434. Designing for Behavior Change: Insights from Dr. Steve Wendel (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 434 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about designing for behavior change with Dr. Steven Wendell. Ready?

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You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is a conversation with Dr. Steven Wendle. Steve is an applied behavioral scientist and senior leader who has helped organizations effectively use behavioral science for good for over a decade. He is the co founder and head of Methodology at Systema Futura, an organization devoted to studying and shaping complex systems for social impact. He served as a Vice President at the Busara center for Behavioral Economics, where he was responsible for technical excellence, growing Busara's presence in Latin America, and overseeing the inclusive finance portfolio. He also previously founded and led the behavioral science teams at Morningstar and at hello Wallet, the developing and field testing hundreds of interventions to improve financial behavior. Stephen has authored dozens of publications, including three books on applied behavioral science, Designing for Behavior Change, Spiritual Design, and Improving Employee Benefits. Designing for Behavior Change now in its second edition, gives step by step instructions on how to develop products that help users take action, from exercising more to learning a new language. And it's the focus of our conversation today, which is a refresh of an episode that originally aired in September of 2020. Outside of work, Stephen Co founded BehavioralTeams.com and the nonprofit Bessie Previously Action Design Network, which has educated the public across North America and Europe on how to apply behavioral research in their work. He holds a BA from UC Berkeley, a Master's from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a PhD from the University of Maryland where analyzed the dynamics of behavioral change in political activism. Now don't forget there are links for my top related past episodes and books waiting for you in the show Notes for this episode which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com434 all right, let's talk about designing for behavior change. Dr. Stephen Wendell welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Melina so I am so excited to talk about your book Designing for Behavior change, which its second edition just came out here in 2020 and whether it was happenstance or the timing of the book being released, both Samuel Salzer and Will Leach, who have been guests on the show, reached out, I think, to us both and said, you guys need to talk because this has to be on the Brady business. And it was within a few days. And I looked at the book and said, oh yeah, for sure. This 350 pages of pure gold. So excited to have you. Can you first share a little bit about your background? I mean, how did the book come about? Who are you? Let the audience know.

Yeah, absolutely. So good to meet everyone. So Designing for Behavior Change is originally a manual I wrote for my team, in this case at a company called hello Wallet, where we tried, in this case, helping people with their finances. And we failed spectacularly. And we realized that we needed to understand what was really going on in people's lives, why they said they wanted to save, but they failed to. And so this book came from, well, what I originally wrote for my own team and a description of what we were doing. And then from that I just had the wonderful opportunity to talk to so many other practitioners in the field. Will was actually one of the early folks in Samuel I met later. But just talking with companies and organizations and just realizing that there's some common lessons here and I wanted to write those up. There's a lot there. It is a textbook. This is how you do this stuff in practice. From soup to nuts, right?

Full disclosure, it's a textbook. We'll say it again. But it is, like I said, it's so well done. And I know I had mentioned in kind of our pre call as I'm working on my own book, I've been thinking through this process of like, whoever said that textbooks have to be boring, you know, like, and cheesy. Sorry. But you know, I'm thinking back and you know, textbooks may have changed since last time when I really had my undergrad and went up like a lot of just drone. And you say like why? Why? Who? Whoever said it needed to be that way. And I think this is a good step in the right direction toward just interesting textbook. And perhaps it's because I'm so intrigued by the topic. Maybe I'm biased in that way.

Well, I look forward to your book. Let me tell you. I'd love to, love to read that.

Oh, well, thank you. Feel like it's the like step toward, you know, some of what you have and that like line between mainstream and textbook. So.

Yeah. And I think introductions like that are great. The gap I saw. Have you seen this as well, is there's so much on just here are all these biases and so little on this is what you do in practice. So mine is from experience. This is how you do it in every aspect of the business.

