What drives the doing

I've turned my attention to the other side of the problem. The patterns cover what to try when you want to change behaviour. Now I need to understand what drives behaviour in the first place. The diagnostic half.

This is where it gets messy, because the academic world has not exactly reached consensus.

There are at least six well-established frameworks for understanding what influences human behaviour, and they overlap in interesting ways while disagreeing about emphasis, language, and scope. I've been reading across all of them, and the experience is a bit like listening to six people describe the same elephant from different angles.

COM-B, from Susan Michie's work, says behaviour requires capability, opportunity, and motivation. Clean. Useful. Also quite broad. "Motivation is low" covers about twelve different things, from "they don't see the point" to "they're afraid of what happens if they try."

Fogg's Behaviour Model says you need motivation, ability, and a prompt. Beautifully simple. The emphasis on ability (make it easy) and prompts (make it obvious) is deeply practical. But it tends to underweight the social layer, the influence that other people have on what we do.

Self-Determination Theory says people need autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This gets at the intrinsic motivation question, the difference between doing something because someone told you to and doing it because it fits who you are. Important for understanding why imposed changes get resisted.

The Transtheoretical Model says people move through stages of readiness: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. This gives me something the other models don't, which is a temporal dimension. People are not at the same starting point. Someone who hasn't yet thought about changing is in a fundamentally different position from someone who tried and stopped.

The Health Belief Model says behaviour depends on perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, cues to action, and self-efficacy. Detailed and well-tested in health contexts. Less portable to, say, workplace technology adoption.

Social Identity Theory says that group membership, identity, and social norms shape behaviour in ways that individual-level models consistently underestimate. This one keeps tugging at my attention, because I see its fingerprints in so many of the patterns I catalogued. Norms, group expectations, visible behaviour, identity fit. The social layer matters enormously and most of the individual-focused frameworks treat it as an afterthought.

My approach, having now spent several weeks sitting with all of this, is the same one that worked for the change patterns: don't adopt one framework. Instead, look across all of them for what keeps recurring.

What do they agree on, even when they use different words?

Three things seem to show up everywhere, regardless of which framework is doing the talking.

First: influence comes from somewhere. Sometimes from inside the person (what they think, feel, want, expect). Sometimes from other people (what the group does, expects, models, rewards). Sometimes from the surrounding context (what the environment allows, prevents, signals, or structures). Three sources. I'm calling them Self, Social, and System. Or in workshop language: Me, We, and Oversee.

Second: behaviour is not a switch. It builds. There's a stage where things are bubbling underneath but nothing has happened yet (attitudes forming, beliefs solidifying, norms taking hold). Then there's a shift, a tipping point where something changes enough to move from intention toward action. Then there's the action itself and the ongoing work of sustaining it. Three stages. I'm calling them Direct, Shift, and Act.

Third: crossing these two dimensions produces a grid. Three sources of influence by three stages of behaviour formation. Nine cells. Nine driver types.

I'm tentatively naming them: Heart & Mind (what people think and feel). Motivation (what shifts people from wanting to starting). Doing (what sustains action once it starts). Group Values (the norms and identities that direct group behaviour). Flux (the disruptions that shift group dynamics). Influence (the social forces that sustain or suppress action). Rules & Tools (the regulations and artefacts that direct context). Environment (the signals and messages that shift context). Pathways (the structures that make action easy or hard).

The grid feels right. It covers the territory that each framework covers, without being locked into any single one's language. Each cell can be decomposed further into mechanisms, which gives me the detail I need for routing. And the temporal dimension (Direct, Shift, Act) acknowledges what the Transtheoretical Model gets right: readiness matters.

Whether it's genuinely robust enough to build a system on, I won't know until I test it. But it's the clearest articulation I've found for what drives behaviour, synthesised from what the frameworks actually agree on rather than what any one of them insists on.

The diagnostic half is taking shape. And I can already see how it could connect to the patterns.

Go deeper into the Building BehaviourKit series: