439. Behavioral Science at Scale: William Mailer on Banking Innovations

Welcome to episode 439 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy in today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to William Mailer, Chief Behavioral Scientist at Commonwealth bank of Australia. Ready? Let's get started. 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. In today's conversation I am joined by William Mailer. Will leads the Commonwealth bank of Australia's Behavioral Science center of Excellence. This multidisciplinary unit of economists, psychologists and data Scientists works across CBA's business lines to improve financial well being and climate action outcomes for millions of Australians. The CBA team partners with leading research groups and practitioners around the world to produce impactful research and develop new innovations in partnerships, products and services. Prior to joining cba, Will established and led the PWC Behavioral Economics team. Will has over 20 years of consulting experience and an MSc in Behavioral Economics from the center for Decision Research and Experimental Economics in Nottingham, uk. Today, Will and I discuss his history in behavioral science and he shares his tips for building out a behavioral team in an organization. We also talk about how his team have approached their work in a very broad way. They've built out relationships with academic researchers and held salon style discussions with people from all sorts of areas outside of their normal business to help them see problems others miss and use behavioral science to creatively solve them. Will shares about two of their projects including Benefits Finder, which has brought more than a billion dollars in benefits to over a million people across Australia that they would have likely missed out on, and how the counterintuitive approach of showing the trade offs of each credit card they offer instead of just touting the benefits has resulted in customers who are more loyal to the bank, use their cards more, and are less likely to get into trouble with their spending. You don't want to miss this one. Really quickly before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Will and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com439 now let's jump right in. Will Mailer, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks Melina. Great to be with you?

Yes. So excited to have you here and to have met you. What's been a couple months ago now in person, when we were both in Toronto and loved hearing about your. The work that you're doing, both, you know, formally to the group at the CBO summit, as well as in conversations that we had throughout our time there. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

Yeah, absolutely. So I lead the behavioral science unit in Australia's largest bank. We are a mixed, disciplined team, lots of different backgrounds and experiences. We also work with lots of different suppliers and external groups that we partner with. And we are really just about trying to better understand financial behaviors and financial decision making and then to use that understanding to develop and inspire new types of products and services to help people reach their financial goals or to improve their financial wellbeing.

And I know a bit about your background that you didn't, you know, start your journey of behavioral science at the bank there. And you have a really interesting history, I think. Can you share a little bit about, you know, how you got into the field and found yourself at the bank?

Yeah, I'll give kind of some, some key moments in history and then we, if you, we could obviously go into any detail on any, if they're interesting. But right back to my parents, I think kind of worked. My dad was in a, in a role that was kind of at the intersection of industry and research. So he worked for the Department of Agriculture in Australia. And he'd do a lot of work kind of advising farmers and the agricultural industry on what kind of crops to grow and how to experiment and try to kind of optimize and learn about agriculture. My mom was a social worker, so she's obviously working very closely with people and communities. And I think both of those, both my parents influenced me in that way to be interested in people and having large scale impact and bringing industry and science closer together. I kind of trained as an economist to begin with. I had lots of different roles that were really about understanding people and human behavior. So I had a role where we would design shopping centers and retail precincts and really trying to understand how people spend and how people navigate those precincts. I had a role designing incentive structures for large sales workforces, which was also very interesting. And then another role where I would, what we would do, basically applied ethnography, where we would sit in airports and shopping centers and observe people and write reports on human behavior. And this was all before I really knew what Behavioural science was or knew old teams that were doing behavioral science, but I think then they started reading, learning more about behavior. These interests came across some great books and then kind of came across this field, this behavioral science, behavioral economics field. And it felt like that moment just kind of clicked and it all kind of made much more sense. Kind of worked neatly with my economics background as well. At the time there were Nobel prizes, so it had a lot of credibility. And then obviously the early pioneer teams of like the behavioral insights team and closer to my industry now, the Barclays behavioral finance team. I think these were really exciting and inspiring moments and you could just. I remember the day I was kind of walking home from work thinking this is it. Like I gotta, I gotta learn more about this.

