The Science of Decision-Making: Enhancing UX with Behavioural Insights with Angela Bliss

“It’s about being able to marry the two, so quant and qual, and to be able to use either one to more deeply explore whatever pattern of behaviour you’re trying to unpack. So with quantitative, you do get the extra rigour that statistically significant findings deliver and to be able to talk very confidently to statistical significance when you’re engaging with stakeholders is very impactful, whereas, you know, qual often feels a bit fluffy when you’re trying to get budget to do something innovative. So I think bringing the two together is super powerful.”
Angela Bliss

This month’s theme

Angela Bliss, a seasoned behavioural scientist and designer, shares her unique insights into how decisions are often made subconsciously, long before we’re aware of them. Angela has worked with top-tier companies and government bodies, seamlessly blending behavioural insights with creative execution.

In this episode, Angela dives deep into the fascinating world where behavioural science meets data science, exploring how this powerful combination can transform the way organisations approach user experience (UX) research. She reveals how understanding subconscious decision-making can be the key to designing truly impactful products and services. Angela shares insights from her experience working with a major bank, where AI and behavioural science are reshaping internal and external campaigns. Angela discusses how organisations are shifting their risk appetite, driven by the need to innovate with AI. The conversation highlights how the cultural shift towards embracing AI is pushing businesses to reconsider their approach to risk and innovation, opening up new opportunities for intrapreneurs. Angela also explores the importance of political savvy in promoting innovation within the constraints of practical business operations, offering valuable lessons on navigating organisational dynamics.

Tune in to this episode and discover how to harness the subconscious mind’s power to drive better decisions.

In this episode you’ll hear about

• What is the importance of quantitative data in design?
• How can designers overcome biases and improve their work?
• What biases does Angela encounter when working with stakeholders?
• How can one check their own biases?
• What are the implications of making decisions before being consciously aware of them?
• What is the best way to understand a person’s point of view or decision-making?
• How can we design for cognitive ability, including cognitive decline?
• What has been Angela’s experience with attitudes to risk and how have they changed over the years?
• What are some positive behaviours Angela sees within organisations?
• What has been a significant learning for Angela in embedding herself within a high-risk project?
• What are helpful or less helpful behaviours in hybrid work setups?
• How can one align people and handle facilitation challenges?
• How can one balance diverse perspectives with a sense of shared purpose?
• How can one manage conflicts between personal brand and team goals?
• How can one get stakeholders to agree on a shared purpose?
• What strategies are used to spread awareness of your team’s success across the organisation?

https://youtu.be/qbAKReOcQFM

Key links

Angela Bliss LinkedIn
London School of Economics (LSE)
National Australia Bank
Telstra
Nissan
Department of Health (Victoria)
Department of Transport (Victoria)
“Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
“Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman

About our guest

Angela Bliss is a behavioural scientist and designer with over 20 years of experience working with Australia’s largest businesses and government departments including NAB, The Reece Group, Wesfarmers Health, Department of Health, Victoria, Department of Transport, Victoria, Telstra, MYOB, Bunnings, Coles and Nissan.

Angela works in the field of applied behavioural science, combining behavioural insights with creative execution across service, product and communication design.

Angela is a member of the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists (GAABS) and holds degrees in economics and marketing, and art history. She also holds a M.Sc., Behavioural Science (Distinction) from the London School of Economics.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: 0:05
Hello and welcome back to the company road podcast, where we explore what it takes to change a company and to talk to the people that have and will continue to set organisations on fire in a good way with their passion and expertise. And by doing so, we’re going to be looking to help you, the intrapreneurs find your feet and make seismic waves with the work that you do today. And I’m Chris, your host. And today we’re going to have a truly exceptional guest who’s at the forefront of driving organisational change through the lens of behavioural science. And this is someone who I’ve worked with recently and who I hold in really high regard the wonderful Angela Bliss. Angela, welcome to the show.

Angela Bliss: 0:37
Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris Hudson: 0:39
Thanks. And Angela, you’re a seasoned behavioural scientist and designer with over two decades of experience. You’ve worked with a number of Australia’s largest businesses and government departments, and your impressive client list includes a number of household names like Nab, Telstra, Bunnings, Coles, Nissan, and key government bodies such as the Department of Health, Department of Transport in Victoria. And from what I see, from what sets you apart is your unique approach to organisational change. And you work in the field of applied behavioural science, And you expertly blend that behavioural insight with creative execution across a number of areas, but service products and communication design mainly, and it’s an innovative methodology and it’s helped a number of organisations that you’ve worked with, obviously implement those effective changes, both big and small. And you’ve got a number of other credentials that are as impressive as your experience. So you’ve got degrees in economics, marketing, and art history, and you’ve got a multidisciplinary background there. And you also earned an MSc in behavioural science with distinction from the prestigious London school of economics, which is an amazing place. I was in London the other week and I walked past that. I thought of you. Yeah. So lovely listeners, whether you’re an intrapreneur, a leader, or someone working in people, culture, ops, product transformation, change, design, anywhere ready Ange’s insights today are sure to provide you with some highly valuable perspectives on driving meaningful change within your company. Yeah, let’s uncover some of the secrets to successful organisational transformation and talk about the power of behavioural science a little bit. Maybe we start with an easy one. What is behavioural science?

