An N of 1 with James Healy

James Healy is fascinated by human behaviour and wants to use behavioural science to create a world where organisations are designed for humans as we really are, not how the economists and management theorists would like us to be. He co-founded and leads Deloitte’s global Behaviour First offering, practically applying insights from Anthropology, Behavioural Economics, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Sociology to help organisations address their most critical challenges - including technology adoption, culture change, cybersecurity, and sustainability. He hosts “The B-Word”, a podcast featuring leading figures from the social and behavioural sciences exploring what it means to be human and how organisations can better understand and influence behaviour.

James has extensive experience leading behavioural, cultural and technological transformation in global organisations. He’s led projects in more than 60 countries on 6 continents in industries including banking, insurance, mining, oil & gas, construction, transportation, government, education, health, human services, and aged care.

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Transcript

So,  with me, of course, the indomitable James Healy.

Uh, thanks for joining me, James. I appreciate it, man.  Oh, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So tell me, you know, we usually start these by really starting, like, early, early. So I want you to remember  James, the high schooler, who probably looked more or less exactly like you do now, you handsome man, you, but maybe with a little less gray in the beard.

Uh,  did James, like, did you know it was behavior? What if I had asked you in high school, what are you going to do? What'd you think it was?  It's a great question. Um, it was a couple of years ago now. Um,  just a couple. I  think,  and I'm conscious that I'm telling this story, as always, from my current vantage point, sort of knowing, knowing how it ends. 

I've always been fascinated by humans,  in, and that has taken, that has taken many forms. Um,  in high school,  I loved history.  History was kind of my subject.  Um, 

history  has a sort of interesting connection to behavioral science as I see it because so much of history, so much of the study of history is essentially trying to figure out why people did things. Yes.  And  a lot of the time it involves a sort of assumption about the way that people behave, the way that people act.

Yes.  Um, my favorite example of this, and I mean, why don't we go straight here, is  dictators.  The number of times in, in history you end up having a conversation or, or, or writing an essay or, or doing some research to try and understand, you know, why did Hitler invade the Soviet Union? Why did Stalin, you know, come up with the Gulag?

And essentially, you end up trying to rationalize the totally irrational,  and trying to explain, well, why, why did,  why did he do this lunatic thing? And I say he, it's usually he.  And so implicit in that is, A whole set of assumptions about the way that humans behave, about human rationality. There must be some rational, some rational explanation for this,  what is, on the surface, totally irrational thing that happens.

If, 

I sort of fast forward a bit from there, I decided  not to study history, I decided to study philosophy and economics. Yeah, you went to LSE, which is not famous for its history program, uh, in the same way that it's sort of like, is famous for sort of its economics. Why econ and philosophy? Like, where did that, was it like a gradual bend and an abrupt left turn?

Like, what happened?  So I, I began studying economics in high school. What we call in the UK A Levels, but that's your last two years of, of high school. And I loved economics and what I loved about economics was  essentially trying to understand why things happen. Trying to understand the way that the world is trying to understand,  I guess, trying to link sort of some of the, the great thinkers in, in economic history to the reality. 

Of the world today or as it was then  And that's have led me more and more into philosophy  and  I mean study straight philosophy. I mean, you know, what do philosophers do what do philosophers do with their lives? They leave university and smoke pot and sit in rooms and yeah, they never make anything of their lives So i'll study philosophy and econ together.

That'll give me a blend of  stuff that i'm interested in But also perhaps some prospect of gainful future employment as well You  And  because I studied economics  at high school,  I actually found first year economics very easy. 

And I was probably a bit of a pain in the ass for the, uh, for my tutor, which was reflected in the fact that about two thirds of the way through that year, he took me on one side and said, I think perhaps with slightly more glee than was necessary. I just want you to be aware  you're going to sail through first year economics.

You're going to ace that and you're going to, and you're going to bail second and third year economics. Really? That's a bold statement for a professor to come and sort of be like, all right, man.  And the reason for that,  as he explained to me, was he knew from the way that I was answering things and the way that I was, you know, talking in class,  I was thinking about  why people did things.

I was thinking about people's behavior. What I was not thinking about was the equations and the graphs.  And he was a very astute man, because I was not thinking about those things, because those are not my, those are not my thing.  Uh, that's not how I think about the world. I'm not a mathematician.  And,  as if to demonstrate his point, I  did very well in that first year economics class.

Absolutely flunked the maths class, like got a stratospherically low score in that, which I knew was going to happen.  And as a result, we all came to the, uh, the conclusion that he'd already come to  economics isn't for me.  I'm going to study philosophy. One of the fascinating things that we hear over and over again in these interviews is precisely that  a lot of people have these moments where someone older and wiser  recognizes  That they're in the wrong field, right?

