Human Risk with Christian Hunt

Rob Bell:
This time, we've selected the sketch entitled Human Risk.

Christian Hunt:
One of the things I find fascinating about the term human risk is that people read lots of things into it.

And the definition I have is this risk of people doing things they shouldn't or not doing things they should.

I want to capture everything from, I was a bit knackered and I messed up, through to I'm intentionally setting out to commit fraud.

Jono Hey:
I lived a long time in the States, and you're not supposed to cross where there isn't a crossing.

But in the UK, that's just not really a thing.

Sometimes if you're walking along the road and you're like, the crossing is way up there, you're really tempted to just cross.

Tom Pellereau:
We have to have quite a lot of legal information just in case someone deliberately misuses our product and then sues us because, oh, you didn't say that I couldn't use this to, you know, clean my children's teeth, and now they've got teeth that don't work.

You know, that's the thing too.

Every year, I have to make them.

Rob Bell:
Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations, The Podcast.

This week, we start with a quiz round.

I'm Rob Bell, your host, and joining us tonight, contestant one, what's your name and where you're from?

Jono Hey:
I'm Jono Hey, I'm from Twickenham.

Rob Bell:
Lovely, and contestant two, who are you and where are you?

Tom Pellereau:
I'm Tom Pellereau, I'm from the planet Earth.

Rob Bell:
Welcome to you both.

Now, this quiz is all about general knowledge and staying cool under pressure.

It's shamelessly stolen from Richard Osmond's hit BBC daytime quiz show House of Games, and it's called Answer Smash.

So, I'll give you a clue, and in that clue, there'll be two names of things or people.

Okay, and you need to take the end of the first answer and blend it or smash it into the beginning of the second answer.

I'll give you an example.

What do you get when you cross an infamous British Winter Olympic Ski Jumper with the 1975 bestseller Jack Higgins' novel set in World War II?

Tom Pellereau:
So, it's Eddie the Eagle and Eagle...

Ah, what's the second one?

Jono Hey:
I don't know the novel.

Rob Bell:
The Eagle has landed.

Tom Pellereau:
Ah, the Eagle has landed.

Rob Bell:
So, the answer is, Eddie the Eagle has landed.

Jono Hey:
Brilliant.

Got it.

Tom Pellereau:
Okay, so it's not the first letter or the last letter.

Rob Bell:
No, no.

Tom Pellereau:
It's the second word.

Rob Bell:
You have to say, you basically have to say all of the first answer and all of the second answer, but you have to smash them together.

So if you'd said, Eddie the Eagle, the Eagle has landed.

That's wrong.

Eddie the Eagle has landed.

Jono Hey:
Clever, clever.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

That's Richard Osman's clever.

Right.

We've got three questions.

Let's go.

Number one, what do you get when you cross a prehistoric cartoon character whose best friend is called Barney, with one of England's most famous landmarks?

Which stands?

Tom Pellereau:
Oh, landmarks?

Oh, hang on.

Rob Bell:
He's jumped in.

Tom Pellereau:
No.

Okay.

Landmarks.

Rob Bell:
I might have to buzz you out for five seconds.

Tom Pellereau:
Freddie Flintstone's...

Rob Bell:
What do you get when you cross?

Tom Pellereau:
Flintstone's Eng.

Christian Hunt:
That's good.

That's good.

Rob Bell:
Which stands in Wiltshire and thought to have been constructed between 3000 and 2000 BC?

Tommy, what is the answer?

Tom Pellereau:
Freddie Flintstone's Eng.

Rob Bell:
Fred Flintstone's Eng.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
Very clever.

Tom Pellereau:
I almost managed to get Freddie Flintoff in there as well.

Rob Bell:
I can see where you're going.

All right.

Here we go.

Let's see how you do with number two.

What do you get when you cross a Winter Olympic team sport played with a puck with a Rolling Stones guitarist, a Winter Olympic team sport played with a puck with a Rolling Stones guitarist?

Tom Pellereau:
Ice hockey Keith Richards.

Rob Bell:
So the answer is?

Jono Hey:
Ice hockey Keith Richards?

Rob Bell:
Ice hockey Keith Richards.

Jono Hey:
Ice hockey Keith Richards.

Right.

Very clever.

Rob Bell:
Come on.

Last one.

You're going to get this one.

Ready?

What do you get when you cross the name for the level below which the ground is saturated with water, with South Africa's most famous natural landmark?

Jono Hey:
The water level Table Mountain?

Rob Bell:
Or the water Table Mountain?

Jono Hey:
The water Table Mountain.

I need a bit of practice at these.

Rob Bell:
So if, I don't think we did this.

If you guys and I had partaken, I'd partaken in a quiz like this.

Part Aiken.

Jono Hey:
I can't concentrate anymore.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, my brain's screwed now.

Jono Hey:
It's all smushed together.

Rob Bell:
But if we'd done quizzes like this during the pandemic, which I'm sure you all did with your families at some point.

About the Haves did.

This was my round of choice.

I always came in with the old answer smash.

Christian Hunt:
I think you do recall that.

Jono Hey:
And I seem to recall that a lot of people struggled.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
Or maybe it was just me.

Rob Bell:
No, no, no.

People struggle every single time.

Not everyone watches as much daytime TV as me.

Jono Hey:
It's like a cryptic crossword.

Rob Bell:
But did you do those quizzes with your family and friends and stuff?

Well, yes, you're right.

We did do one, actually, didn't we?

Jono Hey:
We did some quizzes, yeah.

Everybody quizzes in lockdown.

It was quite good, to be honest.

Nice way to see your friends.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, it was good.

Jono Hey:
Anyway, I saw some friends a lot more in lockdown than I did out of lockdown.

Definitely.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Well, there was a group of us doing exercise three days a week.

Rob Bell:
Right?

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
I remember you kind of learned that hopefully the quiz has got a bit better throughout the pandemic.

But at the beginning, we'd go in, right, yeah, 10 questions.

My dad would come in with rounds of like eight questions or 15 questions.

And some questions had parts A, B, C, D and E.

So some people's rounds would have 10 points that they could score.

My dad's was like, I don't know, like 17 points or 27 points.

Graham doesn't work like that.

Jono Hey:
Disproportionately weighted all on his dad's round.

Rob Bell:
He's only doing himself a dysjustia, exactly.

Jono Hey:
Oh, you mean he couldn't win those points?

Rob Bell:
Yeah, he couldn't win those points.

Jono Hey:
Oh, that's shooting yourself in the foot, isn't it?

Didn't think that through.

Rob Bell:
I think it's more the enjoyment.

Everyone probably enjoys more being Quizmaster, probably, on those things.

I certainly do.

Jono Hey:
Maybe you're right, yeah.

That's funny, that, isn't it?

If that is the case, why aren't there more games where you're just Quizmaster?

Because it is quite fun making up quiz questions.

Rob Bell:
I say, yeah.

Jono Hey:
It's like reverse gaming.

You make the game instead of play the game.

Rob Bell:
Are you fans of pub quizzes?

Were you fans of pub quizzes?

Are you fans of pub quizzes in the actual pub?

Or would you go to a pub on a night when it's a pub quiz?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, if you had the right people.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, people are up for it.

I'd do a pub quiz.

It's fun.

People always assumed that I would be really good at it and that just was not the case at all for pub quizzes.

It was just really random.

There was just some I could do and most of them I couldn't.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

I think people tarnished me with that brush as well.

You know, you've done a documentary on this.

You must know the answer.

I don't remember.

Jono Hey:
You did pretty good with 80s and 90s TV show soundtracks.

Yeah, I was pretty good with it.

Tom Pellereau:
Adverts from the 80s.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, got them all down.

Well, listen, whether you're part of the Village Idiots, the captain of Quizzey McQuizzFace or dragged in as a last-minute replacement for Susan, who broke down on the way here, there's no more time to be messing around with quizzes and such now.

We've more pressing business to deal with.

Let's podcast.

This time, we've selected the sketch entitled Human Risk, the risk of people doing things they shouldn't or not doing the things they should that have wider implications.

And for this episode, Jono, Tommy and I are joined by Christian Hunt, a behavioural scientist who crafted his career spotting ways things could be done better in the world of compliance in the financial sector.

He now runs his own consultancy, aptly named Human Risk, helping businesses apply behavioural science to efficiently mitigate the risk around human error and failure to adhere to well-intending policies and procedures.

Christian regularly speaks and writes about managing risk through behavioural science, indeed he's written a book about it called Humanizing Rules.