Yeah. And when you think back on the time that you were talking about, so you said you know, some stuff with incentives and as you were just observing people in the, the airport or at, you know, shopping centers and were there any kind of common threads for you? Like we know now, you know that behavioral stuff as you get into incentives, there's, it's so much more to it than we realize. And I think there are a lot of people, you know, in those types of early jobs that you just sort of write it off as like I'm watching people again today. And then some people just like really get into it. Is there anything you look back on that at that point, you know, you were super excited about that. Maybe would have been a, a hint or for somebody who's trying to decide if they are interested in this field now that know it exists that they should be keeping in, in mind.

Yeah, I, I think probably lots of little moments. I don't know if there was. There's one big one, but it was always kind of. And I imagine lots of people that are in working in kind of behavioral science roles or research had similar experiences where the things you find interesting, everyone else just is just like, yes or what? Like it's like, wow, look like this, this study of like if, if your plate's bigger, you're going to eat more. That's so, that's so interesting. Everyone else like Mela, that's not interesting. That's just, that's just normal. But I'm just really interested in kind of small observations about people. For a long time and again long before I'd kind of come across behavioral science. I remember just like looking at shop fronts and, and with no customers and thinking how is that shop making money and how are they surviving and then designing sales incentive Packages with like a, you could have package A or package B and people would always go for the one that they ended up actually making less money. And it's. I kind of call them the behavioral wrinkles. So like, what, what are these little wrinkles that don't really make sense? Like, we use the rational irrational language. Don't love that language. But what are the things that we're. It raises these questions of like, why are people doing that and how do we learn more. And then I think having the economics grounding where everything is kind of, you have to have that mathematical precision and optimization to everything and that that was a nice grounding to even amplify that even more and say, well, those wrinkles are really interesting and important in a lot of cases.

Definitely. I know I, I started to think a little bit too, as you were saying, about the irrational language that got, you know, we can be thankful for the book that helped to bring some really widespread awareness to the field. And I know that in a lot, you know, for many of us it's not a favorite, you know, term that we like to use anymore because it's not necessarily that it's irrational. We just don't understand the logic or didn't understand the rule the brain was using or why. Right. And now that we know that it's able to see there, there is a reason and it makes sense why it's being plugged in there. It just might not be that you have all the information to have thought that was, you know, what someone might do. So maybe we can be thinking about it as, like you said, the wrinkles or. I was just thinking of this behavioral curiosities or the, you know, brainy surprises or something. Just get it. We'll find a new brand for it.

Yeah. I just think the world can be like the Thaler quote of like, people aren't silly. The world is hard. And I just think a lot of the most important things we need to do to make our life go better are difficult or complex or we just don't have a lot of practice doing them. So we kind of, in a lot of ways, how do we kind of navigate that complexity and people. I like to kind of come from the starting point that good people are trying to do good things most of the time.

Yeah. Agreed. For sure. Well, I think that sort of can tie into a little bit of the work with benefits finder and something where we know that people get busy. Right. And they are going to miss things that's going to, you know, thaler and sunstein and looking at, you know, just in the basis of nudges and that we should expect error for people. And instead of kind of sitting back and saying, well, you know, I bet they're going to miss that deadline or they'll probably forget about that, which we tend to be inclined to do sometimes you can instead, you know, where can we give a little bit of a feedback nudge or something up front to help people to know all the things that could be valuable to them. And I think again, this project that, that y' all have done really kind of shows we could say it's silly or we can just know this type of thing would happen and you can design a really, really great program that is both valuable for your customers as well as for, you know, your organization. Can you share a bit of the story or. And not even a bit. Tell us the story of Benefits Finder?

Yeah, sure. So Benefits Finder is a. It's a digital experience we built with my current employer and the bank I'm working with today. We were looking. It was one of our first major initiatives when we started the team. So Benefits Finder is an experience that. But let's start with the problem. So right around the world, in almost every country, you have a situation where citizens are eligible for, in most cases, billions or tens of billions of dollars of rebates and concessions and benefits that can help them make their lives go better, get jobs, manage their lives, support their kids. And in every case, there is money left on the table. So eligible populations don't get, for various reasons to claim and access those benefits and rebates and concessions. So we thought it's clearly opportunity and value on the table here for lots of people. In a sense, a lot of the barriers are behavioral. We have an opportunity. We work in an organization that has a huge footprint, very digitally mature. We have daily contact with millions of people. This feels like a space for us. And Benefits Finder is that experience. We built into our banking app and our Internet website that basically combination of behavioral science, AI and really good digital design that helps customers. It organizes, prioritizes and lowers barriers to access for Australians to find benefits that they're highly likely eligible for and just makes it easier to claim. And to date, the Benefits Find is around three and a half years old now. To date, we've helped connect Australians to around $1.2 billion in government benefits and rebates and counting. And that's across millions of claims started by lots and lots of people. So I think it's. So it's A really nice example of kind of industry community groups, researchers working together to find a big behavioral problem and then using assets like digital assets and distribution, kind of the right partnerships to bring that to life and have impact for a lot of people.

