Behaviour Change: the teenage years

“Old age is 15 years older than I am.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

When we launched Behaviour Change on this day in 2009, I’m not sure we were thinking about where we’d be in 15 years time. If we had, it probably would have felt very grown up. Now that we’re here, of course it feels like yesterday that we were standing outside our kind hosts Sputnik, who let us squat in their back office on Carnaby Street for a few months. You may not have heard of the telescoping effect, but I’m sure you’ve felt it stretching or contracting your perception of time.

Not long before that, we’d been debating what to call ourselves. Suggestions floating around included “The Behaviour Change Unit”, “The Behaviour Changers” and “Something random like Google”. David’s lightbulb of “Behaviour Change” was in hindsight a no-brainer, although believe it or not it’s a term that wasn’t in regular use at the time. It’s a decision that has proved pretty handy since then in terms of search rankings, random new business requests and instant recognition.

Early on we launched Eat Seasonably, at the time a major collaborative project to encourage the nation to eat more sustainably, and still an information source today (that’s me below talking about the benefits of seasonal eating back in 2010…) We created 50 Things to do Before You’re 11¾ for the National Trust to help parents get their kids to spend more time playing outdoors in nature, even now a hugely popular intervention. We worked with the national bus companies to shift people in Sheffield and Manchester out of their cars and onto the bus.

Along the way, we’ve proved that kittens can reduce littering by 80%, and taken interventions to scale through the Chewing Gum Taskforce. We’ve tackled the scourge of the badly-parked e-bike. We’ve given parents practical ways to get their little ones to eat their greens. We’ve made the national news (below), just by encouraging people to be nice to each other in the South Downs. And we’ve joined forces with WRAP to take our joint work on re-use, recycling and food waste to the next level.

Thank you to anyone who’s been with us on this journey so far, supporting, partnering, challenging, providing us with opportunities to tackle the tricky behavioural challenges that we founded Behaviour Change to take on.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. holds an as-yet unbeaten record for oldest justice on the US Supreme Court, having retired in 1932 at the ripe old age of 90. Now that’s something to aim for.