Behavioral Insights Group Career Fair 2017: Panel Two

good morning or afternoon everyone I've responded to see so many people interested in behavioral science here and I think you're in for a treat with the amazing panelists that we have the plan for our panel is for the panelists to first introduce themselves um say a little bit about who they are and their organization and then I'll ask them a few questions and then we'll open the floor do all of your questions and with that if I may just start on my left and with introductions can you guys hear me okay okay great my name is Matt Cebulski some of your faces are familiar and a lot of you are not familiar to me but before the end of the day I want to introduce myself to as many of you as I can I'm really excited to be here I am the founder and chief consultant of a company called Ionia behavioral insights we work mostly with health care we are starting to open up a little bit into finance consumer facing finance and we've done some work with education we're also working with a group out of Mumbai at the moment for educational auditing in India and happy to be here behavioral economist by training spend a lot of time in school like many of you interested in making a difference and doing something that matters with my life so I started my own firm which comes with plenty of feelings of insecurity and instability but it's been really rewarding so far we also have a voice language product that we're developing to use for managing patients in the home with chronic conditions when they're not seeing a physician which is about 5,000 hours in the year that they're not in a physician's office and we're also talking to a few banks in New York about developing that for them also so happy to be here looking forward to the conversation thank you very much thank you for joining us yes yes perfectly cool can you all hear me okay there we go hi I'm Kim Lucas I am the director of civic research for the mayor's office of new urban mechanics for the city of Boston what we do as a team or team of 12 and we are basically the mayor's Rd office so we focus on rapid prototyping we focus on piloting initiative and basically lend capacity to departments that want to do something different we learned thinking capacity and doing capacity and we are often known as the department that gets it done the Department of yes the department that actually produces things and so some of the things that you might recognize around both Boston and Cambridge that we have worked on include Boston 3-1-1 or supa benches which I know that Cambridge has a bunch of and you may have seen President Obama sitting on and so we think about our primary focus is on how people experience the city and what that means for them and so how they think and feel about the city as they move through and spatially live in it work in it play in it and just kind of hang out in it looking forward to this thank you very much hello everyone so my name is Nathan Maddox I did a masters here at Harvard like you guys so I've been in your shoes and I know what it's like to be a millennial and on the job market so I'm glad you guys are here I've started an initiative called the behavioral insights global initiative which kind of branched out from work I did with the United Nations on the achieving agenda 2030 report and some projects I started and so I've sort of built them out and been traveling a lot and putting together a number of projects on issues ranging from energy conservation recycling and waste management to health interventions and and other types of behaviors in terms of corruption and taxation and tax evasion I'm sorry and and other behaviors we might want to block off or try to replace with better behaviors so I'm really interested in behavioral change designing interesting new behavioral interventions or nudges in addition to what we already have I'm sure you guys have heard enough about default options and retirement savings I think we can do more with nudges and so I'm looking for partners and research to help me take on some big problems thank you very much Robert everyone I'm Robert Reynolds it's great to see you all here a few years ago I was on the other side of this panel as a student at HKS looking for a job - in behavioral science so today I'm an associate at ideas 42 which is a behavioral innovation lab we were started about 10 years ago as a research initiative here at Harvard a few years later we spun out to become an independent non-profit and today we have over 85 staff in Boston and New York City DC and San Francisco all working on a host of behavioral problems and our work really centers on taking insights from academic researchers like Professor Bonet and applying these two pressing problems around the world and effort to help millions of people we do this in a wide range of domains and health and environment in consumer finance in charitable giving which is the portfolio I'm currently staffed on and we have today I think about 80 active projects good to have you back Nina hi my name is Nina Mazar I have various hats on today so I'm an associate professor of marketing at the University of Toronto and there I'm the co-director of pair which is the behavioral economics and action research center we do a lot of the kinds of research and activities that you guys do actually here at Harvard I'm also the co-founder of PE works which is one of the first people economics consulting companies we're headquartered in Toronto although we are planning the most likely to offer - to open offices in the US this coming year most likely New York or San Francisco or maybe both and I was also for the last two years of being able the senior behavioural scientist on the World Bank embed team was full it was first called geni which is basically their behavioral insights team so we launched it two years ago and those and there we have a bunch of projects where we are applying naval insights to reduce poverty so I can answer all kinds of questions more from the not-for-profit as well as for the for-profit the Western world or around the globe so we'll see what kind of questions you later have fantastic well thank you all for joining us so as I said I'm irresponsible for a tea Kennedy School I co-chaired a panel and sets group together with maxpider moon who some of you will met this morning and I directed women in public policy program so lots of our work focuses on using BL insights to D bias the workplace to level the playing field for everyone independent of the demographic characteristics and just one other thing I wanted to share with you I just came back from Dubai where I co-chair a behavioural insights some council for the World Economic Forum and ideas for the two is representative or Bank is represented many a me various academics are represented and we're basically a council advising the world can reforms on many of the big themes that you just heard mention from poverty alleviation to health care to education to diversity and inclusion just to say that there's enormous demand for all of your insights out there in the world and so I'm just delighted them to see you here so thank you for coming so then let me um start with the first question I mean you've heard already from some of the panelists about the kind of work that you're all involved in but why don't you share with us maybe the most exciting project and I know it's always a hard question because everything is very exciting um but something that is particularly exciting to you and tell us a bit more about kind of you know how you get go about kind of working on the project how did it come your way how did you find it it's i'ma call you did you kind of match somebody else to worry about this and then who else was involved and just give us a bit of the nitty-gritty of the work and if I may I'm just gonna so yes about everything I'm doing Averill insights with clients is very exciting because a lot of them at I think have these aha moments when you start describing a problem away from mechanistic solutions to why do we look at this from like a human behavior emotional solution instead you know like numbers are great but getting people act as sometimes even better especially in healthcare when I was finishing my dissertation I did some research on Believe It or Not modifying a letter series and verbage and using normative cues to get patients to consider signing up for payment plans to avoid bankruptcy this had a lot of benefit to them right they could keep their homes keep their cars which kept them arguably healthier moving into a professorship at a medical school I recognized that a lot of times patients when they're not in the hospital fall back to their own devices very quickly in the home right so all of us are habit animals and moving us away from that inertia's really difficult you've all been reading and studying that for a while there's nudge --is there's default options there's everything and so when I left and start out on my own I was working on a lot of projects on chronic conditions and at the same time Amazon was coming out with this Alexa tool and so I have a colleague a contemporary a mentor senior faculty member at Carnegie Mellon who is the head of machine learning there and he and I were talking about this in relation to some of the work I've previously done and I said you know what do you think the odds would be to start creating a voice language tool to reach patients in the home something that would be iterative something that would connect them to other patients maybe that had the same disease and we could maybe develop this deploy it and see if they could get healthier faster or at least stabilize themselves he was really encouraging I think that for all of you I'm speaking to I when you get to these projects to get these ideas having a mentor a contemporary people around you that say go for it do it don't be a spectator be an agent work do a trial he he was all the way there with me in fact he got me in touch with the Amazon fund and we talked a little bit about that as well and so we're in the process of finalizing that testing it seeing how well it works if it fails miserably if people take the echo dot or echo show that show up in their home and they just play music all the time and they don't take their drugs anyway I'm hoping that some what happens but to me that's really exciting it's a new technology it's somewhat incomplete I think we're all trying to figure out how to use voice language tools I the analogy I've heard that's best for this is sea exploration you know there's this huge ocean around us we're not on the land and when we develop good tech for submarines what did we discover all kinds of things I feel the same way about the spoken word all around us you know we are familiar with using fields of data from search engines and other sources where we can just pull that data out but being able to encode that from everything that we're speaking about in the air imagine if the beginning of nine o'clock today until now we had all the words and all the sentences together and we were able to run all kinds of regressions and algorithms to figure out what's being spoken about what's important and then how to modify behavior and conversation doing the same thing with this voice language tool and droning on here but that's very exciting to me the success we might have with it the failure we might have with it so that we can redirect and go somewhere else the technology that's coming out the future of that it's going to be fantastic and to me as a person that is passionate about behavioral insights and the good it can do for people that's the most exciting thing I'm working on at the moment who some things thank you very much I just caught myself and with order effects something I'm actually very concerned