The gap keeps widening

I keep running into the same thing.

I'm in a workshop. With a good team and sharp people. We've mapped the journey. We've done the research. We've got sticky notes from floor to ceiling. And then someone says, "The problem isn't the service. It's that people aren't doing what we want."

And the room goes quiet. Nobody knows what to do next.

Design thinking gives you empathy maps. Journey maps. "How might we" statements. Genuinely useful. But the moment the problem becomes about behaviour, about why people say one thing and do another, the toolkit runs dry.

I've watched designers Google "nudge theory" mid-workshop and paste something half-understood onto a wall. I've watched teams shrug and say, "People are just like that." I've watched project leads treat behavioural science like a garnish. Something you sprinkle on at the end to make the report sound clever.

Here's what I think the actual problem is. Behavioural science is rich. It is extensive. There are decades of research on why people do what they do. But almost none of it is built for practitioners. It's built for researchers. For academics. For people writing papers that other people writing papers will read.

If you're a designer in a sprint, a change manager on a deadline, a product lead who needs to ship something on Tuesday, you don't need a 400-page textbook. You need a way in. Something you can pick up, use in a real conversation, and actually move a project forward with.

That's the gap. Not knowledge. Application.

I've been reading everything I can find. COM-B. Fogg's Behaviour Model. Self-Determination Theory. The Transtheoretical Model. Each one is brilliant in its own way. Each one also assumes you've got a psychology degree and six months to spare.

What I want to build is simpler than that. A set of tools that brings behavioural science into the rooms where decisions are actually made. Workshop rooms. Sprint rooms. Boardrooms. Not lecture theatres.

I don't know what it looks like yet. I'm thinking card decks. Canvases. Things you can put on a table. Things that feel like design tools but carry behavioural science inside them.

I'm calling it BehaviourKit. Which is a bit on the nose, I know. But at least it does what it says.

The audience is designers. Service designers, UX designers, product designers. People who are already good at understanding users but don't have a structured way to think about behaviour. I want to give them that structure without asking them to become behavioural scientists.

The ambition, if I'm being honest with myself, is this: make behavioural science a language that practitioners can speak. Not a discipline they have to study. Not a credential they need to earn. A language. Something you pick up through use.

I know that's a big claim for a set of card decks. But everything starts somewhere.

The tradeoff I'm already making, and I should probably write this down so future me can't pretend otherwise: I am choosing practitioners over academics. I am choosing usability over rigour. Not because rigour doesn't matter. It does. But if the choice is between a perfectly precise framework that nobody uses and a slightly simplified one that 500 people pick up tomorrow, I'm choosing the 500 people.

I think that's the right call. I suppose I'll find out.

Go deeper into the Building BehaviourKit series: