What does a behavioral intervention actually look like in practice?

A behavioral intervention is a deliberate change introduced to enable a target behavior by modifying what people can do, what the situation makes easy or hard, or what feels worth doing. In practice, an intervention can be something you add, something you remove, or something you redesign.

Adding: a prompt in the CRM that reminds managers to log client interactions before they can close the session. A peer teaching program where early adopters demonstrate the new process to their teams. A weekly five-minute check-in where team leads share one win from using the new approach.

Removing: extra approval steps that create friction in the new process. Access to the old system that makes it too easy to fall back. Ambiguity about who is responsible for the new workflow.

Redesigning: the default settings so the new process is the path of least resistance. The meeting cadence so feedback happens in a structured, low-risk format. The dashboard so the new metrics are visible and the old ones are not.

Behind each of these sits a specific Behaviour Change Technique (BCT) from a validated taxonomy of 93 techniques. The prompts use BCT 7.1 (Prompts/Cues). The peer teaching uses BCT 6.2 (Social comparison). The default redesign uses BCT 12.1 (Restructuring the physical environment). Naming these precisely matters because it makes interventions testable and replicable.

The delivery mechanism comes from implementation strategies (a taxonomy of 73 labeled ERIC). Champions, learning collaboratives, audit and feedback systems, coaching cascades: these are how you deliver the active ingredients. Intervention design is not guesswork. It is structured selection based on diagnosis.