Why do so many campaigns skip the diagnosis? Shayoni Lynn on doing the thinking first

Tony
This is Viva PR podcast.

Shayoni
I became more interested in the gap between what organisations communicate versus what people understand versus what people believe. So I thought, you know, you only live once, give it a go. If it fails, if it tanks, you know, go back in house. And I was told by many people that research doesn’t pay and clients aren’t going to invest in research. If we don’t have the confidence and the credibility to sell research, why would clients buy it?

Tony
So welcome to PR in the Real World with me, Tony Garner. In this episode we’re looking at behavioral science. It’s probably one of the most talked about but least understood areas in comms right now. But fortunately we’re joined with one of the UK’s leading voices on the subject, Shona Lynn. She’s founder of the behavioral science consultancy Lynn and she’s going to help me separate what actually works from what’s just hype. So Shayoni, thanks so much for joining us today and I know you’ve got a hugely busy schedule, so I really appreciate you time.

Shayoni
Not at all, Tony, thank you so much for having me. Really excited to have this chat.

Tony
Let’s turn the clock back to when you were at Cardiff University and what was the trigger that got you interested in behavioural science?

Shayoni
Yeah, so prior to setting up Lynn, I was in public sector communications and I was working at Cardiff University heading up their alumni relations, fundraising and strategic partnerships communications programmes. And I developed quite a data driven program at Cardiff. So I think that came from a realisation that communicators, practitioners are inherently very creative and intuitive people. But we seemed to have, and I believe we still do, a persistent weakness in kind of looking at the evidence and the evaluation side of things. So that moment in time when I fell into behavioural science, I can’t quite remember what that window was for me, but I know it was a transition that I think was meant to happen via developing a data driven program and then naturally thinking about what that meant from a human behaviors perspective.

Shayoni
I became more interested in the gap between what organisations communicate versus what people understand versus what people believe and then what do they actually do. So for me, I think behavioural science provided a much more systematic way to examine that gap. And I was very fortunate in that I had that framework set up within my programme to be able to run a series of, albeit looking back now, perhaps introductory, but experiments and different ways of evaluating effectiveness of different methods. So yeah, so that was where I got interested in behavioural science. I started using you the kind of frameworks that our colleagues would be aware of such as the east framework and Combi as a diagnostic. And I was able to see small changes leading to quite significant outcomes. And I was able to secure buy in from senior leadership to demonstrate that.

Shayoni
And if you know, a data driven program, one that’s embedded in evaluation, one that looks at human psychology and cognitive drivers of decision making, leads to much better outcomes. So I was able to create what to me seemed really attractive as a program, as a kind of evolution of my practice. And yeah, and then I, when I was looking at my next role and this is pre pandemic, I again was quite fortunate to have a profile within the industry. I was doing quite a lot of public speaking on exactly this topic. And I was approached by a lot of colleagues, necessarily not from the higher education sector, but from public health, for example, who really wanted to apply these principles to their programs. And I never thought of setting up my own business. For me, that just wasn’t front of mind.

Shayoni
But there was so much interest and it felt like an opportunity to kind of bring more people on this journey and get people to see the impact of these methods, which I had seen personally. So I thought, you know, you only live once, give it a go. If it fails, if it tanks, you know, go back in house. That is still the plan today, by the way. So yeah, and here we are, is like, yeah, 10 years on, still kind of enjoying the practice, enjoying running a robust, academically leaning communications practice.

Tony
And you saw a gap then 10 years ago. And do you think that gap still exists today?

Shayoni
I do believe that gap exists today. I think behavioural science is in the last half a decade or so, maybe a bit longer, has been seen as sexy. And I think people have kind of conflated the behavioural word with kind of sexiness and like a magic bullet, kind of ignoring the science side of it. So I feel like there’s a lot of interest in behavioural science. It’s kind of seen as, you know, the dark art of persuasion and it leads to outcomes as it does. But I feel like as an industry we aren’t as capable as we could be. And that’s because, you know, when especially in house practitioners also agency side. Right. We are so busy, there’s so many different competing priorities. I don’t believe we often invest in our own learning.

