The Job Centre
Paul1 is sitting in a job centre in Essex, on the outskirts of London, waiting for his appointment. Paul is twenty-four, has had a few brushes with the law and has never managed to hold down a job. In the past, that didn’t matter. He’d usually found work pretty easily, bouncing between a range of formal and informal jobs. But times have changed. It is May 2011, in the middle of what has become known as the Great Recession, and the employers that would have taken him on in the past are much more cautious now. Paul hasn’t had a job for seven months and things are becoming very difficult for him – he’s got a young daughter to support and is starting to fall behind on his rent. He’s desperate to find a job, so has swallowed his pride and reached out to the job centre for help.
Across the desk from Paul is Melissa. She has spent years helping people to find work, but has become increasingly frustrated by the system. She spends her days assisting jobseekers to fill out endless numbers of forms. Forms to calculate your income; forms to get you onto the benefits system; even forms to confirm you are who you say you are on the other forms. Over the previous year, Melissa had seen hundreds of people’s motivation and confidence slowly drain away. She wanted to do more to help, but often felt like she was battling the system, the economy and sometimes even the people she was trying to help.
All that changed for Melissa and Paul when they began taking part in a new initiative. It wasn’t your typical multi-million-pound project, supported by a team of brash consultants and lots of new technology. Instead the focus was on the small changes Melissa could make to the way that she helped Paul and others to find work. Though the changes were small, when added together they would reset the way that Paul would think about looking, preparing and ultimately securing a job.
Melissa would normally have begun by asking Paul to start filling in forms. But now she was encouraging Paul to think about why he was at the job centre and why finding a job was important to him. He told her about how he wanted to provide for his family. Melissa wasn’t used to having the time or incentive to have these conversations, but found it came very naturally to her. She then asked him to set himself a specific goal for getting back into work. Times were tough, so Melissa encouraged him to be ambitious but also realistic. Paul set himself a goal to find a job in the next three months, ideally in the construction industry.
Paul was then encouraged to break his goal down into steps, like improving his CV, replying to job adverts, asking his friends who were in the trades to speak to their bosses, and getting the new tools he needed for the construction work he was looking for. Focusing on completing each of these steps would help ensure that he didn’t feel that the ultimate objective – getting a job – was too distant. They would help him feel as though he was making progress along the way, and this in turn would stoke his motivation.
Then, every fortnight, each time Paul met with Melissa, he was encouraged to think about what specifically he was going to do and when. He wrote down each of these tasks and linked them to a moment in his daily routine – like making sure he sent out three applications for jobs on Monday morning after breakfast. This would help create a mental link between moments of the day and week and the things he needed to get on with. In addition to this, he signed his name against each of the separate steps. In doing so, he was making an active commitment in front of Melissa to follow through on the tasks they had set him that week that would help him to find a job.
Both Paul and Melissa felt as though they’d been given a fresh start. Melissa was no longer policing people against a set of administrative tasks, and it seemed to Paul that he’d been given back control. It wasn’t easy. Paul made application after application without success. But with Melissa’s encouragement he stuck with it and, after three months, he found a job on a construction site. Paul later told Melissa that the way she helped him gave him renewed focus in life, improved his relationship with his wife and afforded him the means to support his young daughter.
Behavioural science
The changes we made to the way that job centres help people find work have now been introduced across England and are helping nine million people a year to find employment more quickly. Each of the new practices was based on ‘behavioural insights’ – ideas from behavioural science research. We will set out many of the most important ideas from this body of research through the course of this book. But before we go any further, there is one underlying theory that is worth dwelling on because it underpins everything that follows. It is that human beings have two different ways of taking decisions and processing information.
This ‘dual process theory’ was most famously articulated by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.2 The ‘fast’ system operates automatically with no sense of effort or voluntary control. You will be using it when someone asks you ‘What’s the colour of grass?’ or ‘What’s 1 + 1?’ The colour green and the number 2 will pop into your head, whether you want them to or not. The ‘slow’ system, by contrast, requires your active attention. You use it when someone asks you ‘What’s 12 × 19?’, or if you’re walking down the street and you’re asked to try to actively maintain a faster walking pace than you are used to.3 Unless you’re a particularly advanced mathematician or very used to varying your walking pace, these activities will feel effortful and will require your active attention.