Oh yeah. And I love the example and just thinking about again the problem in a bigger way and understanding people and what's going to be valuable for them and knowing that it doesn't have to just be about you. Right. It's not about your savings accounts or your products or being like the face of a bunch of things, but it's understanding this problem and seeing that you and your organization can uniquely help to solve this for a lot of people in a way that's going to make a great impact. And know that the, you know, the goodwill, benefits and the value of people talking about you, it will pay off right there, there's value in it for the organization when you do these sorts of things, right. And people are more likely to want to talk about you, think about you, the, you know, the goodwill and saying, man, I love that they do that. That is just a really cool approach I think to show again when you get out of your own way, it just, yeah, has this real win win.

Yeah, absolutely. And the bank I'm working with has been around for a very, very long time. It will be around for a very, very long time. And I think that working with an organization like this, fortunately you can take a longer view on a lot of your initiatives. And we're not here just to kind of look at narrowly, but how can we support customers over their financial lives. We around more than one in three Australians call us their main financial institution. I also think that your financial wellbeing is much bigger than your bank. Like your financial life is bigger than your banking products. And so if you're really serious about financial health and financial well being, you've got to, you've got to look not just at like what's the next traditional banking product we're going to promote? How do we reimagine the products and services that we have that kind of integrate more with people's full financial life in a way that kind of helps right across the seams.

Definitely. Well and just in that mental reframe as we think about the mission, vision, values of an organization, right. And we go back to, you know, great article from Harvard Business Review from many moons ago. But you know, in that talking about company making buggy whips and saying that we're, you know, going to make the best darn buggy Whips in the world sort of thing. But instead if you don't realize that you're in the industry of making things go right, then it's when the car comes along, you can't compete because people don't need buggy whips anymore. But it's about helping, you know, get from A to B. Or in the, the case of, you know, you don't make, people don't buy drills, they buy holes. And like the drill is the, you know, path to get there. So think in that way. When you think about the bank's purpose of helping people to have that better financial well being and the, you know, security that they feel and the how that helps the overall community and when you think about it in that way, there are a lot of things that you can be doing that are outside of those traditional products certainly.

And like there's kind of commercial competitive context as well. Banking, like there's lots of really cool fintechs and financial services innovators emerging over like the recent years and currently and kind of it's not just, it's not just innovating for innovation's sake, it's also competitively you've kind of got to think about what's next and what is that gap and as you say, like, like think about the hole in the wall, not the drill. But yeah, I, I think it's, it's all those things, it's what is your purpose and how are you supporting financial behaviors and also like just staying relevant and competitive. I think it's both.

Yeah, definitely. So as we build on this, I really love that, you know, you're talking about how this has a behavioral element. Right. And I. That was written about your team in the newsletter magazine, whatever we would call it from the group up at Bayer, Behavioral Economics in action at Rotman from Toronto. One of the things that it mentioned is that you have, I think, you know, four or five questions that you answer to determine which projects are going to be a fit for the team. And one of them, probably one of the main aspects there about it being that it has a behavioral element at its core and how, how do you go about deciding what counts as a behavioral element and that it's like enough versus something that's not, you know, for me I think people really kind of get hung up on this especially because, you know, all humans are behaving like, you know, we could make an argument, you know, that anything's behavioral if we really wanted to. And so, you know, how do you classify that?

