Behaviour change wheel
A systematic method to design interventions, built around COM-B.
What it means
The Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) is a comprehensive framework for designing behavior-change interventions, built outward from the COM-B model at its hub. Around the COM-B core it arranges nine intervention functions — education, persuasion, incentivization, coercion, training, restriction, environmental restructuring, modelling, and enablement — and an outer ring of seven policy categories that can deliver those functions, such as guidelines, regulation, legislation, fiscal measures, and service provision. The mechanism is a structured sequence: diagnose which COM-B components must change for a given behavior, select the intervention functions most likely to affect those components, and then choose policy options to implement them, optionally specifying the active ingredients with a behaviour change technique taxonomy. The wheel was developed by synthesizing nineteen pre-existing frameworks of behavior change, which were judged incomplete or inconsistent, into a single coherent system, and its value is in making intervention design systematic, transparent, and replicable rather than ad hoc. It matters as one of the most widely used tools in applied behavioral science, especially in health and public policy, for moving from a behavioral diagnosis to a matched, well-specified intervention.
The eight-step method
The wheel is a procedure, not just a diagram. Its accompanying guide organises the work into three stages and eight steps. First you understand the behaviour: define the target behaviour precisely, then diagnose it with COM-B, often refined through the finer-grained Theoretical Domains Framework, to locate which of capability, opportunity, and motivation must shift. Second you identify options: map each deficit to intervention functions, then to policy categories, filtering candidates through the APEASE criteria of affordability, practicability, effectiveness, acceptability, side-effects, and equity. Third you specify content: name the behaviour change techniques that will deliver each function and decide how to implement and measure them. The output is an intervention whose every component is traceable back to a diagnosed cause rather than to a designer's hunch.
Where the structure comes from
The nine functions and seven policy categories were distilled, not invented from scratch. Michie and colleagues gathered nineteen existing frameworks of behaviour change and judged each against three tests: comprehensiveness, whether it covers every kind of intervention; coherence, whether its categories are the same type of thing at the same level of specificity; and a clear link to an overarching model of behaviour. None of the nineteen passed all three. Most were incomplete, and few connected their categories to any account of what actually drives behaviour. The wheel was assembled to close those gaps, which is why its layers nest so tidily: a behaviour system at the hub, the functions that can change it, and the policies that can deliver those functions.
Where it shows up
Adoption has been widest in health and public policy, the fields the wheel was built for. Teams have used it to design interventions for hand hygiene, smoking cessation, medication adherence, physical activity, and antibiotic stewardship, and it has shaped guidance from national public-health bodies. Its reach now extends well beyond the clinic: pro-environmental campaigns on littering and energy use, driver-distraction programmes, workplace wellbeing schemes, and digital health apps all report structuring their design around it. The common draw is the same repeatable path from a behavioural diagnosis to a matched, fully specified intervention. That path makes the reasoning auditable by funders, regulators, and reviewers, which is a large part of why the wheel spread faster than the many frameworks it was meant to replace.
Limits and caveats
The wheel organises and describes; it does not predict. It tells you what kind of intervention fits a diagnosis, not whether that intervention will work or how large its effect will be, which still depends on execution and on evidence the wheel itself does not supply. Every step also rests on judgement: two analysts can code the same behaviour into different COM-B components or functions, so the transparency it promises is only as strong as the reasoning recorded at each choice. Jane Ogden has argued that this drive to systematise can crowd out the variability and clinical intuition that behaviour change often depends on. Used well, the wheel is a scaffold for thinking, not a substitute for domain knowledge or for actually testing the intervention it produces.
Examples
Diagnose a motivation gap, then select 'persuasion' or 'incentivization' functions to address it.
A hospital finds staff able and willing to wash their hands but with no sanitiser within reach — an opportunity gap, so the wheel points to environmental restructuring, not another poster.
If people cannot cook rather than will not, the wheel routes you to training and enablement, and at the policy ring to service provision rather than a fiscal measure.
A school wants pupils to cut back on sugary drinks, but the canteen makes them the cheapest, nearest choice — a physical-opportunity gap that one defensible reading routes to restriction, limiting what the canteen may stock, rather than to education alone; an analyst who saw the pull as price-driven might instead reach for incentivisation.
A gym wants newcomers to try the free-weights area, but they never see anyone of similar age or build using it — a social-opportunity gap the wheel meets with modelling, recruiting peer demonstrators, though a coder who read the barrier as low confidence would treat it as a capability gap calling for training.
First described in Michie, Atkins & West (2014).
Key references
- Ogden, J. (2016). Celebrating variability and a call to limit systematisation: the example of the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy and the Behaviour Change Wheel. Health Psychology Review, 10(3), 245-250. doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2016.1190291
- Michie, S., Atkins, L., & West, R. (2014). The Behaviour Change Wheel: A Guide to Designing Interventions. London: Silverback Publishing. silverbackpublishing.org/products/behaviour-change-wheel
- Michie, S., Richardson, M., Johnston, M., Abraham, C., Francis, J., Hardeman, W., Eccles, M. P., Cane, J., & Wood, C. E. (2013). The behavior change technique taxonomy (v1) of 93 hierarchically clustered techniques: building an international consensus for the reporting of behavior change interventions. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 46(1), 81-95. doi.org/10.1007/s12160-013-9486-6
- Michie, S., van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation Science, 6, 42. doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-6-42