COM-B Model

Dimension: Mindset · Type: Foundation

A behavioural-science diagnostic for any goal that is not happening. For a behaviour to occur, three components must be in place at the same time: Capability (mental and physical), Opportunity (physical and social environment), Motivation (conscious attitudes and unconscious habits). Most stalled behaviours are blamed on motivation when the bottleneck is actually opportunity.

Introduced by Tiina Likki (Behavioural Scientist, WHO Transformation team) at the Behavioural Science for Career Development session of the UN Inter-Agency Career Week 2026, on 8 May 2026. Tiina presented COM-B as the diagnostic foundation for the session’s behaviour-change toolkit, paired with the EAST Framework for the matched interventions. Tina Stochmal (WHO HR) translated each component into career-development examples. COM-B is original to Susan Michie and colleagues at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change and sits at the heart of the Behaviour Change Wheel.

The framework

For any behaviour to actually happen, all three must be in place. The model is multiplicative, not additive: if any one component is missing, the behaviour will not occur reliably regardless of how strong the others are.

When to use it

• When you have set a career goal and notice you keep not acting on it.
• When you want to coach someone through a behaviour change (your own or a colleague’s) without defaulting to “you just need more discipline”.
• Before designing any intervention to change your own habits, to make sure you target the right component.
• As the upstream diagnostic that tells you whether the EAST Framework principles will help, or whether the issue is upstream of behaviour design entirely.

The three components

C: Capability. What you bring to the behaviour. Two sub-types:

• Mental capability. Knowledge, skills, cognitive ability, attention, memory, language.
• Physical capability. Physical strength, dexterity, energy.

For career behaviours, the capability question is usually mental: do you actually know how to write a good cover letter, design a CV, prepare for a competency-based interview, run a structured career conversation. If not, capability is the bottleneck and the right intervention is learning, training, or shadowing someone who knows.

O: Opportunity. What the world around you allows. Two sub-types, both routinely underweighted:

• Physical opportunity. Access to time, money, tools, locations, regulations that permit the behaviour. The friction or ease of doing the thing.
• Social opportunity. Norms, expectations, role models, the behaviour of people around you. Whether your team, family, or peer group supports or undermines the behaviour.

The session was emphatic: opportunity is the most underestimated component. The speaker’s example was concrete: she stopped buying a daily pastry simply because her new office was two minutes farther from the cafeteria. No willpower change, no motivation change. The physical environment changed, and the behaviour changed with it.

When in doubt, look at opportunity first. Most failed habits are misdiagnosed as motivation problems when they are environment problems.

M: Motivation. The drivers of decision-making. Two sub-types:

• Reflective motivation. Conscious attitudes, intentions, beliefs, plans. The kind of motivation we usually mean when we say “I am motivated”.
• Automatic motivation. Habits, emotions, automatic responses, impulses. What System 1 (in Kahneman’s dual-process terms) does without conscious thought.

The mistake most behaviour-change interventions make is targeting only reflective motivation through information and willpower. Automatic motivation is what runs most daily behaviour, and it does not respond to information campaigns or pep talks. It responds to changes in cues, rewards, and repetition (see Habit Loop).

Steps

1. Name the behaviour. Specific. Not “develop my career” but “spend 30 minutes per Tuesday evening updating my CV with new achievements”.
2. Test each component honestly.
   • Capability: Do I have the knowledge and skill to do this well? If not, name what is missing.
   • Opportunity: Does my physical environment support this? Does my social environment? Where is the friction high or the support low?
   • Motivation: Do I genuinely want this (reflective)? And does my habit pattern match (automatic)?
3. Identify the actual bottleneck. Resist the default of “I just need more motivation”. Most often the answer is opportunity (environmental friction) or automatic motivation (existing habits running stronger than the new intention).
4. Match the intervention to the bottleneck.
   • Capability gap: learning, course, mentoring, shadowing.
   • Physical opportunity gap: change the environment (move the gym bag near the door, block the calendar, install the website blocker).
   • Social opportunity gap: find a different group, ask a peer to join, make the behaviour public.
   • Reflective motivation gap: clarify the why (use SMARTEER Goals, reconnect to values via the 5i Framework Identify dimension).
   • Automatic motivation gap: engineer new cues and rewards (use the Habit Loop and Tiny Habits Setup).
5. Apply the EAST Framework principles. Once you know the bottleneck, EAST gives you four design principles for closing it: Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely.
6. Re-diagnose if the intervention fails. A failed intervention usually means the diagnosis was wrong, not that the behaviour is impossible. Re-run the COM-B test and look for the bottleneck you missed.