Tony
Yeah.

Shayoni
And so for me, even though I’m not academically trained behavioural science practitioner and I’m very fortunate, I keep saying the word fortunate. I’m, I, I truly, I am truly fortunate to have a lot of colleagues now within Practice who have invested in their learning and they’ve gone on to do their masters or their, you know, PhDs in behavioural science, which shows that people are investing in that side of things. I am applied. I don’t have that, you know, formal qualification in behavioural science, but I have kept abreast with the CPD side of behavioural science, and that’s possible for anyone to do because a lot of this research is very easily accessible. There’s a lot of resources out there. There’s a. And I think the behavioural science world is also a very generous world. We’re very open to sharing.

Shayoni
So if you do make those inroads, which is what I did, I was then able to keep my behavioural practice, you know, up to date. So.

Tony
Yeah, so you, you’re a strong advocate for being curious and learning and, and that you can learn enough to bring it to good, solid practice within the PR world.

Shayoni
Absolutely. I don’t think you need to be an academic behavioural scientist to use behavioural science well, because, you know, comms practitioners intuitively use a lot of the principles that is within behavioural science in practice. They just don’t quite know it. Right. So I don’t think you need a formal degree to begin developing, to begin to develop behavioural science capability. But what we do require is things like intellectual curiosity, you know, respect for evidence, understanding the limits of one’s expertise, the kind of focus and interest in diagnosing before intervening, you know, and then like a willingness to be wrong, a willingness to test your own assumptions rather than kind of be entrenched to them or believing them as fact. Because we are never our own audience.

Shayoni
And so to be able to understand how a message lands with particular audience, we must be open to testing it. And we must be open to being wrong as well, because that’s the ultimate outcome of a behavioural science method.

Tony
I mean, you. I think my next question is going to be around. You know, I’m always conscious when I’m having these conversations with experts like yourself, you know, what could we do at Viva? You know, and I’m sure our listeners often take these episodes and think, how could they improve their practice? So what’s, you know, for a small agency like ours without that kind of specialist in house? What’s a realistic starting point, you think, for us to kind of start embedding it within our practice?

Shayoni
Yeah, I think so. I don’t believe that you need to have a large team to have a behavioural approach. I certainly did it being a one person. Well, I wasn’t a one-person team I was leading and I had a team of communicators within my Cardiff University team at the time. But I think what we need to have is more for an academically rigorous mindset. So starting with not what is the campaign I can design or what is the stunt that I can, you know, develop or how do I get the, how do I land the coverage? Instead going back and saying, what is the problem I’m trying to solve, right? Who are my audiences, who am I trying to speak to, what behaviours am I trying to encourage in them?

Shayoni
You know, get them to perhaps stop doing certain things and then working off that in a segmented fashion because, you know, we’re not working to one size fits all, working through audience segments to understand, okay, so what are the barriers to them doing this behaviour is that I think we do ask that question, but we kind of stop at the informational, you know, what information do I need to provide for my audience to understand? They need to do X, Y and Z. But beyond that, what are the social barriers, what are the structural barriers? What are the cognitive, you know, decision making barriers that will stop audiences from processing messages and then working through intervention?

Shayoni
So it’s a much more reflective process, I think, you know, where we tend to go straight to solution because I think that’s how we are as people who inhabit this world. We love coming up with creative solutions. It’s kind of taking that step back and saying, what is it that I’m trying to solve? What am I trying to achieve? How will I know when I’ve succeeded? And then working through a systematic method, doing it time and time, iterating, learning, testing, and then, you know, you can do that. You don’t need a budget to be able to do that. It’s just having a mindset. And at Lynn, we have a framework called the Lynn Framework. It is a proprietary method. We’ve had the business since it was founded from 2019 and that has five stages within that process.

