All 56 articles in the Stubborn Optimist series. Each one takes a real problem and looks for the place in the world where someone has already solved it, and what behavioural science tells us about why it worked.
Each article takes a stubborn problem and looks for the place in the world where someone has already solved it. And what behavioural science tells us about why it worked.
This is the blog series I have had in my head for years: a genuine search, not inspiration content. Each article is a question: where has someone already solved this? And what does that tell us about how behaviour really works, and how you can design it?
Behind all those questions sits the same conviction: behaviour is a design choice. And anyone who shares that conviction can learn to do something with it.
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Behaviour is shaped by context, not willpower. And that means change is possible. The starting point for everything we do.
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Vittra Telefonplan in Stockholm has no classrooms. Five types of space instead of one. The curiosity followed naturally.
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Bogotá closes 120 km of main roads to cars every Sunday. Two million people take to the streets, without a campaign, a fine or a reward.
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Eataly built its reputation on the opposite of every retail instinct. Smaller baskets, slower shoppers, higher satisfaction.
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Maggie’s Centres gave the building a role in cancer care. Lower anxiety, greater sense of control. Not despite the architecture. Because of it.
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Buurtzorg runs 10,000+ nurses in self-managing teams with no managers. The engagement is not a culture story. It is a design story.
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When two Fortune 500 companies removed their walls, face-to-face interaction fell seventy per cent. The fix is counterintuitive.
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Roger Ulrich’s 1984 study found that patients with a window view of trees left hospital a day earlier. The environment was the treatment.
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For decades, a Pennsylvania town had strikingly low rates of heart disease despite unhealthy habits. The protection lived between the people, not inside them.
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Medellín built a cable car into its most dangerous hillside settlements. Violence fell fastest where connection was rebuilt.
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Seoul demolished a motorway and most of the traffic disappeared. The road had been generating the very demand that filled it.
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Gary Klein’s premortem changes one thing — the tense of the question — and surfaces a third more risks. Honesty without asking anyone to be braver.
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Ghent reorganised its streets so driving through the centre was no longer the shortest route. Car traffic fell 30%. Nobody was forbidden.
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Ireland brought together 99 citizens — randomly selected, deeply divided — and gave them a process instead of a debate.
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Halden is a maximum-security prison in Norway where windows have no bars and guards eat with inmates. Norway’s reconviction rate fell to 18 per cent.
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The Rijksmuseum gave children a riddle to solve, and the same galleries became a treasure hunt. Curiosity, it turns out, is a design choice.
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Most AI adoption stalls not from lack of skill but from pluralistic ignorance: everyone privately uncertain, everyone assuming the others have it handled.
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Japan’s Silver Human Resource Centres match retired people to real local work. The wellbeing followed not from recreation but from being genuinely needed.
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Microsoft Japan closed every Friday for a month. Sales per employee rose 40 per cent. The shorter week revealed how much time is spent performing work rather than doing it.
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Microsoft found that a single manager one-to-one in the first week outperformed any amount of formal induction. Belonging is designed, not assumed.
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South Korea charges households by the kilo for food waste, at the moment of throwing away. Food waste recycling climbed from a few per cent to 95 per cent.
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Changi Airport’s Terminal 2 redesign built calm into the architecture: a 14-metre digital waterfall, 20,000 plants, and a layout that hands control back to the traveller.
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Paley Park in Manhattan is a pocket park the size of a large room. A waterfall wall blocks noise, moveable chairs invite strangers to sit close, and honey locust trees filter light.
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In the 1970s, Dutch cities gave streets back to children by redesigning the street itself. The woonerf removed the kerb and changed who the space was for.
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Danish cohousing routes residents past each other’s front doors by design. Neighbours were not recruited or encouraged into friendship. The layout made it likely.
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Jane Jacobs showed that safe streets depend on active frontages and natural surveillance, not on lighting and locks alone. The safety was built into who was watching.
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Bogoá, Singapore, and Zürich keep their streets clean through design rather than enforcement. The mechanism is the descriptive norm: people read the state of the space.
