Habit book notes · Susan Michie, Lou Atkins & Robert West · 2014

The Behaviour Change Wheel — the big ideas

A guide to designing behaviour change from the COM-B model — capability, opportunity, motivation — through to specific techniques.

Free — no account needed to read

A professional guide to designing behaviour change, from diagnosing a behaviour with the COM-B model to choosing intervention types and specific techniques from the BCT Taxonomy.

The big ideas

COM-B

Behaviour needs capability, opportunity and motivation; find which is missing before choosing a fix.

Intervention functions

Education, persuasion, incentives, training, environmental restructuring and others each target different gaps.

Specify techniques precisely

Describe exactly which techniques an intervention uses, using a shared taxonomy.

Key concepts

• COM-B
• Behaviour Change Wheel
• Intervention functions
• BCT Taxonomy

Limits

• Designed for professionals building programmes, so it’s detailed and technical.
• It organises choices rather than predicting which will work for a particular person.

What the research says

• Michie, van Stralen & West (2011) — Introduced COM-B — behaviour happens when there is Capability, Opportunity and Motivation — and the Behaviour Change Wheel for choosing interventions that target whichever is missing. Limits: A framework for designing interventions: it organises rather than predicts.
• Michie, Richardson, Johnston, Abraham, Francis, Hardeman and colleagues (2013) — An international consensus listing 93 distinct behaviour-change techniques in 16 groups, so researchers can describe exactly what an intervention does. Habit Lab’s technique library is built on it. Limits: A reporting language, not a ranking of which techniques work best.

Apply this idea

For one habit that isn’t happening, ask whether capability, opportunity or motivation is missing, and fix that one.

Described in our own words with the source named — not a summary of the whole book.