Yeah, I think the Decision triage that you're referring to is something we set up very early in the team kind of as a survival mechanism more than anything else. We. Well, we started as a team of one. So I started by myself in an organization that had roughly 50,000 staff and billions and millions of customers. And fortunately I came into a pretty receptive environment which the manager that had hired me at the time did a great job of kind of getting everyone very excited. So the first month on the ground was about not getting crushed under like trying to help everybody and work on everything all the time. Fortunately we got to start recruiting. So we then two people, then we have three people. But it's still incredibly. And today we're a very, very small team in the size of the organization and the industry we work in. So we set up like, let's think carefully about. You've got to choose the highest value projects that you think, not just what you want to work on, but what is going to have the most impact given your specialization. And of course as a setting up a behavioral science or what we call the behavioral economics unit at the time was what is the thing that we bring that is the differentiator and how do we absolutely help the bank and our customers to make the most of that special skill. And as you say, like number one, it's got to have behavior at its core. And I remember this exchange someone early on it wasn't myself, it was external, but someone's like, hey, can you come and nudge people to use my website more? I really want to, I really want people to use my website. And I remember the behavioral person they were talking to is like, your website's terrible. So there is now you cannot nudge people to do something that's not good or not going to help them. You know, and it's this idea of like, I think there's, there's two types of error here. This one is like this. There's clearly value on the table and someone's able to get to it, but for some reason they're not taking that action. And that's probably the benefits behind a story that falls into that category. And then the other one of course is like, there's this thing that's actually making your life go worse and you're repeatedly doing it. So it's kind of the other side of that coin, systematic self defeating behaviors. And really that's our starting point is like, is there one of those two things pretty obviously at the, at the center of this problem? If it's not, maybe it's not for us and that's fine. So there's a lot of big important challenges in the world. That's not behavioral science. That's okay. But if we could find those opportunities, we think it will have the right impact aligned to our purpose. We have the right business partners and external partners and researchers around us that we think we can do a good job of it. That's kind of our triage to say this falls into like a high priority project for us. We've declined lots of work that don't neatly fit into those things. Again, very fortunate to be in a position to be able to kind of identify higher and lower opportunity projects. But that I think that as I say, like in the early days, that was. Helped us with survival to say this one's not for us or this one. We're gonna like, we're just gonna go really hard in this at this one and to be able to say why we're doing that. And I think it's also just important for behavioral science teams starting out to really be clear on your differentiator. So there's big organizations have lots of people trying to support customers and why, why are they investing in you? And why, why do we need behavioral science, Behavioral science units or nudge units? You want to be pretty clear on that. And that that helped us with that as well.

Thank you for going into some detail on that for, for everyone we've talked a bit about before this interview. So not here yet, but you and I have talked about. There's this piece where I think as people, you know, when you first start with behavioral economics, behavioral science, and we're looking for again the, the nudges and the quick fixes. And for a long time the industry was really kind of focused on being that, you know, tool that you use to, you know, tighten something up at the end. And yeah, so many of us now are having the conversation about being involved earlier in a process. Right. And understanding these problems from, you know, the behavioral aspects early on, like, you know, benefits finder being a great example of that. What are your thoughts on kind of in that future of the industry and types of projects or even just how you and your team have evolved, you know, over time to be shifting from maybe some of those little things that are still important. Right. We, we can still learn from tweaking the length, the framing on a subject line of an email or the color of a button. It's not to say that those things can't be helpful and that we don't want to do those things. But there's so much value in starting earlier as well.

Yes, totally, totally. And I think behavioral science early on suffered from both the promise that we could kind of parachute in and like triple, triple your top line with a really simple and, and inexpensive tweak or hey, here's my like 99.9% finished product. Can you just add the kind of the nudge sprinkles on the end and like make it 20% more effective. And I think, don't, I don't think that created a lot of buzz and excitement early on, but I also think it caused some issues kind of further down the line like probably 2010 to 2020 was a period where we started to see the conversation break into two, two tracks which is like, one is like hey, this doesn't actually work the way all the newspaper headlines setup did or the TED talks or the books and then the other track of like no, it does sometimes and you've got to kind of have a process to kind of understand when and when not and to do it kind of carefully. And it's, yeah, it's not just nudges. Like there's lots of, lots of ways we need to be thinking about applying this. And I think very fortunately for me earlier in my career I was, I was looking at again, I didn't know it was behavioral science, but I was like changing like the way people get paid or the way to design a shopping center. So I had, I got an opportunity to look at a bigger kind of structural level kind of approach early in my career. And then one of the guiding principles when we first set up the team was like, it's not always a nudge. Like nudge is not. But it doesn't have to be the first and only thing we do. There's lots of things we do. Benefits Finder again, very fortunate to actually develop a whole new technology driven kind of banking experience from from 0 to 100. So end to end again with lots and lots of other teams like I should add. So that was a whole kind of village that kind of came together to raise Benefits Finder. We've also done things like helping people with banking experiences and features that help people like realign their cash flow. So it's not just a pop up to say hey, watch out, your mortgage payments coming up in three weeks. It's like, no, let's move your mortgage payment. Let's kind of sync up your cash flow to make your life go easier without having to have that nudge in the first place.

