Richard Chataway: The Behaviour Business

We interview Richard Chataway, Vice President of BVA Nudge Unit UK and founder of Communication Science Group (CSG), and one of the most experienced behavioural science practitioners in the UK. We talk to him about how understanding people's behaviour can be the best path forward into the future.

00:35 Insights & Takeaways
10:25 Interview

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Twitter: @rich_chataway

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Transcript

Marcus Kirsch: 0:16

Welcome to the wicked podcast where we read business books you don't have time for. I'm Marcus Kirsch. And I'm Troy Norcross, and we are your co hosts for the wicked podcast,

Troy Norcross: 0:27

we take from the 1000s of business books out there and test the author's ideas by comparing them to real world challenges. With over 40 years or projects between us, we've got quite a bit to compare against. We give you the condensed takeaways followed by an interview with the author's we

Marcus Kirsch: 0:43

know you want actions, not theories and his actions that we want to help shape, because that's what the wicked podcast is all about helping you to become a wicked company.

Troy Norcross: 0:54

So Mark, is who we got on the show today.

Marcus Kirsch: 0:57

Yes, dry. So today, we will interview Richard chataway, who's the vice president of the bV energy unit bouquet, and the founder of the communication science group CSG. He's one of the most experienced behavioural science practitioners in the UK for organisations, and he's the author of a book called the behaviour business. So we talked to him about understanding people's behaviour, and how can how that can be the best path forward into the future. In particular, given our current situation here.

Troy Norcross: 1:24

Yeah, well, I remember when I was reading this book, I read it basically, in one long sitting. And there was so much great stuff in that book, I could I could talk to this guy for like, like a day.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:35

Yeah, I was quite surprised when you said you had basically done over the weekend. Same here, it's like, I don't know if it's still it will be in the interview. But you know, I said to Richard, it's like two books. And one, there's so much stuff in there. So many examples and case studies, it's, it's a really good reason. I think there's something for everyone, which is a weird, a bit of a cliche line to say, but it's really true. There's just so much stuff in from different industries, where you can really see the value of this, of this behavioural science in organised organisations. It's brilliant. So what do you think our takeaways are?

Troy Norcross: 2:08

So it's, there are a lot of things I could take away from reading the book. And from the the great interview that we just had, I think one of the big ones for me was this real serious point, you don't need to have a degree in behavioural science to get started. Yes, you need to have certain behavioural skills, but the most important thing is, is to get started, regardless of the size of organisation that you happen to be. And I think, when I was working for a big pharmaceutical company, we only talked to 10 different users of the service, but we learned a huge amount from just 10 users. So the most important thing is a start. And B, don't worry about having 1000s and 1000s of people, you can learn a huge amount from just 10.

Marcus Kirsch: 2:53

Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, I have the same attitude towards these new things. Some might sound very complex when you read them, because they have a lot of terminology. Same with service design, you know, and when I was training people on service design at bt, or red HSBC, sometimes it can look very overwhelming when you show up with like, 20 different tools, they all have to reason at all after value. So it's, it's hard sometimes to pull back a little bit as a practitioner and understand when these things are new. They look like oh, my God, that sounds not just complex, but it sounds scary. It sounds like a massive investment and a massive risk, therefore, but oftentimes, those things can be done. You know, quite in small steps. There's a lot of small, already quite effective things you can do that sometimes feel a bit obvious and common sense but are not because likely you haven't done them before in your process. So you know, small steps forward, just getting one person in or just adding something to your process like that, in terms of research is immensely valuable, and absolutely doable tomorrow, which is a bit of what we would talk to Richard about.

Troy Norcross: 4:05

And I think there's kind of piggybacking on that a bit. We talked very briefly about the appetite for risk. And you know, that's one of my bugbears I, I talk a lot about how big companies tend to be very risk averse. But there are two extremes. They're really, really large companies that have the ability and the confidence to take certain risks in their innovation departments. And they're really small companies, the startups, who inherently are trying different things and pivoting. At least the successful startups are not all startups. And I think there's a huge middle ground where people are afraid to get in and learn something because it might break their business model, or it might cause some level of change. And for them change is risky.

Marcus Kirsch: 4:49

Absolutely, yeah. You know, where startups have to prove something quite quickly. They're nearly forced to do so. Because if they can't confirm or proof of concept of us customers and that there's anything there That's accepted by the market, they'll die quickly. And the ones who do do not do that day that wants to tend to die within the first couple of months of inception. Yeah. And then the big ones, the companies, their strategy departments, or smart people sitting there going, like, we should really be doing this. And they can, they can lose a million or two, and it's not gonna really, really scratch down. So and they used to also doing transformation and change all the time, it just depends on what they're changing, or what they're bringing in. So bringing in something new like that, is absolutely doable for them. And I think that a little bit more used to it. Also, on the other hand, as I, as we probably both found is, sometimes these big organisation can have changed fatigue. So people are just tired of another new thing to come into the office. But you know, it's it's just a matter of how you introduce that and how you show value, that people can adopt it quite quickly. So the middle grant, as you rightly said, is, that's the tricky part where you have a business that's just about grew a bit, that's just about his business and revenue coming in. And then really risking taking an extra investment into something new that might or might not work might be trickier for those type of businesses or size businesses and others. So what what would you normally then say to business like that?

Troy Norcross: 6:21

Well, that kind of leads on to the second takeaway that I was I was talking about with you, which is understanding that Homer mode, as in Homer Simpson versus Spock mode, as in, as in Star Trek, applies not just to the customers of the company, but can also apply internally. And I think if you're going to start talking about how do we use behavioural science, and how we're going to learn from and adapt our product, or our service or our offering, we need to start remembering that we as people in the organisations are operating in Homer mode, not everybody inside the organisation is operating in a truly logical, rational thought process. There's a huge amount of emotion, there's a huge amount of emotional decision making or Homer mode decision making. And we as organisations, and people, like yourself and myself, working with organisations need to help them understand that there are emotions driving the decision to or not to do behavioural science and studies and test tube studies.

Marcus Kirsch: 7:23

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that comes down to So Richard gave a good quote, I think from the current CEO of Microsoft, who said something along the lines of we need to change it from a know it all culture to a learn at all culture, which means that, you know, there's probably two sides to this right, to really go and say, we need to learn everyday, a little bit more, because the problem is too complex. So you know, that's, that's sort of my side to the argument saying, you know, in a wicked problem world, where things keep evolving, you have to keep learning if you if you're not, if you stop learning, you're basically not keeping up with what's going on today. But the tricky part there seems to be, and I found that a lot in when organisational changes happening, that I think organisations understand that they don't fully understand the customer. And any teams that understand the problem around the customer better, that's one thing. But the other thing I find sometimes missing to some extent is that leadership has to maybe communicate, I don't know how much they have accepted this, maybe they have accepted it, but they don't communicate it always that they actually are biassed and don't know anything. So if they would start on communicating that they're running on Homer mode, which is an odd thing to say, if you're a very senior person in leadership, and you get paid a lot of money to make the right decisions. But I think that trend seems to be changing. And we know that from when we talk to Sonny and to some of the other ones where, you know, everyone says who's been out there in management consulting, like, leaders should not be expected to make the decisions that much anymore, they should enable other people to get the insights and make smart decisions or the order iterative decisions, right. So that's sort of a trend we see. And I think, maybe it can actually contribute to say, we actually know we're all in Homer mode, we accepted the actual nature of how our brain actually works. And not this dream story of like, Oh, we are very logical, and you're thinking more about things than we think we do. You know, we don't scientific evidence is there. So I really like that as an option to say, let's work on that maybe.

