Behave yourself

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Behavioural economics and its application to marketing strategy is ubiquitous these days. It’s rare to hear a discussion on consumer decision-making that doesn’t refer to System 1 and 2 thinking, and how its related biases can be manipulated to encourage people to act in certain ways.

But management consultant and executive coach Caroline Webb thinks we can – and should – look beyond applying this thinking only to other people, and use its primes and nudges to affect our own working behaviour positively.

Throughout her career – she trained as an economist but has spent 15 years at McKinsey and her own firm – Webb’s focus has been on working with CEOs and senior teams to help them “shift their behaviour, raise their game and be at their best more of the time”. But she believes the same approach is applicable to people of all ages, roles and levels of seniority.

Using her science-based approach to “engage people to think about personal change and where the opportunities might be”, Webb has written a book, How to Have a Good Day: Think Bigger, Feel Better and Transform your Working Life. It introduces the ‘science essentials’ of the two-system brain, the discover-defend axis, and the mind-body loop.

The book also introduces a series of building blocks, to be used in any sequence by people to nudge themselves towards better, more effective working behaviour. These blocks were identified through Webb’s experience at McKinsey.

“Part of the diagnostic phase of a project to help organisations shift culture in a positive direction was to interview a bunch of people,” she says. “I always used to ask: ‘What’s a good day for you?’ Then: ‘What’s a bad day? And what will give you more good days?’

“I used the answers given over 15 years to come up with the seven building blocks in the book.”

The areas covered by the blocks are: priorities, productivity, relationships, thinking, influence, resilience and energy. Webb says she uses all of the techniques she describes in her daily life, and she believes most market researchers are well placed to take advantage of the techniques, given their awareness and understanding of the two-system brain.

“If you already know about anchoring and priming – and all the other fun things that are out there as nudges – then it just shortcuts some of the explanation and makes it a bit quicker and easier for you to imagine how you might turn this around,” she says. “You already understand how permeable people are to influence.“

If you don’t have time to read her book, however, Webb identifies one key element of behaviour that can make an immediate difference.

“If you do nothing else, be more deliberate in deciding what matters to you and what you want to notice as you go into important parts of your day,” she says. “Because we have selective attention, we’re always experiencing an edited, partial version of reality. Whatever is top of mind for us will determine, to some extent, what we notice.

“It’s very rare to really confront the fact that you have this very partial, personalised, subjective view of reality. But it is definitely the most powerful thing you can do.”

Caroline Webb is CEO at Sevenshift, senior adviser to McKinsey, and author of How to Have a Good Day: Think Bigger, Feel Better and Transform your Working Life, published by Macmillan