Interview with Richard Chataway

Behavioural Science is a rapidly expanding field and everyday new research is being developed in academia, tested and implemented by practitioners in financial organisations, development agencies, government ‘nudge’ units and more. This interview is part of a series interviewing prominent people in the field. And in today's interview the answers are provided by Richard Chataway. Richard is Director of Behavioural Science at Concentrix, and one of the most experienced behavioural science practitioners in the UK. He has worked in senior strategic roles for government in Australia and the UK, and with clients including HSBC, Atos, Southern Water, UBS, Coca-Cola and Natwest Group - and conducted training for call-centre personnel, marketing directors, sales teams, creatives, and everything in between.  Richard has a reputation for the engaging, effective and practical application of (behavioural) science as a frequent conference speaker, and author of the book ‘The Behaviour Business’. He is a former board member of the Association for Business Psychology, the industry body that is the home and voice of business psychology in the UK.

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How did you get into behavioural science? Like most people, I think it was by accident rather than design! When I was working at the Department of Health in the UK, I was managing anti-smoking communication campaigns. We started bringing in a lot of outside expertise and insights from what was then called social marketing. But there was one strategist we worked with called Kate Waters, who had a psychology background and she started bringing some insights into the work, helping us rewrite our strategy using insights from the world of behavioural science. This was incredibly interesting to me, but also proved to be much more effective in terms of the work we were doing. The strategy moved from being about telling people why smoking is bad, in simple terms, to helping people with addressing their motivation to quit, but also simultaneously providing them with the right tools to quit more successfully. We reached our government set targets for reducing smoking rates a year early in 2009, in large part because the campaign became so effective. As I say, those elements of behavioural science that we were bringing into the campaign were making our work much more effective and helping us better deliver what we needed to deliver on. And it was a light bulb moment for me, where suddenly the world made a bit more sense. So that started to become an area of focus during the rest of my career, which spanned working in government at the origination of the Nudge unit, as well as working for the federal government in Australia and with Rory Sutherland at Ogilvy. Then setting up my own business called CSG, specializing in applied behavioural science to customer communication and customer experience. And that's really where I've been focussed ever since.

So over that entire journey, what are you proudest of?

Well I think some of the work that we did on anti-smoking is pretty amazing. It's some of my proudest work, because obviously it's very beneficial at a societal level. In particular, I'm proudest of the work on smoking cessation in Australia, which involved creating a mobile app called My QuitBuddy. I'm very proud of it. One, because it was, for the time, an innovative approach. And two, because it has been hugely effective – eight times more so than quitting without help. The challenge we were given by the federal government of Australia was similar to the challenge that I'd been working on the UK. And the issue with quitting smoking is that the cravings can really hit at any time. So you need a solution that can also stop that craving, at any time; to remind you of the reasons for quitting smoking and why you should try and resist that craving. And the only thing that all of us have really within arm's reach 24 hours a day these days is our mobile phone. So that was the insight that drove it. It was we need to provide some kind of tool to people that will help them 24 hours a day. Or that they can reach 24 hours a day - a mobile app is a perfect way of doing that.

We had a particular challenge where once the department had approved development of the app, it was eight weeks until ‘World No Tobacco Day’ and the Minister for Health had a slot booked on ‘The Project’, a very popular Australian primetime TV show, and wanted to talk about this app. Which meant that we had eight weeks to get it built and in the app store and available for people to download. We did it and we got a basic version of it out there. There was a great five minute segment on that show talking about the app and the benefits of it and with screenshots of what the functionality was. And that proved to be hugely beneficial in terms of driving downloads of the app.

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And I'm curious, though, given that you've applied behavioural science to many people's lives, do you apply to your own life? And is that also why you are so passionate about smoking cessation?  Oh, well, it's funny you mention that. I've never been a smoker myself, but I think that one of the most fascinating things in applied behavioural science is in giving you an insight into why people do what they do. However much we want to lead happier, healthier, more lucrative, lives, we struggle to achieve those goals often because of competing motivations, competing incentives, trade-offs etc.

