Behavioral Selection
Behavioral Selection explicitly involves identifying and prioritizing the specific behaviors that, if adopted by your users, will reliably drive strategic outcomes and measurable success. It is a core process within the broader Behavioral Strategy discipline.
Note: On this site, Behavioral Selection is the umbrella label for a two‑step workflow: Behavior Matching to enumerate candidates, then Behavior Ranking & Selection to decide.
Key Insight
Not all behaviors are equally impactful; rigorous selection clearly identifies behaviors with the highest potential for measurable strategic results.
Example
A subscription-based business aiming to increase renewals may use Behavioral Selection to identify behaviors strongly correlated with retention, such as users engaging weekly with a key feature or sharing content regularly. Clearly targeting these selected behaviors directly improves renewal rates.
Practical Steps
- Clearly define measurable strategic goals.
- Conduct behavioral research to identify candidate behaviors.
- Evaluate and prioritize behaviors based explicitly on impact and feasibility.
Heuristic: Explicitly select and prioritize behaviors that directly drive your measurable strategic outcomes.
Scoring rubric (0‑10 each; weight by context)
- Impact on strategic outcome (w=0.4)
- Feasibility for the median user: Ability + Environment (w=0.3)
- Motivational alignment: intrinsic drivers present (w=0.2)
- Measurability and speed to detect Δ‑B (w=0.1)
Behavior Priority Score = Σ(weight × score). Pilot the top 3. Keep the winner only if Δ‑B ≥ pre‑registered threshold in the pilot window.