So what I hear in that too, I think is a bit of like, you get paid on the first of the month, but your mortgage isn't due for two and a half or three weeks. And so instead of saying, hey, don't forget, you're gonna have to pay your mortgage in, you know, 18 days. So like, don't spend that money, don't do it. Right. But instead to, yeah. Line up those payments to peop for people to help them out. Right?

Yeah, like that three weeks while you're like hanging onto that money, waiting for that huge payment. That's just anxiety. And again, all choice preserving, like, do you want to align or not? It's like we just create that very low friction experience for customers if they want to do those things. But again, it's not just like the, the nudge to say, like, hey, watch out, in three weeks time, it's coming. It's like, what are the, what are the five or six other ways we could kind of address that? Whether it's as you say, kind of just the tweak at the end or like stepping back and thinking. No, no, let's like think about this more holistically.

Yeah. Well, one of the examples I really love here, I think is, you know, as you think about something like credit cards, that we would say, hey, credit cards are credit cards. People know what they need to know and let's just talk about the best things we've got here. So one, I think in general, you know, the business problem that may get presented to your team, whether this is, you know, in the case of the listener, right. It's if you're in marketing, if you're, you know, heading up some of the sales team, or maybe you're designing the product, you're working on the website team or whatever might be like, we need more credit cards. We need more people to have more credit cards and to be using them more. Like that's what the, the bank may need. Right. But if we then stop and say, well, you know, it's easy to just say, you know, put another ad out there, throw out more bonus points, give some cash back, try to get some people in the card and just talk about all the good things. Right? Because people want to hear the good things about it. And sometimes things get put in disclosures, right? Because there's, we have lots of disclosures there and we still need disclosures. Those things happen. And while it may feel counterintuitive, even if we say, oh, we only want to talk about the good stuff, there's actually value in Talking about the trade offs. Right. Can you share a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's another study we, it kind of came out of those early days and those round tables where I mentioned earlier as well. And we're working with our good friends at Harvard Business School, particularly Ryan. Professor Ryan Buell works on this idea of operational transparency and it's this idea that if in this case, if you're not, if you're not kind of being upfront with like all of the important features of the decision that people need to be balancing, you might get people into the wrong fit product. And so Professor Buell and his team proposed something quite, it's been, it's become known in the, in some of its kind of media and some of its write ups as the unbank like experiment. And he proposed to our head of digital, hey, what if we just put the trade offs up there in lines as well. So for example, this card is a lower rate card but it doesn't come with travel insurance and it doesn't have points or this is a low fee card but hey, it doesn't have some other feature that other cards do and let's put that up in lines. It's like really. And I thought perhaps a career limiting move early in my career at, at the bank. But fortunately it was a time where we had continue to have really a visionary leadership and the financial well being purpose. Let's try it, let's go. And we ran a pretty large field experiment on this. You can read about it but it's now published. So we launched this thing and everyone kind of held their breath and goes what's going to happen? We've now got, you can see it today if you go to the Commonwealth bank website, you'll see the credit card page with the benefits and the trade offs of our product. We've also adapted it to other products as well. Pleased to say some of our competitors have copied the patterns also. But we kind of launched this very large field experiment and then we tracked what happened over nine months across all the various stages. And the first thing we noticed was that the sales, the upfront sales acquisition numbers were unchanged. So at a headline level we didn't see any significant change in sales. What was interesting is that customers started to choose differently across the choice set. We have a very large kind of choice set on our credit card offer. So customers were sorting themselves into different products. And then what got really interesting is that the retention rates were like 20% higher over nine months. So customers much more likely to stay with us. And the idea here is that they've got a better understanding of how the product works, they're using it effectively. And then in terms of financial well being, right down the end of the study, we actually tracked how many people were likely to fall into arrears and we noticed that people were like 10% less likely to get into trouble with the transparency, trade off treatment. So what an amazing study and an amazing kind of initiative. Say, hey, let's help customers with the important information up front. Help them kind of make their best choice, use, use the card or the product in a way that they want to stick around. And they're less likely to kind of get in trouble with that product because they're probably because they better understand it. And we've kind of, that was a really great study for us kind of early in the team's career being able to measure like very kind of complex experiment over a long period of time and to get that result kind of showed what was possible and I think has set us up to do similar work since as well.