And so I'm acutely aware of that more than most. What I'm also acutely aware of is that I'm prone to the same biases and heuristics as everyone else. And so what I would say in terms of applying it into my own life is to be a little bit more conscious of when something might be a result of one of my own biases, or that I might be post rationalizing a particular behaviour at a certain point.

Do you have a frustration with the field?

One of the things that behavioural science gives us is the evidence base for the value of diversity in organisations and how important that is. What's been driving business efforts in DEI previously has been that it is ‘the right thing to do’. And don't get me wrong, it is the right thing to do to try and promote diversity in organisations. But actually what behavioural science tells us, is that it's not just the right thing to do, it's better for your business. If you have too many people who look the same way and think the same way and have the same background, that's generally bad for business because it discourages innovation, it discourages new ways of thinking, it discourages progress and growth. But unfortunately, a lot of businesses have struggled to measure that in the right way. They found that unconscious bias training (for example) doesn't work for them or isn't achieving what they want and all DEI initiatives go out the window. Any behavioural scientist - or anyone with even a fairly rudimentary knowledge of behavioural science - will say, well, of course, training on its own isn't enough; just because I'm aware that I have biases doesn't mean that my behaviour will change. You then need to implement initiatives, processes, nudges, to encourage people to behave in the ways that you want.

One of the reasons I wrote my book, ‘The Behaviour Business’, was realising those frustrations and seeing it in multiple different areas of business. Every challenge that business faces has a behavioural component to it. And so behavioural science has value to add for all of those challenges. And so if you're talking about an issue like diversity, there will be behaviours that are driving that. And simply telling people, you know, oh, you have a bias against this group, and that's why you're not recruiting, is not necessarily enough to change their behaviour.

And technology can make this worse, not better. One of the classic examples of this is when Amazon built an AI based recruitment tool to screen CVs. That backfired very quickly. Within 24 hours, they had to shut it down because it screened out all CVs from women, because they had historical bias against recruiting women and the AI tool was just building on that data and learning more quickly.

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Do you see technology as a challenge for the field of behavioural science? Or do you see it more as a potentially very successful avenue of deployment?

I'd say both. I spoke at the Contact Center World conference in Berlin in February, and the topic was the application of behavioural science for generative AI. The business I work for, Concentrix, is one of the largest providers of customer experience solutions and technologies in the world. We are engaging with millions of customers every day and increasingly making use of generative AI tools to facilitate that.

My argument has always been that these tools are there to augment the capabilities of humans rather than to replace them. And the reason for that is the very nature of a human to human interaction is very different to a human to bot interaction; it triggers a whole different set of biases when we know we are talking with a bot rather than a human. And that is often forgotten. There was a very interesting study done recently in China. They simulated a scenario where a person was told they had to guess a number between 1 and 10 that had been pre-selected either by a human or by a bot. And then afterwards you had to say how close your guess was to what the number was chosen by the human or the bot. So there was the opportunity to lie about how accurate your guess had been. There we no stakes. If you were lying, you were just doing it to try and make yourself look good rather than for any kind of financial gain. And in the no incentive scenario, people lied a bit. And slightly more when they thought they were talking to a bot rather than a human.

So there was a little bit of lying about how accurate their guess was. When they introduced financial incentives, results changed significantly. In this second scenario they simulated a customer service interaction, where you had bought clothing online and you had the opportunity to return it. You had the opportunity to lie about your reasons for returning it, to get your delivery fee back. So effectively you could save some money by lying. When people thought they were talking to a human, 12 percent of people lied. But when people thought they were talking to a bot, 62 percent lied. This is fascinating from a behavioural viewpoint because it shows that a lot of those biases we have around honesty and reciprocity and so on are triggered by talking to humans, but not when we're talking to a bot. And if you think about this from the perspective of a retail organization planning to directly replace a load of human agents with a bot, you're potentially exposing yourself to a huge amount of risk in terms of fraud and loss of revenue and profitability. That’s something to consider.