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The cities where residents walk and cycle the most have not solved the motivation problem. They have solved the design problem. Infrastructure is the intervention.
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A covered walkway routes every resident past every other front door on the way in and out. The social effect is not the result of programming. It is the result of the path.
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Danish nursing homes built as living streets give residents front doors, destinations to walk to, and the daily texture of a life. Ellen Langer’s research explains why it matters.
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A GP practice redesigned its waiting room to place health information at the moment when people are most receptive: the minutes before they see the doctor.
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Scandinavian hospitals that redesigned staff spaces — break rooms visible from the ward, short-cuts that save steps — cut nursing turnover significantly.
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Albert Lea, Minnesota enrolled in the Blue Zones Project and redesigned its sidewalks, school lunches, and walking clubs. Residents did not get more willpower. They got a different environment.
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Mountain Equipment Coop built climbing walls and test paths into its stores so customers could try before buying. Returns dropped. Satisfaction rose.
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Google moved the sweet dispenser two metres from the coffee station. New York employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories in seven weeks. No campaign, no instruction.
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Pixar’s Braintrust reviews rough cuts in a room designed to separate feedback from authority. The observations are not instructions. Honesty follows from the structure.
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LEGO’s return-to-office redesign replaced assigned desks with spaces built for the kind of work that benefits from being together. Attendance followed without a mandate.
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Leadership development programmes that return people to an unchanged environment see the change fade within weeks. The environment is the missing variable.
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Blind recruitment removes names, photographs, and university names from applications before review. The diversity of shortlists reliably increases. No training, no workshops.
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Merger integration that works does not ask the two companies to respect each other. It builds situations where people from both sides work on shared problems first.
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Culture is what people do when no one is watching, not what is on the wall. The organisations that get it right build the values into the environment, not the slides.
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The Apple Store was designed so customers handle products before a salesperson approaches. The sale follows from the experience of choosing, not from the salesperson.
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SportCity Amsterdam rebuilt its entrance as a community space. Members began organising their own sessions. The gym became a place people belonged to, not just paid for.
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The Edge in Amsterdam makes sustainability the default: smart lighting, bike storage at the entrance, plant-based meals prominent in the canteen. No campaign needed.
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In Buiksloterham, Amsterdam, visible green façades became a social norm. As more houses greened, the descriptive norm shifted. The next neighbour did not need persuading.
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Tel Aviv made plant-based food the easy, prominent, competitively priced default at markets and restaurants. People chose it without being asked to think about the climate.
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Copenhagen added benches at the right height, removed kerbs, and installed handrails. Older residents moved more, were less lonely, and stayed healthier.
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Grorudalen, Oslo, redesigned shared spaces across a multiethnic neighbourhood. Contact between people from different backgrounds rose — because the space made it easy.
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Iceland organised all government services around life events rather than ministry departments. One login, one coherent journey, no wrong doors. Trust in institutions rose.
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Finland teaches every student to recognise manipulation techniques before they encounter them in the wild. Prebunking, not debunking, is what actually works.
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Brazil’s compulsory voting, combined with electronic machines that reach remote communities, shifted turnout from an elite practice to a near-universal one.
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Zaatari refugee camp developed a market street, the Champs-Élysées of Zaatari, where residents opened shops, traded, and rebuilt the texture of a normal life.
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Youth centres in Aarhus, Denmark, offer young people at risk of radicalisation a genuine alternative: mentoring, education, and a future. The mechanism is significance, not surveillance.
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Copenhagen’s Torvehallerne puts farmers’ names on stalls and makes food provenance concrete. The connection between producer and consumer changes the behaviour downstream.
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Swedish skateparks designed for progression draw young people outdoors and keep them there. The outdoors won not by banning screens but by being genuinely better at what screens offer.
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Australian schools that removed smartphones from break times found that students who had nothing to stare at started talking to each other. Conversation requires an empty hand.
Read the article →If you believe behaviour can be designed, the next step is learning how. Our training programmes give you the methods, the tools and the practice to turn that conviction into real change.