Angela Bliss: 2:04
It’s a good question. Thanks so much for the lovely intro, Chris. So behavioural science is a multidisciplinary field in itself. So it combines neuroscience, psychology, economics, and behavioural economics to understand how people make decisions, understand what barriers and biases might be in play when they’re trying to make decisions, and then how do you intervene in a way that helps people make the best decisions for them, as opposed to imposing decisions on them. decisions on them. So you can use behavioural science for good and for bad. And a sense check for myself as always, am I helping the customer or the employee or the patient make the best decision for them?

Chris Hudson: 2:47
Okay. That’s a concise definition. That’s good. So essentially it’s helpful for decisioning by the sounds of it. Let’s maybe take a step back and think about you and your career and some of the things that you’ve done. What’s been your journey? And maybe describe yourself to those that don’t know you as much.

Angela Bliss: 3:03
Yeah, sure. So, I started life as an economist, so I did an international business degree, um, majoring in economics and marketing. I did a very short stint at the Australian Trade Commission and then went to Japan, fell in love with art and design, and that was a segue into doing a master’s in an archaeology of Asia at a time that I was determined to become unemployable, and then I was. And so I got into digital design. And so that was, And, but I’ve always been a kind of economist at heart. And then when behavioural economics started to be an evolving, emerging discipline, I was fascinated by the premise that we are not rational, that we are highly irrational, that we make impulsive decisions and if you studied economics when I did, which was the Keynesian model, which is all predicated on the rational, considered decision making process. It was quite revolutionary. And at that time I was working within the UX field, which is, as you know, the intersection of psychology and design. be able to frame that within this, the model of behavioural economics was just another layer that I found to be super powerful when you’re thinking about interface design.

Chris Hudson: 4:16
Amazing. That’s taking you on a little bit of a journey, obviously, away from Japan and things that were maybe less employable, as you were organisations out there are needing to consider not only the psychology behind the design and deliver that through the user experience, obviously, but it just feels like it’s often straight to design and out the door, right! There’s no kind of way around saying that politely, but it’s like, let’s ship it and go. So what have been some of your challenges along the way, do you think?

Angela Bliss: 4:43
Oh, look, that’s the knee jerk reaction to de scope research and deep inquiry. You do data science as part of behavioural science, and I feel like the kind of going in through the data avenue is a bit of a Trojan horse. They’ve got a, in a way, data. And that whole world has a license to deeply inquire into behaviour rather than the design teams. I often find an avenue in and often I will pair with data scientists now as much as designers because I feel like they do have the license to explore deeply.

Chris Hudson: 5:19
And what’s been your experience with designers? Because obviously, some are quite tuned into the user needs and customer behaviour, others are probably more into the aesthetic, and sometimes you get the hybrid. But what’s your view of the world when it comes to working with designers? And how do you get the best out of them from a behavioural science point of view, do you think?

Angela Bliss: 5:35
Look, it is challenging. It’s one of the reasons why I kind of couple almost more comfortably with data scientists these days than often designers because of the designer’s lack of quantitative experience, good UXs, good service designers are pretty fluent with regards to qualitative methods, but they’re often lack experience with regards to rigorous quantitative survey based exploration of behaviour.

Chris Hudson: 6:03
Can you tell us a little bit more about that quantitative side and some of the things that you helped to maybe unpack the discussions that I had on the quantitative side that would lead to an improved design in some sort of way?

Angela Bliss: 6:13
Yeah, sure. So it’s about being able to marry the two, so quant and qual, and to be able to use either one to more deeply explore whatever pattern of behaviour you’re trying to unpack. So with quantitative, you do get the extra rigour that statistically significant findings deliver and to be able to talk very confidently to statistical significance when you’re engaging with stakeholders is very, very impactful. Whereas Qual often feels a bit fluffy when you’re trying to get budget to do something innovative. So I think bringing the two together is super powerful.

Chris Hudson: 6:52
Yeah, I definitely agree. I’ve seen that work really well and often the qualitative side seems that the kind of comfy side for it. A lot of design conversations where it can be interpreted in one way or another. But you’re right, businesses, and I think decisioning is probably more, particularly now anyway, the board level, that people are expecting results to be quite quantified and measures to be quite specific. And so if you’ve got research and data, basically, to back up your design or to show that it’ll, Deliver XYZ and you can frame that up in some way and put a number against it, then that’s well received usually, but it’s quite hard to do. Right. It’s not easy to just come up with the numbers. And I think a lot of people, particularly intrapreneurs that I talk to find it a little bit daunting. I want to say the confidence with numbers that you either feel like you’re going to back yourself and your team to do it, or you feel like. You know, actually I could put a stretch target down of triple the sales next year or whatever it is, or it’s conversions or whatever the metric is. It doesn’t matter. I think there’s a lot of fear around numbers. What do you think?