So for example, like when I went off to, you know, I was preparing to accept my grad school, uh, PhD sort of acceptances, um,  uh, uh, Tom from Cornell was like, you keep talking about applied.  And I just want to be clear, like, we don't, we don't do that, we're scholars, like, we study, but we don't change, right, we don't, we're not designed to change the system, we're designed to study the system, and, you know, I couldn't, I was like, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, like, off to PhD, I go, he was absolutely right, and we have heard that in interview after interview where someone within the discipline who's doing that thing says, yeah,  Not in an unkind way, not in a, not usually, not usually in an unkind way, like, hey, get the hell out of my discipline, but rather, hey, you, you might not, this might not be your thing, like based on your reaction to this, even though you are very certain it is,  I am equally certain that you are wrong. 

So why, so you come to this realization after, after the tutor and after you have some time to fail some math, so you get some evidence, you accept no opinion, you go get some evidence, which is that you fail some math. And then why philosophy?  Because that was what I was already studying. Um, the philosophy program at LSE is, is great.

Um, it essentially meant I could just continue on  without,  without having to do another year without having to totally change tack  and one of the benefits of doing just a straight philosophy degree was it meant I had suddenly a whole load of optional courses opened up. When you're doing a dual honors, kind of everything's, you know, laid out.

You're taking the, you're taking the set. The gas. Yeah.  Um, so, you know, I did a, I did a history course. I did a social anthropology course. Did you take any psych?  So no, not formally, but,  but.  Many, I'm not going to say all, my, my philosophical interests sort of went in, in two parallel directions. One was sort of political philosophy, the, the, you know, the history of Western philosophy,  Plato through Aristotle, yeah, all the way through to sort of Marx. 

That was one angle. The other angle was the angle of,  well, that part of philosophy  that sort of veers inexorably into neuroscience.  So consciousness, so, you know,  Dan Dennett, the stuff that, that now people like Anil Seth talk about.  Um,  the other angle, and the LSE philosophy department pushes this very hard, because Karl Popper was kind of the founder of the  LSE philosophy school,  is philosophy of science. 

And I studied this elective,  History of Scientific Revolutions,  and it was basically, starting with Copernicus, those pivot points in the history of science when the status quo, the accepted,  you know, received wisdom was turned on its head.  Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Darwin.  And towards the end of this  There was this whole section on these two weird Israeli psychologists. 

And at the time I was like,  why are these guys, like, I'm sorry, these guys are not in the same category. They are no Copernicus. Danny Kahneman is no Copernicus.  Exactly.  And so, you know, read a couple of the foundational papers that Kahneman and Tversky had written,  and  suddenly I've now come full circle because having been, you know, I won't say kicked out, but having been politely,  politely ejected  from the economics school because I, I think too much about the way that people behave, suddenly I'm, I'm reading these two kind of renegades. 

Who are really focused on the way that people behave, and who, you know what,  are casting a bit of doubt on all that mathematical stuff that's being taught over in the econ department.  Now, it's interesting though, if you read their, I mean, they are very much, I think the social psychologists, we all really want to claim them.

Some of those papers are very, I mean, there are a lot of equations in those papers, man, they are very much like, you know, you read that next to a typical social psych paper, and you're like, this is an economics,  Paper, right? Yeah, but to your point, it's interesting. This is such a great point about framing and sort of cycle and sort of scientific revolutions because You know to us we're looking at it going that is definitely economics and the economics guys are going Nope,  like I don't know what you're doing just because it have an equation like, you know  What's the weird stuff happening here?

Uh, and you know, that's where that conflict comes from is, you know, there's no Inbuilt discipline where people are like, oh, yeah, this makes total sense that you would do this thing  until you make it  It's funny, right and it speaks to a sort of deeper truth of human nature. We we categorize things we automatically categorize things That's particularly true in academia.

There's a great quote from Kissinger that I can never quite remember, but it's, it's something about, you know, basically the, the reason that  conflicts in academia are so  poisonous is because the stakes are so small.  And it comes down to people fighting over, you know, is it in, in this category? Is it in that category? 

One of the things I've noticed through my, through my career, to be honest, is that  people spend a lot of time worrying about which category they're in.  People try very hard to fit in.  Actually, there's a lot of opportunity at the boundaries between categories. There's a lot of opportunity from not quite fitting in,  because all the opportunities that sit firmly within categories  Someone within those categories has already taken them.

Someone has already solved the problem. If, if, if there's a huge challenge that sits squarely within someone's remit,  they've probably dealt with it, because they can, because it's within their remit. The really interesting challenges are at the boundaries. They're at the borders between things, in the gray areas. 

For sure. Well, and particularly for social psych,  you know, in applied behavioral science,  You know, when you move out of academia, right, into the applied world, I just care that it works, right? You can call it I had an interesting discussion today with a client where, where they were like, Do you call this behavioral science or do you call it human centered design?

I said, I don't care. You call it anything you want. You call it schmooly googly. As long as it is behavior as an outcome and science as a process, I literally don't care what you call it. And she found that very freeing. And I, you know, and that's to your point.  You know, in academic disciplines, there are combs about, is this human centered design or is this behavioral sign, you know, like combs.

Well, we're about, you know, what we should call a thing. And the beautiful thing about applied part is as long as it works. Right? Like, moving on.  So now you're, you're over here in the philosophy thing. You take this interesting, you're, you've at least now been exposed. It's interesting to me in the economics, even in first year economics, I guess we should put this in time here.

