Why awareness alone will never change behavior

Behavior design is not a buzzword - it is a context problem

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Raheel Waqar to explain what a “behavior design agency” actually is, because even people inside the space often do not understand the term. Raheel’s answer is precise. Every product, every service, is already designed for a behavior to be performed. Apple thinks about the packaging, the way the software loads, the way the box unfolds. The question behavior design asks is: how do you understand human behavior and then design solutions that fit the context in which that behavior actually needs to happen?

The clearest example Raheel gives is handwashing after COVID. “Awareness alone doesn’t change behavior,” he says. “A lot of us know that we should wash our hands but we don’t do it.” The reason people reach for hand sanitizer is not because they received a 30-second message - it is because the bottle is right there. Convenience is the intervention. Context is the design brief.

This is also, Raheel argues, where most development programs fail. They are designed for an ideal environment - a drawing room, a controlled setting - and then they hit the ground and life happens. The context was never accounted for, so the behavior never follows.

From selling Sony Walkmans at 14 to starting a company at 21

Raheel’s path into this work is not linear. He grew up partly in the United States while his father completed a PhD, returned to Pakistan, found the model school system creatively suffocating, and spent his O and A levels deliberately staying out of the top five. “I’d make sure that I was a different pastor,” he says - meaning he was more interested in the real world than the academic one.

At 14, in 1994, he was already reselling Sony Walkmans - the iPod of that era, as he puts it. He made a loss. The lesson he took from it was not about electronics. “Money can never be your objective,” he tells Muzamil. “Money is a by-product of something.” That framing stayed with him.

His father persuaded him to finish a bachelor’s degree with a simple deal: get the degree, then do whatever you want. Raheel enrolled at what is now MDI, largely because the dean at the time - a man named Howard, an entrepreneur who had spent 30 years in England - sat with him for an hour and said things that made sense. Howard’s first or second class included a moment Raheel still remembers: the dean put the textbook aside and told the room that if you want to do business, you have to go out and do it. It will not happen in this classroom.

One year later Raheel had a part-time job. He left without collecting his last paycheck because he felt he had not contributed enough to earn it. By 2001, during his education, he had started his first company - Magnus Multimedia - built around Flash and interactive CDs at a time when saying “I’m a Flash designer” at a party was enough to hold a room.

Storytelling as the first tool: animation enters the development sector

Magnus Multimedia ran for five years, mostly doing corporate production work in Islamabad. The market was limited. Raheel went back to Howard, who told him he was missing a large opportunity: the development sector - NGOs and social organizations - was communicating in what Howard called the dark ages. Print material. Posters. Go approach them.

That conversation was the unplanned entry point into a territory Raheel has now spent 15 years in. The first significant project was a report on child sexual abuse. The report existed. It had facts. Nobody read it. Raheel’s team converted the entire story into a ten-minute animated film and showed it to the same stakeholders. “After 10 minutes these people standing up and saying yeah we can’t imagine this happening, tell us what to do.” That moment, he says, was the point where they realized they had found something.

White Rice Communications was founded in 2006. The name came from a Chinese restaurant. Raheel and his co-founder were trying to figure out what to call the company and ordered white rice, then started adding dishes around it. The metaphor clicked: they wanted to give clients a creative canvas where mixing different elements could transform something ordinary into something extraordinary. “No one’s going to forget it,” Raheel says. He was right - people forget his name, but not the company.

The child stunting project: 26,000 mothers and the aspirational character

By around 2010, Raheel’s team had moved through gamification, design thinking, and content production. They could produce good communication campaigns. But they could not see scalable behavior change at the end. That gap pushed them toward behavioral economics and behavioral science, which was evolving at the time and offered something the earlier work lacked: a science behind why people do what they do.

The clearest illustration of what that shift produced is a 2016 project with UNICEF in Sindh on child stunting. Raheel sets the context carefully. Pakistan’s child stunting rate is 43.7 percent. Eighty to ninety percent of the brain develops by age two. That window - nine months in the womb plus the first two years - is what he calls the first thousand days. After that window closes, the loss is largely irreversible. A child whose brain developed to 60 percent cannot reach 100 percent later. They will grow, but they will not close the gap.

The project worked with 100,000 mothers overall and 26,000 directly. The goal was to get mothers to perform three to five specific behaviors around breastfeeding, nutrition, and hand hygiene. The research used visual tools because literacy was a barrier. Mothers were asked to draw an ideal mother. The drawings opened conversations about aspiration, about what trajectory they imagined for themselves. The community’s aspirational figure turned out to be Madhuri Dixit. So the campaign characters were designed to look like her. The campaign was called Masalima.

One of the most effective moments was a live demonstration. The team would fill a glass with junk food - biscuits, the kind of things children were being fed - and ask: what do you want to drink? Nobody wanted the contaminated glass. “This is what you’re doing with your child,” the facilitators would say. “This is your child’s stomach right now.” Experiential, immediate, visceral.

