What I’ve learned from 2 years working for an NGO
How do we apply human-centered design and behavioural insights in changing behaviour?
I have just completed my 2-years journey with a waste management NGO in my lovely hometown, Bali. I led our behaviour change team, working on transforming the current system of throw-straight to-landfill into source separation-material recovery to-landfill.
It has been a journey, really. A journey of learning. A journey of transformation. A challenging one yet very much fulfilling. I closed the chapter with a big proud heart that I have tried my best. This writing is my reflection, learnings, and personal experience of how a community transformation looks like, from the behaviour change lens.
Human-Centered Design (HCD)
A lot of what I’m gonna share here relates closely to the concept of human-centered design. Per IDEO, a design thinking company specialising in human-centered design, HCD is a process that starts with the people you’re designing with and ends with new solutions that are purpose-built to suit their needs.
“ Human-centered design is about cultivating deep empathy with the people you’re designing with; generating ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made together; and eventually, putting your innovative new solution out in the world.”
I think the below graph summarises human-centered design perfectly. I really like the fifth phase where you can see the infinity branches at the end, symbolising that rarely, we will get into the solution in one go. We need to keep evolving.
So, why human-centered?
This is probably the easiest bit to answer. We are all human, aren’t we? The key to human-centered design is empathy. Empathy is, at its simplest, awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. And I couldn’t emphasise this enough, we want to make sure that at least we tried to understand the people, the community that we are working with. Because whatever projects we are working on, eventually, we want to design and implement something that works for the community. If your solution doesn’t work or help people’s lives, why do it then?
The same concept is very often used in the start-up world. Especially when thinking about becoming a customer-centric company and thriving enterprise, we often thought about achieving product-market fit. Product-market fit means finding a good market with a product capable of satisfying that market. The same goes with community transformation projects, we want to ensure that our project is capable of satisfying our community’s needs, and in the end becoming a long-lasting, impactful project.
HCD framework has four critical principles in general, which I will dive deeper into each.
- Fall in love with the problem, not your solution
- Design your solution WITH the people. Not from your ivory tower.
- Prototyping is not only for tech companies
- Accept that you will most likely fail. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate
Fall in love with the problem, not your solution.
Oftentimes, we focus so much on implementing our working solutions, replicating them to as many people as possible. However, this may or may not work for all the communities in which we are working at. Each community are unique. Even from the outset the problem could look the same, digging in deeper might show us something different. Here, we need to really listen.
A good example is the project I was working on in waste management. Our target behaviour was the same, to transform community members from non-sorting to sorting waste at the household level. Digging in deeper, we could see different communities faced different barriers to changing their behaviours. Community X is comprised of a very strong local and traditional religious community, hence the barriers were more of complying with social norms. If their neighbour didn’t source separate, people think it’s okay not to sort their waste. On the other hand, community Y is comprised of young families who don’t interact much with their neighbours. Their barriers were the investment of time required to learn sorting waste and to buy the proper sorting facilities such as separation bins. Very different, aren’t they?
My favourite framework for understanding barriers that people face is the COM-B model. This model recognises that for us to alter our habits, we face many barriers that come in different shapes and sizes.
- Capability refers to the limitation in our physical or mental ability to participate in the change of behaviours. Let’s say we want to start the habit of running but were prevented to do so because of our ankle injury.
- Opportunity refers to external factors that support the new behaviour. Let’s say we want to buy our fruits and vegetables without single-used plastic but those options are not available in our neighbourhood supermarket.
- Motivation refers to our conscious and unconscious cognitive processes that direct behaviour. Let’s say if you don’t believe that global warming is real, you have little to no motivation to consciously change your non-sorting waste habit.
Design your solution WITH the people. Not from your ivory tower.
The next principle is about co-creation. Co-creation is the practice of collaborating with other stakeholders to guide the design process. We want to involve our community members in the process of designing the solution. Not just because they have wealth of experience and information, but also by doing so will significantly improve community empowerment and commitment. Here, we need to collaborate.
Now we want to devise solutions one by one for each of the barriers that we have identified in the previous step. My go-to framework for designing a solution is the EAST framework, first coined by the fantastic team from BIT. If we want to encourage new behaviour, we want to make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely (EAST).