Troy Norcross: 9:50

I mean, and that's a nice summary of how things are and I love how we're bringing in more and more of the real world examples like from companies like Microsoft And also during the interview, we're talking not just in the enterprise level, we're talking about how these principles can apply at the society level or in politics. So it was a really well rounded interview.

Marcus Kirsch: 10:13

Absolutely, because we covered ethics, and so on and so on. But let's stop babbling around. So we go to the interview then.

Troy Norcross: 10:20

Yeah, but Marcus, I, I love these parts of our conversations, this, this is the part where, where we get to have the most fun, but you're right, let's get on with the interview.

Marcus Kirsch: 10:29

Cool. Let's do it. Hello, Richard. And thank you for making time, we had a quite intense time reading your book, because there's too much in it. So we try to compress it so that we can fit some essential things into an hour. But it feels this will probably going to be quite a relevant one given given our current context and our times, and not just the COVID. But a lot of other things that just been happening around the globe that are just so close to looking at people's behaviour. So let me start by asking you the idea of that humans are purely driven by logic has been quite a bank and advertising and politicians are always trying to look at how we how we do things and predict and convince us of certain things. So can you tell us a little bit about what what's behavioural science for organisation? And sort of what's the difference to the other things that we sort of know and that are out there? Can you explain that maybe a little bit?

Richard Chataway: 11:29

Yeah, sure. So I mean, I prefer to use the term I suppose this is the kind of a semantic distinction to some degree, I prefer to use the term behavioural science rather than behavioural economics, which, which a lot of people might be familiar with, simply because To my mind, Bible science is really an amalgamation of lots of different disciplines that give us new insights into how people behave and what drives people's behaviour. And as you say, you know, the key thing that we've learned, and one of the things I say in my book is that, you know, we've learned more about human behaviour in the last 50 years than we have in the previous 5000. I mean, the discipline of psychology is barely over 100 years old. So there is actually really in terms of what's what's driving human behaviour is relatively new. And there's lots we can learn from disciplines like behavioural economics, social psychology, even neurology and neuroscience to some degree, about how you know how we make decisions in the real world, and how that how that guides on behaviour. And I think, you know, the key thing for me, and one of the reasons why I wrote my book was that, in what we assume about human behaviour, and what drives human behaviour is often erroneous, or at least misguided. And that's one of the key things that behavioural science tells us is that, you know, people don't behave in a totally logical rational fashion, as you've said, in most in most contexts, we're often very driven by environmental and contextual factors in terms of our behaviour. And those things are often forgotten. And we often assume that people are, you know, very consistent or rational in the ways that they behave. And actually what behavioural science tells us is that that's not the case. And that people are emotional, people are driven by how they think other people are behaving, social norms, and as well as those environmental and contextual factors. And, and those are things that we don't give enough credit to in terms of guiding our behaviour, and we don't factor them in enough as to how we, we try and influence people and in the business world, that's definitely true. And, you know, for me, one of the interesting things is that having come from a public sector background where behavioural science and psychology is, has been used successfully in a number of different contexts for for a number of years, we're not doing that enough, or systematically in the business world, and there's loads, we can learn from that, about how to create better products and services, and how to influence the behaviour of our employees, and how to market those products and services better as well.

Marcus Kirsch: 13:51

So when you look at that, then, because he said in an organisational context, and you talked about work, working in the public sector, a few months ago, we would have asked you how this works there. Now maybe there's a lot of element to that, where it's relevant towards what's been happening around COVID-19. So, you know, Where, where, and how can a nudge team help, and if you can give us maybe some concrete examples of maybe what you've done and how you've done that, let's say around the HMRC tax notice, or you dealt a lot with health care and worked in that area, and how you also balance these things between what an organisation and maybe the public sector is doing and what also the capitalist side of it is that probably sometimes contradicting when you talk about, you know, one side wants to help you eat more healthy and the other side goes on to sell more burgers. So can you give us some some concrete examples maybe how those dynamics work? Yeah,