Yeah, well, I know I have so many people. So for one, I have people weekly, more than that, reaching out who are interested in getting into the field and want recommendations for should I get a master's or a PhD? Can I just start myself? Do I go do a certificate? Do I go, Should I just buy what books? Where do I go? You know, everything, every question. And so having a resource like this for those people who want to get into the applied space, see if they are wanting to be in that master's or whatnot, or maybe not. Maybe they don't want to do hard research. You know, I think this book really can help anybody. And I'm assuming, you know, someone can buy it even if they aren't part of a, a school, as it is a textbook, right?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's. I actually, I actually use the term like it's a guidebook. It's not, it's not a academic. Here's each part. But yes, it's very different than most of what's out there. It's not a quick fluff. It's the details of how you do this. And it does have all the academic citations, but they're hidden back there. Don't worry, they won't scare. So, yes, absolutely. People, this is used in classrooms. The first edition was. And I'm assuming that's hoping the second will as well. Right. But it is used in classrooms, but I think by and large it's used by the design, the product and business communities who want to get into this space, right?

Yes, for sure, for sure. And so, you know, you say that. So you were at hello Wallet, using it there. I also have a background in financial services, so I know that.

Yeah.

So I know that a lot of the audience is from either banking or in a credit union or investment services. So I think that's going to be really intriguing for them. And so for you, as far as getting into the behavioral stuff, did you go to school for that as well? Or, you know, on the job type training as you were figuring it out?

Kind of a mix. So my PhD is in political science, but kind of a strange subsection of political science. I studied under an experimentalist, so somebody did field experiments in political behavior and I learned from him. And then on the job I was really lucky. And people like John Beshears at Harvard and John Zinman and Katie Milkman and they Partnered with me.

Awesome.

And they taught me how to do all this on the job. And really, I have to say, I'm just indebted to a great many people who I learned from, from other companies, from other. From other academics.

That's. Yeah. That's phenomenal.

We've.

And I have talked about Katie Milkman and some of her experiments on the show before. I love a lot of her work in behavioral change and how important that is. So glad to hear her name as well. I know there's a great group out there for sure.

She's simply awesome. She's simply awesome.

Well, we love all of that work. So let's dig in on what is in this amazing content of the book. So I enjoy. You have a couple of frameworks. We have Create as one, the Create Action Funnel. And I do want you to tell a little bit about that. But if you can start with this story about the fish, I think that that. And I don't know if that always comes up as you laugh at it for the world, you know, at least in the version that I saw the book, it's on page 149 for anyone that wants to look. But I love this story, so if you can explain it, I think it does a really good job of setting the stage in an obvious kind of way.

Sure, sure. No problem. So the story of the fish is this. So let's say you're walking on a beach and you see a fish stranded in the sand, gasping for air. And let's say you want to help the fish. You're not trying to eat it. You want to help the fish. What do you do? Do you walk up to the fish and say, get in the water. What's wrong with you? Don't you realize how important this is? Do you perhaps say fish, Let me educate you about dissolved oxygen and how your gills extract dissolved oxygen. You can only do that in the water. No, you don't do either one of those. That's because that's dumb. Instead, you do one of a few different things. If possible, you would knock the fish out gently. Don't want to kill it? Pick it up, put it in the water. Done. Behavior change as you did it for the fish. Problem solved. Sometimes that's not possible. And so you may be able to pick up the fish and carry it over to the water. And all the fish has to do is stay in your hands. Now, the third option is let's say you don't want to get your hands dirty. That's fine. I don't Judge, you dig a channel in the sand and you pour water over. And so it's easy for the fish to take action. These are the different ways that we can drive behavior change. The yelling, the screaming and the educating are all about value proposition. And when we're trying to help somebody do something, they almost always have the value proposition. They get it. They know they want to be in the water, right? They know they want to exercise. They know they want to use your product because it's awesome, whatever it might be, that's covered. But yet we yell at people instead. We can cheat and just take this hard obstacle that someone's facing and just make it go away, do it ourselves. Right? We can change the action so it's something fundamentally easier for the person to take, which is holding the hands and carrying, which is. Okay, so maybe this 50 page sign on sequence is a bit much. Let's make it two, right? That's an example of changing the action. And then finally we can change the environment. We can remove the friction. So we can't change the overall path, but we can remove frictions along the way. So maybe you don't have to have your exact bank account details when you're signing in for this system, et cetera. You can just give an estimate of how much you earn, whatever it might be. And so that's removing friction from the process. These are the main ways, right? And you can think of yelling and valiant. That's all about fundamentally changing the understanding of the person or the fish. That sometimes works. But let's look to the environment before we try to change who people are. Right?