about two different would have got to me not tell you very briefly about one that we're currently doing with the World Bank so there we have been approached about a financial inclusion project where it's and the goal is to get more women to have a savings account and be able to save for themselves and for the families and and what has been interesting there is I mean there is so much research already fairly rich body of research and being able finance right somebody mentioned and so it's it's it's very easy to to quickly come up with already solutions and ideas on what kind of interventions one may want to run but then we recently had a field trip to Bangladesh so a few of our associates were there for for almost two weeks and engaged in a lot of interviews and and roundtables with women in garment factories women in in urban as well as rural areas and and after gathering a lot of information what we realize is all our interventions were about trying to convince women or nads women to to open an account and save and it and we learn well maybe the biggest gain may be to go through the men because we have a society where we're we're and still go to their men or even their fathers to ask what they think of opening an account and since this is about mobile money it's also the additional issue that sometimes would not even have their own phone they share it there's sometimes just one phone also in the household so those kind of things you know you can ask people on the ground through a WebEx connection of Skype all kinds of questions but you may not realize those fine details so really being on site two weeks speaking to various women accompanying them through their day is a really important aspect whenever we do our work so this is basically the Diagnostics phase and and so after that we came back and and had a few more brainstorming sessions with our whole team and had some cool ideas and we are currently trying to now convince the relevant agencies on the Bangladesh side to to try and test a few of them in the field so it's still in the relative beginning even though this is a project that has that has been in the making for a while so that also is one of the experiences that I've been making depending on in which sector we are working sometimes a project can take a long time until you actually have the green light from all constituency is to really go ahead while when we work on a project for example would be e Works which is under for-profit which is a consulting company their thing is move extremely fast thank you very much um let's go to the other side again Kim one project so one of my biggest projects and some of you may already know this because you're working on a CDP with me as a children's savings account projects called Boston saves so the idea behind this project is to bring children's savings accounts which is a mechanism toward I would argue both college and career path making and culture building within the city and also a mechanism toward financial empowerment dual generation financial empowerment tool to the City of Boston starting with a pilot of last year it was five schools this year it's 11 schools we're learning a lot there and going out to all 72 schools that have kindergarten classrooms in two years from now it's a really exciting project I think from my perspective mostly because it's a lot of many experiments in one we have the opportunity here for a three-year pilot or in their second year of a three-year pilot right now and a lot of the questions we've asked have been around program design and now that we are in our second year they are more about program refinement I'll just give a little bit of insight into the design piece which was fun for us to do I think Nina mentioned this like going into the field and hanging out with parents who were gonna come into kindergarten when we rolled out in our first year and asking folks so let's say we give you money how would you want that dispersed what would get you to buy into this program and and what where would your ears perk up and say wait a minute can I can you get me more information about that and so here's one interesting tidbit about our program we came in thinking okay so these programs we're gonna need a lot of money to get folks in the door to get folks to like say oh this is interesting so we're gonna give everyone a hundred dollars of seed money in every account so we brought that that idea to our families and a lot of our families said wow that's amazing we'd love a hundred dollars and then we brought it to our families in a different question and they said actually fifty dollars would be enough and in fact could you use the other fifty dollars for something else to get us to do something else and maybe what that could be is XYZ that helped us really design out this program so that they're not just engaged in the beginning part of the information getting part of the program but also in the doing parts of the program that we're asking them to do that are heavier lift and so now we've been able to leverage as government tends to do leverage funds that we don't that we barely have to kind of make them stretch right and all because our families informed us that we could do that that that would make sense for them and we actually see that bearing out in our first and second year that actually that is enough and actually for the kind of other things that we're asking them to do that are a little bit heavier those other incentives play a better a bigger role in getting them to do those pieces of of the process so that's fun and there's tons of other fun things that we do like thinking about using leveraging technology as a means of building trust in government figuring out what that looks like and how that feels and all the way out to working with schools right so schools are our other partner aside from families so thinking about that so I like this project because