You know, this is 2000, 2001. You know, Kahneman and Turski haven't yet won a Nobel Prize and are super famous for doing this thing. So there's a reason, maybe now in intro psych, or intro, uh, economics you might get.  Some of the stuff that you didn't get.  So you're over here in philosophy. You've now learned about Conrad.

Like you're sort  of cruising through philosophy. You go straight into a master's program  to do international history. Yes. So tell me about, so it's not like, you know, sometimes this is an interesting difference. You know, some of our guests.  They have the revelation and then it's, from then on, it's the thing.

And some people get exposed and then it takes some time before they sort of come to that as a thing that they, that they want to do. It sounds like you're more in the latter quarter. You're sort of getting this exposure, but it's not like, and now I will do behavioral science.  Correct. And I, I always find it funny when I'm asked, as everyone is, you know, talk me through your career, tell, tell me your,  your career story. 

And it is very much a story, and essentially a career, I, I think, is, in some respects, a story that we construct retrospectively to explain choices which  may have occurred for a variety of reasons. So I, I could try really hard to come up with a, a sort of rationalization for, for why I took that route. I think the honest answer is. 

I wanted to do another year of study. I wanted to do a master's to differentiate myself a little bit. In the UK at that point it was still a little bit differentiating to go to grad school.  And  I was really interested in history and essentially it was a free hit.  So  I did this program, Masters of History of International Relations, is what it was formerly called.

It was essentially 20th century global history.  Uh, so I had a big focus on U. S. 20th century foreign policy and also a big focus on the Middle East, which was another sort of passion area of mine.  And then you graduate and?  So it's funny, LSE has this global reputation and depending  what you do and where you sit in the world, it has a very different global reputation.

So there's a lot of people who know of LSE as this  kind of hotbed of 60s counterculture sort of left wing radicalism. So it  was essentially the Berkeley of UK  academia for a long time.  You know, in the, in the 60s, they were burning things, they were having sit ins, they were, you know, doing all that stuff.

That kind of left wing current is still there,  and there are all kinds of, you know, radical protest groups on campus.  A lot of people leave LSE and, and take a,  kind of take that route, right? 

A huge proportion of people also go straight into finance or law and make lots of money.  You, uh, No, wait, hold on. Before we talk about which one you did,  if you went back now, do you think you could pick who, you know, is there a sorting hat? Is it clear who's going to go each direction? Or do you think graduation happens and then, and then magically some assort one direction, to magically some assort the other direction? 

I'd say it's 80 20 rule, um, so there are some people who are like, they are here because their aim is to go work at Goldman Sachs. A couple of my very good friends fit into that category.  They have done that very successfully.  Equally, the firebrand radical leader of the Socialist Worker Party on campus,  who, you know, was out there leading the anti capitalist  movement,  he also had a very successful career at Goldman Sachs.

Uh, I would,  I would love to, love to talk to him about how that played out,  uh, cognitive dissonance right there.  Some people it's very predictable, others, others it's not.  And so do you, if you now, so this was a leading question. If you went back and looked at baby James.  Would you have known that Dave James was going to go to Deutsche Bank? 

No, um, and I'm sure a bunch of my, my close friends, uh, if they're listening to this at some point will be chuckling away, um, because they've given me a lot of shit over the years for, you know, that, that level of, uh,  I hesitate to use the word hypocrisy, but, uh, I was very sure that I was not going to do that.

And then, you know,  as you get towards the end of the university, that sort of uncomfortable economic reality of,  I now need to do something. 

So yeah, I, I then spent 14 or 15 years in, in big banks and doing various things started off in, in pretty menial kind of back office processing type roles,  ended up spending a long period of time sitting on, sitting on the trading floor.  And the way I always describe this is if you're interested in human behavior. 

The trading floor is the equivalent of the Masai Mara or the Serengeti for people who are interested in animals. It's like, this is, this is humans  and human behavior  in its most elemental form. Nature read in tooth and claw.  Correct. It, it is also  home to this really interesting, sort of,  real life demonstration of the, of the, the, the paradox within economics.

Thanks. Because you have all of these people who speak this language, I'm talking here about traders, right? They, they speak this  language of pure economics. They try to  live and act in this purely rational  way.  And some of them are exceedingly smart. All of them are exceedingly smart, to be honest, just in different ways. 

But they, they talk this language,  they  try and personify that purely rational, economic man. Seemingly oblivious of the fact that if they were rational,  they wouldn't have a job. Because if everyone were acting rationally, there wouldn't be any price differentials to make money off. The markets would be efficient.

That's right. They would be a perfectly efficient market, like things would be valued at exactly the value that the, you know, right, whatever their current, you know, plus some hand, you know, there has to be, we have to have differences of opinion. The whole market is based on differences of opinion.  Correct. 

And this is,  you know, I think this is interesting at any point in time. It's particularly interesting if you happened through pure happenstance to, uh,  be on a trading floor  through 2007, 2008, 2009. Right. 

