The three-day ‘Behavioural Science in Practice’ executive education programme, which CogCo runs with Warwick Business School at their London campus in The Shard, is entering its eighth year this November.
Back in 2018, most of the participants were looking for an overview of behavioural science theory. But it is increasingly apparent that participants are now signing up for Behavioural Science in Practice with the aim of using the learnings from the course to address specific challenges that they want to tackle.
So we thought we would share some examples of the kinds of challenges that participants are coming with, and the kind of roles that they typically occupy within their own organisations. They include:
1) Executive Directors of large organisations, who want to increase the engagement of their employees, including around their organisations’ values and culture. This is especially relevant for any organisation that is going through a period of change - such as a merger or acquisition, or a change in strategic direction.
2) Marketing Directors of companies who want to learn new tools and techniques for encouraging their customers to engage in content and take action. These individuals are often also interested in finding out how to test these insights in practice, in order to find out what methods are most effective (and which don’t seem to be working quite so well).
3) Heads of Products, who want to encourage the users to engage more with their products and adopt new behaviours that drive retention and growth. These participants are often interested in the overlap between behavioural insights and design-driven methodologies, such as usability testing, and how they can be combined.
4) HR Professionals who want to improve employee engagement. Often these participants are also interested in very practical questions, such as how to encourage employees to respond to staff surveys or how to start using a new performance development framework.
5) Operations Managers or Directors, who are looking for new ways to encourage their staff to follow new procedures. We are finding that there is a particular interest in industries such as financial services or pharmaceuticals, where compliance is lower than it needs to be with certain requirements they might have to ensure everyone is up to speed with (e.g. mandatory training courses).
6) Research and Insights professionals, who want learn new methodologies for understanding their customers, users or employees. This might include, for example, how to understand what’s stopping an individual from engaging in a particular action (i.e. the behavioural barriers); or methods for running a randomised trial to measure the efficacy of a new campaign before it is fully rolled out.
What unites all these different types of participants is the recognition that behavioural science might help to provide them with a set of additional tools that they can bring back to their workplaces. They have moved from asking ‘what is behavioural science?’ to asking ‘how can behavioural solve my specific problem?’
So if you are interested in using insights from behavioural science to tackle a challenge you are currently grappling with, feel free to:
- Join Ed, CogCo's MD, one of the creators of Behavioural Science in Practice and a Course Director,for a 'Lightening Talk'
- Sign up to the next sitting of Behavioural Science in Practice and we will see you there!
