Naming the shapes

There's a moment in any cataloguing project where the mess starts to organise itself. You don't force it. You just notice, around paper 150 or so, that the new things you're reading are starting to rhyme with things you've already read.

I've been working through academic papers and case studies for five months now. What started as a question during lockdown has turned into something closer to an obsession. I wanted to find out what intervention shapes actually recur when people try to change behaviour. Across healthtech, sustainability, consumer products, public policy, workplace change, community programmes. Anywhere someone has tried to get people to start, stop, or change what they do.

The shapes are arriving.

I need to explain what I mean by "shape," because it's the word that keeps coming to me and I think it's the right one. A shape is bigger than a technique and smaller than a theory. It's a recurring structure. You find it in an energy company's demand reduction programme and then again in a hospital's medication adherence trial. The surface is completely different. The underlying structure is the same.

Think of it like a chord progression in music. There's one that goes I-V-vi-IV. If you know that progression, you hear it everywhere. Pop songs, hymns, film scores, football chants. (As a long time music player, I had to drop a music reference somewhere!) Once you can name it, you can spot it. Before you can name it, each song feels unique.

That's what's happening with the behaviour change cases. Once you see the shape, you see it everywhere.

Here's an example. I keep finding this move: an organisation wants people to do something, and instead of persuading or incentivising them, it simply changes the default. You're enrolled automatically. The pension contribution is pre-set. The organ donation preference is assumed unless you say otherwise. The pattern isn't the pension or the organ donation. The pattern is the shape: remove the decision burden by making the desired option the path of least resistance.

I'm calling that one "Default Them In." Descriptive. Functional. Does what it says on the tin.

Another: "Tell the Right People Clearly." People don't know about something that would help them, so the institution offering it sends a clear, credible message explaining the benefit and how to access it. Trust plus knowledge plus accessibility. It appears in healthcare, financial services, public programmes, and local government. Same shape, different wallpaper.

The naming process turns out to matter much more than I expected. When a pattern has a good name, I can hold it in my head alongside 40 others and keep them distinct. When the name is vague or abstract, everything starts to collapse together. Naming is a form of precision. Get it wrong and the patterns blur back into noise.

I've also started maintaining something I call the graveyard. Every time I think I've found a new pattern, I test it against every existing one on the list. Is this genuinely different? Or is it wearing a costume? Last week I removed "Make the Future Felt" because it was too close to "Bring Tomorrow Closer" Both rely on consequences and knowledge. The distinction wasn't sharp enough to justify two separate entries.

The graveyard has a rule: every removal needs a reason, written down. This discipline matters. Without it, I'd either keep everything and end up with a bloated list, or I'd cut too aggressively and lose things that deserved to survive. The graveyard is the quality control for the whole process.

There's a method behind this, although I didn't set out to follow one deliberately. In qualitative research it's called constant comparison. Every new piece of data is compared against everything you already have. You're looking for genuine distinctiveness. If two things overlap too much, one of them goes. If something genuinely new appears, it earns its place and every existing entry gets retested against it.

The patterns are clustering naturally by scale. Some operate at the level of systems and institutions. Some work at the community level. Some address individual behaviour within a group context. Some focus squarely on the individual. I didn't plan that hierarchy. It emerged from the data, which is precisely why I trust it.

In the wider behavioural design world, there's a growing conversation about what "applied" actually means. More people are distinguishing between academic behavioural science (understanding how people think and act) and applied behavioural science (designing interventions that work in the field). The shift in emphasis from "what do the studies say?" to "what can we actually do with this?" is becoming more visible. It's the shift I've been working toward since I started BehaviourKit. It's reassuring to see other people arriving at the same question from different directions.

I'm up to about 40 distinct patterns now. I think the final number will land somewhere around 50. Every new paper I read is more likely to confirm an existing pattern than to generate a new one. That's a sign that the set is getting close to complete. Or at least, close enough to be useful.

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