Richard Chataway: 14:55

sure. So this Yeah, so so I guess in the context of COVID-19 there's You know, we've tried to encourage a lot of behaviours from people that are, are to some degree, obviously hugely different to how we used to behaving, you know, we're not used to having to stay two metres apart, or one metre apart from each other, and socially distance or we're not used to, not being able to go out to restaurants and bars and so on. And, you know, and the core of the work that we do at big energy unit, but also, the work that I've done in the past, when I've been working for governments in the UK, and Australia, around healthy behaviours and addressing public health is that, you know, in most cases, people actually want to behave in a way that benefits them benefits their their health, and helps them lead longer and healthy lives. And that's as true of COVID-19 is with issues like obesity or smoking and so on. But because we know that people are slightly irrational beings that we are driven by, you know, emotional and, and non conscious factors that influence our behaviour, that means that we, we struggle to do that sometimes, you know, we'd all like to be a bit healthier, we'd all like to exercise more, we'd all like to eat more healthy, and yet, we struggle to do so because maybe we don't have the willpower, sometimes contextual drivers are too strong. So, um, so that, you know, that's common across the work that we do. And the way you know, whether we seek to influence behaviour in that way is to frame the choices in a way that the beneficial behaviour is more attractive and appeals more to some of those subconscious or, or what we might call system, one factors. So to give you an example, you know, I worked with the government in Australia, and we were working on smoking and encouraging people to quit smoking. As a big public health issue, single largest preventable cause of death in Australia as it is, in most parts of the world is smoking related illnesses. So, but the thing is, when you speak to smokers, when you ask smokers about their habit, everyone knows that smoking is bad for them, you know, 97% of smokers are aware that it's detrimental to their health. So the battle has been won in terms of persuading people to quit, to be honest. But what most people struggle with is actually the act of quitting and actually staying off cigarettes. Because he's addictive. It's he knows chemically addictive, but there's also a very strong habitual element to it, which means that other people, therefore is a part of everyone's daily lives, and they struggle to move away from that. And that's why, for example, more recently, products like e cigarettes have been quite successful and vaping is because it's mimicking the same habit. It's just obviously, replacing the, the product. And, and but but this was back in 2012, when I was working with Australian government before these products were available. And, and what we wanted to do was we wanted to use technology and facilitate people to quit and help them quit more successfully. And at that time apps was relatively, you know, mobile apps were relatively new technology. But the insight that drove us to develop that, as an app called my quick buddy to help people quit, wasn't that, you know, there was a new piece of technology available, the insight that drove it was, what's the barrier to people quitting successfully? Well, the barrier is, is that people need to have something to do when the cravings hit, they can happen at any time of the day or night. And that's what gets people to reach for their cigarettes, we need to effectively provide a substitute something else that they can reach for somebody else that's in arm's reach, that can give them the necessary motivation, willpower and support to help them with quitting smoking. And what's the one thing that everyone has within arm's reach 24 hours a day is their mobile phone. So a mobile solution was the best possible solution for that, and that was driven by an understanding the behaviour and, and the Behavioural Insights. So and then, and then when we made the app, what we incorporate into that was a number of different behavioural nudges, to encourage people and help them with with staying off cigarettes and staying, quit from smoking. So things like you know, there were social norms, elements to it, where you could have messages from your loved one saying, you know, keep going, you know, you're quitting for us, your kids or whatever it might be. There was also a kind of community element to it, so people could send each other messages of support. There was, you know, every time you open the app, you got information, salient information on how much money you saved, how much tie you'd avoided in toxic chemicals, which was reinforcing that behaviour. And it proved to be very successful, and the app is still going strong eight years later. It's you know, it's had over half a million smokers in Australia have used the app between one in three and one in four, and the quitting success rate from using it eight times what you'd get from quitting cold turkey. So and you know, and for me, the other interesting insight about that as about a solution was that the the app is still, as I say, working very successfully is later because Be able to continually optimise it and update it by using data and feedback from users, which very much mirrors the way that the technological world, you know, works in terms of the kind of minimum viable product approach, and can release in continuous updates to improve the functionality of technology. But also, you know, that's a great way to use Behavioural Insights is to continually test learn, adapt. And that was one of the kind of key insights behind my book. So I guess, to bring it back to that question about, you know, how you how do you square the circle in terms of, you know, there are these influential factors within any any kind of free market economy, which are nudging us towards unhealthy behaviours, like smoking, drinking, unhealthy foods, you know, but there are also, you know, governments who are trying to influence behaviour towards healthy lifestyle, for example, and in the same way with COVID-19, you know, we're trying to influence behaviour towards, you know, staying at home, not gathering in groups, not, you know, maintaining social distancing, you know, that there are always going to be those competing forces. And, and I would say, in the context of things like fast food and obesity, it's an arms race. And to be honest, the McDonald's and the Burger Kings of this world have far more resources at their disposal, than then governments do it both financially and in terms of, you know, the influence that they have on particularly younger people. In the case of COVID-19, I think one of the things that's reassuring is that, you know, the competing influences have until recently not being very strong, as in, you know, when here in the UK, the initial government message, which was stay at home, was very clear, people generally abided by it. And it was actually pretty remarkable, to be honest, actually, how few people were, were not abiding by those restrictions. What we're starting to see now is, is obviously, that, that more and more people are not obeying it. There are arguments being made in countries like the US about how it's a restriction on civil liberties and freedoms. And, and then it becomes more challenging, because because there's a bit of sort of dissonance there going on amongst the population where people are realising that that actually, you know, some of their fundamental beliefs around how they should be allowed to leave their lives are being contradicted by being how they're being forced to lead their lives. And then it's, then it's, I would argue, you're getting out of the territory of nudging, because ultimately, you do reach a point where actually you might have to compel people to behave in certain ways for their own safety. And that's a that's a different challenge. But I would say, Sorry, go

Troy Norcross: 22:45

use the word dissonance. And I was going to bring up the word kind of cognitive dissonance. And that happens a lot when people are conflicted with what they should do or what they want to do, and how those two things sometimes don't align. And I think that you whether it's the fast food industry, with their billions, trying to say consume our products, of course, we don't want you to consume too much, because we know that's unhealthy. And the government coming out with, you know, here Have some fruit here, you know, this is a heart disease, this is high blood pressure, this is cardiovascular, all of these things can be fixed with just improving your diet slightly. And does that conflict of messages you're being bombarded with, you know, cause new internal stress in the individuals?

Richard Chataway: 23:28

Yeah, it's a very good question. I think, yeah, I mean, undoubtedly, it does to some degree, because as I say, I think we all know, that we, you know, we, we could lead or we want to lead healthier lives, we want to ensure you know, that we live life to the, to the fullest and are able to, you know, that we none of us want to die prematurely. So, so, yeah, it does, it does create stress for people. And and, you know, it's interesting, I think, some research you see about, you know, well, I would say it was, you know, anecdotally, when I go into McDonald's, I don't see a lot of happy faces. And I think that's because to some degree, people realise that, that obviously, it's not necessarily the best choice for the lifestyle wise. So. So, you know, I think there is absolutely, there is a there is a stress to that, but I guess, you know, this is the, one of the beauties of of the work that we do in terms of nudging behaviours is that it's entirely consistent with the philosophy and, and beliefs of a free market democratic system, which is that you know, you people are free to behave in the ways that they choose, as long as so long as it does not harm other people. And what we are doing in you know, we're nudging behaviour is we are framing choices in ways that benefit those individuals. But you know, but the fundamental principle and this is one of the The argument I make whenever people ask me about the ethics of nudging is to say, you still have the choice to behave as you wish, you still have the choice to go to McDonald's, you still have the choice to, you know, to smoke. But But, you know, it's it's important from the point of view of, of maintaining, providing the best possible outcomes for citizens within a society, that those choices are framed in a way that is informative and ensures that the choices that we make are going to benefit us. And, you know, and I'm some people argue about it from an ethical viewpoint about, well, who were you to choose what's beneficial for individuals, if people want to smoke themselves to death, they should be allowed to say, absolutely, you still can do that. But the problem is, as I say, 97% of smokers at any point in time, say, I really wish I didn't smoke. So you know, it's incumbent on us as a society to facilitate that behaviour, when the thing that we're you're battling against is a chemically addictive product that is marketed in a, in a insidious way to encourage people to use it. So so that's the, you know, those that's the the, I think the the benefit of nudging is that people are still free to choose and behave in the way that they want, what we're just doing is trying to nudge them into behaviours that are beneficial to them, and ones which actually, they would want to adopt themselves.

