Laura Sommer does not like behaviour change stories that let anyone off too easily. Not the ones that heap what she calls “the burden of the guilt” onto individuals, and not the ones that tell people their efforts are only a “drop in the ocean”. She keeps returning to the same awkward ground, where what a person does matters, what surrounds is key to what they do, and neither gets to slip free of the other. For her, that tension is her work.
She knows that drop-in-the-ocean feeling from the inside. There have been stretches when her own work felt inconsequential, when the scale of the problem made the effort seem hardly worth naming. That is not surprising when you work in sustainability and have to look straight at the state of the world. What pulled her back was not a grand conversion story, but small, tangible signs that things do move. A friend stopped using plastic bags. A family member put solar panels on the roof. She says this plainly, without trying to turn it into more than it is. But it helps explain why she is so alert to the moment when people start to believe their actions count for nothing.
That alertness follows her into organisations. When Laura walks into a team to work on these kinds of challenges, she says she keeps her “feelers out” for what is happening internally. Not only the behaviour she has been asked to look at, but the confidence in the room, the team dynamics, the things no one is saying outright. Organisational psychology matters to her as much as behavioural science. Before she gets to what people are meant to be doing, she wants to understand what sort of environment that behaviour is being asked to survive in.
That is especially true in sustainability work. Teams in that space, she says, are often used to making the moral case. You should do this because it is the right thing. We need to change. But the people they are trying to reach are usually dealing with something more immediate: retaining clients, keeping people employed, keeping products working. Laura does not treat that as a corruption of the work. She treats it as the reality the work has to move through. Her wider writing makes clear that she does not assume people have endless cognitive or emotional room for doing the right thing. The task is not only to make change feel virtuous, but possible within a life that is already full. Keep making the ethical argument to someone whose day is shaped by a different set of pressures, and you may keep being right, but you will also keep being ignored.
In Germany, Laura has been working on a project around reusable cups and bowls. On paper, the system is not bad. There is policy. There are return points. There are partners. The cups can be brought back in lots of different places. But uptake still stalls. Laura describes the policy as a “paper tooth tiger”: present, visible, but not enforced enough to do what people hoped. The hospitality industry points at customers and says they are not asking for reuse. Customers point back and say the offer is not attractive enough. Scheme providers sit in the middle asking what else they are supposed to do. Laura’s attention moves in closer, away from the policy itself and towards the moment where the whole thing either lives or dies.
That moment is often at the counter. The way the cup is presented. The ease of the explanation. The confidence of the person saying, just give me the one euro now and bring it back tomorrow. For Laura, this is where a system stops being abstract and starts being social. In one round of interviews, she met two women working behind the counter at a petrol station. The place itself had surprised her. She had expected something greasier, harsher, less alive. Instead it was bright and busy. People came in every day for breakfast, coffee, a bagel for the road.
The women behind the counter were not sustainability purists. They said so themselves. Their boss cared more than they did. What they had instead was ease, a bit of cheek, and the kind of local authority that comes from seeing the same faces every morning, coffee first, bagel after, little scraps of chat before the day properly starts. If a regular came in for coffee, they would simply hand over the reusable cup and carry on. No speech or moral framing. No awkward pitch. One of the women joked that if a man was already asking her what he should have for breakfast, she could decide what his breakfast came in too.
Laura noticed more than the joke. She noticed their confidence, the positive energy around them, and the fact that people came to talk to them every morning. The women estimated that, for some customers, they might make up a third or even half of the social interaction they had that day. The reusable cup is not only being carried by policy, price, or convenience. It is being carried by trust, routine, and the ease people build with each other over time. For Laura, these are not soft extras around the edges of change. They are part of the conditions that make change possible in the first place. But it is also being carried by particular people. That is where Laura’s thinking gets less neat, and more interesting.