Shayoni
And we have rigorously applied the Lynn Framework to every engagement. And it starts with research and insight. So we 90% of the time when we work with a client, we will undertake some level of primary research. Because human behaviour is contextual. What works today may not work tomorrow. What works in Wales may not work in London. So we need to think about the real time context. So research and insights being the first phase of the Lynn Framework. Following through, we have design and development. So we take those insights from phase one, wherein we typically develop a behavioural diagnostic. So we will have A guide for our client to say, this is what you’re trying to achieve. These are the people you’re trying to speak to. These are the barriers that exist based on primary research.

Shayoni
And these are the interventions that we think will secure that outcome. Communications being one intervention, it could be policy, it could be pricing, it could be design, multiple different interventions. We take that into design, then we do all the fun stuff, which we all love doing, all the creative stuff. We then have a phase called the rapid test phase, which is our experimental phase. So at Lynn, we have Lynn labs, we have narrative labs, and we have risk labs, and we’re able to run randomised control trials with segments of that target population in very controlled spaces. So we can kind of have a better understanding of the nuance of behaviour. So, for example, and we do field tests as well. So we do run the field side of things, what we typically see as brand lift studies.

Shayoni
And we do that to kind of get ecological validity. But just because someone engages with the piece of content does not mean that they engage with it for the right reasons. And what our control trials help us to do is help us understand why people might engage with a certain piece of content. Does it get them to think of that behaviour in a positive way, in a negative way? Does it, you know, create anger, does it create outrage? All of these things, which is very important in today’s information context. And we take those RTP insights, we then refine our strategy. You know, we have been wrong on many occasions. We have come up with creative ideas that failed at testing, and that’s brilliant. We go back and we say, okay, let’s go back, let’s understand why that failed.

Shayoni
And then we activate, which is our fourth phase. And then finally we evaluate so that. So that kind of thinking, I think, is fundamental to an academically leaning program where you can kind of work, you can, you. You can talk through your process with a lot of confidence because you’ve done it so many times. There’s so much iterative learning in the process that you have that confidence to be able to apply that to any challenge and kind of have a high level of confidence that it will work.

Tony
Going back to your Cardiff days and getting excited by this, I guess we’re all excited by learning something new. But what were the kind of things that when you saw it actually work, where you went, oh, wow, that’s great, because obviously, if you’d have had failed experiments at the start, it would probably have put a roadblock in the way, and you may have gone off in a different direction.

Shayoni
Yeah, I mean, gosh, it was such a long time ago. We had, I had a very segmented data program and I had a great data team who was very. I think that interdisciplinary working is really important. So our data team was super supportive. I could go and make any ask and ask for the data to be sliced in any which way and they would be more than happy to support. So between us, we created a very strong CMS to CRM program where were able to. I think at one point we had like 48 different segments going out which. And it was deeply personalised.

Shayoni
So we applying, you know, like looking at the kind of segmentation data we already have, trying to understand what is it that is working, what is not working, slimming down on things that don’t work and then starting to do really small scale experiments of like, you know, starting with AB but then moving up. So we started with AB testing and then went into, okay, let’s try, you know, control treatment. And so we would then have four. And I remember before I left we ran this campaign and it was a, it was trying to engage with the lost alumni, which is a big. In higher education. So these are people who’ve fallen off. The CRM was a big piece of work.

Shayoni
And I still remember were stuffing, we, it was such a large scale RCT that we’d run and were stuffing envelopes with different personalisation according to different. So it was like it was an actual randomised control trial. It wasn’t online. It was. We were stuffing envelopes based on really personalised content, you know, signed off by different people across the university based on all of the data that we knew those cohorts to have demonstrated interest. Interest in. So yeah, I mean there was loads of things we did a lot of work with the fundraising team, for example.

Shayoni
So where previously they would go in based on their one to one relationship, were able to then have those conversations, we provided them the data to say, actually these segments prefer these types of content, engaging more with say cancer research as opposed to student scholarships, so they could open those conversations much more naturally and engage those philanthropists much better than they could go in blind. So I think it was like a very, in looking back at it, even though it was very rudimentary, it was still one that was interdisciplinary and it did have the buy in of senior stakeholders which helped in basically me running completely mad trials and then kind of getting them to work and then running more mad trials. So that was so much fun.

