Unit 6: Implementing SIDE

Done well, applied behavioral science is inherently sustainable and that is a huge advantage of this process.

The first source of sustainability comes from the ability to fail forward. When we don’t use science, every failure is a loss of resources – all it tells us is that a particular intervention didn’t work. But when we connect those failures to pressures and the evidence that came before them, now we can fail forward. Remember our three gates; knowing why a pilot didn’t work makes it easier to find an intervention that will.

The second source is our use of evaluation. Remember, if we skip piloting, we’re still doing an experiment – we’re just doing it at scale! By starting with small experiments, we make failures less costly because they are limited in scope.
We fail small, we learn big.