And he also hosts and produces the Human Risk Podcast.

And poking about on social media, Christian, I've also spotted that you're an avid fan of train travel, which I'll definitely come on to at some point as well.

But firstly, welcome to the podcast, how you are.

Christian Hunt:
Wow, I didn't recognise that individual, but I'll try and live up to that billing.

But thank you for having me, pleasure to be here.

Rob Bell:
Am I right about train travel, Christian?

Christian Hunt:
You are spot on.

So I spend half my time in Munich in Germany, half my time in London.

And so I travelled between the two and I got so fed up with flying and I thought the environment deserved a bit of a break.

So I do that quite frequently by train, yes.

So you will find me quite regularly doing that journey.

Rob Bell:
I spotted a video of you on a Deutsche Bahn train with a German railway network in a carriage that had its own private office.

Christian Hunt:
Yeah, so they're really quite innovative there and they test out new trains.

And I happened to be near Munich where they were testing out this thing called the Ideensur, which is the ideas train.

And it's basically like an Ikea, if you imagine an Ikea train that you can just change the bits.

And so there's a configuration where you could have a gym, there's a configuration where you could have like a bar area.

So all the things that you would kind of, they just wanted to play with different spaces.

And one of the configurations was in first class, you could literally have your own little office.

And so I thought, well, I've got to try this out, right?

So I went for a ride on this and tried podcasting from a train carriage, which sounds like a really cool idea, except for the fact that there's so much background noise.

And of course the ticket inspector doesn't help because they open the door and try things.

So it was not a particularly good idea, but I loved every second of it.

Rob Bell:
We did a podcast episode in a car, heading up the M1, and we chose a load of Jono's sketches that were based around cars and driving and transportation.

And it was an SUV, it was a Volvo XC90, so it had good sound insulation.

And it worked quite well, but every now and then there were kind of road noises and sound noises.

And you could just about kind of put up with it, and it added to the energy of what we were trying to do.

But on a train I think it is quite different because you are getting interruptions, aren't you?

Christian Hunt:
Yeah, and I was trying to do it with a remote interview.

So it was like it was the worst idea in the world, but kind of fun to do.

The episode never got released, but worthwhile experiment.

Rob Bell:
Brilliant.

Good.

We're a good company.

I also love trains and train travel.

Now, Christian, we'll come on to behavioral science quite a bit in our discussion here.

But something that I really like, the strap line on your website resonated very well with me.

So for our listeners, if you go to humanrisk.com, you'll see that Christian sets out what his consultancy services offer and it's summarized beautifully by this strap line phrase underneath.

Christian, do you want to tell us what it is?

Christian Hunt:
Yeah, sure.

It's how to get people to do what you want without pissing them off.

Brilliant.

Rob Bell:
I'm a massive fan of that, Christian.

How do people tend to respond to that when they see it or when you might even tell them about it?

If that's what you're here to do.

Christian Hunt:
So the reason for it is one, obviously, it's slightly provocative, but I think it does get to the heart of a really critical issue, which is in many cases, if we want to mitigate human risk, to get people to do things we want them to do, not do things that we don't.

And that's compliance, that might be health and safety, it might be ethics, tons of people in the organizations.

The traditional presumption has always been, because we employ you or we have powers over you, we can just tell you what to do.

And that's of course legally correct.

But in many cases, we need people to work with us, because we can't see what they're doing all of the time.

We might need to do it when we can't supervise them, or we might only find out afterwards, or we need them to do something to a certain standard.

And so if we're just going to tell people what to do, and there are certain circumstances where we are going to want to do that, but if we're just going to, at some point, we're going to hit a thing where they're going to get irritated by it.

And so I just thought it's really interesting, if we want to mitigate all of these risks, we've got to think about, at what point are we pissing people off?

And so what I like to do is to use that as a test and say, when you've pissed someone off, you've pushed them a bit too far.

So are there ways that we can persuade people to work with us to get the outcomes that we're looking for?

And so this test of what pisses you off is something I think is really important.

It's a visceral, we all know what it means.

And so if you're an organization, it's worth thinking about that.

So I started to talk in those terms and I just thought, well, if that's the test I'm using, let's just put that on the website.

And the brilliant thing is obviously, there are certain potential clients who don't like that.

We don't want to think in those terms, vile, vulgar language, all that kind of thing.

And I'm fine, don't work with me, right?

Go work with some people that think differently.

I think that's a really important test and I quite like it because it's something that we all recognize on a basic human level.

And so what I'm looking for is techniques that we can deploy that don't do that.

Let's not piss people off unnecessarily, recognizing that we're sometimes gonna have to do that.

But if we can avoid doing that, wouldn't that be a better place to be?

Rob Bell:
Absolutely, at work, Christian, yeah.

Jono Hey:
I'm a big believer in finding the right language, the way people normally talk about things.

It's partly from like product design research, and you wanna name stuff how people actually talk about it.

But I also distinctly remember from my PhD, which was about studying how design teams build shared frames of meaning around what the problem is, and what people normally call that is getting on the same page.

And that just resonates with people so much quicker than like the technical term about it, which is say, not pissing people off is just like, yeah, I get that.

Tom Pellereau:
This conversation with the train one before, so I was coming back from the airport on Sunday afternoon, and we're getting the train, and you normally get that whole alarm of, please stay behind the yellow line, please stay by.

And when you're at Gatwick Airport, there's a lot of people, a lot of bags.

And sort of a bit weirdly, there was a very aggressive person with the whistle going, stay by, you, on your mobile phone, get back.

And clearly that person was not cared about pissing people off at all, but just needed actually people.

And he clearly also had a very, very long day.

But all of us kind of looked around in sort of shock of, you know, that's not the standard, please stay behind the yellow line remark.

That is proper, we don't care about pissing you off because you could be injured if you don't do what you're asked to do.

Christian Hunt:
And I think that's a brilliant example of where pissing people off is fine.

Rob Bell:
Yes, I agree.

Christian Hunt:
Because it's a matter of safety.

We know what happens if people don't stick behind the line.

And that individual is not trying to build a long term relationship with us.

So if that were an employment situation and your boss was treating you in that way, we'd have a very, very different view on it.

So I think that's a beautiful example of context.

And I would say in safety critical contexts where not following the rules has very negative consequences, then that's probably a situation where you can say, okay, it's perfectly all right to treat the people off at some point.

But if you do it with say ethics or, you know, sort of you want good customer service and you try and beat people up to give good customer service, that's not going to work.

And so there are contexts in which pissing people off is fine, but we need to recognise that we're doing it and say, is that appropriate for that context?

And I would argue that in that situation, what alternative have they got?

To scream at people because people probably wouldn't pay attention otherwise.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, God, there's so much I want to say about this, but I'm going to get some of our admin out of the way, though.

First of all, so depending on your podcast player of choice, you should be able to see Jono's colourful, exciting, amusing sketch, actually, in this case, on human risk on your screens now.

But I will include a direct link to it in the podcast episode description down below.

If not, and thank you for all your correspondence since the last episode.

We'll be going through a selection of those at the end of this podcast.

And if you'd like to send us your thoughts and your examples around this week's topic, then by all means, leave us messages on our social media posts, or you can send your emails to hello at sketchplanations.com.

Thank you, Tommy.

Right then, human risk to start us off with.

Now, Jono, you reference Christian and his work in your sketch.

But first, do you want to talk us through the sketch itself and how you came across Christian's work and why this topic came to mind for Sketchplanations?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I should say that I'm really interested in this area.

This was explicitly something that Christian introduced me to.

And so the genesis from the sketch is from Christian and his work and his thinking.

And so that was what I wanted to do.

And in fact, the definition is, I believe, your definition explicitly of this, right, Christian.

And I was trying to think about how to visualise it.

And I remember hearing a story about, if you think of what the greatest defence is in the world, it was like, at one point, it was the Great Wall of China.

You literally build an enormous wall across the entire country.

And then I heard that apparently Genghis Khan bribed the guards to get through the wall.

And so it doesn't matter how big your wall is, you just pay the guards and you get through.

And so that was the idea from the sketch.

I believe the story is not true, but the point is quite relevant.

So that's what-

Rob Bell:
It does illustrate the point very well, yes.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, exactly.

So that's what the sketch is.

You've spent all your time building this enormous program or giant wall across China, and then actually the guards fell asleep and the army just wanders through while the guards are asleep.

And so it's the humans which are causing the problems.