I talk all the time about, I've seen so many books or articles or whatever where you say, you know, 95% or 99% is done in this automatic process. So you want to target the 1% and look at that conscious faith, like why, why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense. Go for 99. You know, work with it. Yeah, like work with the channel of the water. Make it work for sure.

Yeah. And most importantly, folks, listen to Melina's podcast, right? Because it's about understanding the biases and the challeng people have whether they're your customers or whether your product team building your product. Right. And she's gone through so many, I haven't listened to all of them. You know, very impressive track record, but it's really great coverage of this, this core understanding. You don't change fundamentally human nature, you work with it. Right?

And that's the thing, right? So you could also. I guess the other option would be trying to. What most people would do even isn't educating the fish on how to breathe. How it does breathe. You're trying to explain to it about how inept it is at breathing actual air and say, you know, you'd be a lot happier if you could breathe air like I can. Silly fish.

Good luck.

Oh yeah. So I love it. And then. But it makes it. Like you said, it's so obvious when you look at it in this sort of a story. But that's exactly what's happening all of the time when we're trying to encourage people to buy or use our products or whatever that happens to be. And if you're not working with the brain, you are yelling at a fish, essentially.

Exactly. Exactly. It's our own confirmation bias in that we know how awesome our product is and everywhere we look we're like, oh yeah. They just need to have that same understanding. Our product is awesome and we're blind. We don't pay attention to it. We don't recognize all the other obstacles that are in people's lives.

Yeah, absolutely. I like to say that should is a four letter word. Right. Everyone should do all these amazing things.

I think I can actually spell it as four letters. Yeah, that could work.

Yep. S, H, U, D. We got it.

Yeah.

So I made a few notes of different episodes that we'll have linked in the show. Notes for sure. So interview. Talking with Roger Dooley about friction. You know, you mentioned the term specifically. We've got confirmation bias and we didn't call it out directly. But I do want to address when I had Dan Ariely on the show and we were talking about shape and he was talking about with this weight loss and so there's a point where you've a lot of people think you want to take the conscious decision making out of it. Like if you can pick up the fish and put it in the water that it's going to be better and people would prefer to just have their money magically being saved for them and never have to think about it. And he was making the argument or explaining how it's actually you do want it to be. There's a level of awareness that is important and taking that physical action matters, but it's making it an easy action where you can tie it to something else. So do you have any examples of that from your own work of showing. I love having the practical application. I don't know how much you're able to share of client work and stuff versus what stories you have, but would love to hear some of how Create or Decide have been put into action so that people can understand the type.

Of work you do. Sure, sure. So I'm happy to give some examples. Maybe. Maybe it would help if I just quickly summarized what Create and Decide is.

Please do. Yes.

So I think of it as the book trying to accomplish three things for readers. Right. To help people with three things. First is to understand how the mind works, how people actually take action. And Create is a summary of that. It's the six things drawing across all the literature that people need to take conscious action to your point. The second is, okay, you understand how the mind works, but how do you actually build product or build marketing or gain customer insights? Given this, what do you actually do that's decide, that is step by step defining the problem, crafting the intervention, determining its impact, et cetera. Then third is, okay, you've got a sense of how to do this mechanically, how do you do this organizationally, what are other companies doing all around the world? What do you need to start a team? What do you need if you want to enter the field, et cetera? I think that helps to get that little context on Create and Decide. So, yeah, happy to give examples as well.

Well, and we can also. Let's. We can take a minute to define what they are. So I have my notes, but. So create stands for cue. So we've obviously got habits in there. Reaction, or your intuitive reaction, evaluation, ability, timing, experience. And so maybe if there's an example of how. What that means for a company.

