuesday wondering what I’d done.
I ended it energised.

The calls were sharp, honest, and rooted in real challenges. From retail to banking. From ed-tech to enablement. From early-career pivots to high-stakes strategy.

What stayed with me were the small patterns. The quiet things that shape whether behaviour lands, or slips away.

1. When every rota wipes the slate

One strategist told me about the retail floor. Staff churn every few months. Habits never stick. They’d built a buddy system, short check-ins between stores, but it slid into a checkbox task. Forgotten. Thin.

In high-churn worlds, repetition isn’t enough. People don’t stay long enough to form habits. The system has to carry the weight.

It needs three anchors:

A reason that matters to the staff, not just the business.
A pathway built into daily tools. Clear, visible steps that slot into the workday.
An owner who spans the cycles. Managers, not the passing cast.

And when you measure success, don’t count how many did the task. Ask whether the system delivered the moment, the prompt, the purpose.

2. When knowledge doesn’t turn into action

A learning lead put it plainly: “We train, but nothing changes.”

Their consultants knew the theory of proactive selling. But in the field? No shift. Calls the same. Leads unlogged.

Knowledge alone doesn’t turn the wheel. The gap lies between the cue and the action.

The fix starts here:

Map the four everyday scenarios where the skill should surface.
Pair each with a small “noticing” cue.
Tie the action to fast, visible rewards. A shoutout in chat, a leaderboard nudge, a same-day coffee voucher.

Close the loop. Make recall natural, and rewards immediate.

3. When everything looks fine… until it isn’t

A banking lead worried about duplication. Staff kept asking for external data when internal sets already existed.

The catalogue was clear. Guidance in place. Dashboards looked fine. Costs stable. Uptime solid.
But waste was piling up quietly.

That’s lag-metric blindness. By the time outcomes show red, the behaviour has long settled in.

What’s missing is a behaviour owner. Someone who tracks the small signals:

% of requests that reused internal sources.
% who opened the “Check First” prompt.

Their role is translation:

To Finance, it’s “cost avoidance.”
To IT, “system efficiency.”
To HR, “habit drift.”

Amber signals matter. Otherwise red arrives too late.

4. When the reward misses the moment

Two people. Two angles. Same friction.

For Gen-Z reps, quarterly bonuses were too far away. For parents weighing up a live ed-tech course, the £700 price tag felt like another video bundle.

This is misaligned motivation. Wrong timing, wrong currency.

The fix?

Shorten the loop. Recognition now, not later.
Change the value signal. Gen Z want proof they’re improving, not just cash.
Reframe the offer. “Coaching at home” sits beside trusted tuition. “Online learning” gets stacked against YouTube.

The product didn’t need to change. The framing and timing did.

5. When the label steers the wrong response

That same ed-tech team had a second snag. They sold expert-led coaching… but called it “online learning.”

Buyers heard “videos.” Compared the price to cheap subscriptions. £700 felt outrageous.

It was the wrong mental shelf. The wrong category.

Shift the label and the comparison shifts too. Call it “weekend coaching, from home.” Place it beside tuition, not tech. Ground it in the stories of average families, not just star students.

Anchoring matters. Categories shape value.

6. When the language loses the room

The last call of the day was with someone gearing up to pitch behavioural strategy to execs. They asked the question I hear often:

“How do you make leaders see behaviour as strategy, not soft HR?”

The truth: we often talk in our language, not theirs. We say “behaviour.” They hear “research project.” Or worse: “risk.”

The shift is this: tie behaviour to what leaders can’t ignore. Revenue. Growth. Risk.

Over time I’ve built a stack I carry into every room:

bROI: Behavioural ROI. The return on better behaviour.
BRO: Behavioural Risk Offset. The cost avoided by fixing a behaviour.
BDrift: Behavioural Drift. What happens when you stop reinforcing what’s working.

That’s when behaviour stops sounding soft. It becomes strategy.

And if there’s one thread running through all six stories, it’s this:

Stop pushing more from people. Start building systems that carry behaviour, even when people rotate, forget, or drift.