What Corporate Leaders Need to Know About Behavioural Science

Most leaders still think behavioural psychology belongs in marketing textbooks – a tool for predicting why customers buy one product over another. But as Guy Champniss points out, the real revolution is happening much closer to home: inside the organisation, inside teams, and inside the minds of leaders themselves.

“Almost every challenge organisations face,” he says, “comes down to behaviour. Not strategy. Not structure. Behaviour.”

It’s a striking observation because it reframes the pressure executives now face. The modern organisation is no longer a machine driven by process; it is a behavioural ecosystem shaped by habits, social cues, cognitive shortcuts, and invisible norms.

And the speed with which AI, hybrid work and economic volatility are reshaping that ecosystem means leaders can no longer rely on logic, hierarchy or even technical excellence to drive change.

Behavioural psychology – once peripheral – has become leadership’s missing operating system.

Executives invest millions in transformation, technology and restructuring, yet the same obstacles return: people don’t adopt the new tools, teams slip back into old routines, decisions skew towards the familiar, culture changes stall. For Champniss, none of this is surprising.

“If you don’t understand how behaviour actually works, you will misdiagnose the problem every time.”

This isn’t a failure of intelligence or strategy. It’s a failure of behavioural fluency and in today’s environment, that’s the gap leaders can least afford to ignore.

The Behaviour Gap Every Leader Underestimates

Early in the conversation, Champniss shares a simple, almost startling observation: “Most organisations don’t have a strategy problem – they have a behaviour problem.”

“If you walked into the organisation tomorrow, what could you record on your phone that tells you the change is working?” he asks. “If you can’t answer that, you don’t have a behaviour definition yet.”

Whether the issue is AI adoption, customer engagement, safety practices, innovation, or team collaboration, the symptoms leaders observe are almost always behavioural:

• Employees aren’t using the new tool.
• Managers aren’t coaching consistently.
• Teams still operate in silos.
• Customers aren’t choosing the new product.
• Yet very few leaders translate these frustrations into behavioural terms.

“They’ll tell you they want transformation,” he explains. “But rarely do they articulate it as: which behaviours must reliably occur for this transformation to work?”

This is the first leadership gap. The second is more subtle and more consequential.

Motivation: The Missing Engine of Organisational Change

Corporate leaders overwhelmingly default to two levers when they want change:

Capability — train people.

Opportunity — give them tools, time, and resources.

But behavioural science shows this explains only part of the picture.

“Motivation is the engine of behaviour. But most companies treat it as an afterthought. They assume that if people have the skills and the tools, the behaviour will just happen. It won’t. Because people are driven by fears, habits, emotions, social expectations – none of which get addressed in a traditional training programme.”

In behavioural science, the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation → Behaviour) demonstrates that unless motivation is addressed – reflective, emotional, and automation – no amount of training or resources will reliably change behaviour.

This is particularly evident in the global rush toward AI.

AI adoption: A behavioural challenge disguised as a technology challenge

Organisations obsess over AI tools, infrastructure, ethics, risk, and productivity gains. Yet the real barrier is human:

• fear of incompetence
• fear of redundancy
• ingrained habits
• misaligned incentives
• scepticism about leadership endorsement
• lack of social proof

“The conversation about AI is almost entirely technical,” Champniss says. “What barely gets discussed is the behavioural cost: fear, habits, social cues, and what people think leaders want. That’s where adoption succeeds or fails.”

AI adoption will succeed not because leaders invest in technology, but because they invest in human motivation – the stories, symbols, social norms, and nudges that reduce fear and amplify confidence.

Why Habits Run Your Organisation More Than Strategy Does

One of the most revealing parts of the interview addresses habits – the overlooked behavioural force that shapes almost half of daily actions in the workplace.

“Almost 50% of what we do each day is habitual,” Champniss notes. “If leaders ignore habits, they ignore half the organisation’s behaviour.”

When X happens, I do Y.

“Habits fire on context. You walk out of the tube in the morning and get a coffee not because you want a coffee, but because that’s what happens at 7:45 when you walk past that Pret. In organisations, we build routines and processes that create patterns – and those patterns drive behaviour far more than rational choice.”

During the interview, Champniss shared an example. A global healthcare company wanted to reduce unnecessary corporate travel – without imposing restrictions.

