Why does everything cost £4,999?

Workarounds, common behaviour? Obviously ‘everything’ doesn’t actually cost £4,999. However, if you work in public services sometimes it feels like a lot of things do. It’s linked to some common behaviour you see around procurement and ‘workarounds’. The magical £4,999 figure might be something you are familiar with if there’s an organisation procurement policy with […]

How to Spot the Decoy Effect in Business Case Options Appraisals.

Coffee Choices and the Decoy Effect. Have you every bought a coffee and been ‘bedazzled’ into getting a bigger or frothier one than you’d planned? “It just seemed sooooohhh much better value to have the Maximo Grande Frothiata…”. Basically you’ve had your behaviour ‘modified’ by the retailer using a process called Decoy Pricing or the […]

Why isn’t the Retail Sector doing more ‘Nudging’ of Hand Sanitisation?

Is anyone else thinking about Behavioural Nudges and Hand Sanitisation? If you’ve ventured to the supermarket since COVID-19 you’ve probably experienced some version of the ‘Hand Sanitiser Station’. The good, the bad and the ugly. My experiences have ranged from the pathetic – empty bottles of disinfectant spray lurking behind the crisps – through to […]

Choice Architecture; how to avoid being a ‘Meeting Lemming’

This post follows the one I wrote about meetings being a virus that use human hosts to reproduce. Paul Taylor rightly questioned; ‘we know meetings are a problem, but why are we unable to do anything about them?’. Ultimately there’s something strange going on with meeting attendance; people cannot, or do not want to, change their […]