Angela Bliss: 7:49
Absolutely. Absolutely. Within the design community, a lot of people become designers because they weren’t good at maths. That’s tends to be the general trajectory. But if designers want a seat at the table, which often that they rightly ask for, then the ability to articulate results. Quantitatively, I think is really powerful and something that designers to think about upskilling and go and do the data science courses that you can find online. It gives you very powerful language to be able to justify your design decisions.

Chris Hudson: 8:23
There’s probably a benefit. You’re not just talking about your end user or customer, but you’re talking about your internal customer. your audience within the organisation. So I was saying we record another podcast previously where we were talking about the extent to which you have to listen to your internal stakeholder, listen to the language they use and what they’re passionate about and what they’re angry about and all those things. I mean, all of that is in your toolbox ready to be able to reframe your work in relation to their world and then take things forward from there. So from a behavioural science point of view, is there anything to build on that that you think would be helpful?

Angela Bliss: 8:54
Yeah. I think that when we’re dealing with. stakeholders, we’re also dealing with their entrenched biases and barriers to adoption. And I think that being able to speak very confidently to the numbers allows you to confront those biases. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes, as we know, sometimes it does. Stakeholders will continue on a particular path, and that’s fine. It does also give you an elevated, I don’t want to say status, but sometimes it’s hard to break away from the notion that design is about making things pretty. And so, to be taken seriously, which is what we’re trying A lot of designers are angling for sometimes being able to weaponise numbers in your favour to be persuasive and to get cut through is really worthwhile.

Chris Hudson: 9:41
I think that design is the word is polarising a lot of people within the organisation. It’s unfortunate, but that is the case. It’s not understood and designers have the best intent, but obviously their positioning. Isn’t always fitting with that of the stakeholders that are making decisions. Sometimes. I think that’s probably why product is becoming such a big word instead. And that’s why a lot of roles are kind of gearing up more towards that, because it’s all then in the language of, okay, we’ve got a thing, we’ve got IP, we’ve got results, we’ve got targets that we can attach to it and designs. It’s a different type of work. It’s more to do with the practice than the output. Perhaps that seems to be helping. What are the biases you saying coming up? You mentioned biases there. What are some of the big things that you see day to day?

Angela Bliss: 10:22
highest paid person. Sunflower effect, where everyone turns to the highest paid person in the room for decision making. At the LSE, where I studied, we do a whole unit on decision architecture. So how do you create not only a forum within which the best possible decisions are made, but how do you create spaces that. scaffold and support good decision making, and often it’s to break through that group think. When skilled designers are equipped with these tools as well, it’s not just behavioural scientists, it’s about good facilitation of ideas. Just certainly having to confront biases. I often will take a behavioural science based approach to stakeholder engagement where I stand back and I really think about the biases and the barriers that I might be confronting when I’m dealing with a stakeholder and I’m trying to persuade them to go a certain way or take a, a risk and so I’ll design my approach to stakeholder engagement very purposefully as I would behavioural mapping exercise to design the best outcome for a product or service or communication tool.

Chris Hudson: 11:35
Yeah, I mean stakeholder mapping I think is an under looked way of running things because often you just turn up the meeting like people think we’re just going to turn up and see what happens but actually there can be a bit of planning involved in getting to the right outcome for the team and for yourself obviously and for the stakeholder and it’s a mutually beneficial one ideally as well. Yeah but it takes a bit of preparation a bit of foresight right? It does. You’ve got to check your

Angela Bliss: 11:56
own biases too, going into these

Chris Hudson: 11:59
situations. How do you do that? Because I’ve been through mindfulness and I know about body check and all that sort of stuff. From checking your own biases point of view, is there anything that you find to work particularly well?

Angela Bliss: 12:09
Oh, look, it’s pretty hard. Yeah. Ask other people what your biases are.

Chris Hudson: 12:12
Ask other people.

Angela Bliss: 12:14
That’s a good way to start. It’s just being aware that you take, that you carry a very specific lens into things. I mean, that’s the power of co design and lived experience. Co design is being able to check your biases by actually introducing diverse voices into the room when you’re trying to solve a problem, because it is very hard to identify our own biases. biases. Most of our decisions, 95 percent of our decisions are made in the system. One brain, they’re impulsive, they’re subconscious, they’re on gut instinct. I was looking at this really interesting neuro marketing. I dabble in a bit of neuro marketing as well. Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 12:51
As you do.

Angela Bliss: 12:53
The brain, they run these MRIs on the brains looking at decision making processes and often the decision was being made 12 seconds before the person was conscious of making the decision. I mean, that’s incredibly interesting with regards to engagement with advertising, engagement with marketing, engagement with product.