Yeah, sure. So Q is where so many products falter.

So I ran right at the beginning.

Yeah, I mean, you stop at the first stage of the funnel. I mean, this is true. So, and this is where we get to the yelling. We assume that if our product is awesome, all we have to do is get people's attention to its awesomeness and then they'll go. And that's just not the case because your product, your communication is competing with every single other possible thing the person could be doing.

Right. Not just the other products in that vein, but everything else.

Right? Your product is competing with their kids, competing with their dinner. It's competing. And this is the really hard one with Netflix. And so the cue part. So, for example, instead of yelling, instead of trying to get a more splashy advertising campaign, Right. Instead of trying to get a better expert testimonial, whatever, find out when people can pay attention. There's a randomized control trial, an experiment that I ran with one of the largest employers in the world. Large minimum wage population. I can't name the company, but you could probably figure it out. And we tested two dozen different times and days of contacting people. This is standard marketing stuff. The problem is in marketing, what you'll see if you search online is people say Tuesday morning, that's the time.

Oh, everyone says Tuesday morning.

That's bs.

Good to have it validated. Good to know.

So we ran the test just like you, just like us. So the folks, we found a particular time for this population. It was Sunday evening and a huge swing. Right. 75% change in response, just over a few hours. What matters here is not that test, but comparing it. We also ran that on one of the largest manufacturing companies in this case in the country, I don't know, in the world. And for them it was a completely different time. Because it's not about some magic thing that we want to accomplish. We just have to find the magic time. Instead, it's all about our users and the structure of their time. When those minimum wage folks who are often working two jobs when they're off shift and they have a little bit of time to prepare for the week, that's when they actually have some bandwidth. The manufacturing folks, for them, for this particular population, email over the weekend, this was an email communication is simply. They don't do it. It's not part of the culture. But Tuesday morning, perfectly reasonable time to slack off and read external emails. So the queue is all about not getting people's attention, but finding their attention and being there for them. That's what, that's. I mean, that's why marketing swag is so important. That's why I don't have mine on today. But exercise trackers.

Right. And you have a story about one of those in the book as well?

Yes, yeah, I do, I do. About. About how it insulted me and my family. It's great. Yeah. So you got to get it right too when you do it. But those are effectively cues that aren't about getting attention, they're about finding it. Right. When can somebody pay attention? And that's where so many companies falter because they assume their products. Great people pay attention.

Yes, you can build it. But you know, it's not even that they won't come. They're not going to pay attention or know that it exists.

They don't know about it. Right. Or they did, but they've forgotten it and now they're playing with their kids. Right, right.

It gets put in the. When things get too complicated. I Like to say they get put into the I'll think about that later drawer, whether that is virtual or a physical space. And then, you know, three months later you say, did I do that? You know, I wanted to. I knew it was a good idea, but.

Exactly. Feed my cat, you know, learn language, whatever.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to feed my cat for three months. Oh, no, sorry. That was me. Funny. So, yeah, absolutely. I love that example of the time of day and knowing something as simple as that. That's where I talk about how everything matters. You have a chapter talking about how details matter, which is right at the beginning of part two of the book. But so we're saying if details matter, tell a little bit more. And obviously there's this piece, you know, that coming in. Understanding where they're from matters. What else?

Exactly right. So this gets to the decide part, how you actually apply this stuff. Somebody telling you details matter. It's true. It's just not very helpful because. Oh, my God. Which details. I've talked to so many groups where they're in what I call AB testing hell.

Oh, yeah.