Troy Norcross: 26:22

So going back to your your book, and I loved the ideas of Homer mode, versus Spock mode. And the idea of making conscious decisions, almost implies it's more Spock mode, it's the it's the cognitive, okay, I've got choice a choice B, I'm going to choose B, as opposed to the kind of the Homer mode, which is the non engaging brain and just kind of following along with some level of, of intuition. And if you bring that back into the organisational thing, we this is where Marcus and I spend a lot of our time is working with enterprises and enterprise teams. And yes, it could be that the marketing department understand that most of the decisions that are made by their end customers are, are in Homer mode, but how do you communicate Homer mode versus Spock mode? To the engineering department? To the finance department? To to the to the executive team?

Richard Chataway: 27:16

Yeah, it's a really good question. And it is a big challenge, because I think there's a, there's a couple of things that are that are challenging around this. One is that, as you say, it's generally true that I think people in those kinds of teams, particularly engineering teams, I would say that we shouldn't stereotype are quite logical in their thinking a lot the time and their way to problem solving. And so wouldn't necessarily recognise that, that you know, that the consumers they're dealing with, but also their own decisions might be more instinctive, and driven by some of these biases and heuristics that we have in when we're in that home or mode than they realise. And then And then also, you know, that the other challenges that, you know, by necessity, if you're working for in an organisation, you are thinking much more deeply about the problems that organisation faces than people outside the organisation, I think he mountain. So you know, if you think about it, in terms of as consumers when we go into a supermarket, and we are making a choice about what brand of shampoo to buy, for example, that's not a that's not a decision that anyone thinks about in a huge amount of detail, and a huge amount of depth. Because, you know, frankly, we've all got better things to do with our time, but the people who work for those shampoo brands are maybe are making the assumption of making very deep considered decisions about the way that that brand is marketed the way it where it sits on the shelf where you know, what the what colour The packaging is. And, and they should be doing that recognising that actually, the heuristics that the consumer is using, when they're making that purchase in the supermarket will be very instinctive and largely home alike. But because you're breathing, breathing that brand every day for, you know, seven or eight hours, it's difficult to put yourself in those in those shoes and to think about it in that kind of, in that kind of less rational way. And, and, and typically the kind of processes and systems and, and organisational structures within a business, our reward logic and reason in the way that we approach decisions, and therefore, you know, that's the that's the challenge, I guess. So to my to my mind, I guess, you know, the way to address that is, firstly, to recognise that a lot of the decisions that people are making about the products and services that you develop, will be largely driven by that Homer mode, and more people will be in that more instinctive mode. But the way to get an understanding of that and understanding those issues is really to test it and ideally test stuff in the real world. And this is where, in some of the examples I use in my book, around the likes of Google and Amazon and Netflix, the way they built their products and services is entirely built on that. So there's an example in the book about Amazon and amazon prime. So you know, I'm sure you and your listeners are probably familiar with Amazon Prime, it's their subscription based products, you know, you you pay a monthly fee, and you get free delivery for however many items you purchase for Amazon. Now, before Amazon introduced amazon prime, they conducted a big econometric modelling project. So they basically went out, they got some econometricians, to do some modelling to see whether it was going to be profitable for them. And econometric modelling predicted it will be massive failure would cost them millions of dollars a year. But credit to Amazon, you know, they thought, Well, okay, that's one piece of data, if you'd like about the effectiveness of this, why don't we actually just test it with a subset of our users and find out if we think it's effective, and over, it's going to work in the real world. And so what they did was introduced amazon prime to a small subset of Amazon Prime Amazon customers. And in the first year, it wasn't profitable for them, it costs them money. But actually, what they found was it drove in a much more loyalty amongst those customers. And in fact, those customers who were on Amazon Prime in the in the US spent nearly twice as much a year and visiting the site nearly twice as often. So they weren't spending more per visit, they were just spending more overall and visiting Amazon more often, and become more loyal. We're using Amazon to buy a wider range of products than they had been previously. And effectively it, it became massively profitable. And it's obviously now being rolled out globally as part of their offering. And I think, you know, that's really interesting for me, on two levels. One is that, you know, the modelling that had been, had a number of assumptions built into it proved to be incorrect. But the other is, it just shows the value of conducting real world tests and reward testing amongst users. Because when there are these biases and heuristics and system, one processes applied, often, the only way you can get a good read on that is to actually recreate the context of the decision and get people to, you know, try it out in the real world,

Marcus Kirsch: 32:04

but also, you know, my backgrounds design in particular, at the moment, service design is a thing. So human centricity, human centred research, not too far away from what you're doing, maybe less rigid, but it does the same thing. Like it looks to really prove, you know, that behaviours and things are actually happening in the real world, rather than assuming that certain things are there. And it goes a lot into the qualitative, soft emotional aspect of it. Now, the biggest challenge there, and I've, you know, with, I worked on a big project at, you know, bt HSBC, nationwide, where they talked about customer centricity a lot. But the challenge there, in some kind of nutshell, I guess, would be that it was really hard for them to commit to it, because they still measured what they were previously measuring. They were measuring what they should be measuring. And that drove prioritisation. Right. So if they don't measure what they should be measuring, if they don't measure the new, then the results will not come back to prove them wrong, the results will come back to prove them right by saying I it's probably not gonna work. And our design is just fluff. And we can just focus just on the customer, because the business needs to survive. So the businesses have a relevancy and evaluation on that side. Tell me a little bit about what challenges you found in exactly that, when you come in with something that's still in a lot of organisations pretty new. To say, hey, hang on a second, this actually is a value, you're just not measuring it yet. But actually, there is a massive amount, can you give me time to prove that it works, hope that it works in this particular case? You know, and like, for example, like we prove over at bt, we had two of the three pilot project, we hadn't actually run proper research, we had to pivoter. Because the assumptions were totally wrong. We save the millions and investment to fix the real problem. If you're given a time, that's great. But what's your experience sort of in being an organization's and telling that story to say, I'm the new kid on the block? What's the new measurement? Can you adopt that? Can you give me time to do that? What's your experience there? Yeah, it's

