One of the assumptions people often make in behaviour support is that if you include more strategies, you’ll get a better result. It sounds logical. More options, more detail, more situations covered. On paper, it can look like the plan is more thoughtful, more thorough, and more complete.
In practice, it usually creates the opposite result.
When I’m reviewing plans, one of the first things I notice is how many strategies are included. Sometimes there are pages of them, covering different situations, different variations, different ways of responding. You can see the effort that’s gone into it, and clinically a lot of it makes sense. But as soon as you step back and think about what this looks like in real life, you can usually tell where it’s going to fall down.
Most environments where behaviour support is being used are not calm or controlled. They’re busy, people are moving between tasks, different staff are on shift, and there is often more than one thing happening at once. In that kind of environment, there isn’t time to stop and work out which of the five different response strategies applies in this situation. People will default to what feels easiest or familiar in the moment, especially if they’re under pressure.
What ends up happening is that nobody applies the plan in the same way. One person remembers one part of it, someone else remembers something slightly different, and another person isn’t confident with it at all so they just respond based on instinct. The intention behind the plan might be good, but the consistency just isn’t there, and without that consistency behaviour doesn’t really change.
It’s actually much more effective to go the other way and simplify things. Not in a way that loses the clinical thinking, but in a way that makes it usable. A smaller number of strategies that are clearly explained, that make sense in the environment, and that everyone can follow, even when things are busy or escalating.
It often feels uncomfortable to do that, because it can look like you’re leaving things out. Plans can feel almost too simple when you read them back. But the difference is that people actually use them. They don’t have to stop and interpret what’s meant or decide between multiple options. They know what to do, they do it consistently, and over time that consistency is what starts to shift behaviour.
There’s also something else going on here, which is that when there are too many strategies, the focus shifts away from what really matters. Instead of everyone working towards the same small number of changes, attention gets spread too thin. People try a bit of this and a bit of that, but nothing is applied often enough or consistently enough to make a real difference.
The role of the practitioner isn’t just to list everything that could help. It’s to decide what should be prioritised so that it can actually be implemented in real life. That takes a different kind of judgement. It means thinking about the environment, the people involved, and what’s realistically going to be followed through day to day.
At the end of the day, behaviour doesn’t change because there are more strategies written in a plan. It changes because a small number of strategies are understood and used the same way, over time, in real situations.
