Unit 5: Evaluation and Measuring Change
Evaluation is the last step of the SIDE™️ process. It’s the step that most frequently gets skipped and yet it is the most important part of any good applied behavioral science method.
It isn’t science if you can’t prove what works and why!
Remember, the question isn’t whether or not you’re willing to do an experiment. If you scale something without evaluating it, you’re still doing an experiment…you’re just doing it on everyone, all at once!
Sometimes, applied behavioral science becomes a victim of its own success. By the time you get to the evaluation step, you’ve already written a clear behavioral statement, have insights that are cross-validated by quant and qual, and have interventions that are clearly connected to those pressures. It can feel like you have a ton of evidence!
But it doesn’t work until you prove it works.
Activity:
Implementing a behavioral science approach into a workplace is also a behavior change project. You can approach this in a scientific way too.
List some potential inhibiting pressures your workplace might have for running pilots and evaluating them.