Here is to the stubborn optimists
How do you change human behaviour without trying to change the human? It sounds like a contradiction. Almost everything we are taught about change says the opposite. Work on yourself. Find more discipline. Build better habits. Adjust your mindset. And if you want to change other people, convince them, motivate them, explain why they should care. The whole logic points inward, at the person, at the will.
It mostly does not work. Not because people are weak. Because the target is wrong.
The uncomfortable finding
For decades, research into how people actually decide and act has pointed somewhere uncomfortable. Most of what we do every day is not a conscious choice at all. It runs on what is easy, what is obvious, what the situation around us quietly invites. We are, to a degree that is almost insulting to the ego, products of our context. The room we are in. The rules we never wrote. The path of least resistance laid out in front of us. These shape what we do far more reliably than any resolution we make on a Sunday evening.
On the surface that is a deflating idea. If willpower is not in charge, why try?
But turn it over and it becomes the most hopeful idea I know.
If behaviour is shaped by context, then context can be designed. And if context can be designed, change is no longer a matter of waiting for people to become better versions of themselves. It becomes a matter of building situations where the behaviour you want is the natural one. The problem moves out of the person, where it is hard to reach and easy to blame, and into the environment, where you can actually work on it.
That move changes how you approach almost everything. You stop asking what is wrong with these people and start asking what this situation is producing. You stop trying to win arguments and start changing the path. You stop leaning on motivation, which is fragile and runs out, and start leaning on design, which holds even on the days nobody feels motivated. It is the difference between nagging a city to cycle more and making the bike the easier option. One exhausts everyone. The other quietly works.
Optimism as a conclusion, not a mood
Here is something I have come to think is not a footnote but the whole game. What you focus on is a choice. Any situation can be read as a threat or as an opening, and the facts do not hand you the reading. You make it. The same stuck problem is either proof that nothing can change or an interesting place to begin. The same shift in technology is either the thing that will undo us or the thing we get to shape. Most people experience this as the truth simply arriving, but it is a decision, made so fast and so often that it stops feeling like one. Choosing to look for the opening rather than the threat is not denial. It is where the useful work starts.
I want to be precise about this, because it matters to me. It is not positive thinking. Not the belief that things sort themselves out if we stay upbeat. I have no patience for that, and the evidence has even less. What I am describing is the opposite of naïve. It sits on study after study showing that environments shape behaviour, that small structural changes produce outsized effects, that the situation tends to beat the intention. My optimism is not a mood. It is a conclusion. I think change is possible because the research keeps showing me it is, and because I keep watching it hold up in the work.
Which is why cynicism does not interest me. It is the easiest position in any room. It costs nothing, risks nothing, and is almost always wrong about what is possible. "That won't work." "We've tried that." "People never change." Those are not insights. They are a refusal to look closely.
What is already going right
And there is so much to look at. An enormous amount is already going right. People in technology, in healthcare, in the way we design cities and schools and care and work, are quietly solving problems we were told could not be solved. Almost none of it reaches us. The media runs on alarm, and our feeds have learned that fear holds attention better than progress does. So we get a steady drip of what is breaking and almost nothing of what is being built. The picture we end up with is not exactly false, but it is badly out of balance, tilted hard towards the threat.
That imbalance is the reason the stubbornness matters. If we want to move forward, we cannot absorb the feed passively and call the resulting gloom realism. It takes a deliberate, slightly contrary effort to notice what is working, to learn from it, and to pass it on. In a system built to feed us the opposite, optimism is not the lazy default. It is a small act of resistance. It is also the only place from which anything gets built.
Because when you do look closely, at the prisons that cut reoffending by treating people as people, at the care organisations that improve by stripping out the layers that got in the way, at the streets that rearrange a few junctions and shift a quarter of a million daily habits, the cynicism does not survive contact with the facts.
Turn your instinct for progress into a method
The Behavioural Design Method gives you tools drawn from decades of research to design situations where the right behaviour becomes the natural one. For your organisation, your team, or your own work.
What survives
What survives is something more stubborn. A refusal to accept that the way things are is the way they have to be. A habit of looking at a stuck situation and asking not whether it can be different, but how. An insistence that progress is real, that behaviour can be designed, that the future is made and not fixed.
That is the person I work for. Not the dreamer who hopes things improve, and not the cynic who is sure they will not. The one in between, who is harder to be than either. The one who refuses the status quo and does the work.
We built SUE for them. For people who think in possibilities instead of limitations. Who ask "what if?" instead of "yes, but". Who treat a problem as an interesting starting point rather than a wall. Who would rather spend their energy on progress than on explaining why progress is impossible.
We are not dreamers. We are evidence-based optimists. We work with data, with experiments, with iteration. We test, we measure, we learn. Always with the conviction that it can be better. That is not soft. It is stubborn. Stubbornly holding that progress is possible, that behaviour can be designed, that small changes carry large effects, that the future is makeable.
So if you ever catch yourself thinking "there has to be a better way", or "I believe this is possible", then you and I are the same kind of person. A stubborn optimist. A changemaker. And the work I do is to hand people like you the tools, drawn from behavioural science, to turn that instinct into something real, in your organisation, your team, your own life, or the world around you.
Behaviour is not destiny. It is a design choice. Treating it like one is the most stubborn, most hopeful, most quietly radical thing a person can do.
What this blog is for
That is what this blog is for. In the pieces that follow I am going to take the hard design questions, the ones that sound almost impossible, and look at them one at a time. How do you design a prison people do not return to. A street that changes how a whole city moves. A care organisation where good people can finally do good work. A team that trusts each other without being told to. A product people actually want to use well rather than compulsively. A school where children stay curious. A leader whose presence changes a room before a word is spoken.
For each one I want to find where it has already been answered, somewhere in the world, by someone who refused to accept that it could not be, and to work out what behavioural design can teach us from it. Because behind every one of these questions sits the same promise: more wellbeing, better teams, smarter organisations, more liveable cities, products worth having, leaders worth following.
Less a column than a search. For the answers, and for the stubborn optimists who built them.
Turn your instinct for progress into a method
The Behavioural Design Method gives you tools drawn from decades of research to design situations where the right behaviour becomes the natural one. For your organisation, your team, or your own work.
Frequently asked questions about stubborn optimism and behavioural design
What is a stubborn optimist?
A stubborn optimist is someone who refuses to accept that the way things are is the way they have to be, and who backs that refusal with evidence and work rather than hope. Not a dreamer, not a cynic. Someone who looks at a stuck situation and asks not whether it can be different, but how.
Why does context matter more than willpower for behaviour change?
Research consistently shows that most human behaviour is driven by environmental cues rather than conscious decision-making. We follow paths of least resistance, respond to defaults, and mirror what the situation makes easy. Willpower is real but finite; well-designed context is not. That is why designing the situation produces more reliable change than trying to strengthen the individual.
What is behavioural design?
Behavioural design is the practice of applying insights from behavioural science to shape situations, products, services, and organisations so that the desired behaviour becomes the natural one. It draws on decades of research into how people actually decide and act, and turns that knowledge into practical tools for positive change.
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