Yeah, I think it's such an important piece to show how one thoughtful lever can impact so many other areas of the work that the organization does. Right. So having a background in financial institutions myself, yourself, knowing that, you know, things like, like you said, collections, those departments, they're expensive and having to write off or charge off loans is also very expensive with things like credit cards. Right. And that makes that impacts everybody else with the rates you're able to charge, the loans you're able to say yes to or not. And, and obviously for the sake of anyone, you don't want your customers to have to be dealing with that either. Right. And it's also expensive to be doing, you know, these special promotions or things that you're going to be running to try to drop like anybody in. Right. So if you're just throwing out a big net and hope you're gonna pull in some people that are gonna stay. But then if you're doing, you know, 0% for however many months or whatever that is, people just leave, you know, or, or your card is one of too many in a wallet that they don't pay attention to. But for the sake of that, that moment of thoughtfulness where they're thinking through what they're going to want to get and say, yeah, you know, why, why am I going to use this card? Right. So you think about that one question you might get the buyer to ask that is going to make them be more thoughtful about why they're going to do be using it, what the benefit is that they want the value for them and what they don't care about as much. Right. So then they could say, okay, so I, I'm going to have it for this reason and this is this. And I'm thankful to, you know, reciprocity. Right. The bank for sharing this with me to help me make this decision. And then it helps, you know, all the way down the line and just that win, win again, I think is so beneficial and you can provide those sorts of things where again, when you think about it early on, it is a fairly inexpensive type of an intervention in this way, but the ripples of it are so massive when it's done thoughtfully. And it also shows the importance of the test. Right. Because like you said, if you're just checking to say, well, we, we had, you know, 10,000 credit cards on average during this period the year before, and we had the same amount like this year. So I guess it didn't work.

Exactly.

Yeah, you got to measure the right thing.

Yeah. And I think these types of interventions, everyone's got a strong view at the beginning of what's going to happen. And then I think the result actually pleasantly surprised a lot of people. And a lot of the insight that was surfaced was only because we were able to set that experiment up the way we did. Credit to the researchers we were working with and the business teams that made it happen. But yeah, as you say, without that kind of carefully controlled test and all those measures over that time frame, it would have been easy to dismiss that or kind of just fall back to old ways of working and miss out on all those benefits both for the customer and the business. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, as we go to wrap up our conversation here, I would love to ask, you know, for people that are listening and thinking that they would be interested in doing work in the way that you do it. So this way that you've built out your team, like you said, with bringing in really top researchers early on and being able to work with them, what sort of advice do you have for people that may want to do something like that but kind of have, have no idea why and you know, how can they decide if that's a fit for them, that style of, of working relationship?

Yeah, I, I think to the way you asked the question, Melina, it's like, understand the why, like, why do you want to do it? And I, before my current role, I was working in, I actually led a behavioral science team in management consulting. And it was a great team. It was Very successful. We did lots of cool projects. But something I found hard was like the context switching between different ideas and playing that small slice in a bigger program of work. And what drew me to this role was the opportunity to have like one big puppus where I could help lots of people. And I felt like, what's an industry where you can kind of have a really positive effect on lots of people's lives? And I feel like financial services for me was the one that kind of really felt right. And I would say start with what's the big chunky problem that you're passionate about? Rather than start with I want to do behavioral science. And the Jeff Bezos thing of like, hey, why did you set up an Internet company? I didn't set up an Internet. I didn't want to be the best Internet company. I want to be the best, most customer centric company. The Internet just happened to be the thing that was going to help me do that. And I like that. And I feel like it's the same with all the AI conversation at the moment. It's like first understand, like what is the big chunky world problem that you really want to jump out of bed and solve? And then if behavioral science or other other kind of ways of doing that present themselves, that'll do lots of things that'll kind of give you a lot of that passion and motivation and energy to, to kind of sustain and want to do it for a long period of time. I think it'll get other people excited. It's also when you, when you're kind of coming to the table to solve a big problem, doors open. It's. It's when you're trying to force something onto the, onto the agenda that it's harder. So I would say start there. And then just for us, it was surround yourself with really good partners, try to kind of get other people as obsessed as you are about that problem to solve. And then as you mature, like what we're trying to do now, and I think a lot of bigger teams around the world are trying to do, is actually then build the infrastructure around the team and into the organization such that it just becomes easier and automatic to do good behavioral science work to solve those problems. And eventually, like if we can make our organizations behavioral, we can kind of design ourselves out of the, out of the role.

