Abstract
Many challenges emerging from the current COVID-19 pandemic are behavioral in nature, which has prompted the field of behavioral design to propose solutions for issues as wide-ranging as hand-washing, wearing masks, and the adoption of new norms for staying and working from home. On the whole, however, these behavioral interventions have been somewhat underwhelming, exposing an inherent brittleness that comes from three common “errors of projection” in current behavioral design methodology: projected stability, which insufficiently plans for the fact that interventions often function within inherently unstable systems; projected persistence, which neglects to account for changes in those system conditions over time; and projected value, which assumes that definitions of success are universally shared across contexts. Borrowing from strategic design and futures thinking, a new proposed strategic foresight model—behavioral planning—can help practitioners better address these system-level, anticipatory, and contextual weaknesses by more systematically identifying potential forces that may impact behavioral interventions before they have been implemented. Behavioral planning will help designers more effectively elicit signals indicating the emergence of forces that may deform behavioral interventions in emergent COVID-19 contexts, and promote “roughly right” directional solutions at earlier stages in solution development to better address system shifts.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic is a natural fit for behavioral design, a field informed by psychology and economics that focuses on redirecting “irrational” behaviors through redesigned choice architecture and nudges
Traditional behavioral approaches may inadvertently produce solutions that initially appear robust, but become fragile as conditions change or individuals adapt to new norms (Smith et al, 2009)
We suggest that a more generative, foresight-driven behavioral approach borrowing from strategic design—behavioral planning—can improve behavioral solutions to COVID-19 and complex crises by solving for three common “errors of projection” that currently contribute to behavioral solution brittleness: projected stability, which fails to recognize that interventions function within inherently unstable systems; projected persistence, which neglects to account for changes in system conditions over time; and projected value, which assumes that definitions of success are universally shared across contexts
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic is a natural fit for behavioral design, a field informed by psychology and economics that focuses on redirecting “irrational” behaviors through redesigned choice architecture and nudges. Even when interventions achieve shortterm success they may quickly become brittle when conditions change, coming at the expense of greater resilience and longer-term impact (Sanders et al, 2018) and remaining perpetually reactive rather than proactive in their positioning and tactical rather than strategic in their ultimate aims. We suggest that a more generative, foresight-driven behavioral approach borrowing from strategic design—behavioral planning—can improve behavioral solutions to COVID-19 and complex crises by solving for three common “errors of projection” that currently contribute to behavioral solution brittleness: projected stability, which fails to recognize that interventions function within inherently unstable systems; projected persistence, which neglects to account for changes in system conditions over time; and projected value, which assumes that definitions of success are universally shared across contexts
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