Start at the End summary

So far, you’ve identified the gap between the world as it is and the world as you’d like it to be. Your next step is to write up a formal description of the ideal world you want to create. 

This is called a behavioral statement, and it can be broken into five components. The first is the behavior you’re trying to promote. Usually, it boils down to purchasing and using your product or service. For example, when Uber launched its ride-sharing service in 2009, the behavior the company wanted to promote was, well, taking an Uber. 

Thanks to your behavioral statement, you now have a precise description of the ideal world you’re trying to create. The next step is to start figuring out how to make it a reality! 

Here, we begin with two basic premises. First, there must be certain factors holding people back from engaging in the behavior in which we want them to engage; these are inhibiting pressures. Second, there must be certain factors encouraging people who are engaging in the behavior; these are promoting pressures. 

If you’re conscious about your health, the high calories and sugar content of a pack of M&Ms are probably going to be a pretty significant inhibiting pressure, dissuading you from eating them. But if you’re feeling hungry or experiencing a blood sugar crash, they could also be a promoting pressure, tempting you to gobble them down. 

Here we encounter an example of a counter-rational pressure – a pressure that can go in either direction, contrary to what a rational observer might expect. These counter-rational pressures are context-dependent. For example, M&Ms have a playful, lighthearted branding that features anthropomorphic candy characters. In the context of a kid’s party, that branding is a promoting pressure – but at a romantic dinner, it would probably make them feel pretty out of place; their branding would then become an inhibiting pressure. 

Let’s say you’ve finished mapping out your target behavior’s inhibiting and promoting pressures. On a whiteboard, you may have drawn a picture of the behavior in the middle, surrounded by downward arrows for each of the inhibiting pressures and upward arrows for each of the promoting pressures. 

You can now see at a glance the balance of forces surrounding the behavior. The more the promoting pressures outweigh the inhibiting pressures, the more likely people will be to engage in the behavior. Conversely, the more strongly the inhibiting pressures push down against the promoting pressures, the less likely people will be to engage in the behavior. 

At this point in the IDP, you’ve mapped out the inhibiting and promoting pressures that surround your target behavior. As a result, you now know the balance of power between the two sides. 

To promote your target behavior, you need to alter that balance of power to make it more favorable to the reality you want to create. You can’t directly force people to engage in the behavior in which you want them to engage – but you can indirectly nudge them in one direction or another by manipulating the pressures that surround them. 

Now that you’ve come up with some possible interventions to promote your target behavior, you’re probably going to be feeling pretty eager to go out into the field and put your ideas into action. 

But hold on – before you move forward, you need to hit the pause button and conduct an ethical check. After all, what you’re setting out to do is to influence people’s behavior. Now, that can be a good thing; just think of anti-smoking campaigns. But it can also be a very bad thing, like the ads that glamorized smoking in the first place.

Let’s say you’ve done an honest ethical check and you’ve confirmed that your target behavior matches your target population’s goals and motivations, that the benefits of the behavior outweigh the costs and that you’ve been transparent in making this determination. All’s well and good; now you can move forward with your interventions, right?

Well, not so fast. It’s not just your target behavior that you need to check; it’s also the interventions themselves. Remember the old caveat: the ends do not justify the means. Even if your target behavior is totally laudable, that doesn’t necessarily mean your interventions are ethical. For example, you could try to convince people to get a flu shot by sending them scare letters telling them they will die if they don’t get one, but that would be a pretty unethical intervention. 

When you reach the final step of the IDP, you enter it with a handful of possible interventions that you think might foster the behavior you want to promote. Now it’s time for the rubber to hit the road and see if they work. 

But you don’t want to spin your wheels too fast here. In theory, you could take one of your possible interventions and roll it out right away on a nationwide or even international scale. But what if it doesn’t work? That’s a lot of wasted time, energy and money. Plus, what about the other four possible interventions you might have come up with? You probably don’t have the resources to try out all of them on a large scale. But if you don’t test them all, you’ll never know which one is the most effective. 

Assuming you’ve collected data for one of your pilot studies, you and your team now have some sense of whether or not the intervention you’re looking at is a promising one. Your sample size will have been pretty small, so you can’t be very certain of your results at this stage. But with at least some degree of certainty, you can now make a statement like, “this intervention seems to increase people’s engagement in our target behavior by 20 percent.” 

In scientific parlance, the degree to which you’re certain about a statement like this is called your data’s p-value. Counterintuitively, the lower the value, the higher the certainty. If your p-value is 0.05, that means there’s a 5-percent chance your data are wrong and therefore a 95-percent chance they’re right.