it offers so many different ways of thinking and questioning and potentially answering those questions thank you Robert so I'm on our charitable giving team and all of our work is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and on the point of where do our projects come from sometimes we do our own business development and we'll go and find organizations to run charitable giving experiments with and other times the Gates Foundation will connect us to the businesses nonprofits who else other foundations we can run experiments with and so one of my current probably tell you about a bit about one of my projects so let's imagine viewer the charitable giver who were trying to nudge and let's say you've graduated from Harvard and you decide you're going to become a writer you have a very steady income for a number of years and then you release what becomes a best-selling book and so your income skyrockets for one year and then you talked with your tax advisor and they tell you you should give say a million dollars to charity this year this is the optimal amount we should give and given your tax situation and so you have basically two choices you can give that million dollars away this year and get that tax write-off now or you can use something that's called a donor advised fund where you send that million dollars away to this phones out there convened you get the tax write-off immediately you don't actually have to distribute that money to charity and tell time in the future and so one of my current projects is with a large donor-advised fund and working with them we've come to realize that there's a lot of people who park a bunch of money and these accounts would then take a really long time to distribute it out to charities and once the money is put in an account there's absolutely nothing you can do with it are they gonna give it to charity so people have the intention to give it away they're just failing to follow through on these actions and let's imagine again you're this writer you're busy working on another project and you just this money might be out of sight out of mind so we're developing a package of nudges to help people who have been advised funds better accomplish their incredible giving goals and hopefully be more generous in the near term so that's one project I'm really excited about that's great thank you Nathan yeah so I have to go last so these are all awesome projects but uh let's see if I can outdo them in some way so I've been traveling like a crazy person so I've been to like 14 countries and 20 cities in the last like five six months which is pretty awesome it's free also pretentious so I try to make the best of it and I got an opportunity to go to Montenegro with the United Nations to advise and give a bunch of talks to local country office UN representatives so that's people from the United Nations Development Programme UNICEF who I didn't really know what to expect I've never done anything like this before so I went spent about a week there in a very small city called Port khortytsia which is which was interesting by yourself but the cool thing about that was I got kind of pulled into all kinds of conversations that I wouldn't have gotten pulled into in a bigger city and so there were many different representatives from many organizations in the room listening to the different talks on behavioral economics or public policy or what behavioral sciences and after one of the talks the Regional Director of the World Health Organization made a point to like meet with me I think we should just talk for five minutes five minutes okay cool you know how that works out it's not it's like okay why not and so that that turned into a really cool project on we're working on a study in Eastern Europe with students who start smoking so there they give a global survey on youth substance use and abuse for thirteen to fifteen year olds and about half of students that age have tried tobacco or any type of substance and ten percent consistently use tobacco so there's a lot of interesting data on the fact that students want to quit it so even don't people write this is this is like really young thirteen fifteen year olds starting smoking who's who have started smoking and so we're running a study to help them think about what other behaviors students might want to engage in over the weekend instead of hanging out with the friends and smoking and drinking because there's probably a conformity of social norms effect going on so we're running a an open-ended planning task and a meditation task in health courses on Fridays in some schools to get students to think about what they would like to do over the weekend by writing out a list of all the activities they would really enjoy doing if they could do anything so it's somewhat hypothetical then also now what will you do with your weekend and so we hope in the intervention condition so the treatment condition that has these various types of open-ended exercises those students will think more about these different activities and then the follow-up study should show that these students have actually engaged in other activities over the weekend so this kind of a creative solution to think about how we can stop students from smoking giving that about eighty eighty percent of them think that others so this is interesting eighty percent of them think that they could stop smoking at any time yet they think in general people only about it so sorry twenty percent of them think that it's it's really unlikely that anyone could smoke only sorry I flipped that so they really think so many statistics okay they really think that it's that they can stop smoking but it's really hard for everyone else to stop smoking and so that's interesting so that's what we're trying to thank you um I mean I think we're already hearing some themes emerge here from all of the speakers I mean one that you might think