Giving Compass' Take:

• Ideas42 offers tips on how to create behavioral design teams after years of cultivating an approach of effective and sustainable behavioral design. 

• How does behavioral design help city growth? 

• Now that you know how to build the right team,  you can also read about the five steps for applying behavioral design to programs. 

For the past few years, we have been applying behavioral science to city programs and services in New York and Chicago to help the city government take into account complex human behavior, and the contexts in which we make decisions. We have embedded experts into agencies themselves—a model we call Behavioral Design Teams (BDTs)—to tackle challenges at the city level.

We’ve been refining our approach to behavioral design teams through dozens of engagements across both cities, achieving great success and impact. Given the BDT model’s effectiveness in quickly identifying and addressing behavioral barriers within government programs and services, we want to see the number of BDTs grow in order to have as much positive impact on as many people’s lives as possible.

To pave the way for other municipalities to start a Behavioral Design Team, we distilled years of rigorously tested results and real-world best practices into an open-source playbook for public servants at all levels of government.

Thinking about starting a BDT? Here are five tips for launching (and sustaining) a city behavioral design team. For more insights, read the full playbook:

  1. Compose your team with care
  2. Choose an anchor agency
  3. Establish your criteria for selecting projects
  4. Build buy-in with a mix of project types
  5. Keep learning and growing

Read the full article about behavioral design teams by Mitra Salasel at ideas42