CLEAR and the OECD’s LOGIC Framework

CLEAR and the OECD’s LOGIC Framework

The OECD's 2024 LOGIC principles tell governments how to make behavioural science a standard part of policymaking. CLEAR tells a team how to run a change. This paper compares the two and shows where each needs the other.

1. Three frameworks, two altitudes

It is easy to compare frameworks as if they were rivals for the same job. The OECD's two behavioural frameworks and CLEAR are not. They answer different questions.

LOGIC sits at institutional altitude. BASIC and CLEAR sit at project altitude. The interesting comparison is therefore twofold: CLEAR against BASIC as methods, and CLEAR against LOGIC as method against preconditions.

2. What LOGIC says

LOGIC's premise is that behavioural science has proven itself in pilots and now needs to be mainstreamed, meaning routinely and systematically applied rather than deployed by a specialist unit when someone thinks to ask. Its five dimensions describe what has to be true of an institution for that to happen.

• Leadership. Senior leaders explicitly request and advocate for behavioural evidence, and managers actively cultivate that support. Without sponsorship at the top, behavioural work stays a curiosity.
• Objectives. Behavioural science is written into strategic plans, with a formal account of how a behavioural perspective helps the organisation reach its goals, and its use is monitored over time.
• Governance. There are structures, mandates and ethical safeguards that decide who can apply behavioural methods, how quality is assured, and how the public interest is protected.
• Integration. Behavioural thinking is built into standard processes: policy design, regulatory impact assessment, service design, evaluation. It is a step in the workflow, not a parallel track.
• Capability. Staff across the organisation, not only specialists, have the skills, tools and networks to apply behavioural science at the level their role requires.

The framework is deliberately not a method. It does not tell you how to diagnose a behaviour or design an intervention. It assumes you have BASIC or an equivalent for that, and asks what surrounds it.

3. CLEAR against BASIC: the method comparison

BASIC's five stages are Behaviour (identify and prioritise the target behaviour), Analysis (diagnose why it happens, using the ABCD lens of attention, belief formation, choice and determination), Strategies (design interventions), Intervention (test them, ideally experimentally), and Change (scale, monitor, maintain). CLEAR's are Clarify (objectives and key results), Leverage (map the system and find intervention points), Experiment (test small), Analyse (evaluate against key results, attend to surprises), Refine (feed learning back, scale, start the next cycle).

The two are close relatives. The genuine differences are three. First, the starting point: behaviour versus outcome. Second, the unit of diagnosis: the individual mind versus the organisational system. Third, the shape: BASIC is a sequence that can be repeated, CLEAR is a loop by design, with each cycle expected to sharpen the objectives set in the last.

4. CLEAR against LOGIC: method meets preconditions

Read LOGIC as a checklist of what an organisation needs before a project method can be run more than once, and the comparison with CLEAR becomes practical.

Where CLEAR already covers LOGIC's ground

The Clarify step does at project level what LOGIC's Objectives dimension asks at institutional level: it forces an explicit statement of what success means and how it will be measured. A CLEAR programme that has been run well produces exactly the evidence base LOGIC's Leadership dimension wants senior leaders to be asking for. And the Refine step, by feeding learning back into the next cycle, is a small-scale version of LOGIC's Integration principle: the behavioural perspective becomes part of how the next piece of work is planned.

Where LOGIC identifies what CLEAR cannot do alone

CLEAR is silent on governance. It assumes the team running it has the mandate, ethical framework and quality assurance to do so. In a corporate setting that assumption is often safe; in a public one it is not, and LOGIC's Governance dimension is a necessary addition. CLEAR is also silent on capability beyond the team in the room. LOGIC's Capability dimension makes the point that a method is only mainstream when people outside the specialist unit can apply it. A CLEAR practice that lives with one consultant or one internal team has not been mainstreamed, however good its results.

Where CLEAR sharpens LOGIC

LOGIC's Objectives dimension asks organisations to state how behavioural science serves strategy. It does not, because it is not a method, say how to size those objectives. CLEAR's insistence on key results, and the practitioner discipline of matching goal size to intervention size, gives LOGIC's Objectives principle teeth. And LOGIC's Integration dimension talks about embedding behavioural thinking in processes; CLEAR's Leverage step supplies the systems map that shows which processes matter.

5. Practical guidance

If you are in government or a regulated public body: use LOGIC to assess institutional maturity across the five dimensions before committing to any project method. Then run projects with BASIC where the target is a citizen behaviour and the diagnostic tradition (ABCD) fits, and with CLEAR where the target is the organisation's own behaviour: how a department adopts a new process, how a service team changes its working pattern, how a policy unit learns from its own experiments.

If you are in a company: LOGIC's dimensions translate directly. Does leadership ask for behavioural evidence? Is behavioural change written into strategy with measurable objectives? Who is allowed to run experiments on staff and customers, under what ethical rules? Is behavioural thinking part of product, HR and operations processes, or a separate innovation team? Can people outside that team do the work? Score yourselves, then run CLEAR cycles on the dimensions that scored lowest. The organisation's own adoption of behavioural science is a change problem, and CLEAR is built for change problems.

If you are a practitioner choosing a method: the choice between BASIC and CLEAR is mostly a choice of starting point and unit of analysis. Start from a behaviour and a citizen, use BASIC. Start from an outcome and a system, use CLEAR. Either way, LOGIC is the list of things that will stop your second project from happening even if your first one succeeds.

6. Conclusion

The OECD's LOGIC framework is an important document because it names the real bottleneck in behavioural public policy: not the lack of methods, but the lack of institutions ready to use them routinely. CLEAR does not compete with it. CLEAR is one of the methods LOGIC assumes, closest in shape to the OECD's own BASIC, and differing from it by starting with outcomes rather than behaviours, by mapping systems rather than individual decisions, and by looping rather than sequencing. Where the two meet is the organisation itself: LOGIC describes the destination, and CLEAR is a method for getting an organisation there one experiment at a time.

© 2026 Erik Bohjort · clear-framework.com