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Tales from the Behavioural Science Twilight Zone
Halloween is here, and so is The Behavioural Science Twilight Zone—a collection of stories capturing the strange and surprising realities of behavioural science implementation. Like Rod Serling’s original The Twilight Zone series from the 1950s, where each episode starts in a world that feels familiar but quickly reveals eerie surprises, these stories explore what happens when elegantly crafted interventions meet the unpredictable human systems they’re meant to change.
In writing these, I found five core truths that every practitioner learns (often the hard way):
Theory and practice are separate lands, with a heavily guarded border
Context isn’t just king—it’s the entire kingdom
Human factors aren’t noise; they’re the signal
Complexity is often the costume failure wears to work
Wisdom without expertise is blind, and expertise without wisdom is dangerous
From The Implementation Abyss, where flawless designs encounter the real world, to The Behavioral Immune System, where systems develop resilience against change, and The Scaling Specter, which haunts every attempt to replicate success, each story captures a flash of recognition—the moment when theory meets the unexpected challenges of the real world. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes unsettling, but always instructive.
Consider these tales my treats (and a few well-learned tricks) for fellow practitioners navigating the shadowy territories of behavioural change!
A sneak peek of the booklet below....
There is a dimension beyond that which is known to practitioners. It is a dimension as vast as human behavior and as complex as organizational change. It is the middle ground between theory and practice, between evidence and implementation, and it lies between the pit of failed interventions and the summit of behavioral insight.
You've just crossed over into... the Behavioural Science Twilight Zone.
Each story reveals a fundamental truth about behavioural science practice:
The gap between theory and practice is often wider than we admit
Context and implementation matter more than perfect design
Managing human factors (politics, expectations, resistance) is crucial
Simplicity and humility are underrated virtues in intervention design
The field requires both technical expertise and practical wisdom
The Theory-Practice Divide
Submit, if you will, to a world where evidence-based dreams meet implementation nightmares. Where perfect pilots go to die, and randomized controlled trials face the uncontrolled reality of human systems. Ahead lies the graveyard of elegant theories, where practitioners learn the hard way that the map is not the territory... and the territory bites back.
Theory and practice are separate countries, and the border is heavily guarded. In this section, we explore three tales of what happens when perfect theory meets imperfect reality:
The Implementation Abyss: Where flawless interventions discover they're only flawless on paper
The Problem-Solution Paradox: When solving the wrong problem creates bigger ones
The Measurement Mirage: Where the numbers we trust may not even exist
The Context Kingdom
Consider the humble intervention, perfectly designed, meticulously tested, ready for deployment. But wait - what's this? The ground beneath it shifts. The context changes. The system pushes back. For in this dimension, no intervention survives first contact with reality, and what works here will surely fail there... often spectacularly.
Context isn't just king - it's the whole kingdom. Three stories from the frontlines of context collapse:
The Scaling Specter: When perfect pilots breed imperfect scaling
The Infrastructure Gap: Where context makes or breaks our best-laid plans
The Behavioral Immune System: When interventions spawn their own antibodies
The Human Factor
Step into a realm where human nature defies behavioral logic, where resistance isn't just expected - it's ingenious. Watch as subjects become agents of their own destiny, transforming our careful nudges into unexpected shoves. Here, in the twilight zone of implementation, the most carefully designed intervention is no match for human creativity... and rebellion.
Human factors aren't implementation noise - they're the signal. Three chronicles of humanity's response to being nudged:
The Reactance: Where mandatory wellness creates voluntary illness
The Signal: When our warnings become invitations
The Manipulation Manifesto: How good intentions pave the road to dark patterns
The Complexity Curse
Observe the deceptively simple intervention before you. Clean. Elegant. Doomed. For in this dimension, every solution spawns new problems, every fix creates new breaks, and every success plants the seeds of its own undoing. Welcome to the realm where complexity isn't the enemy - it's the battlefield.
Complexity is often the costume that failure wears to work. Three tales from the depths of unintended consequences:
The Overflow: When success collapses under its own weight
The Compensators: Where solving one problem creates three more
The Displacement: Hit the behavioral mole here, watch it pop up there
The Wisdom Paradox
Tonight's specimens: the experts who know everything, and the practitioners who know better. Watch as knowledge battles wisdom in a dance of hubris and humility. For in the Behavioral Science Twilight Zone, the most dangerous practitioner isn't the one who knows nothing... but the one who thinks they know everything.
Wisdom without expertise is blind, but expertise without wisdom is dangerous. Three cautionary tales of knowledge, hubris, and humility:
The Airport Book Apparition: When a little knowledge becomes a dangerous thing
The Certainty Seeker: Where guarantees guarantee only failure
The Data Doppelgänger: How numbers tell the stories we want to hear
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