Responsibility & Behavioral Change

Christiane Wenhart talks about The Deep Bench's responsibility journey and how a month-long experiment led to great insights on behavioral change.

As in most places, the topic of sustainability was a constant in our office in 2019. We discussed a lot about our own responsibility, personally and as a company, and how this would affect the way we live and work.

We decided to take on our part and started by intensively studying it from a number of perspectives.

We discovered six avoidance strategies and their underlying psychological mechanisms that keep us from taking action. The one thing they all have in common: They are all based on our deep unwillingness to sacrifice and change.

So to get people into action, you have to find a way to address and breakthrough these strategies.

We also had to realize that the real challenge is to establish a long-term change of habits. Our self-experiment helped us to define essential building blocks for such a change.

To keep people going it is helpful to utilize the psychological effects which are key to truly unlearn ”bad habits” and establish more responsible behavior.

Our journey is still ongoing and will so for the foreseeable future. However, we believe that having taken these steps has made us experts in challenging habits for the better.