Tony
Yeah, no sounds it. I mean, I think again when we came in were saying that behavioural science is everywhere now. You know, I seem to be hearing about the time and lots of agencies talked about it. So do you think we’re getting better at it or are we just better at talking about it?

Shayoni
I think there is, there’s significant interest. I definitely agree there’s significant interest. But, you know, I always say that I think our industry is a very. What’s the, what’s the phrase I’m looking for early adopters. We are, right. We get excited about new things quite easily. So there was behavioural science, then there was misinformation, I would say. I. So we kind of are kind of, we do chase new innovation quite a lot and I think behavioural science was no different. I think the interest is then, you know, we’ve seen large employers like the UK government, for example, with the government Communication service, certainly under Alex Aiken’s remit when he was exec director of GCS, really embrace that and create interdisciplinary working teams, you know, behavioural scientists coming together with communicators, coming together with policy, you know, and creating that kind of shared learning space.

Shayoni
So I think there is interest. I think perhaps there’s stronger interest on the public sector side than perhaps the private sector side, albeit budgets are more reduced in the public sector sides. It’s a catch 22, I think people, you know, I do a lot of public speaking on both behavioural science and misinformation and I always have really good cohorts coming in to listen to me. But I worry about the follow through because I think, you know, it’s one thing to get inspired, but what do you do with that learning? How do you ensure that you start embedding certain things in practice? And as I say, I’ve got clients and I’ve got colleagues in the industry who have been in my sessions years ago and then got really excited and gone on to further study.

Shayoni
I’m speaking to someone who’s completing their PhD on us on a subject. So I think it’s nice to see that there are parts of our industry who are actively investing in their learning and better understanding of the science. But I would say overall, we’re still in our infancy in terms of where we could take our profession if were to truly embed behavioural science.

Tony
And are there kind of common mistakes or a common mistake that you hear about when in house or agency teams try to apply behavioural science without really knowing what they’re doing?

Shayoni
Certainly. I think there is often a disconnect between interpreting the evidence. So more and more public sector teams certainly have access to behavioural science teams and behavioural scientists within their discipline study communications as an intervention function. Yeah. However, their study of what communications is versus what we as strat comms practitioners would say it is there’s also a disconnect there. So I feel like we kind of sometimes don’t speak each other’s language. And so there’s a lack of interpretation and translation, which means good insight doesn’t often translate into good campaigns. I also think that, you know, in terms of mistakes, I think there’s often too much reliance on frameworks. You know, people talk a lot about, like east and, you know, Combi. I think it’s a. It should be a mindset.

Shayoni
We shouldn’t be so beholden to certain frameworks because there’s so many frameworks, by the way, those are the two that we talk about all the time, but different frameworks do different things. So kind of having a more of a reflective mindset of diagnosis first, intervention second. I think that can kind of take us out of that trap. And also by doing that, we’re giving the. The problem that we’re trying to solve more space to breathe and live and kind of really try and understand what it is instead of going straight into what is the creative. So when I say intervention, I mean, you know, creative solution. What is the creative solution that we could do? What is the stunt? I keep going back to stunts because I don’t know, I was reading Word earlier today or, you know, how could we get some cover?

Shayoni
What event should we do? You know, it’s all outputs. Right. We need to start with what is the problem we’re trying to solve? What evidence do we have to understand that problem? How connected are we to the audience that we’re speaking to? Who are the messengers our audience should be talking to and then work out? Right. Okay, now that we have that evidence, what can we design around it that would fit that brief? But I feel like we go straight into that creative thinking, brainstorming piece and research and insights gets. Becomes either it’s. The investment is not there, so there’s some kind of rudimentary desk research being passed as research, or we’re using quite old data. We’ve seen that often with clients will be like, oh, we did some research 10 years ago. The world is a very different place.