The fast and slow systems don’t just help us decipher colours, tackle maths problems and undertake unusual walking exercises. They are constantly at play when taking any kind of decision – including setting our goals in life, and working out how we should go about pursuing them. The trouble is that most of us are blissfully unaware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the fast and slow systems, and how they interact with one another. We usually assume that when we set ourselves a goal we will probably pursue it with focus and attention, drawing heavily on our slower, reflective system.
This wouldn’t be a problem if we had unlimited processing power. But we don’t. We have a limited budget of attention that we can allocate to activities and – as Daniel Kahneman argues – if you try and go beyond that budget, you will fail.4 Try working out what 12 multiplied by 19 is at the same time as reading the next paragraph and you’ll see what we mean. Or more pertinently, if you want to lose weight, see how difficult it is to maintain a calorie-controlled diet, not just for a day or two, but for weeks and weeks on end. You will find that the cognitive effort required is much more demanding than you might think. In other words, we are human beings. We are not the ‘Econs’ described in classical economic textbooks who have the mental agility of Albert Einstein and the willpower of Gandhi.5 We have a finite amount of cognitive ‘bandwidth’,6 and this limits our ability to draw on our slower system all of the time.
Many people mistakenly interpret this to mean that the slow system is the ‘smart’ part of the brain, forever grappling with the ‘stupid’ fast system, which has a tendency to leap to conclusions without thinking through the consequences. In this characterization, the slow system wants to count calories, but the fast system sees a Mars Bar and snaffles it. But this misrepresents the complex ways in which the fast system operates and how it helps us to live our lives in an ever more complex world. Think about how it felt when you started to learn to drive a car for the first time. It was a struggle and required your constant, active attention. Your slow system was in full mode. Now think about how it feels to drive – effortless and automatic, as your fast system takes over. So while the fast system can trip us up (we eat too much, fail to save for retirement, never get round to finishing that work assignment), it also holds the key to setting us on the path to achieving our goals in life.
This book, then, draws on the latest available behavioural science research to help you channel your attention in a way that will enable you to achieve your goals. It will provide you with a simple framework that will help you to use your slow system wisely in ways that allow your fast system to kick in when it’s most needed. A big part of this will involve using your more reflective system today to put in place the behavioural scaffolding around which your future self will act. In doing so, we will be reminding you that the small details matter a lot more than you might expect. To achieve big, you will need to think small.
From nudging others to nudging ourselves
The ideas at the heart of this book are not just based on the last fifty years of academic research. They have been tested over the past six years in programmes we have developed at the Behavioural Insights Team (commonly referred to as the Nudge Unit) set up by David Cameron shortly after arriving in Downing Street in 2010. The Behavioural Insights Team's aim back then was the same as it is now: to take the ideas from behavioural science research and to apply them in the real world in order to help people make better decisions for themselves. In 2010, most people thought it would not work. There was scepticism in the press – most journalists thought it sounded more like a gimmick than a serious new departure for government. And there were challenges from many government officials, who believed that government was primarily about big spending programmes, new laws and bold announcements. Big thinking was the order of the day.
In our previous roles at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown we, too, were used to thinking big. It might have been a project on what local government should look like in fifteen years’ time, if you started with a blank sheet of paper. Or how the entire schools system should be reformed to improve pupils’ educational attainment. Big strategic programmes like these are, of course, often helpful. But when they are undertaken, a gap can open up between the strategy developed from behind a desk and what actually happens on the ground. So when setting up the Behavioural Insights Team we seized the opportunity to tear up the policymaking handbook in order to understand better how government programmes affected the decisions people took in their everyday lives. And this required us to start by thinking small, not big.
The first change we made was to how we gathered evidence. We got out from behind our desks and started to look closely at the way that public services worked in practice. We spent weeks in job centres before making the changes that would help Paul and others find jobs. We went on dawn raids with bailiffs, to understand why people were not paying their court fines on time (it turned out that many people didn’t even know they had overdue fines). We even waded through hundreds of tax forms to understand why millions of people still fail to pay their tax on time. In each of these areas, we used the decades of behavioural science research to inform how we could do things differently. We also drew on the advice of some of the world’s leading behavioural scientists to support our efforts, including Richard Thaler, the co-author of the book Nudge, who continues to be one of our closest advisors.
