Before we start, I want to say a quick word on Aspirations, Goals and Behaviours. It is common to conflate and confuse these terms. Thus, for this MOOC, the definitions are as follows:

Aspiration – An aspiration is the identity you currently have, or wish to achieve. Becoming a runner; being a good teacher, mother, or father – an aspiration is an identity made up of multiple explicit behaviours that can be worked towards using the behaviour design method.

Goal – A Goal is the outcome you wish to achieve through behaviour design. This is typically a complex or simple behaviour that makes up a part of your aspiration. For example: if your aspiration is to become a runner, then the goal may be to run three times a week. If the aspiration is to eat healthily, then the goal may be to eat vegetables three times a day.

Behaviour – A behaviour is the smallest action that you can do consistently that helps you achieve a goal. For example, if your aspiration is to become a runner and your goal is to run three times a week, then the behaviour to get you to that point may be putting your running shoes and socks next to your bed every night, or putting on your workout clothes first thing after you wake up.

Good behaviours and bad behaviours are not fundamentally different when it comes to their components. Behaviour is behaviour and is always a result of a person’s motivation and ability coming together simultaneously with a prompt.

Everyone has at least one behaviour they want to implement or remove in their life – to run more, to eat healthier, to eat less, to go to the gym, to be a better husband or a better wife, to be more empathetic, to be less judgemental. We want to change this behaviour and aspire to be who we wish to be, yet most of us can’t bring ourselves to do, say, look or think the way we want.

Why is there such a disconnect between what people want and what they do?

Is it that, as a whole, people are just unmotivated? Lazy? Don’t want it enough? We often frame out behavioural failings as some moral or intrinsic failure – I am just a bad student, teacher, or person.

We will be examining the notion that a lack of behaviour change is not a moral or personal failure but a behavioural design problem. The systems we have set up to enable us to enact this behaviour change are flawed, not the person operating them. There are no good or bad students or teachers, simply good and bad behaviour change systems.

Most teachers agree that for a student’s outcomes to change, we must change their behaviour. However, most don’t realise that only three variables drive this behaviour: motivation, ability and prompt.

This can be expressed in the simple formula B=MAP: Behaviour (B) is the result of the intersection of the Motivation (M) and Ability (A) to do the behaviour when a Prompt (P) is attended to.

Motivation – Your desire to do, or to not do, the behaviour. This can be high or low, depending on your desire to change.

Ability – Your ability to do the behaviour, based on how easy or difficult the behaviour is to do at the time of prompting. Having a high ability to do the behaviour means the behaviour would be easy, and a low ability makes the behaviour hard.

Prompt – The stimulus that triggers you to do, or not to do, the behaviour.

Looking at the behaviour model above, we can see that behaviours will or will not happen when these variables are manipulated. This idea is illustrated by the curved line on the graph, called the ‘Action Line’. Any prompt that falls below this line will fail, and we will not see the behaviour. If the prompt is above this line, the behaviour will happen with consistency.

If you are prompted to perform a behaviour, you have a high ability to do but no motivation for, that behaviour will be seen as tedious or annoying. If you are prompted to perform a behaviour, you have a high motivation to do but no ability, it will simply result in frustration. Finally, regardless of your motivation or ability, the behaviour will not occur without a prompt.

Our job in behaviour design is to understand and manipulate these variables to increase the likelihood of the desired behaviour occurring or not occurring.