The CREATE Behaviour Funnel

Definition

Drawing on Stephen Wendel's Designing for Behavior Change, the book adopts a five-stage funnel that must complete in full for a person to take any action: Cue (the possibility of acting crosses their mind), Reaction (an instant, automatic emotional response), Evaluation (a conscious weighing of costs and benefits), Ability (a judgment of feasibility given the current context), and Timing (a decision to act now rather than later). As in any funnel, people drop off at every stage, so a behaviour-change goal decomposes naturally into five distinct places to intervene.

In the Book

Chapter 3 walks the funnel through a concrete example — a writing tool trying to get bloggers to write more regularly. An email alert serves as the cue, but many users never open email frequently enough to see it (drop-off at Cue). Those who do react to it emotionally in an instant, and some dismiss it immediately (Reaction). Others consciously weigh whether writing today matters enough (Evaluation); those who decide it does may still stall facing a blank page, unsure they have the energy or an idea (Ability); and even users who clear that bar may defer to a more urgent task (Timing). The book maps a distinct set of story ideas onto each stage — swap the cue from email to calendar alert, seed the blank page with topic prompts to help Ability, prompt users 30 minutes ahead to protect the writing slot for Timing — showing that a vague goal like "help people write more" decomposes into five separably testable, separably splittable interventions, each still valuable on its own even when a story tackling the whole funnel would be too large.

Why It Matters

Most "make people do X" goals fail because a team optimizes one stage (usually the pitch/evaluation stage) while people are actually dropping off somewhere else entirely (they never see the cue, or they see it but can't act on it in the moment). Naming the five stages explicitly turns a vague behaviour-change ambition into a diagnosable, splittable structure — build a funnel per persona, instrument drop-off at each stage, and let the data say which stage is actually the bottleneck before spending effort improving a stage that was never the problem. The same funnel logic underlies onboarding design, habit formation, marketing conversion, and public-health interventions.