Calling DIBS

Karen Smallwood, Product Manager in Connected Services BC, BC Public Service.

Karen Smallwood has an eye for how to use BI to save lives! Her capstone project team tackled organ donation from a new angle: It turns out many people assume they're registered donors when they're not! Drawing on her work in emergency management, Karen shares BI barriers faced by folks trying to prevent, prepare for, respond to, or recover from emergencies. She also tells us about Connected Services BC, which will majorly reduce sludge for the people of BC.

Faraz Haqqi, Principal Behavioral Designer at ideas42.

Even highly skilled workers can struggle to find work. Faraz Haqqi provides a snapshot of ideas42’s projects tackling this challenge from Rwanda to Jamaica to Malaysia to the US. The projects approach the problem from a number of different angles, including helping employers provide apprenticeships and internships, helping training programs synch their curricula with market needs, and helping jobseekers complete job placement programs. 

Katherine Flaschen, Principal Behavioral Designer at ideas42. 

ideas42's Katherine Flaschen explains how to tackle complex challenges like "improving educational outcomes" by using a step-by-step process and focusing on meaningful, movable, and measurable behaviours. To illustrate, Katherine shares a project using social norms and present bias to encourage caregivers to enroll girls in school. Katherine also shares key advice like centring target populations and building partner capacity to increase impact.

Nicholas Chesterley, Author of "Future-Generation Government".

Nick Chesterley's new book, "Future-Generation Government", uses a behavioural insights lens to explore why governments underweight the long term, and how we can help them better balance the present and the future. Nick and I talk about the importance of measurement, experimenting with new ideas, and iterating as we learn what works (and what doesn't). We also discuss strategies to make it easy and attractive to govern for tomorrow today.

Dave Hardisty, Associate Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at UBC Sauder School of Business.

Dave Hardisty returns to the podcast to talk about A/B tests, which are a popular and useful tool to help us determine which version of something works best. However, A/B tests run on online platforms like Google and Facebook aren't actually true experiments because of the way platforms try to optimize engagement for each version. Dave shares why this matters, options for online true experiments, and best practices for online platform A/B tests. 

Greg Lockwood, Senior Analyst at Global Affairs Canada.

Greg Lockwood returns to the podcast to tell us about recent projects using mixed methods to explore optimal hybrid work strategies and to encourage deep work in the age of distraction. Drawing from his experiences at the Public Health Agency of Canada and Global Affairs Canada, Greg also shares lessons learned about experimentation, communicating with internal vs. public audiences, and working in BI-specific vs. generalist roles and teams.

Jordana Composto, Postdoctoral Researcher at UBC Decision Insights for Business & Society (UBC-DIBS).

We're thrilled to welcome Jordana Composto as our new DIBS postdoctoral researcher. Through her contributions to the 2022 IPCC report and her research on the mechanics of social norms, Jordana works across disciplines and levels to tackle the climate crisis. She shares helpful ways to categorize behaviour change, gaps that new research can address, calls to better measure and report impacts, and goals for collaborating to implement research insights.

Alison Schatz, Senior Communications Specialist at Metro Vancouver.

After completing the Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights, Alison Schatz is finding a wide range of ways to weave BI into her work. Among other uses, Alison is drawing on BI concepts and methods to write action-focused communications, to coordinate with colleagues, to connect with difference audiences, and to lay the groundwork for herself and others to do full BI experiments to improve services and sustainability for the community.

Takuro Ishikawa, Senior Behavioural Scientist with the BC Behavioural Insights Group (BC BIG).

Tak Ishikawa returns to the podcast to help us understand the recent "debate" about boosts and nudges. To help ground the conversation, we disentangle terms like heuristics, biases, nudges, and boosts. In the end, Tak and I firmly agree that there is no debate -- both boosts and nudges are extremely valuable. Instead, it's about nuance and choosing the right intervention (or combination of interventions) for the situation.

Clea Stone, Associate Director at The Sound.

Because Clea Stone recently completed the Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights to complement her existing skillset from a decade of work in market research, she's perfectly equipped to help us explore the intersection of market research and behavioural insights. To wit, Clea brainstorms opportunities for integrating BI into market research and profiles qualitative research techniques that can round out the BI repertoire.