And so that was the genesis for the sketch, but obviously, Christian, you could talk a lot more about it.

Christian Hunt:
No, so I love this.

And one of the things I find fascinating about the term human risk is that people read lots of things into it.

And I like it because it's a little bit of a blank canvas.

And the definition I have is this risk of people doing things they shouldn't or not doing things they should.

And that's so broad, right?

And that's intentional because I want to capture everything from I was a bit knackered and I messed up through to I'm intentionally setting out to commit fraud.

And so it covers action and inaction.

It covers a range of different motifs.

And it can cover very serious things, you know, very small things or very sort of light hearted things.

And so what I was trying to do in that was really paint a broad canvas and say, actually, whatever it is we're trying to persuade people to do or not do, whatever context it's in, we need to be thinking about the humans that are behind it.

And so I love the fact that Jodo picked a story that I had heard.

And I'm not sure if it's true either.

It doesn't matter because if we think about, you know, scams that go on and the way people rob banks, nowadays, we don't physically go to a bank anymore.

You conduct cybercrime.

And so I love this idea of the human being the weakest link.

So it's great to go that far back to a story, whether it's true or not, because I think it illustrates the fundamental truth that's there nowadays.

When we look at things going wrong in society and organizations, there's always a human component, either causing the problem in the first place or making it worse by the way they react or don't react to something.

And so I love the fact that we've taken something in ancient history that still remains true today, because, hey, guess what?

We're still the same humans we've always been, even though the world around us has changed, and we think we're more sophisticated.

Rob Bell:
And in your work, Christian, do you come across organizations who might not have, at that leadership level, I should say, who might not have understood the implications of, or might not have acknowledged the implications of not fully understanding this element of human risk within their workforce?

Or is there quite a good grasp of, we know we should be on top of this?

Christian Hunt:
There's always a presumption, because if you assume the opposite, you'd be irresponsible.

There's always a presumption that they have it covered somehow.

The reason we're okay is because we've got rules and processes in place that make, we've managed the risk.

And so we have trained our people, we've built massive cyber defences, we're covered on that front.

And of course, the reality is that, as the Sketchplanation brilliantly illustrates, right, you can have the most amazing system, but a human can become a loophole.

And so I tend to work with people that want to open that particular box.

There are lots of people for whom, you know, it would be embarrassing to have to admit that you hadn't got it all covered, maybe in a regulated environment, and I work with a lot of regulated companies, you've told the regulator that you've got it covered, or you've told your shareholders you've got it covered, or you have spent a lot of money on something.

So to sort of have to admit that something's gone wrong is quite challenging.

So I tend to find it's either people that are fresh in post, the new government minister who goes that law is just grateful this thing I've inherited and who have an opportunity to change it in their first 100 days, or something has gone hideously wrong and they have to admit that it's a problem.

Or the most interesting one is where I find people that have kind of intuitively known that not all is well.

They know that they're spending a ton of money on training and processes, but they're a bit uncomfortable.

But they've never really thought about how to solve the problem.

And so what I'm doing is coming in saying, well, actually, if we think about it as a problem of influencing people and we understand what drives human decision making, we can solve it.

So those tend to be the three reasons that people come and talk to me.

There are lots of people that don't want to get this and they won't work with me.

Rob Bell:
So what you're talking about there, understanding where the problems are and coming up with solutions, that's the behavioral science in its broadest sense, is it at that organizational level?

Christian Hunt:
So the behavioral science piece is really saying, if the challenge that we are facing is people doing things we don't want them to do or not doing things that we do want them to do, again, with that qualitative component being in there sometimes, then that challenge is about influencing people.

It doesn't matter what the context is, you're still trying to do the same thing.

So what I'm saying is, if we want to recognize where we might not be doing that well, where we're relying on techniques that might look good on paper but not actually deliver what we expect, or we want to identify where there's risk in the organization, things we might not have thought of before, where our people, I'll put it in simple terms, might let us down, we can start to use the understanding of what makes humans tick.

I don't mean theoretically what ought to make them tick, I mean what actually makes them tick.

If we have an understanding of that, we can start to recognize where people are either already doing things we don't want them to do or not doing things we do want to do, or might in future do that.

We can look at some of the drivers of that with the organization and hopefully steer things in a direction that makes things more towards the outcome we're looking for.

Rob Bell:
That's really interesting.

Sometimes does that come down to individual kind of psychological traits and trends and other times quite directly related to being part of a group or a culture?

Christian Hunt:
It totally depends what people want to let me loose on.

And so sometimes there's a very specific problem that they've had.

If we think about it, banking is a really good example.

It's the industry I worked in.

So if you've had a problem, you've had a rogue trader is a good example, or something's gone wrong, you've got into trouble with your regulator.

It may well be that they want me to come in and help them solve that specific problem.

Or it may well be, actually, we're spending a ton of money on our compliance program, on our training, whatever.

And we're just not, it just doesn't seem to be working, right?

We are consistently having people breaking rules, not doing what we want.

Can you help us to solve that?

Or it might be saying, actually, we seem to be okay, but I'm a bit worried because there must be some things we're missing.

Can you help us to diagnose where that might be?

And so what I'm allowed to look at, how far am I allowed to get into the organization, who am I allowed to work with, is determined by them.

And of course, this stuff can be quite scary because if you start to think, well, we've relied on a certain logic and actually, if he's right, all the training that we've been doing is a big waste of money.

And so I have to sort of work with people.

And so it's a case sometimes, let's find some low-hanging fruit to start with, stuff that's not that embarrassing, that we could improve a little bit to demonstrate, and then we can start to build a little more.

And of course, there are companies that do lots of things brilliantly.

And the thing I bring in there is just an independent perspective, something that they haven't looked at before, the fresh way of doing things.

But in many cases, the effort that goes into persuading customers to buy a product or service doesn't happen when it comes to persuading employees to comply with rules or follow processes.

We take what I call the employment contract fallacy, which is we employ you so we can tell you what to do, legally correct, but at some point, that's where that pissing off thing kicks in, at some point we can push that too far.

And so we need to be thinking, I think we need to approach this and say, what's the employee experience, in the same way that we look at the customer experience, and then we can recognize where potentially we're pushing them a bit too far.

Now, I'm not saying we back off and say, well, we should make the employee's lives as easy as possible.

There are going to be times where we will have to get them to do things that are painful.

But let's recognize when we're doing that and let's try and avoid doing that when it's not necessary.

And then we can hopefully get away with it because we've only pissed them off 20% of the time as opposed to 80% of the time.

Jono Hey:
I think when you mentioned about the cultural aspects as well, Robert, and I think the behaviour of science will be really interesting.

I just think of something quite simple like tailgating into a building.

So like really concrete where everybody kind of knows that you shouldn't let somebody else in who doesn't work there and it might say that in your contract.

And yet, if you're standing at the door and there's a person behind you and it looks like they're about to go in or they're on the phone or something, it's the natural thing to do to like hold the door open for them.

And you want to do that.

People want to do that and to change that is like a cultural thing.

I remember I put an example in the description because this is what came to mind when I first thought about it.

And Christian introduced me to it was an example from Don Norman about like, if you want to break into a building, just like turn up with like a bunch of computer parts and dangling keyboards and stuff, which is really awkward at the door and say, can somebody open the door for me?

And people probably let you in.

You look like you should be in there and you clearly need help.

And so people let you in.

And so I think it's a really interesting mix of like, it might say that you shouldn't let anybody else in, but there's a lot of factors which mean that this is a normal default thing that people want to do.

And so how do you do it?

You could stick a tailgate and sign at the door.

You can change the door to be a gate.

You can make everybody have to scan their card before they get it through.

You can actually have somebody with a whistle standing there saying, don't let anyone through.

But where do you draw the line?

And people don't usually spend a lot of time designing those kind of things.

I mean, maybe they do for tailgating if you're designing a whole building.

But a lot of companies, they wouldn't have that.

But I suppose it applies to all sorts of levels.

But tailgating is a really concrete example.

I feel like I came in touch with all the time.

I'm like, man, we shouldn't be letting people in, but everybody wants to let people in.

Rob Bell:
Tommy, do you see this all in your organization?

Are you aware?

We don't need to poke a pie too much on a publicly available podcast.

But anything you feel you want to share, can share.

Jono Hey:
How can we break into your building?

Tom Pellereau:
Well, there's certainly, yeah, we're on a farm.

You could probably wander in.

I'm interested to see them to understand the three different things.

If we go back to the original sketch, you've got in that picture people are asleep.

