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Behavioural Design Digest
June 2nd, 2020

Dear reader, 

There’s so much a want to talk about this week. As you know by now, the purpose of this Behavioural Design Digest newsletter is to deconstruct influence. In this newsletter I always try to bring the hidden behavioural principles to the surface to explain the reality around us. 

Usually I do a long-read, but I’m also exploring new formats. 
This week’s edition is a collection of thoughts and observations on COVID-19. The are as random as my three year old daughter. 

Best, 
Tom

Dutch gyms are pissed off, but why?


The Dutch Gyms are pissed off, because the government decided that opening up the gyms is too risky at this stage. I can understand the reasoning behind this decision. Gyms are probably the closest thing to heaven for germs. The definition of a gym: Sweaty people touching things.

The thing that I don’t understand is that gyms think too much inside-out. If they would think outside-in, they would realize that their business model is not about bringing people into a room to work out, but about helping people to build and maintain a work-out routine. That’s customer-centric thinking. I haven’t heard from my gym in two months, and if they would have pushed me to join online classes, or to go out running or bootcamping in the park, my subscription fee would have been worth every penny. 
Master Outside-in Thinking in one of our upcoming virtual editions of the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Certification Course. 

I interviewed Klaas Dijkhoff. This is what I learned


Two weeks ago, Tim Versnel and myself interviewed Klaas Dijkhoff for the podcast “De Nieuwe Vrije Eeuw” (Dutch, sorry). Klaas was politician of the year, current head of the Liberal Fraction in Parliament, ex-Secretary of State of Migration during the Migration crisis and official winner of the “Smartest Man Alive” TV-show in the Netherlands.  It was a fascinating conversation about leadership, politics, framing, governing, and influence.  I will write more about this interview in a separate blog, but one thing that got me thinking a lot, was his thinking from first principles.

Whenever you have to lead in a problem of high uncertainty, search for the single intervention that matters the most, and all the rest will follow. The first principle in dealing with the Corona crisis is managing the number of IC-bed. The first principle for dealing with the migration crisis was finding places to sleep. The first principle for managing the CO2-crisis is to ensure that new houses can be build. The idea is that if you focus laser-sharp on solving one problem, all kinds of second-order effects will follow. This reminds me of a brilliant paper on Systems Thinking by Donella Meadows, in which she talks about leverage points. Leverage points are ways to intervene in complex systems. The challenge is to figure out the intervention with the lowest effort that generates the highest change.

 

The best COVID-19 analysis so far


I don’t know about you, but I’m suffering from COVID-19 fatigue. Not by the virus itself (thank god), but by the news cycle around it. Too much correlations, to much speculation, so little understanding. About a month ago, I discovered this blog by Maurice De Hond. He’s a famous pollster in the Netherlands, but he also has a background in social geography. The reason why I love his analysis is that he offers a behavioural explanation for the spreading of the virus: Every major outbreak can be explained elegantly by super-spreading events. Put a lot of people in a context of bad ventilation and low airpressure and you create a perfect storm. When you combine behavioral science and data science, you end up with much deeper insights and much more interesting hypothesis. This is a must-read.
Understanding how COVID-19 changed the behaviour of your customers and/or team is a top priority. In a Behavioural Design Sprint we help you to spot opportunities, test hypothesis and help you to update your strategy fast

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That's all for this week, we hope to catch you next week!
 


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