the first chapter, we considered how to spark a behaviour change revolution in an organisation and how to sell this to colleagues. In this chapter, we considered how you might best form a team to encourage creative ideas. What kind of people do you bring into the team to help your application of behavioural science to thrive? As shown by Babies of the Borough, it’s important to include people who are open to external influences, people with a diverse range of skills and perspectives, and those who are willing to take risks.
#4 Step out of the echo chamber
The best creative people have one thing in common: they’re receptive to external influences. Whilst they may not realise the value of these sources in the first instance, they file them away in their minds, only to uncover unexpected connections at a later date.
Standing in the way of this discovery process are newsfeed algorithms, which reign us into echo chambers where we are only exposed to ideas consistent with our own. To combat this, don’t rely solely on algorithm-based platforms for your inspiration; explore your many and varied interests. Actively seek out sources of stimulation beyond your existing circle and be receptive to external influences. Let your brain do the filtering and joining up, and unlikely collisions will generate extraordinary ideas. Bringing two divergent themes together in a new context might lead to an unexpected and joyous idea about how to apply behavioural science. It’s only by embracing the messiness of this approach that you trigger developmental shifts in a field like applied behavioural science.
#5 Collaborate with people who aren’t like you
Similarly, the collision of diverse skill sets can lead to serendipitous discoveries. Babies of the Borough might not have come to fruition if it weren’t for the combination of energy, resilience, passion, insight, research and artistry of those involved. Brilliant ideas never come from one single person and an idea is nothing without the ability to execute.
The successful application of behavioural science in business relies on generating a diverse range of ideas using people from different fields. Rather than cocooning yourself in an ivory tower digesting behavioural science journals, you need to venture out and take inspiration from people within your own business, or other businesses altogether, if you are to apply the insights from behavioural science in the real world.
As such, build and work in teams with diversified skills. Perhaps you might spend the majority of your time working in solely, say, the marketing team. Day in and day out, you spend time bouncing ideas off people with similar backgrounds, skills and talents. Contrast this with working in multi-disciplinary teams which, whilst more difficult, will inevitably lead to more innovative ideas. As true as this is for applying behavioural science in business, it also holds true for behavioural science research in academia.
#6 It’s risky, but try the crazy idea
It can be frustrating that when budgets are tight, the first thing a business cuts is their allocation for innovation. Taking this approach erodes value in the medium to long term, because sacrificing innovation hinders overall progression. If you aspire to make a successful change, you must allocate resources to trying new things.
It’s fair enough to keep 70% of your budget to do the safe stuff. And keep 20% to try out new approaches. But fight to keep the last 10% available for trying the risky yet innovative behavioural science idea. It might be high risk, but being the first to take an innovative approach gives you first-mover advantage, which can sometimes offer the greatest rewards.
What next for Babies of the Borough?
Credit to the team at Ogilvy, they’ve not rested on their laurels. The Power of Cute has been taken to other territories as street murals. Sam Tatam, a Partner at Ogilvy, is now leading the project to explore whether high-definition photographic images of babies’ faces will be even more powerful than the cruder articulations by street mural artists. Two such shutters are now up, but there are no results yet to illuminate whether the baby schema is more effective as a digital photograph or a caricatured artist’s rendition.
8 Evans-Pritchard (2013).
9 Bushman, Wang and Anderson (2005).
10 Demir, Uslu and Arslan (2016).
11 Dabbs, Hargrove and Heusel (1996).
12 Wilson and Kelling (1982).
13 Glocker et al. (2009).
Chapter 3: Reducing Pickpocketing by PutPocketing, England
Bringing behavioural science ideas to fruition
On 9 August 2007, BNP Paribas froze $2.2 billion worth of funds. With this move, they were the first bank to concede the risks of US sub-prime mortgages. Many cite this as the first sign of the financial crisis. Since then, there’s been a total transformation of the way that businesses make decisions and the governance around decisions has noticeably tightened. With this has come the rise and rise of the business case – it’s now par for the course to have to justify every penny spent.
It could be argued that this is generally a good thing. But it becomes problematic when championing innovative ideas. It takes a leap of faith to endorse untested ideas, which invariably involve both financial and reputational risks. It’s undeniable that some of these leaps will fail, but what if there was a way to identify the ones with a greater chance of success?
This is where behavioural science can lend a hand. Used correctly, it can help to confidently predict whether an idea will work and even explain the mechanisms by which it might operate. What’s more, experimental methods from behavioural science can be used to test a prototype idea before rolling it out into a messy real-world context. In this way, behavioural science can give an idea greater credibility and help to justify it in a business context.
‘Do to think’, rather than ‘think to do’
“Too often,” says Dr Jules Goddard, Fellow of the London Business School, “businesses think to do.” They pontificate, think about ideas very hard, and yet do very little. Rather, he advocates, they should “do to think.” By trying an idea out and quickly discovering the problems, this furthers your thinking and improves the idea. By acting first, and thinking later, businesses can innovate and progress more quickly.
This approach is in stark contrast to that favoured by academics. In an academic experiment, the aim is to empirically demonstrate a hypothesis by retaining tight control over the parameters and possible confounders. More appropriate for businesses, however, is to quickly build a prototype which establishes whether an idea works, thus giving stakeholders the confidence to make a leap of faith. This is exactly why the Avon and Somerset Police were happy to take one such leap when they first heard of Ogilvy’s radical idea to protect the residents of the region from pickpocketing.
Unintended consequences on behaviour
Ask anyone who researches, studies or works in behavioural science and they’ll tell you that behaviour is dependent on context. An intervention which reduces a behaviour in one setting might have the opposite effect in another. Even experts with decades of experience and research under their belt make incorrect predictions about how people will behave in a situation,