How would you recommend someone goes about getting the skills required for the challenges and also the bright future that you've just mentioned? And what skill set is that really?

It is very helpful to have an understanding of the drivers of behaviour. And if you're looking to navigate a world in where the solutions that we are implementing, whether it's in business or elsewhere, are increasingly driven by technology, having an understanding of the technology as well is hugely beneficial. I know that the education system now prioritizes a lot of skills around coding and the ability to understand how technology is built and so is trying to keep up with that as well.

But then if you are already working in organizations, building relationships and networks with technologists, with people at the forefront of building these kinds of tools, is hugely valuable. I can tell you there's a huge number of people working in organizations who face the same challenge, which is that the technology moves so fast that they are looking for expertise to ensure that they're keeping up with the pace of change. And so, being able to sit in a room and say,‘I understand the behavioural drivers of this, but I also understand the limitations and the opportunities of the technology’ is hugely valuable. And behavioural science helps give us that framework around the limitations of the technology.

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How would you recommend that people get into behavioural science, at the very start? I think formal education is important. And I think in any industry there is a huge benefit to practical experience. But there are technical skills required and academic skills required. There are people out there who have read a couple of books, and then feel that they know everything they need to know in terms of applying behavioural science. And that’s something I fight against fairly regularly. We need to demonstrate the value of specialist expertise and experience that we have. But, for transparency, I myself don't have that academic background; my knowledge is all built from practical application and from my own learning, because a master’s degree wasn’t an option at the time I was studying. Now it is, and as such when I'm recruiting for our teams we do specify a master's level qualification in behavioural science, and that is an absolute necessity.

So if this is an area that you want to specialize in that you want to get into, follow that passion and go and get the academic qualifications that you can. And if you're someone who's at a midpoint in your career and you're thinking, actually, it's an area I'm really passionate about, there are still multiple academic routes to go down now. For example at LSE, where they specialize particularly in programs for people who already have built a career. That’s not to say that for anyone to be able to apply behavioural science in their organization, they have to have a master's level qualification. Of course not. I wrote a book which is all about helping people apply behavioural science in a business setting and giving them some knowledge and tools to help them do that. But if you want to be predominantly doing behavioural science in your role, you will need the qualifications.

If you had not found behavioural science, what would you have been?

My sliding door moment, as I mentioned earlier, really was when I started working on the anti-smoking campaigns and working in government in that context and met and learned from Kate. And up to that point, I'd been working in media. So potentially I would have stayed in that world, hopefully moving on to leadership positions. I also really enjoyed writing and researching the book. With a different trajectory and career path and having made different choices at points in the past, I would have liked to have gone down the writing route full time, but that's not to say I would have done it successfully!

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You've already had some great milestones and great achievements throughout your career. What is the one thing that you're looking forward to achieving now?  What would be a huge success for me personally, but also for the organization I work for, would be if we were fully recognizing the relevance and importance of behavioural science in the solutions we deliver for every one of our clients. Whether that’s ensuring that everyone in the organization has a working knowledge of some of the basics of behavioural science that they're applying in their roles, or whether it's ensuring that we are providing the best possible experiences for all our clients and customers through using behavioural science based techniques in conversation design and use of technology and and the creation of great customer experiences. Doing that in every possible way would be a phenomenal achievement. Who inspired you a lot when it comes to behavioural science? Kate Waters, who I mentioned earlier. She's now the director of client strategy at ITV, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster. She has had a very interesting career in terms of having come through that advertising world, but also employing psychology in the work that she's done throughout. Rory Sutherland, who hired me to lead the team at Ogilvy, but I'd been a fan of his for a number of years before that. He’s a really passionate and engaging advocate for behavioural science in general.

And then Richard Shotton, who was the instigator of me writing my book. I think Richard's brilliant in terms of articulating some of the key concepts in behavioural science in a way that is easy to understand. Very engaging, but also evidence based!

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Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions Richard!

As I said before, this interview is part of a larger series which can also be found here on the blog. Make sure you don't miss any of those, nor any of the upcoming interviews!

Keep your eye on Money on the Mind!