So that is incompetence of the staff at that point, right?

It might have been that they've been forced to stay up late, and so the employer has done something wrong by forcing people to stay up too late and they fall asleep on the job, right?

But is that one level of this human risk where someone's fallen asleep, effectively?

It feels like then there's a second level where the guards have been bribed, as it were.

So they've tricked the system, they've taken something for their own benefit.

And then the third one is actual kind of fraud where someone's given them a sleeping pill or someone has shot them or something like that.

Are there the different sort of parts of this human risk that you kind of look at as it well or how do you kind of like there's five different types of human risk?

Christian Hunt:
Yeah, what I'm really looking at is to say, I mean, there are probably 20 more things we could come up with along those lines.

So here's something that could happen.

And so what I'm encouraging people to do is to think about not how we would like people to behave, but how they are likely to behave.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Christian Hunt:
And so if we looked at this particular context, you would say, well, let's imagine we haven't paid our troops much money that'll make them more susceptible to bribery than if we paid them a decent wage.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Christian Hunt:
If we have allowed them to sleep, then they are less likely to fall asleep on the job.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Christian Hunt:
And so it's about saying, let's recognize the realities of the humans that are going through this.

And so in any given situation, if we thought, particularly when things have gone wrong, we can look back with hindsight and say, well, it's pretty obvious that as a result of underpaying our staff, they were open to taking bribes.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Christian Hunt:
And so what we try and do is identify that before it can go wrong.

And very often the problem is that we don't want to face reality about how people actually make decisions.

So we want to make a presumption.

I'll assume that every single person I've hired in my organization is 100% loyal.

And I will assume that they will always want to stay here and therefore they will automatically do anything that is good for the company, even if it's bad news for them personally.

And you can already start to see in the way I'm formulating that, that those presumptions are pretty flawed.

And I'm not sure they've ever been valid, but you can see, maybe there are employment models in the past where the consequences of non-compliance, to use my terminology, were such that you would just fall into line.

But nowadays, people don't stick around with one employer for the rest of the day.

They think about what's in their best interests.

They have a lot of information entering, lots and lots of data that they need to consume, lots of rules they need to follow.

And so, what I'm saying is, let's go there and say the reality is, unfortunately, that we can't simply expect people to always do the right thing.

Even if they're 100% motivated to do the right thing, they can screw things up.

They can be tired.

They can have their heads turned.

They can get pissed off and just think, well, you know, you've annoyed me, so I'm going to find some way of exacting revenge on you.

We've all done this in various contexts.

And so, really, what it's about saying, I don't come in and say, here's the 20 things you need to look out for.

What I'm saying is let's, I help people to think about this in a way that you would, as I mentioned, the customer journey.

So think about what's the employee going through at a particular thing.

And if you've identified there's a rule they're not following or process is not following, then think about why that might be.

And the answer is often the convenient answer for the organization is to say, bad people.

Let's fire those lazy slash dishonest slash whatever people and we'll just hire some new ones.

And the thing I think is really interesting about it, if you don't look at the environmental factors, what happens is you can fire all the miscreants.

And it's a lovely narrative that you can just say, we've got rid of all those bad people, we've hired some better, you'll cause the same problem.

And so we have to look at the environmental factors that drive those behaviors.

And it's much easier for organizations to just fire people.

And we've cleaned this up now.

And of course that doesn't work.

And so that's what I'm encouraging them to do, is to think about the realities of what is going on.

And that is very uncomfortable for some people, which is why those criteria about who wants to work with me, you have to want to.

If you can continue to stick your head in the sand, ostrich style, for some people, that's a very comfortable place to hang out.

And there's no point in me even trying to work with them.

Rob Bell:
I think basically I answered one of the questions I was going to ask you, Christian, about if you have a set framework or methodology that you tend to go through.

And I appreciate that probably does depend on the organization, its size, the industry, whatever it might be.

But I think I think you started to answer that then in terms of how you go about that.

The structure of the work that you do.

Christian Hunt:
It depends if we're trying to solve a known problem.

So something has gone wrong and we're trying to fix it.

And that might be within your own organization, or it might be that a competitor down the road had a problem and you're suddenly panicking the same thing could happen to you.

Or a regulator, if you're in regulated industry, if it's happened, there's lots of regulators that are smart and say, well, if it happens in one company, it could happen in another.

There are some organizations that go, we're a bit lucky that didn't happen here.

Or that couldn't possibly happen here, could it?

And people go, well, there's that sort of thing.

Or you get forward-looking ones that say, actually, we want to be prepared across the piece.

And so depending on what we're looking at and the nature of it will depend on how I approach it.

But I have various frameworks that I'll use that help you to put yourselves in the shoes of the employee.

Because one of the challenges is it's really difficult, if you're the person that's written the rules or the process, it's really difficult to put yourself in the shoes of people that don't know or probably don't care.

And so one of the challenges is how do I write an idiot's guide if I'm not an idiot myself, I don't perceive myself to be an idiot.

Really, really difficult to do that.

And so how do we put ourselves?

So one of my favourite frameworks is a thing called humans that is explained in my book, which you kind of mentioned before, where I look at it.

And so I'll give you an example of that.

One of the things in humans is H is for helpful.

And so one of the questions it's worth asking, if you are applying a rule to people, it's worth asking, how helpful will they find this?

And I don't mean how theoretically helpful will they find, how helpful they find it to themselves.

If you're asking them to do something that they recognize will help them, it'll make their life easier.

It'll inform them about something they wish to be informed about.

The more helpful it is, the more they'll go along with you.

The less helpful it is, right, this thing is a pain in the butt.

I don't see what's in it for me.

Then the more risk that poses.

And we can start to analyze, and there are other factors in that framework that help us to start to try and get a handle on what might this feel like from the other side.

And so that's not, again, back to the earlier point, that's not about saying we try and, we do exactly, let's look at things from the employee's perspective and do exactly what they want.

It's about saying if something, maybe we have to do it, but it's perceived as particularly unhelpful.

Can we change their perception so that they feel it's more helpful?

Or if we can't, we recognize that from a behavioural perspective, that poses a greater risk.

And so we can then start to see which rules, processes, training, all those kinds of things, pose a greater behavioural risk.

And therefore, if the objective is to influence human behaviour, surely we should be looking at it and saying, these are the things that we're getting them to do, which are the most challenging.

And so we should focus more on those, put more defences, controls, surveillance, maybe around those than the things that will fly past because they won't even notice that we're asking them to do it.

Rob Bell:
It strikes me in the way you're describing that, that sometimes there's a bit of a kind of sales marketing job to be done internally of procedures.

Christian Hunt:
Yes, totally.

Rob Bell:
You're reshaping, perhaps, how people might perceive these duties or whatever it might be that they should be doing, what they shouldn't be doing.

Christian Hunt:
Yeah.

And if you want the best example, let's go back to COVID.

Let's go back to COVID.

And the beauty of COVID for me, and that's a horrible sentence to start with, the role with this, was that every single person understood what compliance was, in the lucid sense of the word, and understood what a behavioral intervention was, an attempt to influence us.

And so we can all think back to the pandemic about what our views were about the vaccine, about mask wearing, about social distancing, about all of these things, the way in which it was communicated, what imposition that was on us, whether we thought it was a good idea, was it acceptable, did they go too far?

Were they setting a good example?

All of those factors we know, and therefore we all, every single one of us broke a rule at some point.

And so the question was, if you go back and think about the rules that you broke, the times you did things you shouldn't do, why was that?

And we can start to identify some of these factors.

So we've all been through it, we've all lived it.

Those same things, the reactions that we had to what we were being told to do, apply in other contexts.

We're still that same human that's going through that.

And so what I'm saying is, you're absolutely right.

What I'm saying is treat it a little bit like you would a customer experience and say, are there things we're doing to our customers that piss them off?

Do we make them go through loads?

Hotel check-ins, my favourite example.

We've all been to hotels where the check-in process has been seamless.

I mean, some hotels you don't even need to check in, right?

They give you the key and you just walk to your room.

Others, I don't know what is going on, but we queue there for hours.

We fill in a load of forms, give them information we've already given them.

We're asked a whole load of crap.

You know, it's tedious, it's awful.

And it colours our whole perception of the hotel experience.

And so as we look at that, you know, the hotels that do this well, make sure that their check-in process is streamlined and simple and easy and joyous.

And so I would say we can think in those terms about things we're requiring of our employees.

As I say, we don't necessarily have to go overboard.