Richard Chataway: 34:29

interesting question, because I think, um, yeah, you're absolutely right, that that, to some degree, a lot of the work that we do, does require looking at different metrics or, or we're not necessarily looking at different metrics, but actually just being very focused on one metric, I think is that is the key thing. And you know, I mean, the opening line in my book is if you're in business, the business you're in the business of behaviour, and what I mean by that is that you know, you any business needs to influence behaviour to succeed if you're not influencing behaviour. In some way, shape or form, whether that's influencing people to buy your products and services, or influencing the behaviour of people who work within your organisation, then it's wasted effort, because the key thing that the key things that material science tells us is that there is a difference between our attitudes and our behaviour a lot of the time, and, and, you know, simply influencing attitudes is not enough necessarily to get people to then subsequently behave in the way that you want, which change their behaviour. So, you know, if people aren't behaving, if the people aren't buying your products and services, which is the behaviour, then you're not going to generate any revenue. So, um, and so for me, you know, one of the really, you know, useful aspects of using of thinking of problems in this way, and using Bible science and applied behavioural science is that it encourages you to focus on the metrics that relate to behaviour. So you know, it's a really fundamental level, if you're working on, you know, with a digital on a digital product, you know, the behaviour you want is you want people to click on a certain part of the site, or you want people to, you know, to make a purchase in your place of purchase. And that should be the only metric that counts, and how you get to that, you know, can can could be all sorts of different ways. So to give you an example, we were working with a credit card provider, they were very successful for a marketing viewpoint, driving people to their website with the intention of applying for a card. But what was happening was people were landing on the site, and then very few people were actually completing an application, or even starting application for the car. And, and they asked us to take a look at the site. And we took a look at the site. And then what immediately leapt out was you before you even saw the apply online button to click, you have to scroll through three pages of product features and benefits. And, and key terms before you even see it saw that button. Now, from a behavioural viewpoint. That's, you know, that's, that's a really bad experience, because one of the things that we know and what have been demonstrated countless times is that the more cognitively easy, you can make something for someone the less thinking power or thinking time you require of people to behave in a certain way, recognising they're often in that system, one Homer like mode. Yeah, we are generally lazy in our thinking a lot of the time, then the less likely they are to behave in the way that you want. So So making people assess and read all this information before starting an application was just an additional barrier to the behaviour and wasn't getting people to click on that button. So you know, very simple changes that we recommended where, you know, move the button above the fold on the site, change the colour, change, the wording of it made it as salient as possible. And that instantly increased the percentage of people clicking through to make an application by 54%. Now that change in friendly design terms with a very small, relatively small one, relatively inexpensive one, in terms of the profitability delivered to the business, it was huge. But the only metric we needed to have in place to measure the impact of that was with click through rate, and looking at how many people were actually clicking on that button. And we assessed that with a simple A B test of the, the old website versus the new website. And so, you know, I think if you if you are single minded, if you are focused on you know, we have a behavioural objective, which is to get people to, to do a, rather than B, then then that determines the metrics that you assessment on that because the metric should just be that behaviour. And other metrics, you know, can be useful and instructive. But that's, that's the end goal. And that's what you're aiming towards. And that's where I've seen the value of this really, to be honest, and, and, you know, a lot of what happens within organisations and businesses in particular is that a lot of metrics are constructed in order to, to some degree, allow people to take defensive positions around decisions that they've made, you know, we've increased the numbers of x, you know, by y percent. Therefore, we've been successful, but actually, in terms of what that relates to in terms of your bottom line and what the value delivers to the business, that's often really difficult to define. But if you've got a behavioural metric, which is, you know, as I say, in that particular case, getting people to do an application was directly contributed to the revenue generated by that product. Then Then you can you can demonstrate effectiveness much more, much more.

Troy Norcross: 39:36

In 2006, I was working with a company called e consultancy back in the day. And there was a study that was done on a particular airlines website. And they always kind of gave you the the first choice being, where do you want to travel from and the second choice drop down box, you know, where do you want to go to, and the interesting insight was if they flipped those two boxes, They increased overall sales by satellite 23%. Because most people, when they arrive at a travel site are thinking I'm going to go to my Orca, right here, whether I go from Gatwick or whether I go from Luton, I want to go to my Orca, and that one little change made made huge difference on a similar, interesting approach.

Richard Chataway: 40:21

Yeah, it's absolutely yeah, that's I love that stuff because it's, it's Firstly, it's something that's a bit counterintuitive, which is what Bible science tells us. And the second thing is, you know, the only way you could really assess that was by making that change and testing it. And I think that's what's what the real value of this approach, you know, the some of the examples I talked about in the book, and again, the from, from looking at some of the most successful 21st century businesses, you know, that's been integrated into their approach has been testing every variable from the could have an impact on the desired behaviour, to ascertain effectiveness. So you know, Google test, but the colour blue that you get your Google search results in, they tested that amongst 40, different pan tones of blue alone to find out that had, and that delivered an incremental $200 million in revenue just by changing the colour blue that they used for the first year showing you your search results, which is astonishing when you think about it, that that that should have that level of impact. But but it's that's that, you know, that is the value. And the benefit of the approach is that is that, you know, if you, and I guess this is the other aspect of that's really critical I talked about in the book is that, you know, I, the the phrase I use is test you behaviours, and by that I mean, it's firstly the that you're using the science and using the evidence base around how people behave, and the latest thinking around that. But the other is that you're willing to experiment and you're willing to adopt a kind of growth mindset in terms of going okay, we maybe don't, you know, we maybe don't have all the answers here. Let's test out some new things and some hypotheses to find what works, because you'll often find exactly the example you gave something that's really surprising and really counterintuitive, but delivers a significant business advantage. And Rory Sutherland wrote the foreword to my book, he has a great phrase, which is to test counterintuitive things because your competitors won't, you know, if you're finding something counterintuitive, that's a competitive advantage to you, because other people aren't doing it. And, and that's the real value of what we do in applied behavioural science. And you know, those kind of those examples I love, because they're there when they're obvious when you think about them. But at the time, obviously, previously, no one had ever thought about it.

Troy Norcross: 42:34

I'm sure you've heard Laurie's famous story about increasing the speed from Kings Cross to the tunnel, and the cost associated with it, as opposed to putting scantily clad people on the trains working in the trains and adding more consumer values with one of my favourite stories that he's told Absolutely.

Richard Chataway: 42:52

And people would, as he said, they would ask for the train to be slowed down. Yeah,

Troy Norcross: 42:56

exactly. very counterintuitive, but it works.

Richard Chataway: 42:58

Yeah. And that's your point about working with engineers, you know, it making the trains faster is an engineering solution to the problem. Whereas, you know, making the experience of travelling on a train more pleasant, instead for a fraction of the cost very much a behavioural solution.

Troy Norcross: 43:14

So that leads me that leads me nicely into my next question, which is, there is at least one budget airline who I will not name out. But we all know who we're talking about, whose CEO has described passengers as nothing more than self loading cargo, and has been doing behavioural experiences repeatedly on exactly how bad have a customer experience? Can I make it and still have customers? So we've been talking about how can you make things better, better, better? Do you also see sometimes people looking to increase profitability, drive shareholder value at the expense of, you know, the customer experience with at the expense of the employee experience using behavioural science in the same way?