And essentially have a front row seat for the once in a generation collapse of financial markets.  And 

I've always found it fascinating sort of that the disconnect between the way that this is perceived popularly, the way that it's described in the media as essentially a bunch of reckless cowboys who through their own greed and  devil may care attitude  took on vast amounts of risk.  And blew up the world. 

Whereas in reality,  the fatal flaw was not that they were taking on huge amounts of risk willingly and carelessly. It was that so many of them believed  so much in the models  that they actually didn't think they were taking on much risk at all.  And.  If you think about the sort of caricatures of people on trading floors, there's a range of, of different archetypes. 

And again, this was in London, right? And it'd be slightly different in New York, slightly different  in Asia, but you've sort of got a one end of the spectrum, the, the Cockney wide boys, the guys who left school at 16 have worked their way up, they're really street smart, they've got that Cockney accent that I won't attempt to do right now. 

They're the ones that are seen as, you know, they're, they're kind of devil maker.  caution to the wind, guys.  It wasn't them.  Nor was it the public school boys, the uh, you know, the, the old Etonians with the, the network. The really  dangerous ones  were the really quiet nerdy guys with a PhD in applied statistics from the Sorbonne,  because they were the ones who built  essentially the spreadsheet that purported to model the  human behavior  in a thousand variables that no one else could really understand. 

I have a friend who often describes it as  To your point, I like history and I like the way that history and psychology interact. You know, when COVID first, uh, came about, you know, a bunch of governments called me and said, hey, how do we keep people inside? And I said, well, you know, we've never really done that before from a psychology perspective.

So I don't know that we have any particular answers from our discipline, but you can sure look at history because history has kept people in, you know, we talked about, I, uh,  uh, introduced a, uh, a friend who's an historian of sort of World War II London. And she was talking about sort of like, why did, why did people. 

Obey or not obey  bombing, you know, sirens and she, you know, she, we know a lot about why this sort of, you know, people did the, you know, they broke out for very specific, you know, when people didn't obey, they didn't obey for very specific reasons. And, like, here are the sets of things and it turns out, hey, the same things that people did recover, right?

You know, and so this particular moment in history that you're talking about this, you know, a friend of mine likens it to the moment where people became disaggregated from agriculture.  So you go from people understanding how food. Happens and growing happens. And then, you know, because of mass agriculture in not a whole lot of time.

Suddenly, there's a whole generation of people who don't really understand how things are grown kind of at all. Right. But they're still reliant on that thing. Right. And so when all these models happened, you know, your street smart cockney guys actually had a fairly good understanding of, you know, the underlying things, but suddenly, you know, in a generational shift, they got one step, they got disaggregated by the model.

And so, and, you know, suddenly. You get monocultures and all the weird crazy things that happen when you desegregate your food supply. Um, it is, to your point, fascinating  sort of,  and what's, uh,  you know the movie The Big Short?  Yes.  Very familiar.  It's interesting to watch how, how your archetypes play out.

You know, one of the people was like, I recognize the flaw in the model. Right. Extraordinarily geeky to the point of almost autism. I recognize the flaw in the model, right?  Different thing that is, you know, there's that wonderful scene where the guy's like, how do you know the model's flawed? And they like point at the Asian guy and are like, cause he said so. 

I don't know why I have no understanding of what's actually happening, but this guy who is smart and I trust has recognized a flaw, right? And you can see that disaggregation and that bet on a disaggregation.  What an interest. So wait. You're like,  we got to break your finance career down though, because you sort of start commodities analyst and then, you know, you're on, you're on the floor for a long time across three different, you know, sort of, you know, very short time at, at Deutsche and then at Credit Suisse, and then you were at Standard Chartered.

For a bit.  And then all of a sudden you're the director of human capital consulting at, at Deloitte. So, so let's fast forward through the Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse years. What is happening at Standard Chartered Bank that you're like, Hey, you know what? I am good.  So  I had various roles at Credit Suisse.

Uh, I moved continents. I moved from London to Singapore. Um, the crisis happens, obviously after the crisis, there was this explosion in regulation and essentially attempts to, this will never happen again.  And one of the big parts of that, and this is one of those sort of fascinating but not particularly well known areas of finance, uh, something called recovery and resolution planning.

Now this is categorized in the media to the extent that it's ever in the media at all. It's categorized as living wills for banks. So it is essentially an attempt  to, 

it is an, it is an attempt to answer the question that a bunch of senior bank execs  had a weekend to answer in September 2008. So the way that the story of Lehman brothers played out,  everyone went into a room, uh, at one of the banks in New York. I forget which one was, you know, the, the CEOs of all the big wall street banks, all big global banks, a bunch of guys from the, you know, the New York fed  and the bed. 

Basically, Lehman Brothers is cooked, it's going down on Monday,  and by the way, Monday means Monday, it's Sydney time when the market's open there, so basically, Sunday night. So guys,  how do we  essentially bankrupt Lehman Brothers in 40 hours  without blowing up the world economy?  Eight years later, they were still, still trying to unwind Lehman Brothers.