Customers and employees aren't the same thing.

But if we deployed some of that logic, we might start to recognise that lots of things that we're doing are really, really annoying and really silly.

And then the question is, does it have to be like that?

And I would say eight or nine times out of ten, it doesn't have to be as bad as it currently is.

And so why don't we try and improve that?

And the beautiful thing is, the employees don't expect to have a joyous experience.

We've conditioned people to be really annoyed and irritated.

If I send an email out to employees saying compliance training, nobody is, to use the Marie Conner, nobody has sparked joy in anyone.

And so I'm thinking, well, there's plenty of room there because we're starting from such a low bar.

They think it's gonna be dull and tedious.

Let's try and make it slightly interesting.

And so that customer service logic, where the customer service thing, we really want to get it good.

Employee service or experience, well, if we get it a little bit good, that it's relatively speaking, it's gonna make them more positively disposed.

And if we want them to come forward, report problems, tell us before they do things we don't want them to do, then we've got to treat them like they're adults and we've got to engage with them.

And that does involve some of that customer service logic.

Jono Hey:
Both Tom and I have worked in product design all the time.

In product design, you obviously, you are designing to make things like idiot proof because so that people don't need to know and you are designing the hotel checkout experience.

And I've worked a lot in software more recently.

And it's interesting there too, doing things like, I gave an example about somebody who was doing a transfer for 62 euros 40 and lent on the keyboard the two and sent one for 222 million euros.

And that can happen.

I remember one of the developers I worked with, an incredibly talented guy, he was like, you might turn your back and the cat walks across the keyboard and then you deploy something and your site goes down.

And so if you're in software, it's just the thing you do is you build all these defences to protect against all these like human errors and these accidents or somebody being lazy or somebody not checking something.

And so I was trying to sort of map these sort of scenarios to both the product design I've done, but also the software, because you are.

Like if you got a team of 500 programmers and they're all developing this stuff, one of them is going to accidentally put the stuff in that they didn't mean to from yesterday, which was supposed to be junk.

And so you need to protect against that.

So it's really, yeah, it's really and it's really interesting.

I think just on these internal things, I've also been responsible for security.

And how do you make people aware of phishing attacks, which are so prevalent?

And then there's been some phishing training, which is really quite actually quite fun and interesting to do and make it and make such a difference when people go through that.

You say, this is actually quite interesting.

I think you'll like this as opposed to seeing it as a massive chore.

So, yeah, tons, tons of parallels.

Christian Hunt:
There's something fascinating that I mean, the phishing thing, I think, is a really good illustration of a recognition that it's not good enough just to say to people, don't click on, you know, bad looking things.

And so I think this is interesting, which is training is designed very much for the humans at the end of it.

But we get, if you push that training to the logical extremity, it's those ones where companies sent fake phishing emails to employees, and then they punish people.

You need more training if you click on this thing by mistake.

And so that's an interesting thing from an ethical perspective, because on the one hand, I think it's really smart, because the only way you're going to teach people not to do this is to put them in a position where they can.

And the only way you can test the scale of the challenge that you're facing from a cybersecurity perspective is to replicate that scenario.

And so I think that's very logical.

They seem to get a pass that other aspects of an organization don't.

If you try to do that with an ethical dilemma, drop a tenner on everybody's desk and see who nicks it on the floor, right?

That would be ethically problematic, but for some reason cybersecurity can get away with the same sort of thing.

But what I think is interesting is the way a lot of companies respond to that, which is you failed the phishing test and I'm now going to punish you.

I think that's a really, really, it's well intentioned, but it's very, very dangerous because it pits you up against the employee.

I think that's fine to use that to test it.

But if you then say to employee, look, you clicked on this, you really shouldn't have done, and then explain to you why, and here's what to look for in future.

You take it as a data point, that's fine.

But if you take it as a punitive compliance regime, we're going to now punish you with more training.

Bearing in mind, more training, by the way, is always the solution to things.

Whereas they do, often the question isn't asked, is it perhaps the training that was the problem in the first place?

Let's do more training, you must train me, train.

You know, you wouldn't solve any other problem by doing more of the, well, maybe you would, governments often do, but you wouldn't solve a problem by doing more of the stupid thing that got you into trouble in the first place, and yet that's the way we respond to training.

But I think, John, to your point, is that the cyber stuff, I think is a really good illustration of where, ironically, the people that play with machines understand this human component much better than people that often think they understand people.

Rob Bell:
I'll just point out for the listeners, you probably picked up on it now, when we're talking about phishing, we're talking about the idea of scammers sending emails with a link in there for you to click, which then gets you into all sorts of trouble.

Just to clear that up.

Jono Hey:
There's a sketch on phishing, if you wanna search for it.

Rob Bell:
There's a sketch on phishing, of course there is.

Of course there is.

We've touched on this a little bit.

I'm quite interested to get into some juicy examples, if we can do that.

We don't have to name names, obviously, but what I really love about this, and we talked about this at the top, and you talked about this very eloquently, Christian, is that the potential for this kind of human risk, with your definition of people doing things they shouldn't or vice versa, is potentially everywhere.

It's all around us.

Yes, it's in the financial sector, as we know.

Yes, it's in software, as John has talked about there.

Do you have examples across a whole raft of different industries and different whole different areas of life, generally, not just professionally?

Christian Hunt:
Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Where to even start?

And the challenge I have is I walk around looking for this stuff, and you do not have to look too hard to spot it.

Let me tell you, my favourite story is back to 2017.

And you will probably all remember this.

At the Oscars, they handed out the wrong envelope for the Best Movie Award.

And the guy who did that is called Brian Cullinan.

And Brian was a partner at PWC, the accounting, auditing, consulting firm.

And he's got this one job to do on the day of handing out an envelope.

So as the stars come up on stage, he's the one handing it out.

And you would think that somebody with years of experience would not mess up something as simple as handing an envelope out.

And in the weeks leading up to that particular ceremony, unfortunately Brian had done a number of interviews saying things like, it looks really simple, but it's actually very complicated.

And we have lots of controls in place to make sure we get it right.

And one of the controls that they had in place was to have spare envelopes.

And it was one of the spare envelopes that he handed out, illustrating that the human overrode this thing.

So all well-intentioned, well-designed, he overrode that.

Now, why did he do that?

Well, we can't say for sure, but there is some evidence now deleted from then Twitter Now X, where he was tweeting backstage, taking pictures of himself with the movie stars that just come off stage of background.

Apparently he had asked for a walk-on part.

He considered himself to look a bit like Matt Damon.

So we get a picture of the way this guy is thinking.

He thinks he's part of the show, as opposed to somebody there who's too dead to complete administrative tasks.

So you've got this senior partner for this organization, which tells other companies how they should design controls and audits how they control things, screwing something up on the biggest date.

Of course, it's the biggest award of the night as well, just to add to the whole thing.

But if we think about that particular situation, we often equate experience with, well, you know what you're doing.

But actually it was his experience that led him to be overconfident.

It's very simple.

Of course, I can do this.

And so when we look at that, we say, there's an example of where lots of experience let him down badly.

So what should they have done instead is the question I'm often answered.

Well, give that task to somebody who is used to handling basic admin time.

When was the last time Brian opened an envelope or held one?

Probably never, right?

Because he's got assistance, do you know?

He's not in charge of the stationery cupboard.

So why was he given that particular task?

Well, because he's senior and blah, blah, blah.

You don't want to give it to a junior person who would be terrified.

You want to give it to a mid-ranking person who would still be in touch with doing basic task.

Probably someone that doesn't want to be there, hates the movies, can't wait for this thing to be over.

So you mitigate that.

So I love that story, one, because you can watch the video of this thing unfolding and thinking how the hell is this happening on the biggest stage in the world.

But the second thing is that key idea that we equate seniority with experience with getting things right.

And actually, that seniority can make you get things hideously wrong.

If you want another example, let's balance this thing out and let's pick...

You may not even remember this.

There was a prime minister in the UK last year for about 40 odd days called Liz Truss.

And there's an example, I think, of somebody who had striven, is that the right word?

I don't know, striven to get this wrong.

That was her be all and end all.

And then she gets there and messes the thing up.

And that, again, illustrates the fact that you can spend a lot of time preparing, battling, you know, she put in the groundwork behind the scenes, possibly not all the sort of intellectual and political groundwork, but she said she got herself into that position and things went horribly wrong.

And there's a lovely interview with her before she was voted in by the party members of that position.

She said, I think I would make an excellent Prime Minister.