Yes, Right. So as more and more people understand the behavioral thing, we don't necessarily need. We see everything has to do with behavior. There's just a little bit all over the place, right?

Totally. And there's still lots to do. I think there's still lots of unclaimed benefits, people missing life saving medication, retirement savings gaps that we, we haven't solved it yet. So we still need much more behavioral science.

Yes, for sure. Well, for everyone who I know is now so excited to, you know, learn more about the work you're doing and want to connect with you and you know, all of that, you know, what are, what are their best paths to do.

So yeah, so I'm not, not huge on social media at the moment. LinkedIn is probably the one you'll find me at. You can also a lot of the stuff that I've talked about today is actually like we're pretty open about it. You'll see our studies out there. You'll see, you'll see our name on most of this stuff on our website and kind of published and elsewhere. I think you also referenced there's a case study on the team that was very kindly written up by the University of Toronto. Otherwise, just get in touch like love to hear from you and I hope that's helpful to anyone out there. Obviously. All thoughts my own, but appreciate any kind of feedback or comments. I'd love to hear other thoughts about how people are thinking about these things.

Perfect. Well, and of course we'll put the link to your LinkedIn in the show notes as well as you shared a bunch of articles and things with me. So we'll put the ones that we touched on in the conversation today. We'll share in the show notes for everybody so that can go check those out and just learn about the really great things that, that y' all are doing there in Australia and beyond.

Thanks, Melina. And a huge, huge fan of your work. Really. Thank you for having me. It's been great.

Of course, thank you. It's been super, super awesome to chat with you and just really enjoyed the time. So thank you for, for coming on the show and sharing about the great work that y' all are doing.

Thanks, Melina.

Thank you again to Will Mailer for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I love the way that Will and his team are looking at the value they bring to the bank and the way they evaluate which problems and projects to work on. You can't do everything. You'd get stretched too thin. So it's better to pick the right projects for you. But how do you know which is right? You may have the same criteria that Will and his team have used, including the project having a behavioral problem at its core, or it might be something different for you and the work that you do. The important thing is to be thoughtful about it up front. There's a concept in behavioral science known as the cold hot empathy gap. And yes, there's a hot cold gap as well. Just like it's easy to say you won't get dessert today and you know you're going to be good at dinner tonight if you don't create a plan for what you'll do when the dessert tray comes by or when everyone around you orders dessert. When you're in that hot state in the moment, it's far too easy to succumb to the will of your subconscious and order dessert just this once. The same kind of thing can happen in the moment when you're presented with a problem, opportunity or project. If you aren't careful, it can be so difficult to say no right then, especially if you don't have criteria to evaluate on that was agreed to in advance, taking the time to think it through. In the same way you might tell your dining partners that you've decided to not get dessert before you even sit at the table and ask them to be your allies or to tell the waiter if needed. Or assuming it's about calories and not cash, you could make a plan to look at the menu to see what you might have ordered and make a plan for what you can use that money for that you would enjoy, which doesn't add calories, perhaps saving up for a trip or a new laptop. With projects, it's one thing to say, yeah, we'll only do problems with the behavioral element at their core. But as we discussed today, it could be easy to explain away how something is behavioral and make a case for anything in the moment. If you haven't defined what that means to you. What is and isn't behavioral in your case? Is there a scope that's too big? A timeline that's too long or too short? A specific KPI you want to focus on this year? Make those decisions now so you can be prepared when that hot state emerges. And it will. And it can help keep you and your team on track with the cognitive bandwidth to dedicate to your most important projects that will allow your team and company to shine as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes, which include links to my top related past episodes and books, including ways to get in touch with Will and myself, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com 439 and thank you again to Will Mailer for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. 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 the Brainy business dot com.