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What’s the most fundamental life skill that doesn't get formally taught?

Behaviour.

Would you like to change that?

In a few hours I'm taking to the stage at IntuitMailchimp's From Here: To There sold-out conference, sharing ideas with 400 marketers in how to solve the Click Conundrum. 

Last week I spoke to around 60 web and user experience designers in an ASX 50 insurance company.

A few weeks before that I spoke with a sales and marketing leadership team from one of...

Humans like knowing 2 things:

• What will happen. 
• Why it happened.

Both stem from control. We want to make sense of our world so it doesn’t seem chaotic.

In your business you will wonder:

• What will happen when we send this email out? Release this product? Raise my prices?

And later:

• Why didn’t people open our emails? Buy our products? Pay our prices?

Meanwhile, your customers will be thinking:

• What will happen when I click that button? Take that product...

After Stonehenge, the Roman Baths in Bath is the UK’s second most popular tourist attraction. Making a wish was big business for the Baths, with visitors throwing more than $170,000 worth of coins into the pool annually.

When coins were banned, that all changed.

From March 2022, visitors have instead been asked to make a contactless payment or put money in a cash box.

But most chose not to. Only $4,500 was donated last year.

Now, there are clear reasons why banning coins was...

When an indoor plant is struggling, our instinct is to give it more water.

But that can drown the plant, making it worse.

Some managers are like this, and far too many sales people.

They can tell the person they are engaging with is struggling, but they keep talking anyway.

They share more advice or more information, which only adds to overwhelm.

Overwhelm is one of three core issues when you are trying to influence behaviour, along with Apathy (I can’t be bothered) and Anxiety...

The easiest way to endure an ice bath is to stay still.

A thermal layer forms, protecting you from the cold.

But the lack of movement becomes a problem the longer you stay in because you aren’t circulating blood as well to your extremities.

In business we might feel fine in our thermal layer. Comfortable even.

  But this is a long game. You’ve got to keep moving.

To disrupt the status quo and keep your business moving, see how to influence action.

Change management isn’t really about behaviour.

Back when I worked in corporate, we'd have rounds of Change Management.

Yes, that's Change Management with a capital C and M.

Because Change Management was a program of work. A process to shepherd the workforce from one system to another. This could be new software, new policies or a new management methodology.

That means it's about changing behaviour, right?

We participated in hours of briefings and brain storms to ensure we were engaged,...

Note: This article was written before the referendum was held. It has now been updated to acknowledge the referendum was resoundingly beaten, with 61% of Australians voting No and 39% Yes. 

In business we spend a lot of time chasing ‘yes’.

Yes to buying from us. Yes to renewing. Yes to choosing us as their employer.

So it’s through this lens that I want to analyse the campaign for and against a Voice to Parliament. Behavioural science suggests that one side of the...

I often talk about the need to minimise effort if we want behaviour to happen. The easier something is to do, the smaller the payoff for bothering needs to be.

But.

Sometimes we need to do hard things. We want to do hard things.

There’s the thrill of riding a roller coaster, the relief of passing exams and the satisfaction of climbing a mountain. The adrenaline of presenting your ideas to a crowded room.

In these cases, making the hard thing easy would negate its worth. 

No...

Imagine you have a shop on the high street that is opposite a pub.

When you get to work in the morning the distinctly unpleasant stench of urine is there to greet you and your customers. Yuck!

You decide enough is enough, creating a sign like you spotted in San Francisco.

Here you are using the fear of public shaming to stop people peeing — threatening to post footage to YouTube so the pee-perpetrator will be embarrassed. 

Your neighbour, Jill, is also sick of the pee and...

There are three stages of using behavioural economics. In this video behavioural expert Bri Williams explains the one thing successful businesses do differently, how to move through each stage, and what to do at the critical juncture where you'll either succeed or fail.

We talk about different stages of grief and different stages of learning. Well in my experience, there are different stages of behavioural economics, too.

By the end of this video you’ll know the one thing...