Richard Chataway: 44:00

Yeah, it's a really, I mean, that those case studies are fascinating, I think, because, yeah, I mean, it to a certain degree, it's about the expectations that you create. And I do think it's, it's, in the case of that particular airline, there's a calculate, there's definitely a calculated element to it, which is, if I'm very transparent and honest about the fact that I really don't care, how bad the experiences for the customers, then you've created an expectation that people travel in the airline, very clear in, in, in their, their reason for travelling on it, which is that it's cheap, and that they don't have any expectations of any kind of quality of customer experience as a result of that. And in a way, it's kind of you know, in behavioural science, we talk quite a lot about anchoring, which is where, you know, you can give people an arbitrary number, and then their subsequent valuations of a product or service for example, will be Influenced by that. So, you know, if you're, it's why, for example, in restaurants, the, the wine menus will have ridiculously expensive bottles of wine or two or 3000 pounds or something like that. It's not because you know, there are some people who will occasionally Bible from that value. But what it does is it makes all the other bottles of wine on the menu look like better value, because you've got that high price anchor there. And it kind of works in reverse, I think there with where they're basically saying, look, the pricing is really low. And they've creating that expectation that anchor around it by saying it's low. But that means that, frankly, you're going to have terrible service. And, and you know, he's just reinforcing that image. And therefore creates expectation, if you think about it as well, if anything that that airline does, which, which incrementally adds to the quality of your customer experience, or, you know, even to the extent of you know, the people working on the airline smile at you, like is a terrible place to work, you're suddenly like, okay, maybe it's not as bad as I thought. So So I think there's an element of there is a behavioural element to that, which is that, you know, be by being very clear that the only reason you use them is because they're cheap, and that they don't really have any concern about quality customer experience, they set the bar really low in terms of what they actually have to deliver. Now, I'm not saying it's necessarily, it's a very risky strategy if you ask me. But, um, but I think there's an element to that. And, you know, I, one of the things I always find interesting about, I think it's the, I think it's the same airline that you're thinking of, is that when the plane lands, and it's on time they play a little trumpet sound, do to do because I have to think, and that's hilarious at one level, because it's kind of like, Oh, you arrived safely, that's the result, which is the minimum, maybe I would expect of any headline really, is to actually get me to a destination. But, um, but it's, it's a really interesting example, I think of how they're kind of setting those expectations in a slightly different way. And, you know, in most airlines, obviously, we will spend millions of dollars every year trying to communicate, you know, what a quality customer a high quality customer experience they create. The challenge with that is, if you don't then deliver on that, and this is what a lot of the work that I do is based around is about ensuring good quality experiences people, um, then then, you know, then it's, then people get very angry about it, and it generates a very consistent one emotional response to

Marcus Kirsch: 47:34

Yeah, it seems to be it seems to be generally sort of odd, nearly opposing kind of powers that be within organisations when, you know, when still a lot of business schools are basically teaching that. If you're a company, you want to run a company professionally or successfully, you know, you've got a product, you sell it, you've got a level of margin on it. And if actually anyone buys it, that's great. The next thing to do to grow the business or do we either sell more, but you also, you make the product shittier, right. So you try to produce it with cheaper materials, and whatever save costs when you produce the same product or experience. And that's what a lot of schools are still teaching, that's a normal go to place. So very few companies like Apple, for example, do the opposite. But then they already sit nearly in the luxury experience as a company, rather than in the normal ones like Dell, Dell selling computers as cheap computers not as high performance, quality. Right? Yeah. So to think I'm trying to get to is, you know, customer centricity. It's a good thing we all know it, it actually has a immense value. It can turn companies around. If I would start to use behavioural science in a team tomorrow, and are already have marketing efforts, strategy teams, where would I start? Where would I? How would that look like? How would they one look like and you know, what sort of your experience and where this would be placed right for someone to do that, especially with COVID-19? This stuff sounds so compelling, to actually understand reality, way better than anybody else. I want to do this. How am I going to do that next week?

Troy Norcross: 49:15

And and to add to add to that, before you answer, you made a really good quote in the book that I wanted to pull out. You don't need to have a degree in behavioural science to do it. So not only where would you start, but what are the skills of the people you'd put in?

Richard Chataway: 49:32

Yeah, so so To my mind, where it works most effectively, where I've seen it apply most of what i think that i think that there's two things you need one is one is mindset related and one is skills related. So mindset wise, it goes back to that point about the kind of growth mindset and recognising that you don't know yet there are things that we you don't know as an organisation, I thought was really interesting recently that certainly an Adela when he's asked about the truck, they're trying information that Microsoft has gone through in the last few years. And he said he attributed to moving from a note or culture to a learn it all culture, I thought that was a really nice way of putting it. In that, you know, what, what, as we've discussed, you know, one thing that science tells us is that sometimes the solutions to problems can be slightly counterintuitive, you know, they're based because they're based in some of the rationalities of human behaviour. So, so you have to recognise that if someone you know, it's your example, about pricing, if someone says to you, you know, or the the traditional kind of MBA based approach would be, you know, reduce cost to increase your margin. If someone said to you, well, actually, why don't we just put the price up, and then we might sell more, that sounds mad that to someone without kind of very traditional neoclassical, economic, educational background, but what behavioural science tells us is that actually, yes, by by increasing the price of a product, it's communicating a whole load of subconscious associations, which might actually increase your sales. You know, because there is a there is a broad heuristic we have that higher price equals better quality. So, so you know, there's, there's a, you know, that there's that side to it, which is recognising as I say, as a mind, in any organisation, if you're going to apply behavioural science successfully, you have to recognise that, that actually testing and learning and some of your received assumptions about what's driving the behaviour of either your customers or your staff may not be right. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing, yeah, it does come down to that skill set. And and where I've seen we are when I say you don't need a degree in behavioural science, I mean, I guess there's a slight element of a self serving element to that, which is that, you know, when I was at university 20 odd years ago, it didn't exist as a discipline. So it wasn't an option to me to study in any case. But, um, but it's more that, you know, you obviously, I would say, work with experts, like ourselves and other behavioural consultancy businesses, or, or behavioural scientists, is a good way to start because, you know, the discipline is growing very fast. You know, there's been over 200 different biases and heuristics identified in research. So actually having the knowledge base of all of those, it take does take time, there's no, there's no easy fix to that. But but the but, but the other aspect is that where it works most effectively is that combination really, of, of if you want subject specialism and experience in application in particular areas. And you know, and I've what's been really heartening for me about some of the work that we've done and that I talked about in the book is that, you know, where many of the best results and outcomes that I described in the book have come from, was working with people in a, you know, specialist areas that I knew nothing about, but because of their specialist knowledge combined with behavioural science, we were able to work more successfully so. So to give you an example, you know, one of the projects I've described in the book was working with a major bank here in the UK, with 20 million plus customers, um, you know, we were working with their call centre, the contact centre, and we were incorporating behavioural nudges into the language and scripting that was used in that call centre, when talking to customers, to improve the outcomes for customers in terms of customer service, but actually, overall, to reduce the length of the calls to deliver an efficiency saving for them. And actually, you know, what's interesting about that was that, by making the call shorter, we're actually delivering a better customer experience, because, and this goes back to the point about how versus spark what people want from a call to their bank is they wanted to be short, they want to, they want to get in and get out and get their query resolved as quickly as possible get on with the rest of the day. So the shorter we make calls, whilst also making them successful, the outcomes successful, the better the customer experience for people, but that's obviously beneficial to the bank as well, because the shorter the calls, the more calls, you can handle the brace capacity you have. But But my point is, is that when it came to designing the solutions and the scripting solutions, what we were able to do was to say, well look, best practice behavioural science and existing experiments have shown that if you do x, then y should result. But what we did was we worked with the people in the call centre, we worked with the coaches, and we actually we worked with the, with the individual call centre agents to create those scripts, because they had been talking some of them been working there for 2030 years. So they had some degree of knowledge and experience about what worked in terms of talking to customers and what deliver better outcomes for customers. So we would we were supplying the knowledge and the evidence base, and they would go Okay, well, I know that if you frame it in this way, if you talk, if you use this language is going to be much more successful, but either because it's easier for us to say or the customer that would like to understand it, and so on. So, so that's, you know, I think what I would say That unit, yes, absolutely, you need the expertise, you need the knowledge base. But also don't forget that a lot of the insights that you can get may be things that already exist within your organisation that you just got to unlock them. You know, Amos Tversky, who is one of the godfathers of Bible economics, who was the, the academic partner of Daniel Kahneman for many years who Danny Kahneman won the Nobel Prize and Amos Tversky would have won it, but unfortunately passed away a few years before. He always says, All we're doing with behavioural economics is we're putting into, we're giving evidence to things that advertisers and use car salesmen for many years, which I think is a really nice way of putting it, you know, in that there are people out there working in certain industries and context who are using a lot of these principles and, and recognising the biases and heuristics that humans have, but just aren't aware of how they're doing it, what the evidence basis for that. So they can't necessarily replicate it or scale it. And that's where we, that's where we can help.