less about because I imagine many of you think about BL economics as a bit more quantitative and running experiments and doing data analysis which is definitely obviously the core of our business in many ways but there's a lot of qualitative work that goes into this as well and really being in the field I mean all of you have alluded to that understanding what's going on what are people's concerns and what is the best entry point is it man is it women you know what leverage do we have and then again a second thing of course is real insights that you do have a toolbox I mean as behavioral designers as I sometimes refer to us we do come with a particular toolbox so we're listening to what's happening but just there are not that you know not that many although they're not that few but dozens maybe of some principles that we use and then apply to kind of the problem that we're trying to fix and that might be plan making or that might be kind of norming of people's behaviors and contracting some of their and overconfidence for example as we just heard now but I do think that's an important message that it allows you to really get close to your clients in most all cases and work in the field and really understand an organization that that's charitable organization or a town or a city or school or kids and better but let me ask the panelists one more question before we open to the floor and that is now kind of maybe focusing a bit more on all of you what do you look for in somebody who might be applying to a job at your respective organizations and Kim maybe I can start with you women kind of dad what does the city young kind of look for that's a great question I had this question earlier which was you know what is the background of your team members we have 12 people on our team we have a mechanical engineer we have a film maker I'm trained as an academic we have a former high school teacher so there's not one set of skill or background that we look for on our team what we look for is natural curiosity if your first inclination when you're presented with a problem your gut inclination is to just ask more questions about it that's one of the key things that we think about the other is I think the biggest other thing is really like just an openness to other ways of thinking right so if our filmmaker and me and maybe our you know high school teacher were to tackle a problem we would do it using tools from different toolboxes and none of them are the FEL way but maybe all of them together create a better way and so the ability to hear your teammates but also to hear your project partners which we have many is kind of a necessity to be on our team interesting ruff so we're looking for two main things in our candidates first people who are mission aligned and aren't dedicated to making the world a better place we are a non-profit and so that's what we were all about and people who have a track record of academic excellence we do have lots of MPPs like myself but we're open to any sort of academic background we have people who just have bachelor's degrees people have master's degrees people with PhDs but we're we're very open-minded and so I when I was at HKS I focused on behavioral science and that's what I've learned here is probably 5 to 15 percent of what I use day to day at work and most of what I use is what I learned on the job through the training that I got out ideas 42 and so what's most important is just a background or demonstrated academic excellence thank you I would say that I will be looking for someone who's bold outgoing social and scrappy but also someone who understands that projects are really flexible and they're all different and so in terms of like many of these April insights jobs some of them are part-time full-time the full time jobs kind of hide the fact of like how many projects might get packed into that time so that's something I learned working at HBS some projects could take three weeks some could take six months some take four years so knowing kind of to communicate and where to draw the line and what behavioral science it doesn't do are very important things Thank You Nina I think about the what aside from the academic excellence I I agree there is that the person also has a curiosity and is willing to travel and and it also knows how to how to speak to different entities as in different across different cultures you know a bit of a sensitivity of how to converse with different people I think that that especially when it comes to the world bank is its key it's it's important when you're on a mission but also multi-national diverse cities on this planet but then I came to the World Bank and headquarter so I think that that is very key if you're not willing to travel and and yeah if you have difficulties speaking it may not be the best then for you and unless you are more interested in quantitative work because there are also people that are much more involved in the evaluation side project so it's usually not the same people that go into Mission think about the design and and make sure that the implementation is done in the right way then gets that data and evaluation and also beforehand things about what kind of power do we need to be able to say something in the end so if you have well those kind of interests and we definitely also need that's kind of talent when it comes to be it works so at the moment we are looking primarily for graduate students that in addition to be able in science have some kind of other expertise ideally with a psychology angle but that is just at the moment but I have seen that when we are opening the offices here in the US next year Business School background but I think that's the qualities that have been mentioned here before I mean curiosity excitement and I think this that is key because when I have an interview with you and and you don't seem to be super excited it's just will be very hard to thank you Matt yeah so three things that come to mind and going last my guess is I'm last year it gives me some advantages so I'll try to keep it succinct so I heard from a somebody one time a phrase that really liked that sticks with me I say this all of you because I look in this room and I know some of you and I understand also the marquee where we're sitting you are all as what I would call academic heavyweights you are a force to be reckoned with in the ring so to speak now this phrase goes like that's great so the phrase is this success is often born out of arrogance but greatness comes from humility I know were you all are coming from I appreciate the fact that you have curiosity but along with that you're willing to say hey I'm wrong here you don't have to force your way through to be right in something you can guide other people especially other people who haven't had the fortunes you had to be trained in discourse and their literature you've got to guide them towards answers that are really useful because you know they are but you don't have to be so ugly to them about or arrogant or what-have-you I don't like that despise that a lot of I live in Alabama unfortunately it's in the news a lot lately but there is a really strange culture there that can be difficult which I don't really really like which is this idea of that you're not good enough because of X wires here that you're you're lesser than me and so I have power over you that's the silly and that's not really the American Way the other thing that I would like to say is successful people and people I want to work with have three qualities they're persistent okay I think all of you probably cover that here they have a sense of insecurity and they're kind comes with humility but also comes with this idea that someone's gonna find you out like how did I get in here and how am I sitting with all these brilliant people and you know I'm sitting up here listening to all these other people in like man that got I really have it together you know at the same time you forget you're sitting with them but like you're all sitting here with us the third quality is a sense that your life is supposed to be exceptional and you want to do something that matters and something that has substance to the world I mean you're gonna be gone one day and is the world gonna speak your name at your funeral are they going to still remember you when you're gone because you did something for them and the last thing I'll say is about ionia I was really fortunate being also from Alabama and going to University of Alabama to be in touch frequently with EO Wilson who is a Nobel prize-winning scientists if you don't know yo Wilson that I suggest trying to read some of his work and I took him to lunch one day and he wanted to get ribs because he likes the idea of humans eating meat for whatever reason and so we were there and we were talking about one of his books that he'd written called Concilium and there's a phrase in that book that talks about the Ionian Revolution the Ionians were these Grievous Greek warrior States and they were known for their dog and scholarly work and their persistence and their warrior nature and I after that talk and if you ever sit with someone who's accomplished a lot and been commended and they're kind of like larger than life these these the words kind of earned just emblazoned in your brain and I remember driving home after dropping him off and thinking to myself if I ever started a company one day I'm gonna name it I own you know because I am an Ionian I take these ideas that are seemingly disparate and try to apply them to problems that other people don't and I also want to be with people who are okay doing that and come and uncomfortably uncomfortable doing that and to meet behavioral economics and behavioral insights is exactly that it's applying faculties of knowledge and information into a synthesis that comes out with solutions that really surprised people so those are those are my things I want you to be human humble and persistent and secure a feeling of exceptionality and open to taking ideas from various places and coming up with answers well thank you very much for does some deep parts of wisdom from all of you and on that note well we're opening the floor so please any questions that comments that you have for anyone on the panel and we do have a mic just a question right there in the back hi some curious we've had multiple nonprofit organizations here and throughout the day a lot of research shows that the most important work is not always the and often is specifically not the easiest to get funded so how is it with that or even for profit how do you navigate both providing value and not even necessarily providing value getting funded however that is with also doing the work that you think is most important being the experts that others might not be quick to fund typically what I find is as things start to grow and the ball keeps rolling it's harder and harder to do what I started out doing which is the actual work of behavioral insights and applying that to problems there are lots of administrative things you've got to worry about you've got to get funding what I have found is been surprising is the ideas and the applications that you show to particularly you know potential capital funding they're really open to it very excited about in fact to the point where you have to say I needed some time to consider your your offer here before I come to you I've also had some really interesting experiences with people that are investors trying to explain to them what it is exactly we are doing and why does it matter but I think that's the really short version to answer where you're coming from is it gets harder and harder and farther and farther away from me and so getting people with me who also know that topic and positive anyone else or maybe I can ask that kind of an a thought here from a larger NGO and that is Harvard but but more specifically at the Kennedy School I mean I served us the academic dean here for a number of years since I was also been involved in fundraising and the Kennedy School is kind of interesting as compared to some other schools at Harvard in that most of our donors are mission driven so they care about the topic and they want to fix a problem and it has traditionally and I think that's probably true more generally for our community not been very easy to fundraise for behavioral insights so for tools and you know think econometrics or you know psychometrics or again table insights it's not true that there are no founders we do have some funders who specifically think that's a really cool tool and something that we haven't used enough but mostly it is people who care about health or about education you know or about poverty alleviation and then more generally about you know poverty alleviation in Alabama or you know education in in Boston and I think that is important to keep in mind in particular if you want to go in to get behavioral applications that most offenders come through caring about topic so you have to meet them there and then you have to hopefully convince them that you have a tool to offer that is different from information sharing or from incentives a regulation that has been kind of underused and might be worth evaluating and that you also have an approach that allows funders and that often really resonates to learn about how impactful it is and whatever they're doing and I think that is another big selling point of our approach that we are all very keen on causality and understanding what works is what doesn't work and we are very keen on measuring and many donors you know share that share that of course and other questions hi so my question is like I work for inter-american Development Bank as and I find like us it's like a constant problem like the reluctance of governments or citizens to share information and my question is for Kim because like I was thinking about what you were talking about about you're elaborating on technology to generate trust in governments so I wanted to know your insights or how do you work with that okay so that particular reference is about for Boston saves we have a technology tool where most children's savings account programs are created you have one financial partner that financial partner has technology which then forces people families students whoever is using it to use that Bank and that technology so it basically requires you essentially as government you're saying if you want to participate in this program you must go through these channels what we learned when we asked in the field we asked folks where do you think what do you want how do you do this and we learned that everybody thinks everyone everyone is familiar or unfamiliar with different kinds of products I have 29 what is that I don't even have a savings account what is that so instead of using one partner and one specific technology we went and found a technology piece that let us use lots of partners if you've ever used mint or venmo or PayPal that technology exists so let's use it for this let's trust people in that they know where they are they know what they're familiar with they know what they prefer and we have a hope that we will help them get to that savings product that is expect then like blow out their savings but they're not there yet and we have to meet them where they are so by employing this and making that very concerted choice right we are essentially saying to people we're not going to tell you how to do this but we're going to provide you the tools to help you along the way which then invites lots of other questions right what are those tools that we now need to provide so now we're government not as paternalistic going and telling you what to do but government has support and that as a citizen as a resident doesn't that make you feel better about government you trust us maybe a little especially if you come from a place where you would not want to trust your government including here and so I think that's an important thing and Trust is built on relationships and someone has to extend the olive branch first of the olive branch first and so could that not be us thank you more questions yes right here in the first row and then and am i electing decides thanks so much fantastic I find as a new person interested in behavioural insights framing the topic to non-experts is something I certainly struggle with tell my boss I'm interested in this area and their eyes glaze over and I don't want to just say have you read nudge so wondering how you frame this to whatever your particular audience is or to a broader audience about the power of behavioral economics to solve a wide array of topics try it go ahead okay it's all started so I usually frame it as a sort of data science data collection endeavor because a lot of what we do is creating data so with surveys or whatever other methodology you're using they're essentially offering them free data that didn't exist before and then you can kind of say well we need to now connect it right with whatever you have before to build like relational databases or get into database management whatever they need and it's a way to achieve your goals while still making it increasingly relevant and most companies that most people great I think we have three more questions and why don't we collect them so we'll ask all three questions and I would ask the panelists to just take notes and then choose the one that you'd like to answer so we'll start back there sure so thanks this is great um a couple of you spoke about projects in developing countries and I guess my question is what do you guys feel about how much this field has advanced in developing countries and whether there's a difference in the way governments in say India