Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Understanding Our Efforts: A Brief Story About a Fish

Imagine that you’re walking along a beach. You see a fish stranded in the sand, flopping around a few feet away from the water. Let’s further imagine that you’re feeling more helpful than hungry. What do you do?

Do you walk up to the fish and yell, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t know how important it is to be in the water? If you just understood the value of water like I do, you’d get into the water!”

Or do you calmly and thoughtfully try to teach the fish, “Let me explain to you how your gills work. Your gills extract dissolved oxygen in the water and put it in your bloodstream, where the rest of your body can use it. If you aren’t in the water, you can’t get dissolved oxygen, and you’ll soon die.”

No. That’s obviously foolish. The fish isn’t lying in the sand because it lacks motivation, nor because it lacks understanding. Maybe it doesn’t know the details, but it “knows” the most important part: it needs to get back into the water.

Instead, there are really four things you can do in that moment.

First, you could pick up the fish, hold it in your hands, and walk it over to the water where you drop it in. All the fish needs to do is stay put and not flop around too much in your hands—it’s not trivial, but it’s a whole lot easier for the fish than to get back into the water on its own.

Second, there might even be ...