Make it Easy
The thing about changing behaviour is that it is not easy. Old habits die hard. Therefore, we want to reduce the friction of changing behaviour as much as possible. The question is then — How can we make this new behaviour as less costly, with less friction, as possible? — Cost here doesn’t just refer to money, but also time and brain power. A few tactics normally employed are to leverage the power of defaults (we have a strong tendency to go with the default option since it is easy to do), to reduce the hassle factor of taking up new services, and to simplify the messages (breaking down complex services into simple, easier action).
Make it Attractive
I think this goes for everything in life, not just in changing behaviour. When it is boring, people have the tendencies not to follow it. We, as human beings, are more likely to do something once our attention is drawn towards it. So, designing a solution that attracts attention — using, for example, gamification, personalised message, attractive images and colour, and lottery instead of direct incentives — could be more successful than the usual black-and-white campaign.
Make it Social
Humans are social creatures. We are inherently social beings, who rely on cooperation to survive and we tend to follow social norms. Hence naturally, we are more easily convinced to change our behaviours when we were shown that the majority of people have changed (and vice versa). Here, we want to display public behaviour to encourage the desired behaviour, to leverage peer-to-peer networks when promoting new behaviour, and to encourage public commitment in order to ‘lock the people’ into committing to doing something.
Make it Timely
The right timing could make it or break it. We want to prompt people when they are most likely to be receptive. Behaviour is generally easier to be changed when the old habit has already been disrupted. For example, if we want to get people to start healthy eating habits, we could do this after their vacation trip.
It is also interesting to note that normally there is a big gap between intention and actual behaviour. A lot of people want to be healthier, but fewer people actually take action. For them to take action, we want to devise a solution that is easy to understand, simple enough to be taken action to, and delivered in a timely manner — while slowly incorporating them into the social norms.
Prototyping is not only for tech companies.
Prototyping is an experimental process where design teams implement ideas into tangible forms from paper to digital. It is a concept I think is most famously used in tech companies. Before launching a full-fledged product, companies will normally prototype and launch the minimum-viable-product (MVP) to test the market. Prototyping aims to capture the design concept and to test acceptability on users. Here, we need to test and learn.
Nesta did a great 1-minute video to explain what is prototyping, check here.
“They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.”
— Tim Brown, CEO & President of IDEO
By doing a prototype, we reduce the chance of over-investment, be it time or money. We will also get validation early if our solution is really something needed and useful for the community. We get feedback from the users as early as possible and this will in turn allow us to adapt much more quickly. Adopting the prototype method is extremely helpful in letting us derive more value from the whole design process.
Prototype can take many forms. It can be paper sketches, rough website interfaces, or even role-playing that act out new services. Prototype also doesn’t have to take a full program; you can prototype a part of a solution to test the specific hypothesis of your solution. For example, I will test a few different designs of information flyers to test the feasibility of using them in delivering effective mass communication in the community.
Prototype is also a great tool to improve our empathy. When an abstract idea is tested in a physical form, we will significantly remove many biases that cloud human judgement. For example confirmation bias. Confirmation bias describes our underlying tendency to notice, focus on, and give greater credence to evidence that fits with our existing beliefs. Each of us comes with pre-existing social values and life experiences. We tend to believe what we want to believe, so it is important to get early feedback to validate our beliefs. Rather than believing that our solution will be the best one, we should aim to make mistakes as much as possible in the early stage.
Accept that you will most likely fail. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.
I have a strong, strong belief that nothing ever goes exactly as planned. It has been my personal mantra in dealing with life. So, executing the perfect plan will never result in the perfect impact. The mindset that we will be more likely to fail is hence, crucial. If we think our solution will be perfect after just one try, we will always end up disappointed and frustrated. Our first try won’t be right and it might even not be good enough. Here, we need to improve, again and again.
The iterative process of creating and evaluating is the basic process of design found in all fields. We continue the iterative process (creation-evaluation-creation-evaluation) until the result is deemed enough, or until resources to continue are exhausted.
Once we accept that iterating our solution is normal and almost always expected, we will start becoming better designers. And maybe, a better human being ;)
There are no perfect theories nor perfect understanding of how we can deliver a sustainable, scalable, and impactful transformation. If there is any, all of us will be living the dream life, drinking bintang beer by the beach, and have no worries about anything in this world. Unfortunately — and fortunately — we still have tons of jobs to do to make this world a slightly better place for everyone. And so we shall.