Shayoni
You know, your data is not valid anymore, I’m sorry to say. So, you know, I feel like as communicators, we need to have more confidence to step up and say, actually I can’t design a solution unless there’s investment in research, unless I’m given the time. And that investment is not always monetary. Right. It could be the investment of time, it could be the investment of resource, you know, but to kind of really be able to ask for that before designing a solution.

Tony
Yeah, I think it’s a brave approach in the sense that, you know, we live in a commercial world and you’ve got to try and, you know, win the work, but without kind of like in depth insight, you can’t create the great work. So It’s a catch 22 there, I guess. How do you find that sell of, you know, to people?

Shayoni
I think when I set up Lynn, I was quite adamant that it would be academically rigorous. And I was told by many people that research doesn’t pay and clients aren’t gonna invest in research. Well, that’s not true. I feel like we, if we don’t have the confidence and the credibility to sell research, why would clients buy it? So I feel often we don’t make a good enough pitch to get that investment. And we settle for the activation, we settle for the outputs. We’re also terrible at evaluating, let’s be honest, we’re not great at that. And so, you know, it’s both sides of the bookending of that process. You know, you’ve got to have the insights, you’ve got to have your objectives set out to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of a program and to be able to attribute the effectiveness of your intervention.

Shayoni
So, you know, and I think because I had a profile in that data driven space that when were approached by clients, they knew what they were asking for. We also, by doing so that rigorous methodology time and time again had a track record of making things work. So there was no problem that we touched that we couldn’t solve. And that’s because we had. It’s not foolproof, but quite close to being foolproof. Method, not framework, not diagnostic. A method that would deliver results or be able to find the issues with that problem that perhaps needed a different lens. So, you know, were very lucky. I don’t think looking back since 2019, maybe there’ll be a couple of clients who like repeat clients who had some extra budget somewhere and they were like, oh, could you do like a quick thing for us?

Shayoni
And we’re like, yeah, fine, because you know, we worked with you. But every single piece of work that we’ve done has had an element of research. Again, 90% have had research, 90% have had experiments. They all have had evaluation. And we are also commissioned, not just for PR and comms, but we’ve been independently commissioned for research. So the behavioural science unit within Lynn are, you know, a bunch of excellent behavioural scientists. So we have done large scale research projects for UK government and other governments, which is just standalone research. So we’ve just come in and we’ve either done research or we’ve run experiments or we’ve done evaluation. So no communications at all.

Tony
Right, well that’s fascinating. You, you talked in one of your earlier answers around the tool space and that people get hung up on what tools they should use and so on. What do you think is going on there? And, and why, why the caution around that? You’ve kind of like said that people are a bit too solution driven to.

Shayoni
Yeah, I think we live in a world of technology and we, I think we gravitate towards solutions, typically technological solutions. Because a lot of the stuff, if you think about social listening, for example, we buy or media monitoring, we buy a tool or a product. So I think it’s just by, it’s a habit that we’ve created within practice. And I’m often asked, you must have some sort of AI platform using. No, we don’t. Does that mean we don’t use AI? Of course we use AI. We use multiple large language models to create bespoke customer solutions for clients. But I feel like the lens of the tool doing the work is a rather simplistic one because fundamentally where.

Shayoni
So if you think about the growth of gen AI and what that means for employment in this country, how that’s affecting our profession going back to public relations, you know, there is a big fear in our practice around what does the growth of AI mean? You know, what does it mean for incoming future generations of practitioners? What that, what does it mean for large swords of our practice? Right. Because so much of what we can do can now be done very cheaply with Gen AI. On the flip side, if you look at the behavioral science community, they’re embracing AI. There is very little fear about AI taking away their jobs because the job lives in the head. So there’s a lot of human and loop conversations about how do we use AI effectively to make our practice more effective, more productive?

Shayoni
How can we have more creative ways of exploring problems? So that fear that we feel in the public relations world isn’t necessarily as large within the behavioral Science world. So going back to the reliance on tools, I think if we have methods, methodology and mindsets, we’re able to then kind of safeguard our practice because, you know, the kind of, the result lives in the approach, not necessarily in the tools.