Instead of training, mandating or policing, they made two subtle behavioural adjustments:

Email signatures signalling preference for virtual meetings

A simple mnemonic helping employees judge whether travel was justified

“Within the tier of the organisation we focused on, travel costs dropped by 52%. And at no point did we tell anyone they weren’t allowed to travel.”

The Dangerous Myth of Rational Leadership

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth for senior leaders is this:

Human beings are not rational decision-makers.
Not even CEOs. Not even economists. Not even elite MBA graduates.

“We are cognitively lazy, and it’s not a value judgement — it’s biology. If the brain worked at full capacity all day, you’d be exhausted by 10am. So we rely on shortcuts, heuristics, patterned responses. They save energy — but they can seriously compromise decision-making.”

Leaders may believe they make strategic decisions through reason, analysis, and expertise. In reality:

• confirmation bias shapes what information they value
• recency bias influences which risks they elevate
• status signalling affects which innovations they sponsor
• social norms determine which behaviours they model
• cognitive fatigue drives them toward familiar choices
• Leadership education still teaches decision-making as if humans were perfectly rational. Behavioural science shows the opposite.

Executives don’t need more models.

They need mechanisms to counteract their own cognitive shortcuts.

“Even Kahneman said he couldn’t stop himself relying on these mechanisms. If the man who wrote the book can’t do it, the rest of us have no chance.”

Culture Is Not a Value Statement. It Is a Social Operating System

Another central theme from the learning rewired interview is the underestimated power of social context.

“We are deeply social creatures. The people around us have a huge influence on what we think, what we do and what we feel is acceptable. Culture isn’t a poster – it’s a set of social cues that tell people what behaviour is rewarded, tolerated or punished.”

Champniss highlights two types of norms:

Descriptive norms — what people actually do

Injunctive norms — what people believe others expect them to do

These norms are the invisible rails that guide behaviour at work.

A leader can announce a transformation. But employees will decide what to do by observing:

• what their peers prioritise
• who is rewarded
• who is punished
• whether leaders model the behaviour
• whether mistakes are tolerated
• how much psychological safety exists

“We are intensely social creatures,” he adds. “We look sideways far more than we look upwards. What peers do matters as much as what leaders say.” . Says Champniss

Leadership, therefore, is not a heroic individual act.
It is the design, signalling, and stewardship of social identity.

Why Leadership Development Must Evolve (And What Leaders Actually Need)

Despite its relevance, behavioural science remains largely absent from most MBA and executive education curricula.

“Your job as a leader is to define what the group stands for,” Champniss says. “If people don’t see you as the prototypical member of the group, they won’t follow you. It’s that simple and that complicated.”

Champniss identifies three capabilities leaders urgently need:

1. Behavioural diagnosis

What behaviours must change and what is really getting in the way?

2. Behavioural design

How do we engineer environments, incentives, stories, tools, and norms that make the right behaviours easier?

3. Behavioural self-awareness

How do leaders recognise their own biases, patterns, and social signalling?

A New Leadership Mandate: Become a Behaviour Architect

The leaders who succeed in the next decade will not be the most analytical, experienced, or technically sophisticated.

They will be the ones who internalise a new mandate:

• Transformation lives or dies at the behavioural level.
• Leaders who ignore this will continue repeating the same failures.

Transformation depends on three deceptively simple questions:

• What do we need people to do differently?
• What currently drives or blocks those behaviours?
• How can we redesign the environment to make the right behaviour the easy behaviour?

Leaders who adopt this mindset unlock competitive advantage. Those who ignore it will continue launching transformations that fail for the same reason: human behaviour was never part of the plan.

The Future of Leadership Is Behavioural

If the past decade belonged to digital transformation, the next will belong to behavioural transformation – anchored in psychology, neuroscience, social identity, and human motivation.

AI will intensify this need. So will hybrid work, demographic shifts, social polarisation, and rising employee expectations. The organisations that thrive will not be the ones with the best technology, strategy, or processes – but the ones with the deepest understanding of human behaviour.

“Behaviour is the architecture of every organisation,” Champniss says. “If you don’t design it, it designs you.” – says Guy Champniss

Insights from Headspring’s Learning Rewired conversation with Guy Champniss (Headspring Faculty), hosted by Thiago Kiwi