Unit 6: Implementing SIDE

There are six behavioral science roles, one that goes across projects and give that make up the project team. We’re going to make a separate course on how to interview and select these people; stay tuned!

1. Leader: The person who manages the whole applied behavioral science process. They’re working with Business and Operational peers, embedding the process across the org, hiring and firing the team, and managing the profit and loss.
2. Strategist: They own the strategy phase of the SIDE™ process and their deliverable is the behavioral statement. To do that, they have to understand what behaviors the business is interested in, how valuable they are, and how they are defined. These are often MBA-like folks; they need to be able to make a model to understand how impactful changing a behavior will be and keep the team aligned on that outcome.
3. Qualitative and Quantitative Researchers: They own the insights phase. Quantitative researchers are good at inferential statistics. They need to be able to collect and analyze data, so SQL, R, etc. are useful skills. Qualitative researchers use user research skills. They often are ex-journalists or sociologists who can observe and talk to people in their environment to get a better understanding of the why around their behavior. Together, they are accountable for the pressure map and all of its cross-validated pressures.
4. Designer: They own the design phase. When a lot of people think of a behavioral scientist, a designer is typically what they think of. This is the person who probably knows the most outside research, they may have come for a formal social psychology background, they often know what has worked elsewhere. They have to be able to bring people together because they’re facilitating these workshops. So they also have to understand design thinking and how to elicit diverse perspectives. Ultimately, they’re accountable for the potential interventions and the downselection.
5. Project Manager: They own the evaluation phase. The project manager runs the pilot, and just like the strategist really understands the business model, the project manager needs to understand the operational model, since they’re going to be handing off the projects for scaling.  They’re accountable for the outcome statement and the presentation of the full chain of evidence from behavioral statement to insights to designs to evaluation.

Accountability on the behavioral science team

One of the things that makes for a really good, strong behavioral science team is coupled accountability and autonomy. You’ll notice for each of those phases, everybody has a very clear sense of what they need to deliver. They can ask others for help and certainly in their “off” phases, the expectation is that everyone is following the accountable person’s lead, but ultimately each phase leader is solely accountable for the deliverable of that phase.