Chris Hudson: 13:13
How does that work? So you’ve made a decision before you think you have.

Angela Bliss: 13:16
Yes, before you know you have parts of the brain that are actually triggered when you make a decision of firing off before the parts of the brain that are conscious that you have made a decision. So we think we’re making decisions rationally and we spend a lot of time asking one of my kind of key takeaways or one of my key lessons for my design friends is. there’s only so much that we can glean from reported behaviour. So when we follow these qualitative methodologies, we’re asking people, why did you make that decision? How did you make that decision? And the assumption is that we are very aware of how and why we made decisions and that we’re rational. And in fact, the latest research will tell us that we don’t know why we make decisions. We often make decisions in a split second. They’re based on all sorts of biases that we’re unaware of. So when we’re relying on solely qualitative methodologies to make huge investment decisions on, do you build this feature? Do you build this? product. I would really suggest that you need other ways of unpacking behaviour and often that is observed behaviour. Behaviours, so how people actually interact with your products or service or communication tools rather than how they’re telling you they behave.

Chris Hudson: 14:41
I think that ethnographic side in research is particularly powerful when you do it right. It’s often considered a luxury again in the business discussion and the things that come up because obviously it’s a bit like a smoke and mirrors. Some people don’t understand how you could do that, but you can observe obviously how people are interacting with products and you can glean a lot from that. I also think from an innovation and a new product. Point of view, or if you’re thinking about service design, then that can be really powerful for just understanding the context with which your product or service will sit within the context of their lives. Because if you don’t really understand that, then you can’t really understand as a product designer or as an innovation leader in one way or another. How your products and services gonna fit in separately and meaningfully? Is it something they value? Are they really gonna cherish it? Is it just gonna sit on the side of the table in the house, you know, for two weeks? You just don’t know.

Angela Bliss: 15:30
And Chris, that’s a really, really good call out. Another key lesson from behavioural science is context is everything. So we might say, we make a decision this way. But actually we’ll change our decisions and our preferences and our attitudes as our context changes. So something that often thought about and that’s where that behavioural mapping of context is a really nice supplementary methodology to the traditional kind of UX or service design approaches.

Chris Hudson: 16:00
What you were saying before, it’s an oversimplified understanding of how decisioning works. Really? And how thinking and cognitive processing of what it is you like and don’t like works.

Angela Bliss: 16:10
Absolutely. Preferences are not fixed.

Chris Hudson: 16:13
Yeah.

Angela Bliss: 16:13
Attitudes are not fixed. So think about that from a segmentation perspective, lumping people together, but at a Particular time in a particular day we feel this way but tomorrow we might feel or prefer something different and I think there’s some rigidity in the methodologies that we typically use as service or product designers that needs to be challenged alongside the evolution and how in the science of decision making.

Chris Hudson: 16:41
I mean, as a proxy, then what’s the nearest best way of getting to an understanding of person’s point of view or decisioning that maybe. looks at some of those things. I know you mentioned observed behaviours as one way. How do we know whether people, yeah, that’s the best way.

Angela Bliss: 16:58
It is the best way, you know, so there’s a lot of value of getting the product out in market fast as possible, seeing how people react and testing and learning accordingly. I’m not dismissing qualitative research methodologies as being invaluable. Absolutely not. There is interesting patterns that you glean from them that are worth exploring potentially. through quantitative methods, but if you want to see how people actually behave, then you need to ship your product. I

Chris Hudson: 17:26
think that’s why that innovation anyway, there’s a real shift towards pretotyping and lean startup methodologies where essentially you’re putting things out and see how people respond. And I, for a lot of people, that’s really high risk and they’d never do it. It feels like that’s the way it’s going. And you, you test with more and learn from that and then refine. and reduce and craft after that.

Angela Bliss: 17:48
We can’t predict behaviour. It’s incredibly difficult for all these reasons. I mean, if we can’t even articulate why we make decisions, how would we expect a product designer to be able to preempt that?

Chris Hudson: 18:01
I think so. And I also see that there’s a massive amount of clutter, right? I feel like that the decisioning landscape now is It’s probably harder, much, much harder than it was ever before. If you’re thinking about what triggers the brain and the neuroscience and the impulses behind all of the signals that everyone’s receiving now every day because of technology, it just feels like that’s not simple anymore. You can’t just say, I’m going to buy this toothpaste or that toothpaste and we’re Proctor and Gamble in the 1950s. It’s very different, right?

Angela Bliss: 18:28
That’s exactly right. And it’s that cognitive overload. I’m doing some interesting work in banking with vulnerable communities. And really the design challenge is how do you design for cognitive impairment from cognitive overload all the way through to cognitive decline. And I think that cognitive context of our user groups isn’t. being considered enough. I mean, we talk about accessibility, but we don’t really talk about cognitive ability when we’re designing our interfaces and designing our comms tools, etc. So I think that’s another layer that certainly behavioural science introduces into consideration sets around innovation of products and services. Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 19:16
Yeah. So for cognitive ability, I mean, how do we best take a look at that and how do we understand it better, do you think?

