There’s a certain poetry in how we talk about behaviour change in development. Workshops, frameworks, toolkits, MoUs, all fine words for what we imagine to be a noble craft.
There’s a certain poetry in how we talk about behaviour change in development.
Workshops, frameworks, toolkits, MoUs, all fine words for what we imagine to be a noble craft.
But if you step away from the air-conditioned meeting rooms and sit across from the farmer, the shopkeeper, or the manager of a small enterprise, you’ll find that the poetry quickly gives way to arithmetic.
For them, “change” isn’t a concept. It’s a calculation.
Think of a personal trainer.
You can talk about wellness, motivation, and lifestyle all you like but the client is doing their own sums. They’re comparing effort with outcome: the sweat, the soreness, the time, and yes, the subscription fee.
The moment the number on the scale shifts, or the jeans fit differently, they’re sold. Until then, it’s all talk.
That’s the moment when persuasion quietly steps aside, and the maths takes over.
Our beneficiaries - the farmers, the agents, the small business owners think the same way. They’ll listen to our presentations, nod through our trainings, and then go home and check the ledger.
Does it reduce cost?
Does it raise income?
Does it improve resilience when the next season goes wrong?
If the answer’s yes, they adopt. If not, they thank us politely and carry on as before.
The same logic applies at the company end of the system.
When we invite a firm to “partner” with us, what they hear is a proposition: change your business model, take a risk, and see if the returns make sense.
No amount of facilitation rhetoric replaces that core equation.
So, while we talk of innovation, they’re quietly calculating:
To the practitioner, it’s facilitation.
To the company, it’s a forecast.
And truthfully, they’re the ones doing the sensible thing.
The Economics of Conviction
Behaviour change isn’t born of inspiration; it’s born of conviction and conviction is an economic outcome. When a business sees its own numbers prove the case, change is no longer an act of faith; it’s an act of logic.
When a farmer’s risk calculation turns in their favour, adoption ceases to be an experiment; it becomes common sense.
That’s when facilitation works not because we convinced anyone, but because we made the arithmetic visible.
Perhaps our greatest professional blind spot is that we keep calling it “change” when, to those living it, it’s merely viability.
A View from the Other Side
If you could sit inside the head of a beneficiary at the end of your workshop, you might hear something like this:
“Interesting idea. But if fertiliser prices rise again, will this still work?”
“The business says it’ll buy from us, but at what price?”
“You’ve shown us the model - where are our numbers?”
And that’s the moment when we realise that our success depends not on how passionately we can explain the theory, but on how precisely we can make their calculations balance.
The Reflection
We talk about sustainability, ownership, and exit strategies as if they were lofty ambitions. But to the people we serve, sustainability is simply continuity, the ability to keep doing tomorrow what made sense today.
So maybe the next time we design an intervention, we should start with their spreadsheet, not our logframe. Because when the numbers work, the system works. And when the system works, our role quietly fades, as it should.
Want to Go Deeper?
Suppose you’d like a structured way to test whether your facilitation truly makes commercial sense for the business, the beneficiary, and the broader system. In that case, you can download the Business Case Block from the MSD Implementation Canvas at www.habibonifade.com.
Because in the end, the maths always tells the truth —
even when our theories don’t.