At BC Behavioural Insights Group (BC BIG), the challenges we face are evolving and so are our approaches. Today’s complex, interconnected challenges require adaptive, holistic and collaborative approaches. That’s where behavioural systems mapping (BSM) comes in. It’s a method that blends behavioural science with systems thinking to help us map out the relevant actors, their behaviours and how these influence and interact with one another to impact the desired outcome.
Boosted Brains: Using Heuristics to Our Advantage
Heuristics are simple decision rules, rules of thumb, or mental shortcuts that enable us to navigate the world and make decisions quickly and without conscious effort. Boosting focuses on heuristics’ usefulness. It is the process of training individuals to deliberately use heuristics when they lead to accurate, unbiased, and nuanced decisions, and avoiding them when they lead to systematic errors.
Complementary Disciplines: Change Management & Applied Behavioural Science
Today’s novel, complicated challenges require innovative solutions that reach across traditional disciplines. Thinking about which disciplines to pair together? Consider change management and applied behavioural science: With their shared roots in helping people change their behaviour, change management and behavioural science are complementary approaches that strengthen each other.
Choice Tip Compendium 2024
How Might We?: Strategies to Improve How We Work in Behavioural Science & Beyond
In this reflection on the challenges behavioural science is facing, urban Inuk Stephanie Papik offers a unique and powerful perspective about how different ways of knowing and being can help address these challenges and enhance the practice. This includes asking ourselves things like ‘How might we better include a diversity of voices and perspectives?’ and ‘How might we recognize that multiple “good” choices co-exist?’
Compassion as Climate Activism
Laying the foundations for a behavioural intervention project — Part Two
In this blog series, created for Experimentation Works, we will focus on the first two phases of our (BC BIG)’s RIDE Model for Behaviour Shift. This post, the second in the series, will cover the ‘research’ phase.
Laying the foundations for a behavioural intervention project — Part One
In this blog series, created for Experimentation Works, we will focus on the first two phases of our (BC BIG)’s RIDE Model for Behaviour Shift. This post, the first in the series, will cover the ‘scoping’ phase. While scoping is certainly nothing new to public servants, there are a few aspects of scoping a behavioural insights (BI) project that make it unique.
How local governments are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed all of our lives, at home and at work. Here at the BC Behavioural Insights Group, we’ve rapidly redeployed several of our team members to support the BC Government’s response. In this entry, we’re sharing a resource outlining how local governments are using behavioural insights to respond to COVID-19.
What can behavioural insights teach us during a global pandemic?
The way in which governments around the world communicate with citizens during this global pandemic is critical — not only to help people feel safe and informed, but also to encourage everyone to take part in simple yet life-saving behaviours: hand washing and physical distancing. There have been posters, social media videos, comics, and infographics created in all corners of the world in an attempt to get the message out. As we, the BC Public Service, develop our messaging, it is important to consider how behavioural insights can add value.