How do you design a street where greening your home becomes the normal thing to do?
There is a neighbourhood in Amsterdam North that found a better way, and it worked on two things at once. In Buiksloterham, a local cooperative buys solar panels collectively. The result is cheaper and easier, and the neighbour who already has a heat pump becomes the most persuasive advocate there is. The social norm of the street shifts: greening your home becomes simply what people here do. Two forces combine, the friction drops and the norm changes, and the behaviour that endless information campaigns could not produce starts to happen on its own.
The want that never becomes action
The conventional response to slow home sustainability is to push information at people. Communicate the subsidies more clearly. Build online tools to help them choose. Run awareness campaigns. The assumption is that homeowners are not acting because they do not know enough, and that more information will tip them into action.
But the want is already there; it is the path to acting that is broken. The route to making a home sustainable is so full of friction, comparison sites, finding installers, permits, uncertain payback times, that people postpone it indefinitely. Not because they do not want it, but because the environment actively works against them at every step. Each piece of friction is a reason to put it off for another year, and the years accumulate. More information does nothing to clear this friction; it often adds to it, giving the overwhelmed homeowner yet more to process before they can act. The postponement is not an information problem. It is a friction problem wearing an information disguise.
The Buiksloterham cooperative changes the environment on two fronts at once. By buying solar panels collectively, it strips out much of the friction: the comparison, the installer hunt, the uncertainty are handled together rather than alone, making the whole thing cheaper and easier. And by doing it as a neighbourhood, it changes the social norm, because the neighbour who already has a heat pump, who can be asked over the fence, who is visibly living proof that this works, is a far stronger persuader than any campaign. The friction drops and the norm shifts together, and the behaviour follows.
Why this is design, not good intentions
You could read Buiksloterham as a community spirit story, neighbours pulling together. But that misses the mechanism, and the mechanism is what makes it more than goodwill.
The cooperative does not motivate people to act by persuading them that sustainability matters. They are already persuaded; that was never the gap. The action comes from the environment removing the friction and changing the norm: it becomes easy enough to do, and normal enough that not doing it starts to feel like the exception. People do not act because they were convinced to care; they act because the path was cleared and the neighbours were already walking it. The behaviour is not exhorted. It is produced by lowered friction and a shifted norm.
That is the difference between design and motivation, and in the energy transition it is decisive. Motivation tries to persuade people who are already willing, which is aiming at the wrong target entirely. Design removes the friction that was stopping the willing from acting, and changes the norm so acting becomes the default social behaviour. You cannot solve a friction problem with more persuasion; the person already wants to act and cannot face the hassle. You can clear the hassle and make it the neighbourhood norm, and let the willing finally act.
The endless postponement was never about people not wanting to green their homes. It was about an environment full of friction and a norm that made inaction unremarkable.
Turn your instinct for progress into a method
The Behavioural Design Method gives you tools to find the friction in any situation and redesign the path. For your organisation, your team, or your own work.
The principle: social proof plus friction reduction
The research underneath this is well established, and naming it turns Buiksloterham from a heartwarming story into a usable principle.[1]
Two forces are doing the work, and the strength of the case is that it combines them. The first is social proof, specifically the descriptive norm: people are powerfully influenced by what others around them actually do. Research on solar adoption has demonstrated this concretely. Bollinger and Gillingham found that each additional nearby installation measurably raised the probability that a neighbour would adopt too, and the effect is stronger when the installation is visible. The neighbour's panels are not just a private choice; they are a signal to the whole street about what is normal here. The second force is friction reduction: the easier a desired behaviour is made, the more people do it. Collective purchasing attacks the friction directly.
Buiksloterham combines both, which is why it works where single-lever interventions stall. The collective purchase reduces the friction; the visible neighbourhood adoption supplies the social proof. Information campaigns, by contrast, address neither: they do not make the process easier, and a leaflet is a far weaker norm signal than the panels on the roof next door. The strongest predictor of whether someone makes a sustainable investment is whether their neighbours have, and whether the process feels easy enough. Buiksloterham was engineered to deliver both at once, and the behaviour followed.
The stalled transition was never only about a lack of information. It was about unaddressed friction and an absent local norm.
The visibility point deserves particular attention, because it is where the social-proof lever is strongest and most often wasted. The research found the neighbour effect to be markedly stronger when the installation could actually be seen, which tells you something important about how descriptive norms travel: they spread through what is visible, not through what is merely true. A neighbourhood could be quietly full of heat pumps and well-insulated walls, and if none of it is visible, the norm signal never fires, because nobody can see that this is what people here do. This is why collective, visible, neighbourhood-scale action does so much more than the same number of scattered, invisible individual choices. The behaviour change is the same in aggregate, but only the visible version generates the social proof that pulls the next household along. If you want a sustainable behaviour to spread, making it visible is not a nice extra. It is half the mechanism.
What you can design this week
You do not need a neighbourhood cooperative to apply this. The principle, social proof plus friction reduction, works wherever you want a reluctant behaviour to take hold.
Reduce the friction, do not add information. When willing people are not acting, the barrier is usually the hassle, not a knowledge gap. Map the steps between intention and action, and remove as many as you can. Easier beats better-informed.
Make the desired behaviour visible. The descriptive norm works through what people see others doing. The neighbour's visible panels are a stronger signal than any message. Wherever you want a behaviour to spread, make the people already doing it visible to those who have not started.
Combine the two forces. Social proof and friction reduction are each powerful, and together they are stronger. An intervention that both makes the behaviour easier and shows that others nearby are doing it outperforms either lever alone.
Stop persuading the already-willing. This is the deeper shift. When people who want to act still do not, more persuasion is aimed at the wrong target. The effective move is to clear the friction and supply the social proof, so the willingness that is already there can finally turn into action.
The thread is the one that runs through everything we do at SUE. You rarely turn willingness into action by persuading people harder. You do it by clearing the friction and making the behaviour the visible local norm. Buiksloterham did not lecture its residents about sustainability. It made greening a home easy and normal, and let the neighbours do the persuading.
If you want to learn how to combine social proof and friction reduction so that willing people finally act, that is exactly the kind of work our Behavioural Design training is built around.
Start designing for behaviour, not hoping for it
The SUE Behavioural Design Method teaches you to find the friction, redesign the path, and make the right behaviour the easiest option. In two days live or at your own pace online.
1.5 minutes on influence
10,000+ readers · Free · Unsubscribe anytime