Which is they're arguing over whether to move the button left one pixel or right one pixel or to change it to a slightly different shade of chartreuse, and that's not gonna matter. And so this idea of just continual pebbles, small, small pebbles build a mountain, eventually just collapse. That's a metaphor for continual AB testing. Instead, what behavioral science gives us is a way to organize that space of details. Which types of details may matter, and how do you figure out what matters for your folks? So I think of it as, first and foremost, we have to get clarity on what we want to accomplish. That's defining the problem, and decide second, we have to put all that stuff aside and say, what's actually going on in people's lives? What do they want to accomplish? What's important to them? But also, what are the micro behaviors? What are the tiny steps that they are going through, either through your product or on a new. If they were to encounter your product, etc. What are all the tiny things that might get in their way? And then we use create. Then we look and see, okay, is this a problem of attention? Is this a problem of procrastination, of emotional reaction, etc. We've got that. Basically, most of our work is done. Most of our work is really discovery. Because given that moment of problem and what that type of behavioral obstacle is, that's where you bring in books like Nudge and predictably irrational, etc. We've got a tremendous number of techniques that can match to those problems. But we need to get clarity about our users lives and their behavioral obstacles first. Right.

So are you a proponent, it sounds like you're a proponent of observational research.

I mean, that's certainly part of it. Yes, but we have to understand the limits of observation.

Sure.

And the limits of surveying and talking to folks. But you can't identify people's behavioral obstacles sitting in a conference room.

Right.

It's not going to happen. You may be able to do it by analyzing data about their behavior and you can do it by going out and talking to people and looking. Right.

Yeah.

Understanding of the limitations there.

But a good mix of understanding the problem at the beginning, like looking at the right, the right problem. I talk a lot about question storming instead of brainstorming and finding the right question instead of, you know, it's really easy to find the right answer to the wrong question, so.

Exactly. Yeah.

I love hearing the actual stories of discoveries and things. So if you want to just rattle off a bunch of stories, I'm game whether they're in the book or not. Just stuff that you've worked on I think is always fascinating.

Yeah, sure. So here's, here's, here's one of my favorite ones, which is we used to run a competition to see who could figure out who could come up with the intervention that would help a particular population the most. And this was, now we have my team spread out and we're doing lots of different things, et cetera. This is when we were doing one big thing at a time. Right. So a little while back. And so we were trying to help people because you mentioned a lot of your folks are in finance. We're trying to help people with ATM fees, particularly foreign ATM fees. What we found, and you can read this in the literature, is that it's actually a really big deal for many low wage employees that it can take up to a tenth of somebody's income for monthly income and quite a lot of money that people pay on ATM fees. And then related to that, things like payday loans, just extra user fees on top of that. And so we wanted to say, okay, how do we help people with this? We know they have a bank account. Right. Because they were drawing out money. What do we do? And so we came up. This was actually one where we did some direct user research, but it's actually a somewhat different point here. So I'm lacking on the user research. I'm sorry.

That's okay.

This is one where we're kind of early on in the process. And what we did was we came up with, okay, I think this is what's really going on with folks. And I think this is what's really going on with folks. And we came up with a dozen different interventions. And because of the scale of the testing we were doing, we tested all of them.

Cool.

And we did a bet, actually, we did a casino over time. So we did each round of every intervention people bet on. And two things that were really interesting there for the ATM fees, the thing that worked was not telling people about the ATM fees. It wasn't telling them that other people were avoiding ATM fees. Right. It wasn't vividness and kind of showing them the amount of money, etc. It wasn't making it more concrete and real. It was actually this really cool graphic that showed an ATM eating your money and taking it from you. Yeah, awesome. That in a randomized control trial, saved people one day's wages a month. Wow. Yeah. So in this case, given the amount of time, et cetera, 5% of their income, just massive effect. And one, it was a really cool experiment, but there are two things that I learned from that. One was, wow, these things can be tremendously powerful. The others had very little effect. Right. The person who won, who got that one, was in customer support. Not the behavioral scientist with a PhD, not the research team, not the CEO of the company, but the customer support person who said, yeah, this resonates. Right? This makes sense. And second, we tried 12 different things. Most of them had no effect. All of them were cool. All of which we believed in belief, passion, investment, have little to do with impact on your users.

Right.

That's table stakes. You need to bloody test.

Right.

You need to test in the field. Are you actually helping people? Right.