Angela Bliss: 19:22
Look, it’s really tricky. I’m hoping that AI might play a role here. I think the ability of, to train AI models to detect cognitive ability has potential. I think I’d just version the machines on this one at scale because it’s very hard to consistently train humans to be able to detect levels of kind of cognitive decline consistently and sensitively. So yeah, perhaps this is the role for the AI models.

Chris Hudson: 19:55
I mean, now that you mentioned it, I hadn’t thought of this before, but essentially your browser history, anything that you’re doing on your phone, all of that could be processed as an assessment of your cognitive ability. Absolutely. It’s not like you’re sitting down to do your Myers Briggs or your, your psychometric testing. You could actually be assessed on how you’ve been working for the last 20 years.

Angela Bliss: 20:14
This is my hypothesis yet to be tested, but I think we leave a cognitive footprint when we interact digitally and on the phone that could be used by businesses to more sensitively engage with their vulnerable customers.

Chris Hudson: 20:29
So I think in that sense the role for behavioural science, it feels like will continue to evolve, because you’re looking for that way to get to purest version of the truth when it comes to, what customers need and want, tools are becoming richer. Are you excited about what lies ahead?

Angela Bliss: 20:44
Oh, completely. I did my thesis on the behavioural design of a bot. And I think that there’s huge potential in pairing up with AI, actually, as a researcher and as a scientist and as a designer, in order to explore at scale, these really tricky questions that we’re facing. So yeah, I’m really excited by the potential of working in partnership with AI to unpack some of these issues.

Chris Hudson: 21:12
What we’re left with in the meantime, I feel like there’s been a real struggle to get organisations to even understand the value of some of the things that are used in design thinking about personas, how the customer voice is represented within your organisation and how people best empathise with that and use that to create an ideate and come up with new propositions, things to take to market. It just feels like it’s all been a bit stuck, right? But, yeah. I don’t know if it’s because the insights side of things has been harder for people to really work with and grapple with. There are established research methodologies and practices. It just feels like it’s always a push to get people to really align upon what customers actually need in a strange way, because it should be a lot easier than that.

Angela Bliss: 21:55
Yeah. What do

Chris Hudson: 21:56
you think? Has that been your experience?

Angela Bliss: 21:57
Oh, completely, completely. I think that design is a cost centre. We’re not often seen as a revenue driver. We’re often seen as a cost and time in position on the business and to reduce cost and time. It’s often research that’s de scoped. I think that’s probably the potential of moving to these product models is that you’re and the observed behaviour approaches is that there is a focus on delivery. And then if you move research to align more with delivery, which is not ideal, but is probably expedient politically and economically, and to be able to learn post delivery, that’s probably more aligned to where businesses want to spend their time and money.

Chris Hudson: 22:39
And it’s aligned to the hippo or the sunflower effect that you described before, because the senior stakeholders that gets to go to market. with whatever it is they think they want to go to market with. And then the rest of the team can then get behind it and say, great, we’ll learn a lot through that. And let’s see what happens. We’ll work with the team to understand how people are responding to the product, to the service. So yeah, that can work pretty well.

Angela Bliss: 23:00
Yeah. And it’s a practical approach. I see a lot of designers really getting upset when scoped. And of course that’s frustrating. And of course that’s not ideal. But. You have to work within the constraints of the business environment within which you’re working and very much with an eye on bottom line efficiencies. And we need to work within that model.

Chris Hudson: 23:21
Should we talk a little bit about attitudes to risk in that respect and an appetite for risk? Like what’s been your experience of that and how have you seen it changing in the last. little while, last few years. Is anything changing there?

Angela Bliss: 23:32
Look, it’s interesting. I’m working with a big bank at the moment that is doing some really interesting work with AI and behavioural science, which is why I’m there. Four, five years ago, when I was trying to suggest that it could use behavioural science methodologies and control and to really look at the effectiveness of certain internal campaigns or external campaigns that just got shut down. There was absolutely no appetite whatsoever. The evolution that I’ve seen now in terms of risk and innovation is probably Off the back of AI, actually, businesses know they have to innovate. They know they need to take risks with this new tool. So they’re making space within BAU, alongside BAU, within businesses to play around with AI. responsibly, experiment and play around with AI in order to test what kind of value they can extract from these tools. And so I think that has opened up an appetite for a little bit more risk. It’s imposing change on organisations that they just have to kind of suck up and deal with, or else they’ll be left behind. So Chris, I think that, That was, yes, we still kind of butt heads with conservative risk adverse parts of the business. I think the cultural shift that is happening as a result of AI is going to work in our favour.