There are only two problems.

I don't have any friends and I'm a bit weird.

A genuine quote, which I thought was a brilliant bit of self-awareness.

It's a shame it wasn't displayed elsewhere.

But again, there's an illustration of somebody desperate to get this job, and then they get there and they don't know what they're doing.

And so I pick those two senior examples as illustrations.

There are lots of examples of junior people being put in positions they shouldn't be in.

Easy to laugh at the consequences, but I think we need to look and say, a junior member of staff that screws up is far more predictable than that.

And so as I'm looking around, I'm looking for examples of things where you can say, I'm not interested in humiliating people, I'm interested in the structures that underpin that, that allowed that thing to happen.

And so when we look at it, we can say that both in the Brian Cullen example, Liz Trust example, both the conservative party, I would argue, and PWC didn't really have processes in place for mitigating humor.

They relied on a presumption of how the world would work.

If you're a senior in experience, you've been doing this for a long time, you'll be good in that job.

And of course, we know what happened.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Are there areas in most people's everyday lives, the kind of social lives, family lives, where human risk comes in as well?

Christian Hunt:
Oh, yeah.

I mean, we all do stupid things, right?

And that can be everything from buying stuff that we don't really need or don't really want, we get full, we go to the supermarket, chances are, we've all bought things that, too much of things or things that we don't really want, we've all made terrible financial decisions, we've all taken risks when cycling or driving.

So all of these things that we see going wrong in organizations can also apply to us in our private lives.

Now, a lot of the time, we'll get away with it, because maybe nobody sees it, maybe we're not controlling massive budgets, and we're not doing things in the full glare of TV cameras.

But those same dynamics apply.

What I find really, really interesting is that for some reason, organizations recognize and understand that individuals are fallible, but just not within our organization.

It's almost like when you walk through the door of the company, or you log on to the system, that somehow you're going to become a different person, and you're going to suddenly not have all these fallibilities that we know we have as individual.

I thought during the pandemic, it was really interesting.

When we started to get that, the video calls that went wrong, people who log on to Zoom, and you have the cat mask would be on, and there was that lawyer that couldn't switch it off when using the presentation to the judge, or you'd have all the amusing things that we saw happening.

That was really interesting because that broke down this barrier of personal and work.

So I think for a while, we were given glimpses behind the scenes, and we'd see what people's realities were.

And I think lots of companies and lots of managers, particularly those who were perhaps less good at managing, started to panic a bit because you don't have the same control over people because they're not within the organization.

They're not in our office, so we can't control what they're doing.

This is dangerous.

And I would say that even when they're in your office, you can't control, you don't know what's going on inside their heads.

And so I think we've seen some interesting glimpses of where the logic that gets deployed within organizations of, we employ you, we can tell you what to do, we can control everything, actually that doesn't work because the same human OS that we're using in our private lives that can often does really well for us, but can also let us down, can also do really well for us or let us down in an organizational context.

And I think that's the interesting bit here.

And so, you know, I love finding, if I'm doing a presentation in front of clients, one of the things I try to identify is some shared experience that we'll all have had at going into the room.

And so, you know, whether that's if we're in a hotel for a conference, the hotel check-in process, signs that we saw on the way in, there's always something I can spot, or something silly that's happened that points to human fallibility.

And I think it's almost allowing the sort of humanity into organizations and say, hold on a minute, right?

You've hired these people.

Yes, they're very smart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But they're also fallible.

And so let's take some of those things.

And I always try and tell silly stories about dumb decisions I've made.

One, because I don't want to be preaching to other people.

You know, I make those mistakes too.

But I think there is a there's a there's a clear little read across because we're the same people.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Christian, you made me think of you made me think of jaywalking.

It's a funny one.

I lived a long time in the States and you know, you're not supposed to cross where there isn't a crossing.

But in the UK, that's just not really a thing.

And people cross all over the place.

And I remember, and as you're trying to think of helpful and useful and things, and sometimes if you're walking along the road, and you're like, the crossing is way up there and the road is completely empty, you're really tempted to just cross.

And I remember that's just really struck me when I was in the US.

And then when I came back here after living there for a really long time, I was like, why is everybody crossing all over the place?

This is mad.

Why are people waiting for the crossings?

Christian Hunt:
Let's finally mention that, because I have that literal problem, because I travel between Munich and London.

And obviously the social norm, let alone the law, in Germany is very much, don't cross until it's green.

And here, as you say, and for about 36 hours after I arrive in the other city, I'm doing the wrong thing.

Now that's not to...

Here people look at me and go, why is that weirdo waiting?

He's up to no good, which is fine.

But in Germany, I guess, I can guarantee it, someone will jump out of the bushes and scream at me because everybody is a sort of, you know, policeman for these things.

And so I live that on a regular basis.

I know exactly what you mean.

And it's, the risk isn't any different.

It's just that the social response to that and the environment and the structure, the laws are the same because technically you shouldn't do it here.

And I think if you caused an accident here, you'd probably get into trouble.

And so yeah, I live that all the time.

And it's weird.

It takes about 40 hours to shift.

And I think that's a really good example of where you might say, well, the laws in both countries are the same.

But actually the practices and what people actually do, very, very different.

And that will drive how people behave.

And so I have to change my way of thinking and behaving according to the...

Oh, I don't have to.

I choose to so that I'm not shouted out and look like a weirdo.

Ultimately I do.

I conform and do what everybody else does, particularly in the German situation where, you know, here, as I say, I can get away with not crossing it there.

Why lay yourself open to ridicule, being shouted at, looked at, whatever.

But yeah, it's a hugely important part of our thinking.

Rob Bell:
That's a really good example of what I was trying to get to with the question earlier around the individual decisions and the effect that the culture can have on that.

Because if the laws and the rules are the same, it's then the culture in these two in Britain and in Germany that is different, that affects you individually.

Jono Hey:
You have this funny thing if you've crossed the roads with small children and you press the button and you're waiting for it to go red or go green for the crossing so that you can cross with the child.

But of course, the road is empty and the people next to you walk up and just cross on the red and you're still standing there waiting with your child because you're showing how it's supposed to be done.

But on the other hand, maybe that's a blow the whistle situation, right?

Because it's a safety situation and that's what you're doing.

Christian Hunt:
There's a thing in Germany where they've actually got signs, which tells you the social norm is breaking down slightly.

They've got signs on traffic lights telling people, wait for the green man for the sake of the kids.

And the point is, if there is a kid in vicinity, you have a responsibility.

Their needs to be taught the right thing supersedes your need to get across the road quickly.

And so they've thought about this, but I think it's fascinating that one, they think that's important to signal, but two, that tells you that they also recognise people aren't waiting.

And so that norm is unpicking itself.

Rob Bell:
That's a really good example of something I was going to ask you about.

Positive reinforcement.

Rather than don't do something, it's the do this, a positive message rather than the don't do this.

Like, coming back to trains again, don't put your feet on the seeds.

There is a more positive way to enforce that message or to reinforce that message, I should say.

Jono Hey:
Keep your feet on the floor.

Christian Hunt:
Two thoughts on that.

One is I've seen in Dusseldorf on the tram system there, they did a really cool thing where they put sticker like sort of cartoon footprints, including some footprints of dogs on the floor.

And the idea, we're not telling you to put your feet on the floor, not to put them in the seats, we're just making it fun.

And so I rode a few extra stops just to see what impact this have.

And I'm not sure that it was particularly non-compliant in that regard.

And maybe the wrong people on the train, maybe I should have done it in school holidays.

But that seemed to be working much more effectively, I think, than telling people.

So you're absolutely right.

And I would say we need to think about what's the objective here?

Is it something where you absolutely need to have it happen, at which point maybe you do need a draconian approach?

Or is it something where you'd say, look, the more the merrier, the more people that do this, the better, or don't do this, the better.

And so we can be a bit softer in it because we're not going to get 100% of the people, we just kind of want to try and improve things.

Jono Hey:
It's like the goal in the urinal, to keep people in the middle.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Sorry, Tom, do you have a question?

Tom Pellereau:
So one of the areas that this I find affects me the most is in our product instructions.

And that is to try and communicate to our consumers how to best use the product, right?

Rob Bell:
That's a great example, Tom.

Tom Pellereau:
I am an individual who never reads instructions, right?

Because I am one of those kind of slightly expert users who thinks like he knows how everything works, right?

Rob Bell:
You do know best.

