Behavioural science has become increasingly successful in the past decade: more organisations than ever are exploring the science of behaviour change and the number of practitioners is steadily growing. Much of the focus has been on showcasing our skills in the form of clever and cost-efficient solutions but recently there have been questions raised about the effectiveness of our tools and techniques. 

For me, the reason we see so much variability in the results of our efforts is that we often don't spend enough time thinking about the problem but instead impatiently jump straight to the solutions. It's understandable, because much of the discussion in applied behavioral science has been on discussing how we design solutions with the majority of books, TED talks and articles focusing on them. In the early stages of the profession we have been focused on demonstrating our value and because we have been successful in doing that, we are being asked to solve more complex problems so it's time to start thinking about the problems more carefully too. To quote someone much smarter than me, Albert Einstein once said: