Globally, organisations waste over $50 billion a year on leadership development.
Not because the content is wrong. Because it targets the wrong behaviours, in the wrong context, with almost no measurement of what actually changes as a result.
I've written about this at length — and the uncomfortable truth is that the problem hasn't improved much. Most leadership development still sits disconnected from the specific behaviours that matter in a given programme, in a given organisation, at a given moment.
Behavioural science exists to fix that. And applied well, it's one of the most practical levers available in complex change work.
What behavioural science actually adds to change leadership
The fundamentals of human behaviour haven't changed much in 200,000 years. What has changed is our understanding of them — and the gap between that understanding and how most organisations design and deliver change.
A few of the principles I draw on consistently:
The Planning Fallacy — leaders systematically underestimate the time, cost and risk of change initiatives while overestimating the value of their own prior experience. Understanding this bias is the starting point for more honest programme design. I've written about this here.
The Peak End Rule — people don't remember change programmes as averages. They remember the emotional peak and how it ended. Most programmes are designed for the middle — the part that gets forgotten. More on this here.
The Dunning-Kruger effect — the most confident voices in your steering committee are often working from the narrowest reference class. This dynamic is almost never named directly, and it shapes resourcing and timeline decisions in ways that are expensive to undo. I've explored this in the context of complex programmes here.
Quiet Influencers — the people who carry real trust in your organisation are rarely the loudest. Identifying and activating them is consistently the highest-leverage move in any distributed change effort. More on who they are and how to find them here.
How this shows up in practice
Applied behavioural science isn't a workshop or a framework bolt-on. It's a lens that sharpens every part of the change work — from how you design milestones and sequence communications, to how you read a steering committee room, to how you structure the ending of a programme so it actually sticks.
The organisations I work with are navigating genuinely complex change — ERP implementations, enterprise-wide transformations, distributed workforces, AI adoption programmes. The technical side of those programmes is hard. The human side is harder. And behavioural science is one of the most reliable guides I have for the human side.
If you're leading a programme right now and want to think through what this might mean in practice, start here or get in touch directly.
A few things I've written on this topic:
What two moments will your transformation be remembered for? — the Peak End Rule applied to programme design
The biggest mistake I see leaders make — the Planning Fallacy and why experienced leaders are often the last to update their estimates
There's a risk in your programme that rarely makes it onto the risk register — Dunning-Kruger in the executive suite
The Quiet Influencers — the people your change plan is probably missing