Tom Pellereau:
So therefore, as a company who creates instructions, I do find that quite helpful because I am like, okay, well, you know, people aren't going to read this anyway, so how can we make this?

But that is then bad, obviously, because some of our products, we do have to communicate some things like, don't add water to this or hold that kind of bit, right?

And the reason I bring this up is manyfold.

One is the fact that every year we have to put more legal information into our instructions because we have batteries and stuff.

And so we have to have this huge area for the Wii stuff, WEEE, how you recycle it, for the guarantees, for the, this is the voltage of, this is a...

And then also for legal reasons, we have to have English and French and German and Dutch and blah, blah, blah.

So our instruction manuals become like literally 50 pages.

And most of that is actually completely irrelevant to the consumer in terms of how they turn this on, how they use it.

And also we have to have a quite a lot of legal information just in case someone deliberately misuses our product and then sues us because, oh, you didn't say that I couldn't use this to, you know, clean my children's teeth and now they've got teeth that don't work.

You know, that's the thing.

So every year I have to make these instruction manuals more and more and more and more complicated.

But actually what I want people to know is exactly how to use it as soon as they take it out of the box.

Because I don't want people to have to go through the leaflet and spend the...

Because that's not a good experience.

You've received this product and what you need to do now is sit down at your desk and read for an hour so that you can understand the idea.

And the way that we've started to combat that is the sort of obvious ones, the quick guides that you have at the beginning.

You know, these are the hints and tips.

And then at the bottom, ridiculous, we have to say, but please ensure you read the full instructions before continuing, you know.

But we have to put that in, because otherwise if they don't, and my regulatory person is like, well, you can't do the quick guide, you don't need to tell them that.

And then the next one is the QR codes with them.

And what I love about, talking about the benefits of the COVID, but one of the benefits of COVID is that now every single camera app has a auto QR reader in.

So people know how to read QRs to get to then the video, which we can use to communicate.

But Christian, your point about we're all humans and what can be helpful is...

So we're constantly trying to add helpful bits to our instructions while also making the flipping things an extra 10 pages longer every year.

And that means also the font size gets smaller and smaller.

Christian Hunt:
I think there's two interesting things, well, lots of interesting things, two things I'd pick up on.

The first one is that we have to say X or Y in case we get sued.

And one of the questions I always have for organisations is to say, why is it that lawyers are given a pass?

Well, lawyers can say, well, we have to do this for legal reasons, because if we get sued, we'll be in a much worse position.

But we don't allow, for example, physical security people to say, well, what would make my life really easy?

Well, I'll tell you what, if I could shut all the buildings, not any buildings, lawyers get a free pass for some reason.

And I think there's room, not always, and I accept the fact that particularly if you work in the US, that's a different, potentially different environment.

But often it's kind of like, well, the lawyers say we have to do this.

Well, who are they?

All we're doing is making it easier for lawyers.

Right.

And nobody else gets that free pass.

And so I would sort of, you know, information security people might say, well, what we need to do is no printing of any documents.

And we are going to strip search everybody that walks in and out of this building to make sure they're not taking anything out they shouldn't be.

That would make my life easy.

But we say that would be ridiculous and piss our employees off.

But for some reason, the lawyers get that card.

So that's thought number one.

And the second one is I love that because I grew up, I hate reading instruction manuals.

That the product should work and I should know what to do intuitively.

Otherwise it's bad design.

And I think that thinking is something we don't do when it comes to it within an organization.

We go, well, they'll just have to, they must go on a training course before they can do something.

And the analogy I always use is, if you think about a car, the average car is designed in a way that if you've got some driving experience, you can make it work, right?

The dashboard is designed around you, you sit in this thing, you can probably make it move.

And the confusion you're likely to have is little things like, what does this button do?

What's that little light mean?

And they give you for those purposes, something called the driver's manual that is structured around answering the question, which bit of the vehicle isn't doing what you want it to do, and how can we solve that?

Lots of pictures, really, really simple.

There's a second manual, which is the engineering manual, which tells you how the damn thing works, if you wish to fix it, repair it and understand it.

But you don't need to understand how the engineering works in order to be able to drive the car in a safe manner.

And yet most organizations adopt an approach that, oh, hold on a minute, you want to drive the car?

Well, you better do mandatory training on the engineering manual so we know you understand it.

And they make you go through that process.

And that's that.

So all the things you were talking about from a customer perspective I loved, that just doesn't happen in an organization because we kind of go, well, screw them.

And that's exactly what I mean about pissing employees off, which is the things that piss us off as consumers, you'd sort of sit there and go, what do you mean before I log on to the system?

I've got to go and do eight years' worth of training.

Why can't I just have an idiot?

Or why can't they design the system so I don't even need any training because it's just so intuitive, I can just use it.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Yeah.

Listen, I'm aware of where we are with time and that feels like a lovely place to finish off.

Christian, can I ask you, is there anything that you would like to tell us about?

Have you got anything coming up, anything you'd like to plug?

I mean, you will see there's your website, Human-Risk, which is that the best place to go if people want to find out more about you?

Christian Hunt:
Yeah, that's probably a good start point.

I mean, LinkedIn is quite of all the social media networks, I'm most active there.

I'll tell you about a fun thing I'm doing at the moment, which seems to be resonating quite well, which is covered in the book, but I call it Compliance in the Wild.

One of the things that I'm trying to do is to say, whenever we want to think about a problem we've got, chances are someone somewhere else will have had a similar issue that we may be able to learn from.

What I do is I walk around the world looking for examples of situations that have compliance dynamics.

Now, that sounds really boring, bear with me.

Rob Bell:
We're engineers, we can handle that.

Christian Hunt:
Yeah.

Signs that are out there, silly rules that people come across, or very smart rules that people come across.

I've been doing little one to two-minute videos that take something and dissect it.

The one I released this morning, I'll give you a good illustration, is if you go to petrol stations, they simultaneously tell you that you may not use your mobile phone on the full-core while encouraging you to use the pay-by-phone app.

So how does that happen?

Well, there's a logical reason behind it, but the lesson I draw from that is to say, just because something's logical to the experts, doesn't necessarily, the average punter pulling up the petrol station, is going, what the hell is going on?

This is a bit weird.

So these short videos, Compliance in the Wild, is a newish thing that I've been doing, seems to be resonating people.

So check that out, there's a Compliance in the Wild account on LinkedIn where you can catch all the videos.

Rob Bell:
Brilliant.

And don't forget Christian's book, Humanizing Rules and your podcast, Human Risk Podcast as well, Christian.

Christian Hunt:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast.

I mean, the time has absolutely flown by and we've covered so much there.

Absolutely fascinating discussion.

Thank you so, so much.

Christian Hunt:
Thank you for having me.

Rob Bell:
And we'd love to hear what you, our listeners, have to say about all of that.

You can email us hello at sketchplanations.com or you can leave us messages on social media as well.

And we'll be going through some of your correspondence in just a second.

But for now, to finish off one final quiz question.

What do you get if you cross this show with the name for someone who's been shipwrecked or stranded in an isolated place?

Tom Pellereau:
Sketchplanations, The Podcast away.

Rob Bell:
He's done it.

He's done it.

The penny has dropped.

Thank you to everybody who's been listening.

Go well and stay well.

Goodbye.

All right, then, we're back.

And I'm going to mention this because it was very noticeable to me as I was editing the wonderful episode with Christian Hunt.

What a guy, by the way.

I mean, that energy he has is unbelievable.

I found myself speaking a lot quicker.

It's through the podcast, but it's great because it made me got more in.

But it was very funny.

Christian's strap line, how to get people to do what you want without pissing them off.

We ended up then using the word piss, pissing or pissing someone off quite a lot.

And I decided I'd bleep it because for me, when I was growing up as a kid, it was, you know, that was a bad word.

I'm not going to keep saying now because I will have to go back and edit all those times I've just done.

So if we could avoid saying that now.

Do you know what?

Yeah, it just made me laugh when I was listening back to it, like all these all these beeps that are going on.

And sometimes I hadn't actually covered over the word.

What do you think, John?

Should it be beeps or not?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I don't know.

It's like right on the low end, isn't it?

It's on the low end.

It sounds like some sort of filthy tirade or something.

Rob Bell:
It wasn't that bad.

It wasn't that bad.

Anyway, let's let's move on.

Before we get on to everybody's comments about our episodes with Al Humphreys on Micro Adventures, we've had another comment on the colour wheel that was a couple of episodes ago.

Our episode with Lucia Fraser.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I was going to say we had a lovely email from Niall.