There was still a rump of Lehman Brothers. You know, trading positions, etc. So I think it's fair to say that they didn't do a particularly great job over that weekend.  It was a weekend, to be fair.  I'm not throwing any shade at them, because  It was an impossible task.  So this thing called recovery and resolution planning was essentially forcing the 30 biggest banks in the world  to  do that planning in advance. 

So rather than let's wait, let's wait till the rainy day to fix the roof, let's fix the roof now.  And so let's understand, let's map  at a very detailed level how the bank actually works, how the different subsidiaries, how the different businesses, how the different systems, how it all hangs together.  And kind of implicit in this regulation was, by the way,  when you start doing this, what you will find is  it's hideously complicated.

Your bank is too big to understand. It's certainly too big.  to fail safely. So therefore, as you do this, you will be forced to simplify, to reorganize, to, you know.  And so I ended up doing a piece of work at Credit Suisse around this and I found it absolutely fascinating. It was structural reform of the banking industry. 

And One day I get a call Hold up because we've got to do some good storytelling here. You put your hand up for this. Like someone goes, ah, James is pretty good with people and we're going to make him do that. Like, how does that happen?  Yeah, just kind of, yeah, I was in a, I was in a, an internal projects team and this project came up and I was, you know, it was kind of a place, right?

Time I was available, an internal consulting team effectively. Uh,  I was kind of the right guy to do that.  I was available.  You can weigh out which one of those was, was more important. Yeah, there's a lot of luck, a lot of luck and timing.  And so I did this for a bit, um,  at Credit Suisse. Um, but I was very much on the periphery because Credit Suisse, as the name suggests, headquartered in Zurich.

I was in Singapore at the time. We were a bit of an appendage.  And I then got a call out of the blue from a recruiter who I knew pretty well because he'd hired a lot of people for me over the years. And he was like, hey,  I'm actually just calling for your advice because I've got this  weird role at Standard Chartered and I don't really understand what it is. 

Are you kind of familiar with, with this?  Now, he claims that this was a genuine call. It wasn't a setup.  I still don't know because my response to it was well, yeah, I know exactly what that is because that's, that's what I've been doing for the last year,  silence and he's like Really? 

And so,  yeah, I was one of the very few people in Singapore, frankly, who knew what this was, and  by process of elimination ended up getting this job,  leading this to Standard Chartered. Standard Chartered is a British bank, but it is essentially de facto headquartered in Singapore. They have, you know,  token headquarters in London, but all the operations are in Asia and Africa.

And.  Global role opportunity to do this really fascinating, really important thing with regulators across the globe work with all of these Fascinating in different countries. I mean  standard chartered is the sole bank in the Falkland Islands  it is the biggest bank in places like Zambia or Nepal like  There is just a level of interest in working for an organization that you know is in these weird and wonderful  Geographies and the challenges they have to deal with And so suddenly you're working very cross culturally, right?

Very different sets of You know, promoting and inhibiting pressures for all these different cultures and how they even treat banking. I mean, I think people in the West often treat banking somewhat as a commodity, but that's not the relationship that everybody has with their bank across the world. Right?

Uh, and so you're trying to bring all these people together to sort of get to a unified solution. With very very different sets of needs and competing desires  correct and just very different situations in each market I mean, you know anyone who's any  Project any level will be familiar with you know,  a raid log right tracking risks and issues I still remember the point we had to add an issue in our raid log  about sierra leone because They called to tell us there was a massive ebola outbreak Uh, and so they weren't going to be able to Hit the deadlines which we'd mandated for them to hit and it's like  what's our mitigation for this guy's and it's like  Solving a bowler is slightly above all of our pay grades. 

Come on James. You could do it I believe in you  failure of imagination on my part. I'm sure I'm Working so I did that loved it the great team had a lot of fun. Did this really? important somewhat, you know under appreciated work and And  That kind of came to an end, was a natural sort of decision point.

We've been in Singapore for seven years. Uh, we decided to move to Australia, which is where my wife's from. And we're moving to Perth, which is not a banking town. And that was kind of fine with me. I need to do something different.  So you knew, you knew at this point you needed change. You knew at this point, Hey. 

Kind of my era in finance or at least this kind of finance is over.  I'm going to pick my head up I'm going to look for something different. I'm gonna look at something different. 

Correct and  One of the things I'll say is throughout my finance career, you know, I had continued an interest in  Behavioral science in all of those those things that we've talked about history as well But  and I had been for years sort of Softly bringing in little techniques that we would now call Applied Behavioral Tones. 

Um, one of the stories I always tell about that time at Standard Chartered is  The use of gamification.  So  without going into the details, we needed a bunch of people in all of these countries to do something fairly menial and administrative outside of their day jobs. And surprise, surprise,  it was really hard to get them to do it. 

Until one day we decided to gamify it. And so every week, every Thursday, and it was every Thursday to accommodate the different weekend in the Middle East,  I would send an email to country CEOs,  like, you know, These are people running, you know,  tens, hundreds of billion dollar businesses, right? They're way above, way above my pay grade. 

And I would send them this league table of where their country sat versus all the other countries.  And within about half an hour, I would be cc'd on dozens of  emails from these country CEOs to their leadership teams saying things like, why are we behind South Africa?  I demand that we overtake India next week, you know, Pakistan.

