BE-SOS
Mitigate unexpected behaviours before they stall your project’s impact.
Useful for:
Assessing ideas.
Preempting outcomes.
Strategy and implementation planning.
Project stage:
Deliver
BE.SOS is a tool to foresee and mitigate unexpected behaviours in your projects. It offers insights to guide research, direct ideation, health check your ideas, and form your implementation strategy.
This tool revolves around five causes of unexpected behaviour: Branches, Emotional Impact, Surges, Offsets and Spills. By identifying these five areas, BE.SOS can help you mitigate unexpected behaviour before they occur.
It’s useful for:
Predicting and mitigating potential negative impacts of a solution. Helping you have a wider view of the knock-on effects and impact on unseen groups.
Provides a lens through which to explore potential behaviours. It can influence the questions you ask, the data you collect, and the analysis you perform.
Reinforcing your rollout plan, communication strategy, support and maintenance plans. Knowing what might go wrong (or right) can help you prepare better.
Applications:
The BE.SOS framework can be used in a variety of contexts, such as public policy, product design, marketing campaigns, and more. It serves as a roadmap to predict and mitigate unexpected behaviours, making it a valuable tool for designers, change makers, and marketers alike.
Important reminders:
It’s not a set-and-forget tool. It is most effective when used in iterative design cycles, using each cycle as a learning opportunity to improve your solution.
It requires an in-depth understanding of the target behaviour, users, and context. Without this, you could risk missing crucial elements that would affect your design's efficacy.
STEPS
Identify Branches: Branches refer to the new actions and decisions that could evolve from your intended behaviour. Consider how these branches might either boost or break your idea.
Ask:
How might people interpret or build upon your idea in ways you haven't anticipated?
Can you leverage these potential branches to enhance your idea?Evaluate Emotional Impact: Recognise that your solution may evoke emotions in ways you hadn't intended. Consider if fear or defiance could arise, and how it might affect your solution, implementation and success.
Ask:
What emotions might your idea provoke?
How could these emotions derail your intended outcome?Anticipate Surges: Be wary of shaping a behaviour too effectively, such that it overwhelms the system, leading to inefficiencies or backlashes.
Ask:
What happens if everyone adopts the behaviour at once?
Can your systems cope with a sudden influx in demand?
How can we stage roll-out to manage surges?Prepare for Offsets: Understand that individuals might offset a positive behaviour by permitting themselves to engage in a negative one.
Ask:
How might individuals rationalise negative behaviours as a result of engaging in your solution?
Can you design elements to discourage such offset behaviours?Assess potential Spills: Your solution could influence non-target audiences or spill the action and the message, leading to unintended consequences.
Ask:
How might your message spill over to non-target audiences, what impact could it have?
Could your message be misconstrued or have unintended implications?
Branches
Behavioural branches can either enhance (boost) or disrupt (break) your intended outcomes.
Boost Branches: These amplify your project's impact by fostering behaviours aligned with your goals. Boost branches rely on the Self Perception Theory, suggesting that people replicate their previous actions, forming attitudes and beliefs that encourage them to seek out similar opportunities.
Example: Consider Nike. Initially, it just sold running shoes. However, by following the behavioural branches of their customers who developed fitness as a part of their identity, Nike evolved into a fitness company, thereby creating new opportunities and boosting its brand.
Break Branches: Sometimes, behavioural branches can become detrimental, working against your intended objectives. Hence, while formulating your idea, account for possible negative branches.
Emotional Impact
Your design can influence people's emotions, sometimes in ways you didn't anticipate. The unpredictability of emotions can lead to outcomes contrary to your intended behaviour.
Fear: The Protection Motivation Theory suggests that when people perceive a threat, they might avoid the message or scenario entirely.
Defiance: Reactance Theory posits that people resent being told what to do. Threats to their autonomy can result in defiance, with individuals acting contrary to instructions.
Surges
Sometimes your idea might be too successful, causing a surge. Your intended behaviour creates such a demand that the system cannot cope, which could create barriers to your impact or undermine your wider project goals.
For example, if a successful Coca Cola campaign encourages everyone to recycle their bottles, but the recycling infrastructure is unprepared to handle the surge, the campaign's success could actually overwhelm the system and impede the wider goal of recycling.
Offsets
Offsets refer to the concept of Moral Licensing, where an individual, after performing a positive action, allows themselves to perform a negative one. It's a behavioural offset that can undermine your project impact.
For example, buying a green product might make people feel morally licensed to then buy something that is bad for the environment because they ‘do their bit’.
Spills
Spills signify how your idea might influence areas outside of its intended domain, which could be either beneficial or detrimental. It could spill into non-target audiences, spill the action, or spill the message, leading to unexpected behaviours.
Non-Target Audiences: Your communication could reach people outside of your target audience, causing unexpected responses or behaviours.
Action Spills: Highlighting current undesirable behaviours in the hope of encouraging better ones often leads to the reverse, reinforcing the very behaviour you're trying to eliminate.
Message Spills: The way people interpret your message can lead to unintended behaviours. This is referred to as signalling, as individuals often read between the lines and make conclusions based on your message.
Derived from:
BE-SOS was created by Behaviour Thinking Lab behav. They noted that behaviour happens after the launch of a solution, yet there are few tools to help frame this conversation and pull behavioural science into implementation planning and idea validation. It was shared during a talk at Golden Drum in 2021.