Is it fair for so much of the work to end up resting on certain kinds of frontline people, on their confidence, their resilience, their ability to absorb a bad reaction and keep going? Laura does not tidy that question away. “That’s something that I haven’t figured out yet for myself,” she says. Some people can absorb backlash with a kind of that-is-not-going-to-rain-on-my-parade energy. Others try once, get shut down, and stop. Leadership matters here. Team culture matters. Backing matters. And when the right person leaves, everything can slide back to how it was before. “Isn’t it crazy,” she says, “how much is dependent on one person?” Change that looks scalable in theory can depend, in practice, on someone who is visible, willing, and still in the job. That same fragility shows up elsewhere too, not only in people, but in the conditions around them.
She keeps finding versions of the same pattern. In large housing blocks, poor waste separation is often read as resistance or apathy. Look closer and the picture is grimmer. Small waste stations. Dirty, gruffy surroundings. Rats running around. Rubbish piling up beside bins because there simply is not enough space. Then the money argument begins. Multiple actors cannot agree who pays to increase the pickup schedule or improve the setup. What gets described as a behaviour problem is often, in part, a maintenance problem, a coordination problem, a nobody-wants-to-own-it problem. Again, the neat story starts to fall apart.
That is one reason Laura is not especially patient with biases and heuristics as the centrepiece of a project. Useful, perhaps, for explaining what happened. Less useful, in her view, for building something that works. What she cares about more is the boring, necessary part: asking a question properly, setting up research properly, getting the basics right before anyone talks about nudges. She keeps returning to COM-B because, as she puts it, “it can hold both” what is happening inside a person and what is happening around them, and she has not found another framework that does that as well. She is also drawn to systems mapping, though only when it stays tied to a behavioural lens. Otherwise, she says, it maps everything and explains nothing.
Laura already knows how to translate science. She has done it in academia, education, and client work. Even so, she says that every time she works with Matthias Höppner, the marketing strategist and her co-founder at Green Nudges, he still blows her mind. What he brings is not just polish, but a different starting point. Laura tends to begin with the research question, the logic, the evidence. Matthias starts with the part another person can care about straight away, then pushes that much further than she would on her own. She seems to value that not as surface work, but as a discipline of its own. A way of giving good thinking some chance of actually travelling.
She gives one example from a grant application for the reusable cups project. Alongside the research proposal, the work had to be turned into a pitch deck for a wider circular economy audience. Laura would have built the narrative around the research questions. Matthias built it around the problem the audience already cared about, then let the research arrive as the answer. She remembers flicking through the pages and thinking, yes, yes, yes. That matters to her.
So does the opposite. Looking at one energy efficiency website, she thought straight away: this is administration no inspiration to change. It is not that she wants the work dressed up or oversold. She wants it to spark. She wants it to feel like something you would actually invite into your house and talk about, not something that turns up dead behind the eyes.
That instinct seems to run deep. As a child, she once pulled paper out of a recycling bin in art class instead of taking a clean sheet. There was no need, she thought, to waste one. These days, she does not spend her spare time taking in more environmental collapse. She gardens instead. Gets her hands properly dirty. Lets her brain stop doing that particular kind of circling for a while. There is something telling in that, too: the work matters to her, but she knows it cannot all be carried in the register of urgency.
That may be part of why policy both draws her in and scares her. She admires people who work in behavioural policy. She is also wary of the scale of it. The leverage is enormous, and so is the size of the mistakes you can make. She has not stepped fully into that space yet, and she is honest about why. Systems need changing, and policy is the biggest lever there is. But so much still depends on particular people in particular places: their confidence, their willingness, whether they happen to still be there on Monday. Laura has not resolved that tension between structural change and human fragility. She does not pretend to. She sits in it.
Laura shares her thinking on LinkedIn, where she writes about sustainability, behaviour change, and what it takes to make change work in the real world. She is also building Green Nudges with co-founder Matthias Höppner, combining behavioural insight, sustainability, and strategic communication to turn complex ideas into things people can actually get and act on.
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