Tony
Well, like that. Methodology and mindsets. I’ve made a note of that.

Shayoni
I just made it up on the fly. I’m gonna have to listen back to the podcast.

Tony
That’s, that’s, that’s a great one. I mean again, when we talked earlier, you were describing creating behaviors and protecting them as two sides of the same coin. And I’d just like to kind of understand that a little bit more about what you meant.

Shayoni
Yes, that’s a good question, Tony. So I believe that if we are given the responsibility to create certain behaviours, which is, i.e. behaviour change, which is a big part of strategic communications, then we also have a responsibility to protect those behaviours. We are currently living in an extremely, if not perhaps the most contested and volatile world. The information environment is extremely toxic. Misinformation is seen as one of the biggest short term and long term risks by the World Economic Forum three years running. So it’s a huge problem that we have which, and there is a lot of incentivisation both within the systems that support information dissemination and the actors that surround us kind of geopolitically which allows for disinformation to thrive, which is basically splintering our society and polarising our community.

Shayoni
So if we have a mandate to create certain behaviours, we mustn’t leave the conversation once that behaviour has been created. We must think of how we protect that behaviour. So for example, in Wales we ran Welsh Government’s 20mph campaign. And whilst that was a very challenging brief, it was a policy that was extremely controversial and upfell of debate. It was one of the key policies that was discussing the general elections. We were able to secure collectively with multiple partners a very speedy behaviour change. But we, you know, it’s not enough to do that. So what do we do to protect that behaviour? How do we ensure that systematic change that we’ve helped our audiences to buy into remains part of their belief systems and identities?

Shayoni
Because there’ll be a lot of forces, or you might use the term bad actors who will want to weaponise some of these behaviours because it is in their interest to do so. So I feel like we need to go. We’re talking a lot about misinformation these days, but we need to be proactive in thinking about strategies that can build resilience within our audiences to either identify manipulation techniques or to identify methods of manipulation. So they can, when they are face to face with that misinformation, they’re more prepared to deal with it. And they are not necessarily kind of being coaxed into certain geopolitical directions because it’s in the interest of some people.

Tony
That’s, there is so much in that answer. And let’s stick on that. That campaign, the Welsh government, like you said, politically toxic, you know, quite a challenge to, to kind of embrace. And obviously you talked earlier about you are not the audience, but in some ways you can, you know, you were the audience. You, you would have a natural instinctive response to that, whether you were in favour or not, for whatever reason. How do you kind of one divorce your own feeling from that? And how do you take on such a controversial campaign?

Shayoni
Good question. So I’ll take your second question first. Why do we take on controversial campaigns? We love complex challenges, which is, I feel when you have a behavioural mindset, you want as naughty, right naughty a challenge as you can get because the deeper the challenge, the more fulfilling to resolve it. So we do thrive in that space. Certainly me and my team, we embrace really tricky challenges, really, really complex issues that we’ve kind of dug into lots that I can’t talk about, but we’ve gone in and we’ve kind of fixed it in terms of how do we, how do I depart my own views? I think again, goes back to the mindset now. I was lucky in that I don’t drive, so 20 miles per hours didn’t really affect me. So I was very happy in that space.

Shayoni
But I, I, I was because I don’t drive, you know, where I can’t take public transport, I am having to take taxis, for example. And I did hear a lot of, you know, and I sit back and I listen because I think it’s really interesting instead of trying to, especially when it comes to deeply entrenched behaviours, identity entrenched behaviours like motorists. Motorists have hugely strong beliefs when it comes to their agency and you know, what they can and can’t do with their car, it is very, you know, I’m not going to convince anyone. So for me it’s more useful to hear their views and plug that back in. So I think the mindset is where we are able to kind of step back because it’s a very reflective process.