Chris Hudson: 25:03
Yeah. So it’s kind of like a tolerance or immunity. It’s about immunity to change and being okay with that. And feeling comfortable, all of a sudden things changed. And obviously COVID is one, AI is the next wave. There’s basically ways to introduce uncertainty, which can result in propelling a lot of organisations forward. So if you’re the intrapreneur and you can associate yourself with some of those waves of change, then probably a good thing, right? And you’ve probably seen this in the organisations that you’re working within where intrapreneurs or people within teams have got the opportunity to take some of those initiatives forward. And some people gravitate towards it. And obviously some people don’t. What are some of the positive behaviours you see within organisations? If we’re thinking about intrapreneurs, what catches your eye when you look at people and think, okay, well, they’re on the right track with this, what’s good behaviour in how it’s demonstrated,

Angela Bliss: 25:48
it’s being able to promote innovation and promote new ways of thinking within the constraints of practical business operations. So I think there’s no point. trying to be a battering ram with regards to getting your ideas across the line. I think it takes a level of political savviness and sophistication to work with stakeholders and within operating models and understand how to get the most innovative, best results whilst not breaking the models within which we all have to work. I think people who demonstrate not only innovativeness and risk taking and an appetite for change but can do so in a politically expedient way. That always catches my eye.

Chris Hudson: 26:38
No, it’s good to know. I mean, some of the things that we often talk about here are strategies for embedding yourself within culture, and obviously a lot of people change from one role to another. In that respect, what’s been a big learning for you in your career so far, in terms of embedding yourself within projects or initiatives that Could be high risk, maybe not, but anything that you could say about how you typically go about doing that typifies your approach to it.

Angela Bliss: 27:01
This is a several years ago that you need to pay as much attention to the politics as you do the problem. That was a big learning for me. I had a very consultant mindset, especially when I started to work in house client side where I’d be generously trying to fix all the problems without any attention to the political landscape. So I think that’s one. lesson learned is that you need to step back. You need to understand how decisions are made, who holds the soft and hard power within an organisation and work within the system, like following the momentum or following the flow. It’s easier to swim with the current than against it. And that’s the same in organisations. So. To try and drive innovation internally, speak their language, use the numbers, align to the stakeholders, key metrics, speak to the benefits in their terms, not yours. Those kinds of fundamentals really help and find the kind of change advocates. Again, work with the system, not against it. Find the people who have more appetite for change and for risk and for innovation. They’re always organisations. If they’re as high up as possible in the organisation, they’re even better.

Chris Hudson: 28:12
Yeah, quite a lot to figure out then a lot of people just say go for coffees and that sort of thing. Is anything in that practical sense been helpful to you?

Angela Bliss: 28:20
Turn up face to face. If you want to embed yourself in a culture, if you want to learn about an organisation, if you want to build those strong relationships needed to be an influencer within an organisation, call me old school. But I do think going into offices and working face to face with key stakeholders is really powerful.

Chris Hudson: 28:40
Yeah. I mean, behaviour change. in the way that hybrid work is now set up is doing other things. What are you seeing there as being helpful or less helpful behaviours?

Angela Bliss: 28:49
Look, I think we’ve lost a lot of that. Groupthink can be good and can be bad, but that kind of groupthink in the old war rooms with all the artefacts on the walls and a group of really focused multidisciplinary teams trying to work through problems, I don’t find Miro or Figma anywhere near as effective as kind of collaboration tools compared to actually being in the room with the team.

Chris Hudson: 29:18
One of the big gaps is around facilitation and obviously to sharpen your own skill set and approach to facilitation. It’s not often taught within organisations specifically, but. I feel like that is the one conflict management or if you’re looking for visioning or how do you align people in one way or another? It just feels like that’s a missing skill. Does that appear to you?

Angela Bliss: 29:38
Look, I think facilitation is super difficult. I think it takes a long time and probably a level of experience and dare I say seniority to be really effective at it. It also requires an understanding of decision making processes and human behaviour and groupthink and biases. to do it well. The best facilitators I see give everyone a voice in the room. Actually, a technique that we learned at the LSE was asking the most junior people first and also as a leader, not answering first ever. So not leading the discussion. So letting more junior people in your team answer first, hold the floor before you. impose your view because it’s more likely that the team will align behind the most senior person. So all those techniques come into play. It’s a really difficult skill.

Chris Hudson: 30:33
Oh, it’s a hard balance, isn’t it? Because I’ve been in the situation where the most senior person does go first and then basically ask everyone else for their opinion, and they’re either terrified or basically undermined by what’s already been said. That’s

Angela Bliss: 30:47
right.

Chris Hudson: 30:47
But the other way around, I remember this was said in Paris years ago, but there’s a Big, big, big presentation, right? And it was like four different consultancies presenting their stuff and all of that. And then four or five different business units all around this kind of massive hall. It was a huge place and presentations went up and everyone gave their presentations. And the format after each presentation was for the client to give the feedback on that work. And it did work like you said. But the leader at the top, everyone was terrified of. So there were five or six in each of those teams and they went from the junior all the way through to the senior. But then the senior guy basically just squashed everything that had been said initially in his own point of view. So I think there were respectful ways of doing it without it still feeling like a dictatorship.

