Conversations in behavioural strategy

Lauren Kelly

It’s not often I have a completely free day in the calendar. And usually, I take that as a sign to disappear into the countryside, dog in tow. But this time, I tried something different.

I put out a quick invite:
20-minute 1:1s, open to anyone. Topic? Anything around behavioural strategy, design, or change.

Within a couple of hours, every slot was gone. So I started the Tuesday wondering what I’d got myself into. I ended it genuinely energised. The conversations were smart, honest, and refreshingly focused on real behavioural challenges.

People showed up with sticky questions. From retail ops to banking, ed-tech to enablement, early-career pivots to high-stakes strategy.

So what stuck with me?

Here are things I noticed that quietly shape whether behaviour lands… or doesn’t.

1. When every rota wipes the slate

A strategist / UX designer working within the retail space asked how to drive consistent behaviour on the shop floor when staff churn every few months.

They’d built a “buddy system" between stores. Like a short check-in ritual meant to reduce risk and build shared knowledge. But it didn’t stick.

Staff forgot it. When they did use it, the conversations weren’t that deep or have much value. Usage was mixed. It became a checkbox task, not a behavioural anchor.

In high-churn environments, repetition alone won’t form habits. People don’t stay long enough. So the system has to do the heavy lifting.

Behaviour here needs three things to survive:

A clear and well communicated reason why it matters to the people on the ground. Not just to the business.
A clear pathway into the product. The steps that lead up to the UX within the tablet app. Define and make it clear how and when it fits into what people do day to day.
A clear owner who spans the cycles. Let managers trigger and model it, not frontline staff rotating in and out.

And when you measure success, don’t just track who used it.Track whether the system delivered the moment, the prompt, and the purpose.

Less forcing more behaviour from individuals. More designing a system stable enough to survive a rotating cast.

2. When knowledge doesn’t turn into action

One L&D lead said it outright: “I know behaviour’s important, but I’m not sure how to bring it into our training.”

They were working with Gen-Z property consultants. With training programmes on proactive selling and mindset development. But the field data didn’t shift. No change in lead logging, no difference in how calls were handled.

Knowing isn’t the same as doing.

The opportunity? Close the cue–action gap.

Start by mapping the four most common scenarios where the new skill should show up. Work with them to development cue noticing plans and the next steps they should follow.

Pair each one with a cue that aids recall just before the moment. Then pair the action with fast micro-rewards. It could be a call-out in the group chat, a visual leaderboard shift, a coffee voucher that lands the same day.

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

A service lead in banking shared a pattern that had been bothering them: Staff kept requesting external data, even though internal datasets already existed. The team had a catalogue, a process, clear guidance... but still, duplication crept in.

The dashboards didn’t show it. Uptime was solid. Service costs looked fine. But the waste was building, quietly.

This is lead-metric blindness.

Lag metrics like cost and uptime only show what’s already happened. Usually months down the line. By the time you spot the problem, the behaviour that caused it is already embedded.

What’s needed is a behaviour owner. Someone whose role is to track and respond to early behavioural signals, not just the final outcomes.

Their job?

Watch the levers: prompts, defaults, nudges, UI choices. Track early indicators: like “% of requests that reused internal sources” or “% of staff who opened the ‘Check First’ prompt.”Translate the data. To Finance, it’s “cost avoidance.” To IT, “system efficiency.” To HR, “habit drift.”

Because without someone watching for amber, red comes too late.

4. When the reward misses the moment

Two people shared the same friction from opposite angles.

In both cases, behaviour stalled. Reps didn’t stretch. Parents didn’t buy.

Why? Because the reward didn’t feel right, or didn’t arrive fast enough to matter.

For Gen Z, bonuses tied to quarterly targets felt too distant. For parents, £700 for a live course felt steep… because they saw it as just another video bundle.

This is misaligned motivation: both in timing and currency.

What could help:

Shorten the loop. Recognise action in the moment.
Change the value signal. Gen-Z didn’t want “more money.” They wanted to know they were improving.
Reframe the offer. “Home-based coaching” sits beside trusted tuition. “Online learning” gets compared to 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 faced a second challenge: no one knew what their product really was.

They were selling a structured, live, expert-led programme… but kept calling it “online learning.”

The market heard “videos.” Not “coaching.”

So the comparison was off.

Because it sat in the wrong category, buyers applied the wrong comparisons. €700 felt expensive next to the €10 video learning of a competitor. But it made sense next to private tuition.

This is a category anchoring error. Put the product in the wrong mental shelf, and you invite the wrong expectations.

Behaviourally, the fix is simple: Call it what it feels like in the user’s world: “Weekend coaching, from home.” Anchor it to what’s already familiar: tuition, not tech. Use local stories from average families. Not just star students.

6. When the language loses the room

The final call was with someone preparing to pitch behavioural design/strategy to execs. You could call them a competitor... but as a small community our strength comes from swapping notes. So... how do you pitch behaviour to execs so that they listen and buy-in?

A tough one.

"Behaviour" can sound soft. Or like research. Or like R&D (super risky in this current market!) Or like something that sits in HR. Definitely not the backbone of strategy and business.

Usually it comes down to this:

We talk about the things WE care about. And not about the things our audience value.

We need to speak the stakeholder’s language. Talk about what the behaviour drives in hard to ignore metrics.

Which I gotta tell you, has taken me many years to figure out and cement the behavioural value stack I take into meetings.

So, what are they:

Behavioural ROI (bROI): The return on better behaviour.
Behavioural Risk Offset (BRO): The cost of not addressing a specific behaviour, and the savings by averting the risk.
Behavioural Drift (BDrift): What happens when you stop reinforcing what's working and the behavioural systems that underpin them.

This is what turns behaviour into strategy. Into something that aligns with revenue, growth, risk... business value.

And if there is one thing to takeaway:

Look less at the behaviour. More at the systems creating the behaviour.