Latin America or Africa or frawls has some of these interventions these are very intervention in the I'm curious to know your thoughts on the validity of behavioural insights across different countries cultures and contexts like is there a boundary to a notch in terms of its scalability if the insight that you get from one culture does not apply to the other culture what are the implications of scaling for that thank you for sharing all those amazing projects what I am wondering is as you work on those projects how do you ensure that these are not just exciting projects you write up a report and you move on how do you ensure that your clients actually also implement out in the long run okay thank you very much so we have a question about low-income countries we have a question about scalability across cultures countries and contexts and can your final question about implementation the floor is all yours who would like to talk about the first question on low-income countries yes I'll say this maybe two sentences so it's interesting a lot of the questions are about its if anything you can find like ways to create an intervention or collect data that's immediately relevant so I see advances becoming more more constant context specific cash transfers or various types of financial technologies or anyone else or else and a question tool on there scalability your cross-cultural learning and that's a really big challenge and it's an important one so I the question is if actually so we run an experiment in Nigeria in two different states and you would assume that there are differences between those states and we captured them we know what those differences are based on some surveys that the World Bank is doing on a regular basis but again it's the same country we did the same we did exactly the same intervention through the exact same people on the ground yet in one state it was wonderfully the other state it didn't work at all and we don't really know why because we have all these other measures for the differences between the two states and we ran a regression we control for them we look at interactions none of them explains the difference in the effect and interventions of UK UK and whenever you read about the UK insensitive Tex experiment it's a lot about social norms how wonderful worked it didn't work at all important and again measures to see what could it be but we don't really have a good explanation because I to now find out what's going on but I think that's part of of behavioral science much of it is context dependent and then that's what we teach so often and at the same time I think it's important that we have those experience from the practice because then we can take it back as a academics for example and try to come up with ideas of how we can learn more about what are the boundaries what are the certain contextual factors that make an effective so and this is where I see the very nice dialog between the applied world and the academic world thank you very much and the last question was about implementation how do you make sure that whatever our good ideas are I can touch base on this so as I said before all of our charitable getting work at ideas 42 is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation part of an initiative called giving by all and so we're just one of many organizations who are funded through them and all the different organizations who've received grants from the Gates Foundation are talking to each other and listening and hearing what seems to be working in one shouldn't giving organization what doesn't seem to be working elsewhere and so when something does work or part of an ecosystem where there's a readily available group of people who can scale this it does make sense I can speak on this too with a lot of my work in health care for sustainability of effect I this stuff ad nauseam to the workers there and the administrators there with every hospital system we work with I write weekly digests them about a topic in behavioral economics behavioral insights I speak at management meetings and director meetings we talk about the effect we did a study in an O War and this made our operating room so for some of you in here who might think that healthcare is like this Halcyon and perfection or something it's definitely not there are were surgeons who are not doing a standard safety measure which is a call to timeout and anyone familiar with a timeout right so you stopped the surgery before you cut on anything and you say that everyone did we have this person asleep give them antibiotics are we cutting off or cutting into the right place and we had something like 50% of these surgeons were not doing that which and they almost had they almost actually put a full sip on the wrong hip on one patient and so it was a big deal so we did an intervention using behavioural insights and I can talk to you privately about that after we had great results you know to 100% of course and then afterwards we stopped the intervention for 30 days and then we measured again and we were still at 100% but at that time everyone was kept talking about what that what had happened and how he had she made that change and with the things we instituted they kept doing on their own but I don't think that happens unless you figure out a way to evangelize it really well because you're talking about doing things little bit differently so that's been a useful tool for me for sustaining a change please join me in thanking the panelists [Applause] [Music]

Channel: HarvardCPL

Views: 421

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: leadership, cpl, harvard, kennedy school, government, Behavioral Insights, Harvard BIG, Behavioral Insights Group, Behavioral Science, ideas42, World Bank, Boston City Urban Mechanics, University of Toronto, BEAR

Id: v4lTmgcubfg

Length: 54min 55sec (3295 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018