Um,  this kind of 

very competitive,  very driven people at that senior level  who should have much better things to do than respond to my emails.  Don't, don't want to lose to the South African head.  Exactly. Exactly. And  it's a really, it's a really funny example, but I had been using these little behavioral science techniques for a long time. 

Anyway, moved to Australia, introduced to Deloitte by a friend of mine. I'd kind of been in this internal consulting role at Credit Suisse for a while. So, you know, had some idea of what I was getting into. Uh,  Joint  Human Capital, which is, as the name half suggests, all about humans.  And, very early on, sorry.

Hold on, you're skipping past a point in the story that's very important. When you started talking to Deloitte, were you like, this is it? Or were there other things that sort of were pulling you in different directions and, and there was a choice, choice moment here?  Or were you like, human capital, hey I get to, I get to sort of do this kind of thing that I've now been fascinated with since.

A very long time and I've been applying in all these finance settings, but I get to do it 24 7.  Yeah, there were a couple of other things, but fairly early on, this was, this was the main thing. And, um,  I guess the behavioral science part of it, which I think I talked about in my interview. Um, in fact, actually, I think my interview, my original interview was in the very room I'm sitting in now, which is, uh, which is interesting.

Um,  shortly after I joined  behavioral science became a focus area. It was suddenly. In that way, the big organizations often have, you know,  I think it was, it was becoming a thing in the market and someone else had some well publicized success in this area. One of our competitors and it was, Hey, we need to get into this.

And I was like,  me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.  And I would love to say that there was an immediate recognition of my inherent genius. Uh, and that I was the absolutely perfect person to do this. I suspect it was more that I was just annoying me, me, me, me, me, me, and eventually, fine, you.  And so then, then we began and the remit that I was given and I always laugh about this remit I was given  was totally impossible.

It was  maintain the academic rigor while making this commercially viable  and applicable by as many people as possible. 

Which of course is, you know, an impossible three way balancing act. Yes, particularly because that's not really what XGB is particularly designed well to do. Uh, right, it's not to do, you know, Tom Gelovich calling me, you know, Hey, this is not what, you know, application is not. It's interesting that people, I think people under appreciate that that's actually by design. 

Meaning, I think people look at it and are like, oh, those weird scientists, they're like, those weird scholars are doing their scholarly thing and being obstinate. I'm like, no. Like, they, in order to study a system,  you have to deliberately divorce, you can't start changing things in the system. That's not how, yeah, you can't do that, right?

At that, at that, you know, at that sort of, when you're trying to find generalizable knowledge, right? Changing things in the system is not how you find generalizable  knowledge. Correct.  Uh, it's how you make things happen within a system for sure, but, uh,  so, you're given an impossible task, how did you,  how are you communicating back to people that this is impossible, how are you trying to make it work?

Like, you know, tell us a little bit about that, that upward communicate, you know, uh, I love the, I got my job by being annoying, I think a lot of behavioral scientists get their job by being annoying, because, you know, you see something that other people don't see, right? You know, at that, to your point, very, very early on about, you know, the interesting stuff being at the margins.

The margins require convincing, right? If this was self evident, we'd be doing it already, right? Uh, which I think a lot of young people, a lot of young behavioral scientists wish it was self evident. They're like, I wish it was self evident so that I could just like, not, I'm like, That is not where we are.

We are over here and it's going to require convincing and you're going to have to explain what it is over and over.  And that's particularly the case given what, what I've tried to do and what we've done here, which is take a discipline or a set of techniques that has been fairly well proven and fairly well applied in various guises to changing consumer behavior and citizen behavior, right? 

Yeah.  Whether or not they knew it was. Behavioral science, marketing and advertising departments have been doing this organically for decades, right?  Behavioral science almost retrospectively  explain why they were doing it was working.  Obviously then, you know, the behavioral insights team, 2010, I'm sure everyone listening to this is well aware of that history, it's been largely focused on consumers and citizens. 

The whole thing, my whole thing has been, Hey guys.  Employees are humans too.  Why does the HR department not talk to the marketing department? Hey, how are you influencing people? Maybe we could borrow some of this stuff.  So my, my whole shtick I guess is, Hey,  HR, listen to marketing. They've got some ideas.

Here are some techniques. Here are some.  new ways of doing things that have been proven practically, not just academically, but in practice to change consumer and citizen behavior. Why don't we try some of those things internally with employees?  I have a pet theory and I want your reaction to it. So I have a pet theory that is one of the reasons that HR had struggled to do this or struggles to do this is because of their belief about rationality, right?

HR folks, a little bit like doctors, right? Doctors are often be like, We make this pill, it saves your life. You'll take the pill because you don't want to die. Actually, nobody takes the pill because the pill is huge and terrible and it's annoying to take it every day and it, you know, tastes of bitter chemicals and like all sorts of things that, you know, doctors are like, but you'll die.

And people are like, yeah, I hear you, man. But like,  it's a really bad pill. HR is sort of like, this benefit is good for you, it's good, this is, I can make a mathematical model that says this is like economically good for you, surely you will enroll in this benefit because it is economically, like rationally good for you.