And all the things, again, that should matter, that should work, often don't. It's the random thing. And that's, you know, with Dan Ariely and the coin, the gold coin in Kenya, which is what ended up. I did a research project that was building upon that with savings nudging, savings behaviors here in states, same thing that is like, well, let's try this coin. And nobody really thinks that that's going to work, but it's the one that does the best. These kind of quirky, you know, I was making notes about there's an episode on novelty and story and how our brains are very much biased toward that and making just the visual piece of the. I guess it's anthropomorphizing your. Sorry world. For whoever's judging my pronunciation. But for the ATM machine to show it's actually taking this action can help make it much more real for people and that you kind of want to rebel against this evil thing. You know, I'm sure that there are a lot of financial institutions that would then worry that they are being made out to be the villain of the atm. That the ATM becomes part of their monster is going to rub off on their own brand. Like they're trying to take from that. And I know that you did this mostly just as a test to see what would happen versus actually applying it anywhere. Is that.

Oh, no, no. I mean, foreign ATM fees are evil. Banks, please stop that. Yeah. And then it won't be on your brand. No big deal. I have no problem calling out if there is bad behavior. Yeah, it's bad behavior. Let's stop that. Rather than not talk about the. You know, not talk about the. How consumers might respond. Right. No. There are many cool things companies can do and brands can do to help bolster their image. But all that's based on treating your people well.

Totally. Right.

Right.

Well, I was thinking. So I know from having worked with financial institutions, it's often that. So I am at ABC Credit union or bank and someone uses my card at XYZ Credit Union or bank and they get feed and then they're mad at me even though it was the other one. Right. But it's because they have the account with me and I don't charge them. But they did. You know, it's a problematic space to be in, but that's a conversation for a more specific day.

Exactly.

I guess I also want to note on. So I've actually had several episodes of the show, including an interview with Dr. Gleb Zypersky recently. And we talked about incentives and how. And actually Tim Houlihan talked about this as well. I know. Isn't he. I love him. But about. We're incentivizing your team. So kind of the other side of the story and where. Yeah, there was a betting pool. But the incentive for everyone to partner on this cool project in this like, carrots and stuff sticks world by making it fun and about having the bragging rights or whatever it is helped you to come up with these really cool things in a way that if you would have just said, I'll pay. Whoever comes up with the best idea gets $500 or $5,000, whatever. Totally not the same experience.

Yeah. We didn't. We didn't actually. There was no money involved. At all. It was just bragging rights and making it fun. Right. And making it something that was communal, that we all experienced. Hey, we are trying to help people, so mission matters. Making that, bringing that to the fore for employees and a communal thing. This is something we can work together. We're equal again. The person who won, Arielle, who is freaking awesome, was working in customer support. She moved on for other great things. She had a great career, but yeah, she's customer support, talking with folks every day. And it made a communal, fun thing. It wasn't about the money. There was no money. We weren't paying people. Right.

But when you find that thing that can get people excited and passionate about what they're doing, you come up with these really interesting things. And if you're able to come up with 12 interventions instead of just one or two that seem really obvious, that's where you might find that, you know, the gold coin or the angry atm. I know it's the automated teller monster instead of this.

There you go.

Yeah. And then, then. So where I'm. I'm pretty sure every time I end up talking about ATMs on the show, I think I accidentally have the slip up and say ATM machine. And then I kind of. Ah, I can't believe I did that.

And I know editing is forced. Perfect.

I know this is where you all will know that I don't. I try not to edit on interviews. So when I mess up something like that, it's. It's there for the world to judge me on, and I'm okay with it. So. All right, so we've. What would be another. If you had other. What's the thing that no one asks about that you wish you could talk about on different. Whether it's an interview or a story that you like or what you're interested in moving forward, where you think the future is.

Asked a range of different questions.

I know I'm trying to give you ideas in case you were stuck.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. I mean, I'm particularly interested in the intersection of behavioral science and data science right now. And even though the two are often confused, they're really quite different. And I think there are really only a few people in behavioral science who are taking seriously the richness of personal data that we have sent along. Nathan being one very prominent example. But I think there's just a tremendous opportunity there, and I think a lot of it will come from the data science community.

Yeah.

