Behavioral Strategy

What is behavioral strategy?

Behavioral Strategy, as used on this site, is Jason Hreha’s approach to planning products and programs around human behavior. It starts with a desired business outcome, researches the intended audience, and selects actions that could achieve the outcome while fitting the people expected to perform them.

Behavioral strategy before behavioral design

Hreha’s overview places behavior research and Behavior Matching before product development. The question is not just how to make an action easier. It is whether this is a useful, appealing, and practical action for this audience in the first place.

The approach is a method developed for practitioners. It has not been independently validated as a complete system. Its value in a project needs to be tested through what people do and whether that serves the intended outcome.

Behavioral strategy in academic management research

The term also names an established research field. Powell, Lovallo, and Fox (2011) describe the use of psychological explanations of thinking, judgment, and interaction in business strategy. That broader field is distinct from Hreha’s named process.

The academic paper defines its research agenda; it does not validate the separate method described on this site.