Behaviour & Cultural Change
Challenging dominant practices and social norms is often one of the sticking points when it comes to enacting effective sustainability and circular economy change initiatives.
Drawing on social sciences, behavioural economics, systems thinking and cognitive sciences, Leyla brings a unique perspective and skillset to enacting change when working with individuals, groups and communities.
Behaviour & Cultural Change for Sustainability
Effectively engaging individuals and communities in transforming behaviours and collective cultures benefits from a systems-based approach combined with best-practice social science research. Through her systems expertise, along with a deep understanding of behavioral economics and cognitive bias, Leyla can help you design and deliver sticky change outcomes.
From gamified experiences to systems interventions at scale, Leyla has developed a wide range of cultural and behavioural change projects for companies, NGOs and governments.
Behavioural Change
Understanding the way people move through and engage with the system around them, expectations, conventions and desires all feed into the best methods for intervening in dominant cultural conventions.
Systems Interventions
Leyla utilises systems thinking and systems change approaches to map behaviors, identify gaps, leverage best placed intervention points, identify insights and design systems interventions that work.
Cultural Conventions
Effective change requires an understanding of the cultural conventions that shape a community’s dominant behaviours and social norms. Through embedded research, Leyla ensures outcomes are meaningfully connected to the community.
Overcoming Barriers to Change
Whether it be implementing a new waste management system or understanding barriers to engagement and action, Leyla applies her unique toolset to explore barriers/pain points and achieve tangible change outcomes.
With her extensive experience, Leyla can efficiently and effectively identify how to motivate people to engage with a new way of doing something. She has helped answer questions like:
- How do you get busy restaurants to integrate food waste recycling?
- What are the barriers to adopting a new behavioural trait in an office building that achieves a healthy workplace?
- What gamified experiences will improve online learning outcomes?
- How does a business effectively engage its teams with innovative and out-of-the-box thinking?
- What are the friction points within a system that disable desired behavioural outcomes?
Change Approaches
There are many methods for effectively engaging people with change. Leyla utilises a suite of change tools employed to support effective change management and outcomes, including:
Systems Mapping
Behaviours are the outcomes of interactions that occur as a result of experiences that are often influenced by the system at play, so systems mapping is vital for an effective change program.
Theory of Change
Reverse engineer your change goals through the widely used ToC approach; mapping the actions and outcomes against your resources and methods of action ensures you have a roadmap for success.
Co-Design
Ensuring that everyone is engaged with effectively and not exploited or ignored is critical to a successful change project. By using participatory action research and co-design approaches, Leyla ensures you are inviting rather than instructing participation.
How it works
Combining expertise in social science research methods, co-design approaches, cognitive science/bias, behavioural economics, cultural conventions, theory of change, design solutions and systems thinking, Leyla will ensure a full-picture change model is used to effect positive change outcomes.
Start: Briefing
Every project starts with a detailed briefing call that involves your key team members. This step ensures a clear understanding of specific needs, project goals, and current challenges. The discussion focuses on defining core project outcomes and exploring the most effective approaches to achieve alignment and success.
This multidisciplinary approach enables her to look for friction points that prevent change, develop effective co-design programs that engage community stakeholders in egalitarian ways and design interventions that create sticky, long-term change outcomes.
PHASE 1
Research and Development
Leyla begins by engaging in multiple forms of research with the target group, including site visits, interviews and co-design workshops.
PHASE 2
Analysis & Recommendations
After data and insights are collected, she and her team then analyse it from a systems perspective and create a set of recommendations for how to intervene in that system in the most effective way to respectfully engage that community and achieve the desired change outcomes.
PHASE 3
Final Delivery
Leyla is available to support or manage the whole change project in collaboration with the client.
Explore Content on Behavioural and Cultural Change
Make Change Handbook
This handbook covers the basics of the psychological, behavioral, social and cultural theories on change. It helps readers to...
“Sustainability, done well and with sincerity, is a journey that evolves into us achieving a regenerative and just future. A key challenge we currently face is overcoming pre-established frames, fears and limiting forces — like team members who think that sustainability is just for hippies, or those that naturally have an aversion to embracing anything they don’t understand or already like, or even the ones who are so righteous about it that they think no actions are good enough. A vital part of an effective and positive cultural change process requires reorienting internal narratives, shifting incentive structures and establishing a new company culture, one that embraces sustainability as the core of all business actions and decisions, as an opportunity for innovation and competitive transformation.”
Leyla Acaroglu | From a Problem to Avoid to an Opportunity for Change: Reframing Sustainability
Ready to Enact Positive Change?
If you are committed to change that achieves long-term sustainability outcomes, transforms cultural conventions and enacts new behaviors in ethical, respectful and effective ways, then reach out to Leyla and her team today.