So anyway.

Well, if you can explain. So I obviously said. Oh, yeah. When you said that they are, you know, they're different. But for, for the audience that might not be familiar with the difference. Can you explain how behavioral science and data science are different?

Sure. I think about it as coming first and foremost from we're trying to accomplish different things, and it's not to judge. But data science, often in a business context, is about prediction. In other words, what are the factors that will predict who will become a customer, who will use this feature, whether this meteor will crash into the earth, et cetera. Right. Behavioral science and data science is broad and can be applied to a wide variety of different problems. Behavioral science is fundamentally narrow. We do one thing and one thing extraordinarily well, which is behavior change. We try to understand how the mind works, but that's just a stepping stone to what really matters, which is, can we help? Can we help somebody make a better decision, can we help somebody make a better action, et cetera. And so because of that, we need causality. We need more than prediction. Prediction is, statistically speaking, a lesser goal. It's not lesser in terms of business importance. It's just not as hard. And so that's why we run experiments. That's why data scientists run econometric models, machine learning models, etc. And behavioral scientists work first and foremost with experiments because that's the right tool for causal impact. And then from that you get, okay, how is this applied in a business? All of these stem from what we're trying to accomplish, right? I think it is a cascade from that first question.

Yeah, absolutely. I love the explanation of that and hopefully that is helpful for those who are listening. I know that I've had several. I think that the field is very much going into this space whenever we're having conversations or I'm seeing other people on LinkedIn talking about what they think is next or other interviews people are doing. Pretty much everyone is saying that data science and AI, that's big data. That's where the next phase of behavioral science is going to be converging there as well.

Yeah, I'm seeing that discussion, but I haven't seen a lot of meat yet. Maybe you have in your reading, but it's a lot like, hey, this should be interesting. And I think there's just, to be frank, there's a lot we need to learn, right?

Yeah.

What that's going to look like.

Yes, I would agree. I think there was a lot of meet that was planned for 2020 that, where there were a lot of conferences that were going to be talking about this and bringing people together. And then, you know, that didn't happen, as we all know. And so, yeah, I think that piece is what's put a little bit of a damper delay on some of that. But similarly, I think there's a lot of work that's being done, people that are finding each other that wouldn't have otherwise, because we are all in this differing space. So actually, that brings up a good question that I just came up with right now. So as far as our habits and things where cues are all up in the air now that people aren't driving to work in the same way, and we don't have these same experiences and, you know, all these kind of memes across the Internet of like, Monday, Tuesday, what day? So how do you think maybe things are different in the pandemic space? And have you done any research there yet, or are you thinking about that much?

Doing some in the finance space, but mostly application. And there are some great folks working specifically on masquerading behavior, social distancing, etc. But I think the point about habits is really right on. From what I've seen is, remember early on, March for the U.S. right, for us folks, March and April, I bet a lot of folks felt pretty tired, pretty disoriented, right? And some of that is okay. You're sitting in a crappy chair at home and not in the office where you have this beautiful ergonomic thing, maybe. But a lot of it was you don't have your habits to rely on.

Right?

I don't mean big habits of how you commute to work, obviously, but also where you put your cup next to the computer, right? How you sit, how you take breaks, etc. So that would wear us out. So fatigue of not being able to rely on our habits in everyday life, and whether or not that's gone away, I think largely depends on whether you have kids who are unattended to or not. Because habits are built on stable context, stable cues, stable routine that can be triggered in that environment, right? So in the create funnel, it's cue, reaction and ability. It's cra, which doesn't sound as good as create, but it is the part that's relevant for habits. And so if you don't have unattended kids, then most of us have already started to build those habits. Perhaps they're not fully automatic, but we've built enough routines that our minds can now focus back on our work or focus back on Netflix or whatever it is we're doing. But if we have kids, then they are inherently unpredictable. Little creatures I have too. And that breaks that. It breaks the ability to form those habits because your context is no longer stable.

