What are Behaviour Change Techniques and why should we care?
Behaviour Change Techniques, or BCTs, are the active ingredients inside any intervention designed to change behavior. Think of it like medicine: the intervention is the treatment plan, and the BCTs are the specific compounds that make the treatment work.
There are 93 documented BCTs in a shared taxonomy developed by behavioral scientists. Each one is observable, describable, and replicable. When you give someone instructions on how to perform a behavior, that is BCT 4.1. When you prompt someone with a cue at the right moment, that is BCT 7.1. When you provide feedback on their behavior, that is BCT 2.2. When you restructure their environment so the target behavior is easier, that is BCT 12.1.
Why should organizational leaders care? Because most change programs cannot describe what they actually did at this level of specificity. They say "we communicated the change" or "we trained people" or "we had leadership sponsor it." Those are activities, not techniques. They cannot be measured, replicated, or improved because they are too vague to test.
BCTs make interventions precise.
When an intervention works, you know which specific techniques drove the result. When it does not work, you know which techniques to swap out. When you want to scale it to another team or geography, you have a recipe, not just a story.
In practice, BCTs are selected based on the COM-B diagnosis. Capability barriers map to techniques like instruction, rehearsal, and graded tasks. Opportunity barriers map to environmental restructuring, adding objects, and social support. Motivation barriers map to social comparison, credible source messaging, and framing/reframing. The diagnosis determines the prescription.