And it's very hard to step away from that lens and go,  sell people on this. 

I totally agree. And I think it's, it's, you know, I, I always focus on HR, right? It's compliance. It's, you know,  anyone on this call who's worked in any organization of any scale  will have spent interminable hours on mandatory e learnings for various things. 

It's this wonderful, sort of, I use the phrase again, cognitive dissonance or, or,  Everybody, everybody knows that this doesn't work, everybody.  But yet we all  sign up to this sort of shared falsehood, this shared belief. Yeah, well, if we, if we put out an e learning, then,  then people will comply. And I will compete with James to make sure that my thing gets into the e learning ahead of his thing because we're so convinced that my, that my thing is so important it must have its e learning in class, even though.

I have never watched any learning thing. I just click the button and put things on mute to, you know, like no one actually does this.  Correct. And  I guess it's a  question I now ask a lot of clients  is,  do you want to do something  that will really work  or do you want to do something  and by the way.  Yeah. By the way, there's no judgment in that,  in that question, sometimes just doing something. 

It's kind of what you want to do. It's kind of enough. You want to demonstrate. We've taken this seriously. We have done something, 

but the answer to that question, it really goes to the crux of a lot of this.  So much of what is done in big organizations and in society, frankly, but by government is performative.  Everyone kind of knows in their heart of hearts it's not going to work. It's not actually going to move the dial.  But it's the accepted thing,  kind of, we're socially permitted to do about this. 

It's like that old adage, no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. Now, no disrespect to IBM. Is that so? There's two interpretations, and they both might be present. Do you think that's because of social signaling? Meaning,  You know, we want to gesture,  you know, uh, we want to show people were doing the accepted thing.

What do you think? So that's sort of a promoting pressure thing, right? Hey, this is a social value to do this thing that other people are doing. Or do you think it's inhibiting pressure? It's just people sort of saying, like,  It's hard to come up with new things. It's harder to do the thing that works. And so I'm really just optimizing for ease.

Do you think it's about ease or do you think people genuinely think they're doing the right thing?  I think it's both. I think it's context specific. I think it's individual specific.  There's always a risk in doing something differently.  For sure. Yeah.  And  Rory Sutherland talks a lot about this, right?  You don't get fired for doing the rational thing.

You don't get fired,  but doing the obvious thing that you could make the logical case in advance would work. 

And,  at the end of the day, not getting fired is a, you know, it's a reasonable human motivation.  Turns out,  my poverty but not my will consents. Shakespeare got it right.  Yeah, what's, what, what the hell, what's that quote? I think, uh, gosh, who is it? Wrong. 

It's difficult. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. Yes.  Uh, do you think this is getting easier? So you've now been, right, you've been at Deloitte a little over five years. Congratulations. Right? It was a couple months ago, I think, was your anniversary.

Uh, you know, you've been banging this drum. You've been trying to do this internal version of behavior change, right? Still applied behavioral science, but internal behavioral science.  Over the course, you know, you've been at it long enough. Do you feel like  clients are catching on and it's easier to explain to them?

And, and, is that because they're more receptive? You're better at explaining it? Like, a little bit of both? Like, it's definitely my inherent charm and genius that is driving, driving this. No.  What I'd say is, I feel like behavioral science is, and we're in an echo chamber, right, we're all in this, anyone listening to this is well entrenched in the echo chamber,  very conscious of that effect.

My LinkedIn feed, like yours, like everyone else's, is full of behavioral science, because that's people I've connected with, that's people I follow.  I've carefully cultivated the echo chamber to make sure it's still there. The echo chamber I want.  It feels to me like there is a massive growth in awareness, interest, understanding of this field. 

I feel like, and this is something I actually want to test over the next year or so, I feel like there is this kind of underground movement within organizations. The number of conversations I have  where someone will say, Oh, you do that thing. Oh, I'm fascinated by that. You know, I've always wanted to try and do that here, but you know,  I think we're, we're approaching a tipping point. 

How long are we going to continue approaching it before we tip? I don't know, but I feel like we're approaching a tipping point where we've seeded enough people in enough organizations  who speak a bit of this language, who understand a bit of this.  That  I'm going to sound like a crazed revolutionary here that that sort of moment of change is coming It's getting easier to have these conversations We haven't yet tipped over to this being the norm hr departments have not, you know  On mass, holistically adopted more behavioral techniques.

There are pockets, there are pockets here and there,  but I think it's coming. I think there's far more people  on the train than there were three years ago, five years ago. Do you think it will, will people call it applied behavioral science, or will it be just become the accepted way of doing change management and other kinds of?

To your, to your comment earlier,  I don't know and I don't care, they can call it, they can call it Steve's brawl, I care.  I think, I think the big challenge is there will,  and this is the challenge, I keep coming back to the language of revolution here, but it is the big,  it is the big challenge that all revolutions face, the big paradox, which is  success  means dilution.