Yeah. My husband just asked me this morning, as we now know for sure, that the kids are going to be here through the end of 2020 at least we're expecting this whole school year is just a wash. And so, you know, he was saying, so what time now as we're prepping for back to school, which is here, but still having to do this, what time do we want to make sure the kids are up and dressed where, you know, for this from March is sort of like if they're dressed or whatever, we're just making it work, you know. And so now that we're needing to make this into routines and as if you're going to school, getting them, them routines can help as well. You can structure calls and all of.

That to both help them and help us.

Yes, yes. Very, very much. I will definitely be link the episode on overwhelmed brains and how that impacts our decision making. And I know you had something. I'm looking at my notes of trying to find where it was, but I know you talk about that overwhelmed brain piece.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Often.

And if you had. Have you had Wendy Wood on yet?

No, not yet.

You should.

I would love to.

She is the source from which all of the popular habit books come originally. Her research is really the foundation of our current understanding of habits. And there are other folks, Lally. I mean, there are a variety of other folks, but she's the most central. Just a really wonderful person. And recently came out with a book, Good Habits, Bad Habits as well.

Awesome. Any last stuff that you want to share? I guess so you said you've got a team, so it sounds like you do some consulting in addition to.

Yep. Do some limited consulting. I have a day job, which is wonderful and I'm not looking to change that.

Okay.

Which is. I'm the head of behavioral science at Morningstar. I have one the of larger teams doing applied research and product development, which is great.

Awesome.

But yes, I do some consulting, particularly trainings for folks, behavioral audit, stuff like that. But if. If people are interested, there's both information on how to contact me and a workbook that goes through the core ideas and most importantly the actual exercise. How do you identify the microbehaviors where people struggle? How do you connect those microbehaviors with the vast literature of techniques? And that's all up on my website, which is behavioraltechnology co dot co. Yeah. For the record, I actually had Dot com. And I used it like a few years ago. And then I think I had like my credit card stolen. I wasn't paying attention. Yeah, so I didn't have that credit card and I wasn't paying attention anyway, so I lost the dot com. And then of course, somebody, some automated things scooped it up and now is trying to charge ten grand for it.

Oh, man. I feel like we, we definitely. That brings full circle of the credit card was stolen. Your brain got overwhelmed because you were outside of your normal cues and habits. You had to change everything. That's the.

It was a few years ago that it happened, but yeah, it was. That's. That's full circle.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll definitely have links to the website so people can contact you and for more information as well as the full, full textbook, guidebook, whatever we want to call it. It's awesome. If you have any interest in applying behavioral science, it's worth picking up and using because it's really a great framework with a lot of really valuable information in it. So thank you again for joining me today, Steve. It's been fantastic chatting with you and hope to be able to connect again soon.

Well, thanks for making the time and I'm glad to be on the show. Thank you so much.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about designing for behavior change with Steve Wendle today? For me, the main thing I think about when I think of Steve, even after all these years, is that fantastic example of the fish on the beach and how often we're wired to tell the fish about how it breathes water when it has absolutely no capacity to do anything with the information at that moment. Education feels like the default solution so often. But as we dig deeper into human behavior, it's so often not the answer, at least not the first answer, because there are other steps to help get someone to the state where they're ready to do something with that educational information. And at that point, you do get to be talking about details and educating people. You also have to be very thoughtful about what, what you share when you share it, what you want them to do, why you're sharing it, all that so that you don't share too much detail that makes it so they feel overwhelmed and just ignore all of it. When it comes to applying behavioral science, always start by thinking about what you want people to do, what they're doing now, why, and so on. Zoom out to understand the bigger experience, and then zoom way in to find those nudgeable micro moments where your behavioral intervention are most likely to have an impact. It takes practice and it is so worth it. And of course, Steve's book Designing for Behavior Change is a great resource if you want a guide for how to do that. I've linked to his book and some others, including my own, that help with applying behavioral economics into your work in the show. Notes for this episode, as well as other episodes and ways to get in touch with myself and Steve and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 434 and just like that, episode 434 with Dr. Steven Wendell is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Kike Bellinger, Behavioral Economics Global Leader at bbva. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.