Networks That Shape Behaviour
1972 Munich Olympics. Midway through the 10,000 metre final, Finnish runner Lasse Viren is clipped onto the track. In 230 metres he gets back on it. With a lap and a half remaining, Viren steps it up. With hands held high up, he wins by six metres and breaks the world record. Ten days later, Viren lines up for the 5,000 metre track final. This time he holds off Tunisia’s Mohamed Gammoudi to complete the Olympic long-distance double. Four years later, in Montreal, he does it again. Forty years after Viren’s first double in Munich, Great Britain’s Sir Mo Farah won both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres at the London 2012 Olympics. The same Games that opened with Queen Elizabeth II parachuting into the stadium with James Bond. Four years later in Rio, Sir Mo repeated the double. Years later, when I met Sir Mo at St Mary’s University in London while training with the Endurance Performance Centre, our conversation gave me a rather unexpected link back to Finnish endurance history.
What stayed with me most from training with the EPC was not any single session, but the rhythm of the environment. Athletes trained together, met for long runs, enjoyed Sunday brunch together afterwards (we enjoyed countless full English breakfasts at Mimos on Teddington High Street), lived in athlete accommodation, listened to coaches (Mick Woods) framing the week ahead, travelled together to training camps (Font Romeu was preferred), and studied together. The boundaries between training, recovery, social life and learning were often surprisingly thin. At the time, many of these things simply felt like part of being an athlete. A long run was a long run, and Sunday brunch was brunch. Looking back now, through the lens of behavioural science, I see them differently. Training partners influenced effort, consistency, challenge, and accountability. Shared meals supported recovery, but also created space for conversation and connection. Athlete accommodation reduced some of the friction around training while placing us within a community where sporting routines were constantly visible. Coaches did more than set sessions; through what they emphasised, reinforced and modelled, they helped shape the environment in which behaviour took place.
The athlete may have been the person completing the session, making the decision to recover, or standing on the start line, but those behaviours were continually being shaped by the people, routines, structures and environments around them.
Individuals do not exist in a vacuums; they exist in constant interplay across different socio-ecological levels.
The socio-ecological model asks us to look beyond the individual and consider the multiple layers of influence surrounding behaviour. Rather than assuming that behaviour is simply the product of motivation, knowledge or willpower, it recognises that people are embedded within wider social and environmental systems (Ross Wadey et al., 2018; Lasse Eini et al., 2025).
At the individual level, behaviour may be shaped by knowledge, skills, beliefs, motivation, confidence or fatigue.
At the interpersonal level, coaches, teammates, family members, peers and other relationships can influence what is encouraged, expected and reinforced.
At the organisational level, schedules, resources, leadership, culture, facilities and established routines can make certain behaviours easier or harder to perform.
Beyond this sit community and system-level influences: sporting organisations, governing bodies, funding structures, policies, competition calendars and the wider environments within which athletes and coaches operate.
Elite sport makes these influences easy to see, but the same principle applies in organisations. Employees, leaders and teams do not behave and exist in vacuums. Their behaviours are shaped by colleagues, managers, routines, incentives, culture, technology and policy.
Once we have identified the outcome we want and the behaviours required to achieve it (Read more about Behaviour Change Pathways here), the next question should be: at what level does change actually need to take place? A behaviour may appear to sit with the individual, while its strongest determinants sit elsewhere. An employee may not adopt a new tool because they lack confidence, because their manager does not model its use, because workflows make it difficult, or because organisational policies restrict how it can be used (Read more about Change Objectives here).
This is why stakeholder identification matters. We need to ask who performs the behaviour, who influences it, who controls the surrounding environment, and who has the power to change the conditions in which behaviours occur. The person experiencing the outcome is not necessarily the person whose behaviour most needs to change. A social-ecological perspective helps us move from asking, “How do we change this individual?” to asking, “What needs to change around this behaviour, and who needs to be involved?”
A social-ecological model helps us identify the levels at which behaviour is shaped (Martin Hagger et al., 2020). But levels alone do not tell us how influence actually travels through a system. For that, it can be useful to think in terms of networks (Valente, 2012).
Who influences whom? Who controls resources? Who communicates with whom? Where are the strongest dependencies? Which stakeholders bridge different parts of the system?
A social-ecological lens helps us see the different levels that shape behaviour, while a network perspective helps us understand how influence moves between the people and structures within them. Sustainable behaviour change is rarely achieved by focusing on the individual alone. Once we know the outcome we want, we need to identify the behaviours that matter, the stakeholders who shape them, and the level of the system at which change is most likely to have leverage. The question is not simply “How do we change this person?” but “What needs to change around this behaviour, who needs to be involved, and how are they connected?”
At Lasse Eini Co., we specialise in stakeholder identification and complex network analysis to understand how people, relationships and structures shape behaviour across systems. This helps us identify where influence sits, which stakeholders matter most, and where change is likely to have the greatest impact.
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References
Eini, L., Stubbs, B., Keinonen, K., & Knittle, K. (2025, June 13). Finnish mental healthcare practitioners’ capabilities, opportunities and motivations for employing physical activity behaviour change interventions: A research proposal [Conference presentation]. 4th Joint Seminar on Music, Sport and Health, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland.
Hagger, M. S., Cameron, L. D., Hamilton, K., Hankonen, N., & Lintunen, T. (Eds.). (2020). The handbook of behavior change. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108677318
Valente, T. W. (2012). Network interventions. Science, 337(6090), 49–53. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1217330
Wadey, R., Day, M. C., Cavallerio, F., & Martinelli, L. A. (2018). Multilevel model of sport injury (MMSI): Can coaches impact and be impacted by injury? In R. C. Thelwell & M. Dicks (Eds.), Professional advances in sports coaching: Research and practice (pp. 336–357). Routledge.
AI disclosure: Generative AI was used to support the visualisation of selected concepts presented in this article. The underlying ideas, interpretation, and final content are the author’s own.
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