Abstract
Behavioural science has a long history in identifying small changes that produce big impacts in people’s wealth, health and happiness, often referred to as ‘nudges’. While behavioural scientists focus on the interventions that are used to create these changes, systems thinkers focus on the leverage points where interventions can be situated. Recent critiques of the behavioural insights approach have argued that the approach is incompatible with a systems approach, however, the two approaches are complementary. Until now, most behavioural scientists have been using their intuition to identify leverage points, rather than the structured tools developed by systems thinkers.
This session aims to change this by giving behavioural science practitioners practical tools for systems thinking. We will cover how systems thinking has been used in a variety of policy settings, including employment, health and justice. Participants will walk away with a simple and practical framework to apply behavioural systems thinking to their own work. We will help participants identify key leverage points in the systems they operate in and develop interventions that can have wider impacts across a system.
We will finish the session with a worked example of how we have used a behavioural systems approach to better understand the abuse and mistreatment of older people in Australia and how this approach was instrumental in the development of Australia’s National Prevention Framework for the Abuse and Mistreatment of Older People.