Tommy Birch is a Behavioural Scientist, Coach and Leadership Advisor at House of Birch, a local councillor and CPF Area Leader for Hertfordshire.

There is something infectious about Party Conference, and I’m not just talking about the notorious post-conference flu, which so far, it seems, I have managed to escape (touch wood).

Anyone who spent this week at the ICC will know the feeling: four days moving between the main hall, the fringe rooms and the bar of the Hyatt, and somehow you leave with more energy than you had coming in. Conversations that would take months to arrange happen in a bar queue, old friendships pick up where they were left off, and things that seemed out of reach start to look possible.

For me the highlight was listening to Matthew Syed’s speech at the Business Dinner on Monday night. I’m a big fan.

Then we come home to what feels almost like a different universe with piling emails and laundry and the ever so glamorous normality of life.

Kemi’s speech was electric, and the love the hall had for her was magnetic, but I know some of us will ask where do we go from here?

What turns four days of motivation into a year of action? And, just as importantly, how do we turn enthusiasm for our leader into momentum for the whole party?

We tend to assume people act when they want to badly enough, that if you really mean it, you will find a way.

As anyone who has ever pledged to start a diet “next Monday” will tell you (yours truly included), it rarely works like that. Psychologists call this the intention–behaviour gap, and parties fall into it just as easily as people do: the promises we’ve made to ourselves at the conference hall fade as quickly as the ones we make to ourselves on December 31st.

Researchers at UCL developed a simple model, known as COM-B, which may help us keep the momentum going. The model explains that any behaviour change depends on three things: capability, opportunity and motivation. It works for someone trying to keep a resolution, and it works just as well for a party of thousands wanting to move in the same direction.

Motivation: from her to us

I’ll start with motivation, because it is the most intuitive of the three and the one Conference left us richest in. The model splits it in two. Automatic motivation as the emotional and habitual part, which Conference supplies in abundance; and reflective motivation as the conscious part: our values, goals and deliberate decisions. For the post-Conference buzz to last, it has to be anchored in both a conscious decision about what we will do, and a routine that eventually makes doing it feel natural.

The simplest way to bridge between the two is an “if–then” plan, what psychologists call an implementation intention- “When I get in from work on Thursday, I’ll spend half an hour on the association’s call list.” A specific positive goal means the decision is made once, and there is nothing left to negotiate when Thursday comes, and with enough repetition it will turn into a habit.

That is the individual half of the answer. The party half starts with recognising what the hall was running on. Much of that automatic motivation was enthusiasm for Kemi herself, which is real and very well deserved, but it is also fragile.

Commitment that lasts can’t rely solely on Kemi, but rather comes from identity, driven by a sense of belonging. People stay involved in a group when they see themselves in it, when “the party” means people like them doing things they can envisage themselves doing. That sense of “us” is built by taking part, is essential to us socially-wired animals, and it is also what turns admiration for a leader into a reason to keep turning up.

Capability: can I do it?

The model divides capability into physical and psychological; the physical side largely takes care of itself and is pretty much self-explanatory.

Psychological capability refers to knowledge and skill, basically knowing what to do, how to do it and what to say. Many members left Birmingham keen to help but don’t necessarily know where to begin. Someone who has never canvassed is not short of commitment; they are short of a script, a partner, the practical step-by-step process of doing. Associations can close this gap by pairing newer members with experienced ones whenever they ask them to fulfil a task. Small successes build confidence, and confident members come back.

Moreover, members can only carry a message they can explain in their own words, on a doorstep, to someone who disagrees with them. Briefings that explain the arguments to activists can turn the leader’s case into one that thousands of people can make. That is how a speech in a conference hall becomes a conversation in every ward.

Skills fade when they are not used, and confidence fades with them so the timing here is crucial. The weeks straight after Conference, while the energy is still there, are the best time to train people and keep them engaged.

Opportunity: does my environment allow it?

Picture a member back from Birmingham, determined to do more. She works full time, and the only action day she hears about is on a Wednesday afternoon, run by people she has never met. Her motivation is intact, what is missing is an opportunity to act on.

What she will need is an easy way around time and access, and our goal is to remove friction for volunteers wanting to participate. A standing fixture (the same day each month, the same meeting point, the same coffee afterwards) will save a dozen small decisions, and CCHQ can do the same at scale by making it easy for anyone to find their nearest action day in a dedicated portal for example.

Another useful thing will be knowing who else is doing it. We take our cues from people like us, friends and neighbours, so seeing effort being put in by others is contagious. Associations that share photos from a morning’s canvassing and thank people by name will find others naturally reaching out to join in.

None of this is particularly complicated, and that is rather the point. Momentum is not lost because Conservatives stop caring once they leave Birmingham, but because the conditions that made action easy need to be adapted to fit our busy day-to-day lives. Rebuilding those conditions is a job for all levels of the party; the leadership sharing the credit, CCHQ making it simple to help, associations making it sociable, and each of us turning a vague resolution into a plan with a day and a time attached making action the inevitable outcome of a system designed for winning.