Latest news & events

PACE blog - thoughts on utilising the art of behavioural insight from Rachel North, Derby City Council

In the latest blog from PACE, Rachel North, Derby City Council's Deputy Chief Executive and Strategic Director for Communities and Place shares her thoughts on how behavioural insight can support our conversations with communities.

Delivering services for people has always been at the heart of my thinking. My background is in housing services and my view on place and on our role in place-making for the future comes from a people-first, co-creative perspective.

As constraints on capacity and time have become normalised, we are all aiming to work smarter. That means bringing together a range of experience and perspectives through peer networks, associations like ADEPT and colleagues and asking, who is already working in this space and what can we learn from them? At Derby, we are drawing more and more on people from across the council. And honestly, if you want to know what’s going on in a community, ask a librarian. They know everything.

John F Kennedy said: "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." And that is where we are now, we’re at a fork in the road. In a prescient moment, we had already decided that this session would focus on how to use behavioural insight to ‘drive up’ modal shift and ‘drive down’ car travel. Since then, the Plan for Drivers, the row back on 20mph zones and attacks on Ulez are all making positive engagement with our communities about measures that have to come in, much harder.

Not only that, but it seems like we will need to reappraise our entire approach to community engagement and the stories we tell. Winning hearts and minds is not about the technical solution, it’s the emotions around change that we have to manage.

In Derby we’ve created an Ambition document that we consulted on last year about reinventing our city centre, and it includes how to create a more human centred place by changing the dominance of cars. Should our narrative be focused on tackling the climate emergency or reconnecting communities – which has more resonance? If we look at the negative result of the Cambridge referendum on congestion charges which came despite many years of engagement and investment in public transport, and contrast it with the Mayor of London’s determined approach to ULEZ - is it purely a question of bold leadership?

Dr Tim Harris, Principal Behavioural Scientist from DfT’s Social & Behavioural Research Team has been grappling with the challenge of communities and behavioural change. Exploring how three tenets of behavioural science – using norms, overcoming habits and reducing reactance – could be used to reduce car use, it struck us all that we seem to have jumped straight to reactance and push back. Anger is most likely when people believe their freedom to be threatened, and what is the car if not one of our core symbols of personal freedom? If change is perceived as something coming from outside, that angry pushback is heightened and the anti-Ulez ‘Blade-runners’ are born.

So, what’s the answer? People want to feel they are making choices, that they are gaining something rather than losing, and that they are part of the in-group that benefits. Taking that further, what works best is when people have examples of others who have switched and when people monitor themselves against perceptions of the norm. This has more positive impact than appealing to concerns around air quality or using rewards, even though those would initially appear to be strong motivators.

Sarah Leeming, Regional Director - England South Sustrans spoke about the ‘moment of change’. At times when we move house or experience a pandemic, other changes in our lives can be actively sought and easier to adopt. If we can recognise them, they can be used in the way that active travel policy, investment and infrastructure were implemented during Covid. What is important is to include behaviour change modelling as well as communications within the programme design.

As well as running through a series of case studies, Sarah also talked about the By Ours community project which has been helping residents, businesses and schools to design local streets in Cowley Hill and Bebington. The final contributor, Oz Choudhri, Head of Mobility Solutions – UK and Ireland Enterprise took us through the Go-HI MaaS project for multi-modal travel. Both programmes have behavioural science embedded in their design.

There is so much in the stories we create and people’s emotions are multi-layered. Our cars are our spaces – when we’re stuck in traffic, we ourselves are not the traffic. If we feel like we’re being told off, we’ll come out and defend ourselves. That’s why we need behavioural insight. We have to be far more sophisticated because just doing the normal thing in the current climate of anger and conspiracy thinking is no longer working. Although we understand the differences across our places and have a real, granular place focus, our ability to think strategically and work out complex problems is constrained by the stretching of our capacity, the lack of resources, working with a patchwork of funding and having no time.

That’s why these sessions are important for place leaders. The content is timely, the debate is fascinating and as it is so thought-provoking, you find yourself going back to it in your mind, even weeks later.

I'm looking forward to our next session, because I know that I'll be energised by it both inside and outside the room. There’s a peer group here that I now know well, and that’s really powerful.  The issues we face are multi-faceted and complex and require us to work with all the ideas, experiences and energy of our peers, colleagues and partners. In this joint programme with Amey, ADEPT is doing its bit – and I would urge everyone to find their network too.

More information on PACE Session 2 is available here.

Author

Rachel North, Deputy Chief Executive and Strategic Director for Communities and Place, Derby City Council.

Further information

 

Media enquiries: please contact Coast Communications 01579 352600 | VAT number: 337 0556 05 | Website by Cosmic