Time and again we saw opportunities for improving the way that things worked – not by introducing a big new strategy, but by making a series of small changes which, when added together, could have a sizeable impact. We showed that adding a single line in letters to late taxpayers (informing people that the vast majority of people pay their tax on time) could bring forward the payment of hundreds of millions of pounds of tax debt. We showed that prompting people with a simple text message, before bailiffs were sent round, trebled the fine payment rate. And we showed how the small tweaks we made to the way those out of work look for jobs could help get thousands of people back into work more quickly.
We knew that these small changes were having an effect because we made a second change to the way the policymaking process worked. We began to test rigorously whether or not the changes we were making actually worked. For every small change we made, we would run a ‘randomized controlled trial’ in which we compared what happened when someone got the new intervention (a new tax letter, a new job-searching process) with what happened when someone got the equivalent of a placebo pill (the old way of doing things).7 This enabled us, just like a doctor running a clinical trial, to demonstrate that the effects were the result of the changes we made, not of some other factor.
Testing a policy before you introduce it at scale might sound like common sense. But at the time we started running these trials, it was a radical new departure. It was the steadily growing collection of trial results that started to turn around the remaining sceptics. We were able to show definitively that many of the small changes we were introducing, when added together, were having big impacts. The press began writing articles about encouraging new Behavioural Insights Team findings8 and government officials began to come to us with new ideas about changes that could be made in their policy areas. The ideas we had used to change the way that policy was being made, many of which seemed radical back in 2010, were now becoming the mainstream.
The changes that the Behavioural Insights Team has made over the past six years have tended to fall into two categories. We have either designed new ways in which governments can nudge citizens directly, for example to save more, get healthier or pay their tax, or we have created new tools to help nudge public sector workers, like those that Melissa used in our job centre programme. In these areas, it’s been the Nudge Unit that has been doing the nudging.
This book is focused on a third, less discussed, category of nudge – self-nudges. So whereas classic nudges require someone else to change the environment in which you are taking a decision, in this book we will be providing you with the tools to do the nudging – in your personal and work life. You will most likely be using some self-nudges in your everyday life already – whether it’s setting your watch a few minutes early to help you keep to time, getting colleagues to commit to specific tasks at work, hiding away the cookie jar, or using treats to reward your kids for good behaviour. This book aims to help you do this more systematically, however, by providing you with a range of evidence-based techniques that you can use to nudge yourself and those you work with to achieve your goals. This is why, alongside the numerous studies we look at, we will also be telling you stories about how we ourselves have used these insights to nudge ourselves, and to adopt new practices at the Behavioural Insights Team. In essence, we will be opening up the nudge toolbox, so that everyone is able to use these tools in their daily lives.
At the heart of this book is a simple framework. The framework is built around seven core concepts. These core concepts and the rules underpinning them are all easy to understand and to apply, but the small details in how they are applied matter and, while a lot of it is ‘applied common sense’, they are often counterintuitive. For this reason we take time to explain the research upon which the concept is based and how and where you can trip up.
It is also important to state upfront that thinking small is not about small goals. Far from it. We hope this book will help you to achieve things that will really make a difference to your own life and the lives of those around you at work and at home. Our argument is that in order to reach big, you need to start by thinking small. So it’s not about reining in your ambitions. It is about adopting a mindset that focuses on getting the small – and often simple – details right, that will set you on the path to achieving big goals.
Think Small is not a checklist. You do not have to religiously apply each of the seven steps set out here to the goal you’re working towards. Rather, you should think about this book as providing you with the behavioural scaffolding around which to build your own project, with each of the elements providing you with a different set of tools and support.
The Think Small framework starts with how you set and plan your goal, which provides the foundations for your scaffolding. We will then guide you through how to build the supporting poles and joints that will help keep you motivated along the way. This includes tools to help you make binding commitments, set rewards in the right way, draw on the support of others and get helpful feedback. You don’t have to use all of these tools for every goal, but the more supports you have in place, the stronger your scaffolding is likely to be. Finally, we will explore how you can create the ties that ultimately bind your scaffolding together, by examining the latest evidence on how to keep going and to stick at your long-term goals. These ties will be especially useful when the going gets tough and the pressures of everyday life inevitably get in the way.
We really hope that by using the Think Small framework you’ll be able to choose the goals that are right for you and understand the simple and straightforward ways to achieve them, making the world a little better for you and those around you.