Worked example

A staff member sets a goal to spend 30 minutes a week building her professional network through outreach messages. After three weeks, she has sent zero. She runs the COM-B diagnostic.

• Capability. Mental: she knows how to write a good outreach message; she has done it before. Capability is not the bottleneck.
• Opportunity. Physical: the 30 minutes is in her calendar but at 5pm on Friday, when she is depleted and tempted to leave for the weekend. Social: nobody around her treats outreach as routine; it feels mildly performative.
• Motivation. Reflective: yes, she genuinely wants this; she has named the value (long-term network value). Automatic: her established Friday afternoon habit is to clear her inbox and leave. The new intention loses to the old habit every week.

Bottleneck diagnosis: opportunity (physical timing) plus automatic motivation (the old Friday-afternoon habit pattern is stronger).

Interventions:

• Move the calendar block from Friday 5pm to Tuesday 10am, when energy is higher (physical opportunity).
• Tell her mentor she is committing to one outreach message a week and that she will report back at their monthly check-in (social opportunity).
• Anchor the action to an existing morning routine: “after my Tuesday team standup ends, I will send one outreach message before opening my email” (use Tiny Habits Setup to engineer the new automatic pattern).

After four weeks, the behaviour is reliable. The fix was not “more motivation”; it was a redesigned context plus a stronger anchor.

Common mis-diagnoses

The session highlighted the patterns most likely to lead to a wrong intervention:

• Defaulting to “more motivation”. The most common error. When a behaviour stalls, the instinctive explanation is willpower failure. The instinct is usually wrong; the bottleneck is usually opportunity.
• Treating capability gaps as motivation gaps. “I should be able to do this” is sometimes “I do not actually know how to do this”. Honesty here unblocks the right intervention.
• Ignoring social opportunity. People underestimate how much their environment shapes their behaviour. If everyone around you treats CV-updating as something you do once a year under duress, your weekly intention is fighting upstream.
• Confusing reflective motivation with automatic motivation. You can genuinely want something (reflective) while your habit pattern is running the opposite (automatic). The two need to be addressed separately.

Pitfalls

• Skipping the diagnostic and going straight to intervention. Without the diagnostic, you are likely to apply the wrong fix. EAST applied to the wrong bottleneck does not work.
• Treating COM-B as a label rather than a tool. “I have a motivation problem” is not the output. The output is a specific named bottleneck and a matched intervention.
• Assuming any single intervention will solve a multi-component bottleneck. Many real situations have two bottlenecks. Address both.
• Re-diagnosing every week. The components do not shift that fast. Re-diagnose when an intervention has clearly failed, or every quarter as a check.
• Using COM-B on someone else without their honest input. The diagnostic depends on truthful self-report. Imposing it on a colleague usually misses what they actually experience.

When not to use it

When the behaviour is genuinely not in your interest. The model is for behaviours you have decided you want; it does not adjudicate whether you should want them. For that question, use the 5i Framework Identify dimension.

When the behaviour is acutely contextual (a single high-stakes conversation, a one-off decision). COM-B is for recurring behaviours; for one-offs, the Career Conversation Playbook or Notice, Pause, Shift, Act is faster.

A note on the source

COM-B is original to Susan Michie and colleagues at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change. It sits at the heart of the Behaviour Change Wheel, a more elaborate framework for designing behaviour-change interventions. The model is widely used in public health (smoking cessation, vaccine uptake, physical activity programmes) and increasingly in organisational behaviour-change work. The session presented it as a practical tool rather than introducing a new model.

How I use it

Personal note pending. Davide to fill.

Related frameworks

• EAST Framework, the matched intervention principles for closing the bottleneck COM-B identifies.
• Habit Loop, the underlying mechanism for the automatic-motivation component.
• Tiny Habits Setup, the seven-step practice for engineering new automatic patterns.
• Notice, Pause, Shift, Act, the in-the-moment routine for catching automatic-motivation patterns as they activate.

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Notes compiled by Davide Piga. Last updated 2026-05-09.