Shayoni
So naturally and instinctively, I think we look at the evidence and we will say, you know, we’ve seen, we’ve done lots of work where I’ve been convinced that it’s not an issue or the issue is something else. And the data has been, you know, clear as day, complete. And I’d be like, whoa, okay, fine, I’m gonna eat my hat because I was so wrong. Boy, was I wrong. Thank God we tested. So, you know, that I feel like that testing approach gives you that blanket of confidence because you kind of know before you activate and spend tons of money on media that you have really thoroughly run this process with the audience to know where the chinks are in the armour. And so I feel that confidence can’t necessarily be substituted when you come to just an intuitive only practice.

Tony
Interesting. And that’s another, and that’s another great phrase, the blanket of confidence. I, I got staying with the 20 mile an hour campaign. I’m interested into in understanding what you came up with in terms of like a campaign to kind of support the client on that.

Shayoni
Yeah, of course, this was with the former administration and two ministers back. So the policy itself was very ambitious. The minister who sponsored the policy, Lee Waters, was a very, you know, deeply passionate politician who really believed in doing, and I’m sure he still believes in doing really good work for civil society. So, so were selected, I believe, because we had a very counterintuitive approach to the campaign. And by that I mean it was our laid framework, which started with research, which had experimentations baked in, and of course we had a track record of success by the time were appointed. We were brought in perhaps a little too late. It would have been useful. And this is something that the former minister does talk about.

Shayoni
You know, had we been brought in earlier, we might have had more influence and how some of the decisions could have been led in terms of the communications marketing side of it. So were brought in when a lot of things were set in stone where we didn’t have from a design perspective, and I mean behavioural design perspective, a lot of influence. We’re kind of working with what we had. It was also quite toxic, that conversation. The narrative was already being weaponised and as a lot of insight has shown, which is independent of us, that a lot of that kind of stirring of sentiment was happening by people who did not live in Wales. So there was a political and, you know, a financial perhaps incentive to kind of weaponise this agenda.

Shayoni
So we came in, but we did have, we again, you know, from a design perspective. We need, it was such a, an emotive topic. You know, we needed to come up with something that could cut through that emotion, that could cut through that identity that we talked about earlier. We found a lot of pluralistic ignorance and that people felt that, you know, they are not, they don’t speed and they’re safe drivers and, you know, people. So there was a lot of like social norming things that we had to do as well. We did our research and insights, so we had deep, a very deep diagnostic with our target audience. There’s also a lot of other data points that we could join, which was great. But we did a very significant piece of primary research.

Shayoni
We then also ran our experiments so were able to secure that insight prior to activation, especially given it was so sensitive and there was so much concern around that implementation. One of the big things were tasked with, not just in delivering the campaign, was in trying to keep that policy as whole as possible. That policy, the 20 mph policy, is only effective as in terms of the magnitude of its implementation. If you kind of break that up and you kind of have, you know, fewer roads having that default, that kind of reduces the impact of the policy. So it needs breadth to be successful. So we had to kind of convince a lot of our audiences why this was important to them. And all the data showed within six months there was, you know, very high levels of behaviour change.

Shayoni
This is not data that we have run. This is data that’s been independently run by YouGov and others. You know, there was Esure, I believe that insurance company, they dropped their premiums in Wales by 20% or something like that because, you know, and I believe this is a while ago, so it might be getting my data points wrong, but I believe within the first six months, I want to say we saved the policy, saved the NHS 3.6 million pounds. And of course it was in, you know, we heard a lot anecdotally about people’s lives being safe because of the slower speed limits. So yeah, I feel like, you know, back in the day when the seat belt law came in, were all quite, you know, defiant against it.

Shayoni
But now it’s part of our identity and, you know, we don’t usually get into cars and not buckle up. And this is hopefully what’s. Hopefully this will continue to be protected as a behaviour. So in future generations this becomes the norm and we move into more active travel and public transport options as opposed to necessarily having high levels of road transport, which we know has issues around accessibility as well.

Tony
And if you were taking the lessons learned from that whole experience and talking to an in house or public sector team about working in hostile information environments like that, what would your advice be to them?