Rob Bell:
We did.

Jono Hey:
Who said, I was glad that you mentioned the cultural feelings and emotion of colour.

And he shared an infographic from The Brilliant Information is Beautiful by David McCandless, which if you haven't seen, you should go see it.

I have it on my bookshelf behind me.

It's exactly what you think.

It's beautiful infographics in some ways.

I don't know if he invented it, but infographics is kind of his specialty, the king of infographics.

Anyway, he has a beautiful, it's beautiful and it's informative visual of emotions and colours in different cultures.

And it takes a little while to take it in, but a huge wheel of like all of the different emotions and different aspects.

So like celebration, beauty, good luck, friendship, freedom, royalty, mystery, nature, and all of these things.

And then all the colours that represent that in, I think, eight or nine different cultures.

And it's really fascinating because if you look at it, there's not that much consistency, I would probably say.

Rob Bell:
So the ones that I was drawn to, the ones that, as you mentioned, it did take me a little while, a couple of minutes just to get my head around what was going on with the information.

But then once you get it, you go, oh wow.

So then I started looking at the wheel and seeing which ones where there was consistency for the colour that represents an emotion in different cultures, which ones did have a consistent colour, and then checking what that emotion was.

And then the other thing I did was when they were so vastly different and there were hardly any consistency of colours between different cultures to represent an emotion and seeing which emotions they were.

It was, yeah, God, there's so much info there.

It's brilliant.

Jono Hey:
Sit there and read it like you're reading the paper.

Just like dig in, can't you?

Really fascinating.

Anyway, I think you were gonna add the link to it because it's, yeah, well worth a little look.

Rob Bell:
I've added the link to that infographic, Colours in Culture.

I've added in the show notes for this episode.

You'll find it down there.

Go and have a look.

Yeah.

Right then.

Let's move on to Micro Adventures.

Firstly, what I'd like to say is, it's just Jono and I again for Listener Comments at the moment.

Tommy is still around.

He's very much still around, but he's been spending some of his time, as Al suggested, up a tree.

During his lunch breaks every now and then, is it every once a month?

Is he doing it?

Jono Hey:
Every once a month.

Rob Bell:
Once a month.

Tommy is heading out from his office across a field and climbing a tree and spending 20 minutes up there.

And every time he sent us a photo of it or a little video, it is absolutely wonderful.

It is pure joy.

Jono Hey:
I'm quite jealous, actually.

The pictures are brilliant from up a tree, aren't they?

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Really lovely.

Rob Bell:
Framed by leaves and branches and stuff.

Yeah, it's gorgeous.

I think he's making friends with the squirrel up there.

It's absolutely brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

So I just wanted to update everybody about that.

Tommy is staying true to his word and doing that.

But let's get into some of your messages.

Thank you for everything that's been sent in.

So I've had an email from Simon who says, Hello chaps.

Simon sent us an email to hello at sketchplanations.com.

He says, The episode with Al talking about microadventures reminded me of the feeling we get every time we go anywhere in the van.

It always feels like we're off on an adventure somewhere.

I think this is a camper van Simon's talking about.

One of my favourite things is eating fish and chips in the van at the seafront.

Cozy inside the van with the family, eating at our little camping table in the van whilst watching the sea and weather outside.

The van's been used quite a lot over the years for random stayovers in the garden of friends after a late night at weddings instead of a hotel for work if on a longer trip with a late drive and each time it feels like a little adventure.

I can't imagine life without the van.

That's lovely isn't it?

Jono Hey:
It's a bit like our set is like the mega bivy bag isn't it?

Rob Bell:
You know, it's the mega bivy bag.

Jono Hey:
It also takes you places.

Brilliant.

Rob Bell:
It is literally Simon's vehicle through which he enjoys a micro adventure.

Thank you.

Rich also sent us a message to say, I can't believe you have Al Humphreys on the podcast.

He's one of the people in my world of travel.

So Rich, obviously, big fan of travel there.

There's a lot of enthusiasm for Al on the podcast, I have to say.

A friend of the show, Jeremy Taylor, sent us a message or left us a comment on Instagram.

He's saying, I love this episode, chaps.

I bought Al's book as soon as I got home and realized that Al also wrote my daughter's favourite book, The Girl Who Wrote the Ocean.

The intro also reminded me of a game called Nail that we played at uni.

So at the beginning of the episode with Al Humphries on Micro Adventures, before we got into that, Jono, Tommy and I were talking about a game called Stump, where you're hammering nails into a wooden stump.

So Jez says, the game Nail that we played at uni was a variation of Stump.

We used the sharp end of a brick hammer to take in turns to hammer our own nail down into the stump or log.

Now, brick hammer, instead of a claw hammer where you've got the claw end, and instead of the claw, you've got this, it's quite a thin wedge.

Can you picture it?

It's probably the kind of one that you'd go if you went fossil hunting.

Yeah.

Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip.

So Jez says, first one to hammer their nail in is the winner.

Two tactics, reliable short, sharp blows or really whack it, but risk missing.

He finishes off his message by saying, downstairs neighbours probably didn't enjoy it as much as we did.

Thank you very much, Jez.

That is all good stuff to hear.

More love for our there.

Fairy Lulu left this comment on Instagram saying, I have a micro adventure every day in some of spring and summer, exploring abandoned places, a wonder in the forest or walk down a random footpath.

Yeah, that sounds like a micro adventure to me.

Spot on.

Jono Hey:
Which just reminds me, we actually got back from a really nice weekend in Devon.

And one of the coolest bits was exploring some random bunkers, like Second World War bunkers, which are sort of overgrown and you can walk inside.

And there's ivy coming down the walls and everything's a bit dilapidated.

But it was taking going in those with our 10 and 12 year old sons was quite fun.

Rob Bell:
And where was that, Jono?

On the South Coast somewhere?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, down in Devon on the South Coast.

Yeah, lots of these things.

And also old quarries, like looking around and exploring those old buildings and things like that.

Rob Bell:
You've been micro-adventure-tastic?

Jono Hey:
We have.

We have.

Rob Bell:
Just inspired.

No kidding.

Couple more on LinkedIn.

Louisa Oldfield left us a comment saying, Al Humphreys is a great speaker and the micro-adventures are brilliant.

Highly recommend to anyone with an adventurous spirit or not, I'd say.

Well, with an adventurous spirit or micro-adventurous spirit.

That's the whole beauty of it.

Jon, do you want to take up the last one for us?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, a comment from Hazel, but micro-adventures are so good for well-being and connecting back with nature and who we are at our core as humans.

Step into nature with a micro-adventure.

Just watch your nervous system go as it relaxes and unwinds.

Rob Bell:
It's kind of true, isn't it?

Yeah, it's very good.

It's kind of true.

So, I mean, are we kind of saying here that just going out for a walk then is a micro-adventure in some senses?

Jono Hey:
I think in the episode we're going a bit further than that, right?

So it has to be.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

I think Al likes there to be some sort of challenge, maybe something that you've not done before.

Even if that is going for a walk in a place you've not done before, maybe a micro-adventure is just, yeah, giving it some other undefined element.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, a little twist to challenge you, to stretch you, to go experience something you've never done before.

But I mean, I suppose one of the core bits of it is that you're out in nature, and that's what nature does.

Rob Bell:
Absolutely.

And I think if you'd ask Al, he'd probably say there is no real definition, is it?

Well, he did define it at the beginning of the show, but you know, it's each their own, and it's a very movable beast.

That's the beauty of it.

I haven't done this.

I still want to get the OS map of where I live, right in the centre of it.

Yeah.

Because even though it is rather urban and built up, there will be microadventures to be had within that.

Jono Hey:
Well, actually, to be fair, this weekend, because we have one of those maps, too, and we centred it around this point that we go to regularly in Devon.

And that is the map that we used to go do those trips.

It is really good.

Like, just get it out and go find some bit on there where you've not been to and go see what's there.

Brilliant.

Rob Bell:
Oh, so, so good.

So, so good.

Listen, we're going to leave it there.

Thank you all for listening.

Thank you all for sending in your comments.

Please do send them in off the back of our conversation with Christian Hunt.

I'm sure you've all got the examples of, as Christian has said in the podcast, examples of when we've all been a little bit silly sometimes.

And that could be in your personal life or in your professional life or, you know, whichever realm.

Please do send in your messages.

We love hearing from you guys and we love hearing your stories.

Thanks so much for listening and we'll be back next time.

Bye for now.

Jono Hey:
See you.