Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesCloth scraps kept landing beside the machines because that was the quickest place to put them. The factory offered money for using bins. The floor remained dangerous. Then golden-coin decals reduced the waste. There is something mildly humiliating in this for the behaviour-change industry. We adore explanations, training modules and earnest posters telling people to care more. They make the intervention look serious. Unfortunately, the behaviour is usually happening somewhere else, in three seconds, while a person is trying to keep production moving.
The coins did not deliver a lecture. They altered the meaning of one patch of floor at the exact moment a hand released the cloth. That does not make floor stickers a universal miracle. The symbol mattered in that culture; the production incentive still existed; unsafe conditions cannot be decorated into acceptability. Copy the coin without studying the setting and you have invented expensive litter.
But the order of work is worth stealing. Stand where the behaviour occurs. Watch what the person can see, reach and do without breaking stride. Find the convenient action you are competing with. Only then design the prompt. Picture a distribution depot with a large safety notice near an awkward doorway. Staff walk past it while steering loaded trolleys and watching the floor. A strip placed where their eyes already go has a chance; the policy prose above their heads does not.
The next shift provides the useful measurement: how much waste or how many collisions occurred in the marked area.