Shayoni
I think one of the, perhaps the most important lessons was that communications, sentiment and behavioural outcome are perhaps not the same thing. So I would, I mean there’s a lot of lessons learned, right? You hindsight bias. So many things we could have done differently, I’m sure. But there were certain things that we knew we couldn’t control. We knew that the policy had become toxic, politically toxic. Right. It was highly visible. We knew that actors were engaging with those narratives and trying to influence people’s decision making and thinking. But we also knew how important this would be for the people of Wales and how the change to not just people of Wales now, but also to the future generations in Wales. So were aware of the trade offs. So we having had that mindset, we prepared for it better.

Shayoni
So I think comes down to when I talk about the creation of behaviours versus the protection of behaviours, when we have that mindset, knowing where the blind spots are, we can be more prepared. So were fundamentally prepared for attack. We were briefing our ministers, were briefing our stakeholders continuously ensuring they were aware of the narratives were in circulation, the sentiment within the community, the false narratives that were perhaps influencing their thinking. And so were proactively reaching out to them to help them understand the real facts without necessarily going into fact checking and myth busting. Right. So it was a more proactive approach.

Shayoni
So when a lot of this was happening, the client team was more assured that they would, that they had everything under control because it was, you know, it can be really challenging when you’re in house and you’re having to feel so many different things. I think what I would tell public sector professionals is again, it comes down to methodology and mindset. So at Lynn, we have a, it’s a mindset, it’s an approach. We call it information resilience. And it’s about being organisationally ready, how can we build effective teams and interdisciplinary learning that can constantly be ready for attack. And that’s the lens, that’s the world we live in. We live in a world where if you’re working in health, if you’re working in climate change and sustainability, if you’re working in policing and justice, you are constantly under attack.

Shayoni
You’re constantly battling false narratives, bad actors, misinformation, disinformation, mal information, conspiracy theories. This is day in and day out and being on the back foot is not, it’s not sustainable. So how can we shift the mindset organisationally from constantly being reactive? Constantly being either, you know, and there are two parts of that reactiveness. You either respond to everything or you respond to nothing. Both have issues. So how do we move away from that mindset to being prepared and ready and resilient to be able to tackle any. Well, tackle as much as you can that comes your way. So I think that’s a good example of our organisational readiness, information resilience approach that were able to build in within the team.

Shayoni
And as we can see, it’s still we still having the policy still working in Wales and we’ll see what the new administration does, but hopefully we will continue to invest in it.

Tony
Excellent. Well, yeah, we’ll all keep our eyes on that. I’m conscious of time and unconscious. Your diary is packed. So I’ll get to my kind of final question. Let’s get the crystal ball out and look out to the future. What industry traits would you like to see change in the future when it comes to behavioural science, do you think.

Shayoni
It’s such a good question, Tony. I would like us to become more comfortable saying that we don’t have answer yet or we don’t have enough evidence to recommend an intervention. I would like us to have more confidence to do that. I think fundamentally we’re an industry that’s built around action. Like I’ve said, you know, we’re rewarded for ideas, outputs, visible activity. But sometimes the value of the most valuable contribution we can make is to pause, step back, improve the diagnosis, challenge our assumptions as well as others and recognise that communications may not even be the solution.

Shayoni
So I would like us to be comfortable in that space where we can move beyond using, or perhaps thinking of behavioural science as a set of clever tactics and start to see it more of a discipline and a science that can improve the quality of decision making through the communications process. And I think with AI as that kind of accelerates the production of content, the differentiator in terms of who kind of stays in this industry and who leaves is going to be not just our ability to create more communications, it’s going to be our ability to better understand people, better interpret evidence, make better judgments and decisions about what solution is actually needed. And that in itself is strategic advisory.

Tony
Excellent, brilliant advice. Thank you so much. Well, you heard the lady. Grab your blanket of confidence, get your methodology and your mindset in shape and get cracking. Shayoni Lynn thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute ball and certainly got me thinking. I’m sure everyone listening and watching too.

Shayoni
It’s been a pleasure. Tony, thank you for having me.

Tony
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