order to make behavioural science practical and relatable, it’s important to go beyond telling an anecdote. You want to demonstrate the results in a tangible way. Of course, it’s always interesting to hear about the results of experiments by behavioural researchers, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into clear recommendations in the business world.
That being said, rest assured that the task is made slightly easier by the fact that behavioural science is all about humans. Everybody can relate to it, once you’ve found a way to make it relevant for them.
#1 Get a local proof point
When you bring behavioural science to life for people in their line of work, they start to buy into it more. If you take a behavioural bias or heuristic and find a way to make it local to them, that’s when people start to understand the wide range of applications and merits. To do this, conduct a small experiment or case study within your organisation, in order to get a local proof point. Naturally, the type of proof point you need will depend on the nature of your business.
For example, you might run a small experiment to get more people recycling. You might take your two waste bins titled ‘Mixed Recycling’ and ‘General Waste’, and re-label them to ‘Mixed Recycling’ and ‘Landfill’. You might go one step further and make the landfill slot smaller, so that it’s difficult to put things in. You might conduct this experiment for two weeks and compare how many people recycled before and after your mini-intervention.
Alternatively, you might experiment with nudges in an email. There’s an upcoming event where attendance is voluntary, but you’d like to get more people to show up. Usually, you get a turnout of 60%, but you’d like to get it to 80%. You might begin by saying, “More and more of our employees are coming to these meetings and they’re giving stellar feedback.” You might say, “Eleanor, our Marketing Director, says she truly valued learning about new social media publishing tools at our last event.” You might sign off by telling your colleagues to avoid missing out, because there’s a great guest speaker lined up. You include an easy one-click calendar invite and sit back to count how many people show up to the meeting. You find that employee engagement rises by 25% as a result of that email, at no extra cost to you. You present the findings from your experiment back at the next company meeting, showing the two emails side by side.
#2 Bring your proof point to life
Operating within an agency like Ogilvy gave Jez a massive luxury: access to a world-class creative team with the ability and skill to transform crude behavioural experiments into a story, supported by visual effects, a script and a narrator. If you’re operating in a nascent start-up space, however, you’ve got to be a bit more resourceful. Yes, Jez had hidden cameras filming a boardroom of fully-grown adult jumping bunnies, but anybody with an iPhone can shoot some footage and cobble it together in iMovie. It might not look polished, but it will still bring to life the behavioural changes you’ve influenced. At the very least, it will capture people’s imagination more than documents of text.
#3 Minimise deception to avoid losing trust
An unexpected side effect of running these experiments was that Jez’s colleagues soon started to mistrust his intentions. These experiments were run a couple of months after he joined the company and often involved recruiting participants in an underhand way. For example, he’d sent out a company-wide email offering to upskill colleagues on workshop facilitation skills. After nudging them to jump around like bunnies, he’d later revealed the true purpose of the session. Before long, people grew wary of his motives, and he’d get people questioning whether legitimate and genuine requests were yet another underhand ruse. As such, be careful to limit your duplicity to times when it’s truly necessary.
So where’s the best place to start if you want to apply behavioural science in business? Try running some experiments to bring your ideas to life for your colleagues. Get some evidence to show that it works, bring it life with videos or pictures, but keep it playful. And if you use your colleagues as your experiment participants, then they’ll have some trouble denying that subtle nudges can have an unexpected impact on behaviour.
1 Thaler and Benartzi (2004).
2 TED (2008).
3 Kahneman (2011).
4 Meyers, Stunkard and Coll (1980).
5 Wansink, Painter and van Ittersum (2001).
6 Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996).
7 Ariely and Loewenstein (2006).
Chapter 2: Babies of the Borough, Greenwich, London
Innovative applications of behavioural science come from serendipitous collisions
Have you ever thought about whether the requirement for scientific rigour might be holding behavioural science back? The field has progressed using the scientific method, whereby hypotheses are tested with rigorous experimentation and the results are interpreted with scepticism. In order to get published, academic research must follow the scientific method’s clear steps and withstand countless rounds of peer reviews. The problem with this process is that it limits creativity within the field.
Both Jez and April are scientists by training. Jez has a background in biology and chemistry, going on to study biochemistry at university, before later falling in love with behavioural science. April felt at home in the objective and unambiguous world of the sciences, studying the field of human behaviour at undergraduate and, later, postgraduate level. There is beauty, both agree, in numbers, data and statistics, but these serve no purpose when behavioural science starts and ends with science. After all, what’s the point of testing hypotheses with elegantly designed studies in a lab if the findings cannot be applied in the real world?
Therefore, we advocate a world where anybody can try their hand at applying behavioural science. By democratising behavioural insights, this will enable people from all fields, industries and walks of life to bring them out of the lab and into the real world.
Creativity thrives when worlds collide
Some amazing things happen when the world of behavioural science collides with others. It’s ironic that when people refer to nudge theory they often begin with the fly in the urinal, just as we did in the previous chapter. The cleaning department at Schiphol airport did not meticulously adhere to the scientific method and there was no scientific paper published with the results.
On the contrary, this example was borne of the collision of two worlds. The idea came from Jos van Bedaf, who managed the cleaners at Schiphol, and who in a previous life had spent time in the armed forces.8 Here he’d encountered urinals featuring targets and witnessed the positive influence for himself. Years later in his new role, in a completely new world, he found himself facing the age-old spillage problem. Joining the dots in his head, he suggested that they try a similar thing in the airport urinals. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Innovation may be borne of the collision of any two worlds, but something magical happens when behavioural science collides with the world of design. When Rory, who we met in chapter 1, became a pioneer for applying behavioural science in the world