Troy Norcross: 56:04

And that's, that's really nicely put that there are a lot of people that intuitively are doing these things without necessarily knowing that they're doing them. One of the other questions that we wanted to bring up because a lot of people that we work with, you know, at the enterprise level and the organisational level, for lack of a better phrase are risk averse. The word failure is a dirty, awful, horrible word. And yet to do all of this testing, you know, at the end of the day, some tests are going to succeed, and some are not. Can you talk a bit about what your RCTs are, as you reference them in the book? And how do you kind of get the organisational mindset to be okay with learning what doesn't work?

Richard Chataway: 56:47

Hmm, yeah, so So I mean, and that is a really big challenge. And something that that I add, it's common to a lot of organisations, particularly larger organisations. And I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, the examples that I use in the book and reference I make, to, you know, the fangs, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google and some of the more successful digital 21st century businesses, because, you know, from day one, what's been baked into their culture is recognising that, that testing and learning and accepting failure is really important. And that's, I would argue, is what's driven their success as much as as if not more so than technological innovation. And I think, and, you know, it tends to be the larger, more traditional organisations where, like, say, failure is a dirty word. And, and the reason and, you know, and defensive decision making is, is a key feature of most organisations, you know, people rely on on their work to provide them with their livelihoods and their homes. So, you know, that risk of failing and losing those things is very real. And we know that loss aversion is a really big driver of human behaviour and valuable science. So, so that's why, you know, it is a challenge. And I think, you know, the way I would the way I would approach it is, firstly, as I say, to talk about the look, use the analogy and use examples from those most successful 21st century businesses that, you know, the likes of Jeff Bezos love him or hate him, he does say that, you know, Amazon successes is a feature of, or is a function rather, of how many experiments they run per day, per week, per month, per year. And so he's, you know, he recognises by doing that, that a lot of the experiments, if not the majority of experiments that they conduct will fail. And that's the nature of that's the nature of scientific progress is that, you know, the majority of times you do the experiment if fails, but, but the thing, you only need one or two big wins, you only need one amazon prime to more than compensate for all of those failures if you're testing in a relatively inexpensive, quick and easy way. And I guess that's a key point to mention about so you asked about RCTs RCTs. randomised control trials is a methodology that we'll probably be reading about quite a lot in the next few months, I would imagine in relation to COVID-19, because it's derived from medical science, which is that is how you test new drugs and new treatments. So so you have a group of control group, who are you know, typically in a medical context would be given a placebo. So they're receiving no no treatment on a nutrient different to what they're currently receiving. And then you have other groups who are given the new treatments and you assess the outcomes for the control group versus the treatment groups to see how effective that that medicine is. And, and the the way we use that in variable sciences, that you know, we would have a group who are received no or no communications contacts, for example of working in a call centre, you know, the you have a group of agents in a call centre who carry on, as they were before using the existing scripts. And then we would have test scripts that are used with different groups in the call centre and you look at the outcomes of the calls versus the control group, versus the the other groups where you're testing and that's a gold standard. For the experimentation because it gives you robust data, if you get a gather enough data, you can make sure that the Peace Corps in terms of statistical significance are high enough that you can say, this outcome was delivered as a result of our intervention, rather than any number of other factors you control for the other factors. And that is the gold standard. But the trouble with it is, is that it's often expensive, it often takes time to get to those levels of statistical significance, it can take a while, I would say, you know, an exception to that is the digital world where, you know, if you are a Google, you've got so many 1000s of users that actually get into statistical significance quite quickly, it's relatively easy to do. But But for a lot of businesses and more traditional organisations, it's harder. But But I would say that doesn't negate the value of that experimental approach. And actually, conducting experiments is really valuable for you know, not only for all the reasons I've mentioned around, it's how we assess the effectiveness of behavioural science interventions. It's also really valuable, because even if you do get a failure, even if you if your experiment doesn't work, that's a useful learning to useful insight. It's how we make progress in science, is because if you found that something doesn't work, you know that you should never do that thing. And the next time there's a meeting where someone goes, Oh, okay, maybe we should try this thing. You can say, actually, we have some natural that it didn't work. But

Troy Norcross: 1:01:26

yeah, hold on, don't go racing by that one particular point, the number of people who come into an organisation who want to put their mark on an organisation, and they say, we're going to try x y, Zed. And somebody in the back of the room says, Yeah, well, Karen tried that two years ago when it didn't work.

Unknown: 1:01:45

Yeah.

Troy Norcross: 1:01:48

I'm not Karen, I'll get a different result. And I'm like, You're not listening. This didn't work.

