From insight to influence

SUE | Behavioural Design Method©.

AI is taking over more and more tasks. What AI can never take over is the work that begins once the plan is finished: bringing a team along, getting a client to choose, understanding resistance. That is human work, and it is all influence. That is what Behavioural Design is about: behavioural science made practical.

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A team fills in a large SUE Influence Framework together with sticky notes
The method

How you learn to influence choices and behaviour

Knowing what holds someone back is the start. The Behavioural Design Method© turns it into a way of working, in three steps.

The Behavioural Design Method in three steps from current to desired behaviour: Insight, Intervention and Influence

  • Insight

    Understand the choice psychology of people and identify the forces that drive their behaviour.

  • Intervention

    Use behavioural science to come up with persuasive strategies and ideas.

  • Influence

    Set up experiments to test your interventions with real users.

Knowledge can be looked up. Getting people on board is something you have to be able to do.

Proven in practice

The method has been applied at more than 200 organisations, in every sector.

View the cases →

165%

more individual hand-washing among office employees at the Dutch Ministry of Justice.

Up to 3×

as many flu vaccinations among healthcare employees in the participating organisations of GGD Zeeland.

Heineken KPN Eneco ANWB Randstad Amnesty International Roche Adyen European Commission Centraal Beheer Achmea DPG Media Gemeente Amsterdam Rijkswaterstaat Sony eBay CZ Heineken KPN Eneco ANWB Randstad Amnesty International Roche Adyen European Commission Centraal Beheer Achmea DPG Media Gemeente Amsterdam Rijkswaterstaat Sony eBay CZ

The 7 principles of the Behavioural Design Method©

Every meeting, every campaign, every policy, every product is an attempt to influence choices and behaviour. The question is whether you do it by guesswork, or by method.

Behavioural Design combines seven proven principles and behavioural frameworks into a systematic approach to understand, predict and influence behaviour.

The Art of Designing Behaviour by Astrid Groenewegen
Astrid Groenewegen wrote the method out in full in The Art of Designing Behaviour.To the book →
Principle 01

System 1 and System 2: how the brain actually makes decisions

You have the facts lined up and your arguments are sound. And still nothing happens.

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That is because people decide with their automatic brain first. The reasons come afterwards. You learn to communicate with that automatic brain, with the right trigger at the right moment.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
“Humans are to thinking what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we have to, but we much prefer not to.”Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize in Economics

System 1 and System 2 explained →

Principle 02

Outside-in thinking: the person as the starting point, not the offer

You can make your proposal even more attractive. You can also ask a different question first: what is this person actually trying to get done for themselves?

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That is outside-in thinking. You start with the other person, and then show that your proposal is the best route to what they really want.

Clayton Christensen
“A job-to-be-done is the progress that someone is trying to make in a given circumstance, or what someone hopes to accomplish.”Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School

Jobs-to-be-Done explained →

Principle 03

The SUE | Influence Framework©: four forces that drive all behaviour

When people do not move, it soon looks like a motivation problem. With the SUE | Influence Framework© you see a force field: the four forces that drive someone’s choices and behaviour, and where your influence starts.

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Starts with the Job-to-be-Done: what is someone trying to get done for themselves? The model shows why people do what they do and what holds the desired behaviour back.

The framework explained →

From practice, along the framework

Everyone knew the risk, nobody counted themselves in.

The bank’s question

How do we make customers with an interest-only mortgage aware of a possible problem, and how do we get them moving to solve it?

Comforts · tipped the balance

“People get into trouble, but that does not apply to me.”

The insight

Customers already knew the risk. They just did not count themselves in. More explanation would not have changed that. So the invitation became a question about their own plan, with a few answers to choose from.

The SUE Influence Framework: Human at the top, the Job-to-be-Done at the bottom, current behaviour on the left, desired behaviour on the right, with Pains, Gains, Comforts and Anxieties in between
Principle 04

Friction design: remove barriers instead of adding motivation

When people do not move, the reflex is to motivate them. A better reward, another campaign. But willpower runs out, exactly when it matters most.

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You learn to ask a different question: how do I make the desired behaviour so easy that motivation barely matters?

Ability eats motivation for breakfast.

With the SUE | SWAC Tool© you design the interventions that influence choices and behaviour. How can we prompt someone to act or to make a choice? You look at CAN (are they able to), WANT (do they want to), SPARK (are they prompted to) and AGAIN (do we help them keep it up).

And what do you design? An intervention around a Moment that Matters: the moment someone decides, or has to decide, whether or not to do something.

The tool explained →

Friction in behavioural design explained →

Example from practice

The situation

A large mobility organisation wanted people to leave their phone alone in traffic.

The insight

People use that phone on the road to stay reachable and to get through a dull journey. Ban it and you take away their solution without giving anything back. So the advice became: make the new behaviour so easy that it is almost hard not to do it, and communicate at the moments it matters.

The SUE | SWAC Tool: quadrant with Want against Can around the moment that matters, and the formula Behaviour = Spark x Want x Again x Can
Principle 05

Radical empathy: behavioural research as the foundation for effective design

Every team, every expert has the same problem: they know too much.

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They have become so close to their own solution that they no longer really see the people they are building it for. You train a different muscle. You go back to the real human being, with real doubts, real habits and a real reason not to move.

People always turn out to be different from what you assumed.

Past behaviour never lies →

Principle 06

SUE | 4C Influence Flow©: where does someone drop out, and what is needed at that moment?

One good intervention is rarely enough. Someone first has to notice you, then take action, then feel it was a good choice, and then keep doing it.

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The SUE | 4C Influence Flow© shows you at which of those four moments it goes wrong: Catch, Convert, Confirm or Continue. That is how you turn separate interventions into an influence strategy.

The flow explained →

Commitment devices explained →

Example from practice

The situation

A national volunteer organisation offered young people with debts free personal help, and found it hard to get them moving.

The insight

These young people pushed their problem away, so a solution did not land. The advertisement therefore names a recognisable frustration and says nothing about the offer. The landing page only then comes with the help. The organisation itself is explained later still, at the moment someone wonders whether they can trust it.

The SUE | 4C Influence Flow: the four C's in a row, Catch, Convert, Confirm and Continue, each with yes or no
Principle 07

Choice architecture and context engineering: change the environment, not the person

When people do not do what they should, the default diagnosis is always the same: they do not want it enough, they are resistant by nature. But that diagnosis is almost never right.

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People change all the time, when the environment makes it easy enough.

Choice architecture explained →

Learn the method

Learn the seven principles in two days.

In The Art of Influence© you learn to apply the method: live in Amsterdam in a group of no more than sixteen, or online in 33 lessons at your own pace.

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What professionals say

From those who learned the method

Everything clicked into place. You gave me a mental structure to tackle a great many problems and challenges from now on.

Eline Goethals
Eline Goethals
Strategy Director • Happiness Brussels

Perfect for learning what truly drives people. A framework that lets you add enormous value and use to persuade those around you.

Karin Muller
Karin Müller
Co-Director • Ashoka

As a psychologist I had always been fascinated by behavioural science - but I had never found a method to actually use these principles to change behaviour effectively. SUE offers practical mental models that genuinely work.

AV
An Van Damme
Organisational Psychologist

The method in your field

The same principles, applied to the questions in your field.

Method × AIWhat AI changes about the craft of influence is still very much in motion.Read the latest update →

Learn the method in The Art of Influence©.

Influencing successfully isn’t a talent; it’s a skill. You learn it in two days live in Amsterdam, or online at your own pace. More than 10,000 professionals went before you.

View the training →