Eight months after the campaign, the team returned and ran story circles - a qualitative method for understanding what had changed. They ended up talking to 11,000 mothers in story gatherings, which Raheel describes as the largest story-gathering exercise in the world. Ninety percent of participants could attribute some form of behavior change to the campaign.

Facebook is the world’s largest behavior design firm - and that should alarm you

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of technology and data. The conversation turns sharper here. Raheel’s argument is that data is the future of everything - not as a metaphor, but as a structural reality. “Every company is going to become a software company,” he says, echoing a point about how data will be the underlying asset across industries.

The example he reaches for is Facebook. “The biggest behavior design firm in the world is Facebook,” Raheel says. “They have got 26,000 data points on one person. They know habits that we don’t even know of ourselves.” Facebook knows what you do, when you do it, and can push you toward a particular emotional or political state. That is behavior design at scale, deployed for engagement and polarization.

The question Raheel asks is: what if that same capability were used for good? If you have that level of understanding of human behavior, you could push the right narratives, surface the right issues, and get people into the right conversations. The tool is not the problem. The objective is.

White Rice has already started moving in this direction. During COVID, when field access shut down, the team pivoted entirely to digital. They built WhatsApp community clusters for data sharing. They used social media to reach communities that were otherwise cut off. On the Clean and Green Punjab initiative, when government field operations halted, they rebuilt a digital presence that reached 50,000 people on Facebook within weeks. Frontline workers who had felt invisible suddenly had an audience. In four months, the team reached 2 million people offline and 30 million online with health and hygiene messaging. They are now developing a VR film series to recreate field empathy for decision-makers who can no longer travel to communities.

The Islamabad-Lahore-Karachi problem: clusters, mindsets, and missed connections

Muzamil raises a recurring tension in Pakistani entrepreneurship - the difference in orientation between Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi. Raheel engages with it seriously rather than dismissing it as a cliché.

Karachi, he says, is solution-oriented and money-minded. People will find a way. But a good shopkeeper does not necessarily make a good systems thinker. Lahore has become a tech ecosystem - technology is the secret sauce there, whether it is food, edtech, or donations. Islamabad, because of its proximity to government and the development sector, is where you go if you want to have those conversations, breathe that air, understand those problems.

The development sector, Raheel argues, has spent 15 years generating data points. Every project, every report, every failed program is a map of problems. “Every problem that you see is an opportunity,” he says. The smarter move is to read that map and build intelligent solutions on top of it - solutions with revenue models, not just grant cycles.

He uses a water nudge project with UNDP as an example of where this breaks down. The goal was to use behavioral science to get Islamabad residents to conserve water. The problem: water in Islamabad is not metered. There is no data. Without data, there is no feedback loop, and without a feedback loop, behavior design cannot function. Data is not optional infrastructure. It is the foundation.

Development funding is drying up - and the private sector has to step in

By the end of the conversation, Raheel makes a structural argument about the future of impact work in Pakistan. Development funding cycles are shrinking. Donor countries are dealing with COVID, shifting political priorities, and debates about minimum basic income. The question being asked in donor capitals is no longer “should we fund a water project in Pakistan” but “should we give our own people vaccines or give Pakistan money for water.”

“If businesses are not designed from day one as a sustainable business, even if it’s an impact business, it’s not going to sustain,” Raheel says. The development sector has proven what is possible. The private sector now needs to pick up those proof-of-concepts and build revenue models around them. That is not a compromise of the mission. It is the only way the mission survives.

Muzamil pushes on the academic side of this - the gap between universities and the real problems that need solving. Raheel’s prescription is specific: in the first semester, bring in top development sector organizations every week to present their actual problems. Make semester projects about solving those problems. Get the Karachi kid and the Islamabad kid working on the same brief. Cross-pollination is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism by which good ideas become scalable ones.

Pakistan by 2050: optimism grounded in social capital

Muzamil closes by asking Raheel - born in 1980, with plenty of opportunities to leave - why he stays, and what he sees for Pakistan by 2050.

Raheel’s answer is not sentimental. He points to something specific: Pakistan’s informal charity. Karachi’s street-level giving - undocumented, unregistered, happening at traffic signals - is estimated at two billion rupees. “It shows you that we have a heart,” he says. “We feel for people.” That is a social capital indicator. Many developed countries, he argues, have lost exactly that - the soul, the value systems, the sense of obligation to the person in front of you.

He is also pragmatic about geography. Pakistan sits in an epicenter. China is going to be a dominant global power regardless of what happens elsewhere. His advice to young people is to learn Mandarin. Not as a cultural gesture, but as a strategic one.

The final image he leaves is behavioral. Change does not happen through grand declarations. It happens through incremental steps, the right environment, and sustained inspiration. “You give a vision and then along with that vision you need to give them the right tool sets,” Raheel tells Muzamil. “The right mindset, the tool set of how they would achieve that vision, and then you need to keep inspiring them.” That, in miniature, is the entire argument of the conversation: design for where people actually are, not where you wish they were.