Richard Chataway: 1:01:56

Yeah. So so i think you know, that there is an example I was away without saying it. But there's an example I use in my book. And when I was working elsewhere, there was a meeting where I suggested trying something and someone said, Oh, we tried that nice, 82. And it didn't work. And I was that was, I can tell you, that was pretty much the precise moment, I decided only to get at the public sector at that point. But it was, you know, but that's an example, I get an example of what I would call a fixed mindset around the growth mindset in terms of someone not being willing to embrace new thinking, and, and so on. But it's so So absolutely, that is that is a barrier. But but the value of you know, the value of experimentation is you can confidently say in a meeting that we've tried something and either worked, or it didn't. But I think the the other point I would make about, you know, sort of embracing failure is that when we when we conduct behavioural experiments, we're not typically testing one thing, we're typically testing multiple things, right? And that's why randomised control trials are valuable, for example, because you can test multiple interventions simultaneously and assess them against each other. And what you'll typically find, and certainly the pattern that we usually find from those experiments is that you find, say, you're testing five interventions, you might find to work really well, better than your control, you might find a couple don't work. Or maybe you can't prove statistical significance. But there might have been a small up lift, and you typically find at least one actually is worse than the control. But the thing is, is that you can never tell beforehand. You know, we've done things with places where I've worked, where we've, you know, we've had bets between us as to what we think is going to work and what isn't, then, and people's opinions vary. And typically, you know, often it's very rare that anyone is right. So that's just goes to show the value of testing, because you can't make assumptions. But the other is that, that thing that didn't work is still a really valuable insight. Because you can say, we should never do that. And what you might also find is of the four interventions that did work, if you put them together in some combination, or that they can complement each other, the absolute if you can achieve could be really, really huge. So So I think, you know, that's the importance of testing. And also, I'd say to your point about new people coming into an organisation, we know these things are very context dependent. So if someone's coming from another organisation says, Oh, we did this at company x, I think it could work here. Um, I, my response to that would be to say, absolutely, it may work here, but let's test it to find out because this is a different product. This is a different context. And we need to we need to assess whether it actually works in this context. And I've got seen countless examples of nudges that we've employed that have worked in one place. And then we've tried them almost identically in a different context, and it hasn't worked. Yeah. which just shows the importance of the context.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:04:46

So I'm just looking at the time so as a last question, probably to pull this a bit further out, because it's always fascinating for me to hear and I've been going through different practices from you know, design and coding and strategy. Never thing. If we look at something like a trend where I, I tend to like to go and look at the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and a lot of organisations are still trying to solve problems around efficiency and effectiveness, which is a big mindset change or not just a mindset change, an opportunity change and actually understanding that and if I pull this back also to obviously my favourite topic of the wicked problem, were back, you know, Horst rittel, back in the 50s 60s. Right? There's some problems out there. They're just so complex, they're moving targets, meaning that we'll never know enough about them. It seems to be there's more and more of those problems out there. Because we're more connected and other things are just affecting each other differently in this modern world. What do you say? Because experimentation comes out? A lot is that is that sort of the only way to go? Where basically we can be stuck with just polishing? what's already there, we have to always try for the new, it's just not a an option anymore. It's experimentation. It's connected with reality in 1000 different ways. And really see what's out there because we don't know what's out there in humans. Is that is that is that our only way forward? Is that is that or is it just 50% of any organisation? Or is it what everyone should fully embrace, to really go out with as hard as they can in order to make some sense of this, you know, interconnectedness interdependency of every action you take these days? what's what's, what's your view on that? If you?

Richard Chataway: 1:06:39

Yeah, well, I guess, I would say, you know, I think what the way I would put it is this is that my experience has been is that often in organisations, there is a bias towards not testing as in to justify conducting tests and experiments, particularly based on Behavioural Insights, particularly if those behavioural insights are, as I say, slightly counterintuitive, you know, I, whoever the first person that Google to walk into a meeting and say, I think we should test 40 different pants and shade of blue to see what impact it has on click through rate. I applaud them for having the bravery to do that. But also, I blog Google for being the kind of organisation where they go, yeah, sure, let's test it. You know, it, I would say there is a bias in most organisations to to not testing or assuming, to go back to the satiny Nadella example, you know, assuming that we do know it all, and that we don't have, that we don't have the need to experiment, because there are some assumptions that we're making about our consumers about our ask our employees that, that are given a truth. So if you'd like, and, and I would say, you know, the, the bias should be the other way the bias should be to test as much as you possibly can to gain those insights, rather than, you know, rather than, you know, just fiddle around the edges and around the margins in terms of testing things. So so you know, I mean, one example I can give is that, you know, I worked in the media and advertising industry for a number of years, and particularly worked in media agencies, where major agencies are given budgets to spend on behalf of advertisers, and until and, you know, make recommendations on which channels to use how much to spend on TV versus radio versus digital, to advertise a particular product, you know, the way it worked was a client would come to us and say, we've got 5 million pounds, you know, you build a plan, the most effective plan, you think, to spend that 5 million pounds, there was never any context, we went back to the advertiser and said, We don't need 5 million, we can do the job for you on three, because the incentives were lined up in a way where, you know, we had to spend the vibrant impairments, or we wanted to maximise our revenue. But also, we never went back to that client said, No, no, don't give us the 5 million now give us 50,000, we'll run a few tests to find out which channel is most effective, and then we'll come back and tell you how to spend the other 4.9 5 million. And, and I think that's that for me, is is, you know, is illustrative of the way that the biases in business decision making and organisations operate in the biases away from from testing to try and find out what works before you commit. And I think in a large part, that's to do with, you know, the need to move quickly. The fact that, you know, everyone's always you know, that there is a real emphasis on being first to market for example, rather than, than, you know, then challenging. And so, you know, that would be the way I'd frame it, so it's not necessary. You have to test absolutely everything that you're doing. But I think my my recommendation and I guess, you know, the point of my book to some degree is the the emphasis should be that you should be biassed toward testing unless there's a good reason not to, which is that, you know, wouldn't when in most context will be okay, we've we've kind of got all the data we need on this to know to be to be a degree of confidence that we know it's the right approach.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:10:28

Yeah, that sounds Yeah, I think that's a really good closing point to make, I think, you know, treating most things rather as an assumption. Before the hit reality, we don't really know what's going to happen.

Richard Chataway: 1:10:39

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, that's the basis of our hair assignments is that we are all biassed in ways that we not not conscious of and, and so what that means is that, you know, a lot of the assumptions that we're making have been informed by those biases. And, and because we're not conscious of them, you just have to assume that some of them aren't all we can be safe in the assumption. They're not all.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:11:03

Cool. We're a little bit restricted as well here, ourselves, unfortunately, in time, as we discussed before the interview, maybe in the beginning that there's so much in this book, an hour super short, we tiny bit run over, Richard for now. Thank you so much. This was super insightful, very inspiring, and a great chat to have. Brilliant. Thank

Unknown: 1:11:26

you. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:11:28

Yes, thank you very much.

Troy Norcross: 1:11:31

You've been listening to the wicked podcast with CO hosts Marcus Kirsch and me, Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch: 1:11:36

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Troy Norcross: 1:11:50

You can also get in touch with us directly on Twitter on at wicked and beyond or at Troy underscore Norcross also learn more about the wicked company book and the wicked company project at wicked company calm