Angela Bliss: 31:28
Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s a lot that behavioural science, decision architecture, choice architecture, can provide to facilitators in terms of how to deal with the group dynamics. So I’d encourage facilitators to take a look at the science behind behaviour next time.

Chris Hudson: 31:44
And I think to understand the decisioning flows within the organisation, you almost got to see that play out quite a few times. And that’s why, you know, Probably why you mentioned seniority has been quite important there because you have to see how it works.

Angela Bliss: 31:57
Also being able to hold the floor, just to have the gravitas to be able to hold the floor. And I think that probably a bit more experience and a bit of seniority helps, especially as a woman to, to be complete. Yeah, of course.

Chris Hudson: 32:10
Maybe relating to other people. Parts of your career and some of the things that maybe you found to be a little bit more uncomfortable. What were some of those and how did you get around, did you get past some of those situations? Did you have any other coping mechanisms?

Angela Bliss: 32:22
I can remember my very first presentation. So I was straight out of uni and halfway through the guy who was a senior man in the room said, Just stop a minute, your face is perfectly symmetrical. So that’s what it felt like being post grad when I came out of uni. I mean, thank gosh, work forces have evolved since then. I’ve always coped, and maybe this is not particularly healthy, but working harder than most other people. That was always been my fallback plan, is to strive to be really, really good at what I do. That silences the critics, I find.

Chris Hudson: 32:59
In that moment, I feel like there are situations we can get caught off guard. We just need to take a moment. And it doesn’t feel like time is almost on your side, but you can obviously afford yourself that time. If you postpone, you can defer a decision, or if you haven’t done that work in that moment, and you haven’t got a point of view, you can make time if you need to. But I think a lot of people still feel pressure, particularly in a face to face meeting environment, to just kind of come up and tell everything there during that allotted time slot. Some pressures are still there. Maybe it’s getting easier. I don’t know. What do you think?

Angela Bliss: 33:30
I think it’s getting easier. Look, I think there is more say controls around behaviours in the workplace that I think have benefited everyone. And I think that’s a really good thing. There are still biases out there and that’s something that we all have to navigate.

Chris Hudson: 33:45
There’s a question as well around diversity and particularly in relation to culture because representation. It feels like it’s never been as high on the agenda in a way, but have you found from a cultural point of view anything in working particularly well from that sense that brings in the different perspectives but also contributes a sense of shared purpose?

Angela Bliss: 34:03
Look, I really value co design methodologies for this reason and also lived experience participants. engagement, no matter what the context. So I think those methodologies go a long way, Chris, in ensuring that diverse voices are in the room. When I work, hold workshops, I don’t like to mix senior and junior people. If I can avoid it, I’d rather run two separate sessions where I engage with more junior, especially if it’s anything related to the employee experience. I’d rather separate the management layer from the more junior layer to ensure that they have a voice. I think there’s a lot of really positive moves afoot with regards to ensuring diverse and inclusive voices are heard. And look, there is a sub discipline within behavioural science focused on diversity and inclusion and ensuring that decisions are made with those voices.

Chris Hudson: 35:02
I feel like we’re now in a world of many, many organisations and many cultures represented. There’s some level of uniformity to the way in which organisations are now run, but also there’s a competing aspect, which is the personal brand and the individual and the people that sit within the teams, and it’s not just that individuals associated with the team and the team is delivering on the vision of the organisation, but actually, you’ve got this potentially competing personal brand, which does represent a voice of diversity. But obviously, there’s kind of a need for uniformity as well. So I think it’s always hard to balance some of those personalities and personalities have always been around in the world of work. What have you found works well in that respect?

Angela Bliss: 35:39
That’s a really good insight, actually, is the conflict between what’s best for the group and what’s best for me. That’s always going to be the case. I think people, they’re equipped now with a level of emotional intelligence to understand where someone is trying to push their own agenda rather than do what’s best for the group. I think that work forces and workplaces are tolerating less the people who are just there for themselves and their own personal brand. So I’m quite positive about the adaptive nature and the ability to identify. The people who just aren’t there for the team more quickly and to provide support for them to focus less on the personal brand and more on what they’re doing for their teams and their customers.

Chris Hudson: 36:24
Yeah, so celebrating the point of deference, admiring that aspect, but in the context of what it’s doing for the team rather than.

Angela Bliss: 36:30
That’s right, as opposed to what it’s doing for you. And I think those behaviours are very transparent. It takes five seconds to really work out if someone’s on the bus or doing their own thing.

Chris Hudson: 36:41
Can be a little bit hard to manage when I want to say like four or five different stakeholders have all got their own goals and you bring them together and actually there’s problems with that and it’s already been written down on a piece of paper somewhere and that’s what they’re aiming at. So it feels like they are serving their own personal agenda but actually you still need to find a way through to get them to agree on a shared purpose in a way. in a way that doesn’t feel like compromise. And I think facilitating that conversation can be quite hard.