Success means dilution.  enough people jumping on board this thing  to reach that critical mass. But to do that, you have to dilute the thing.  Yes, a hundred percent. I mean, we,  uh, we have, we have been working on a, what is now something like 80 page long guide, Trying to argue that there is not one behavioral science scientist, but six.

There are six roles, right? We're talking about quants and quals and designers and how, like, how can we look at those differently? To the level of, like, what are their jobs? Here's a JD. Here's, like, interview questions and guides for scoring the answers to the interview. Because, you know, to your point, it's hard when we're at this place where the consumers of the thing  don't know enough.

To know if they're getting sold a false bill of goods, which is a dangerous point in any movement. Right. And he's a dangerous point in any dilution is when counterfeits appear. Right. Um, it is interesting, you know, I'm obviously not in my normal black box. I'm on site with a client and at onsite with client is a, is the change management team from, from not delayed, but a fellow consultancy.

And it was interesting to me when I got introduced to them that they immediately said. Oh, yes, I'm a big fan of behavioral science. That's a big part of what I do. Right? These are people who are in primarily organizational development, change management, right? So they identify themselves as, hey, I'm an OD person.

Oh, yes. Behavioral science is it? Whereas 10 years ago, I don't know that I  And I'm not sure we would have heard that in the same way  No, it was a much more exotic and niche thing.  Um,  and that's great and that  that is progress But it does also mean dilution. It does mean You know a dilution to some extent of the rigor  There's a horrible, sort of,  bastardized version of this. 

I read a paper once, and then I applied that paper blindly. Do you do a lot, I mean, do you spend a lot of time internally focused on sort of prolificating at Deloitte and training OD and change management and other sorts of folks in the, in the, in the discipline of the thing?  Yes, and  You know,  we even have an e learning, Matt, which is the ultimate irony, um. 

Well, actually that's not the ultimate irony. The ultimate irony is that  in an attempt to inculcate into people the understanding that telling people about something, raising their awareness about it, will not change their behavior.  I do that by telling them about it and raising their awareness.  Yeah,  uh, well, on this call is a wonderful, you know, Lorraine, uh, minister, our head of education is on the call.

She is the one who put together our, you know, whatever it is, Lorraine, I'm going to get it wrong. Is it 10 weeks, five weeks, eight weeks? I can't remember how many weeks the training is. Uh, Lorraine's got six weeks, six weeks says Lorraine, right? Uh, is that sort of self guided training version? Uh, but there isn't a lot of,  you know, we sort of made our own at frog.

You know, uh, we've now made this one for B Sci. io, but there aren't a lot of, you know,  specifically human, human capital sort of change management, right? So whether it's change management, OD, right, all the various applications of applied behavioral science, that's really new ground. Do you think you'll, I mean, will you make a course internal to Deloitte at some point? 

But we've, we've done a couple of things internally, um,  we did one right at the beginning. And as with so many things, I go back and look at that now periodically. I was actually looking at it the other day for something I was working on, and part of me  is very proud of it, and part of me cringes and goes, oh my god, like.

But that's good, right? Isn't that, I mean, isn't that a sign that the curve is, you know, I always tell the story of, you know, if you read Start at the end. We never once say the side method. Because we hadn't figured out that like, strategy, insights, design, evaluation, spelled side, right? We've said it, but we never went, oh, you could just abbreviate that.

You know, book is what, four or five years old? We never say always, never, sometimes, started, stopped. Which is now the default way we do research, right? You know, we look at people who always do something, never do something, sometimes do something, just started doing something, just stopped doing something.

This is standard now.  Didn't have the faintest idea five years ago. Right? So, I mean, I think that you're at this, this point of change, James, thank you for spending an hour with me. It's always so fun to talk to you and we got to get you back again, you know, five years from now  to see if the tipping point has happened.

Right? You know, I think you're really, you know, Deloitte and, and, and, and with you at the head is, you know, they're really pushing that envelope of what, you know, you. OD and change management that things can look like through a behavioral science lens. And I'm so appreciative that you sort of shared that lens with folks, um, here and, and, you know, I'll get over to your side of the pond at some point, uh, now that I'm traveling a little more and, uh, uh, I'll finally, uh, you know, buy you, buy you the many beers I owe you. 

No, thank you for having me. And thank you everyone for listening. It's been fun. And yeah, please let me know when you're, when you're down under. I'll, I'll make it happen. And you know, folks on, who hear this, you know, uh, How's the best way to, you know, if they go, Oh yes, we have these challenges internally, Like, I wish I could talk to James about it.

How's the best way to get a hold of you? Social? LinkedIn? Email? LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Um, Aside from LinkedIn, I do not have any social media presence. So, LinkedIn is the place to go. LinkedIn is the place to go. Uh, if you  can't live without the sound of my voice, uh, I do have a podcast series. You can find that, find that on Apple, Spotify.

It's also on my LinkedIn. It's called The B Word. There you go. I was gonna say, you gotta say the name. Yes.  My most recent guest was some guy called Matt from San Diego, um, but you don't listen to him. Definitely not He's a much better interviewer than he is a guest it turns out  Thank you for spending time with me James  Always a pleasure to talk and I'll talk to you soon.

See you my friend. Thank you.