Angela Bliss: 37:05
I think that’s where metrics come into their own. The very kind of tangible, immutable power of numbers. I think that becomes a way of dealing with those conflicts between stakeholders. I think if you get them to align on the metrics and focus back on the metrics and not the political agenda, that’s a really effective way of dealing with that.

Chris Hudson: 37:27
That feels like a really helpful distancing technique from any heated topic or debate, because you can say, okay, well, let’s just bring it all together and we’ll agree on some good old metrics. I mean, that feels like a more rational kind of sidestep. I reckon that would work pretty well.

Angela Bliss: 37:43
And so does framing the problem, getting alignment on the problem statement, that’s where I always start and sometimes that takes longer than you think it should because everyone’s got a different view of the problem. But if you can get an alignment across divisions on what you’re trying to solve and then the metrics then to support what success looks like, that goes a long way to, to break down those barriers between siloed agendas.

Chris Hudson: 38:07
And then taking that from your department outside, spreading the good word about this metric that you, jumping for joy when you leave the workshop, got the metrics. Like, have you found good ways of engaging other teams that kind of need to know about it, but don’t need to know about it, but it’s good for the general. Perception of what your team is doing. If you found anything there works.

Angela Bliss: 38:25
Oh, look, I think the dashboard, like I think just the simple communication, one page, two page. I mean, you’re talking about cognitive overload. You’ve got to think you’re trying to get the same mental availability in your stakeholders mind as you are in your consumers mind. And I think really simple tools of communication, one page kind of dashboards that you circulate to relevant departments in the organisation is really effective.

Chris Hudson: 38:50
This is why it’s always asked for in one, two, three slides or whatever

Angela Bliss: 38:53
it’s called. Yeah, exactly. I don’t know

Chris Hudson: 38:55
if PowerPoint’s helpful or not, but for certain things.

Angela Bliss: 38:57
It’s the language and the tool that most of our stakeholders default to. So again, you’ve got to swim with the current and you’ve got to do things that append to the system instead of trying to fight it.

Chris Hudson: 39:09
Well, both in them understanding the information, but also being able to maybe claim it as their own and pass it on and share it with other people too, so that can help. So

Angela Bliss: 39:18
yeah, exactly. It’s their preferred tool.

Chris Hudson: 39:20
Yeah. Just in terms of behavioural science and for listeners out there that still after the chat really want to find out a bit more about it, would you recommend any resources and anywhere to start exploring it further? Where would be a good starting point?

Angela Bliss: 39:31
Look, I think the books, many people probably have read at least one or two, but Nudge, Predictably Irrational, thinking, fast. and slow, all the classic texts. They’re slightly out of date. Some of them are over 10 years old, but they’re always a really good place to start.

Chris Hudson: 39:47
Maybe we’ll just finish with a bit about you personally and what drives you and energises you and how do you describe to people what’s in the engine room and how does it, how does it drive you forward?

Angela Bliss: 39:57
really interested in humans. I find it absolutely fascinating to learn about how we work, how we make decisions. Science is always evolving, so you’re never up to date, which really drives me. I think I’m kind of an academic student at heart. And then to apply it practically to help people, to help them have better experiences and make better choices. To me, Chris is the key driver. I always say I chase. Big problems to, and work with good people. That’s the engine room.

Chris Hudson: 40:29
No, I love it. And what you’re saying, the academic side of things can really jet propel businesses forward as well. Because I often reckon that 95 percent of day to day meetings are just based on common sense and what people would talk about otherwise, but if you can bring in some level of rigour, Then that can just take to a completely different tangent. It can start other thought processes. It can be incredibly inspiring for people to hear about. So if you’re out there and obviously you’ve got sources of information and things that you can reference from what’s been written out there in the wider world, outside of your boardroom, then, yeah. We

Angela Bliss: 41:02
use the same methodologies as medical scientists. So we run random controlled trials. So not only are they new ideas, but they’ve been rigorously tested and it’s a good study replicated in other contexts. So it’s bringing those insights into corporates and into businesses and then applying those to real life practical scenarios has a huge amount of value.

Chris Hudson: 41:29
Oh, I’ve had a good chat with you today. I’m going to leave feeling inspired and I need to look up some more things as well off the back of our chat. But, uh, thanks so much for coming on and having the conversation with us today. Yeah. If people want to get in touch with you, do you want to leave any contact details or where can people find you if they’ve got a question or if they just want to connect?

Angela Bliss: 41:44
Yeah, sure. Look, I think the best channel is LinkedIn. So Angela Bliss, LinkedIn, I’m based in Melbourne. Feel free to ping me through that channel.

Chris Hudson: 41:53
Yeah. Amazing. All right. And yeah, I’ll leave you to get on with your exciting work for the day. And uh, yeah. Thanks again.

Angela Bliss: 41:59
Thanks Chris. It’s been a delight.

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