The Pioneer Interview with... Owain Service, CEO of CogCo

August 2023

Owain Service is one of the foremost behavioural science experts in the UK. Having co-founded the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team, he is now the founder and CEO of CogCo, a team of behavioural scientists, designers and data scientists, asking the questions: why do people do the things that they do, and how can we encourage them to do more of the things that are in their own self-interest?

During his time with the government, Owain was Deputy Director of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and played a pivotal role in setting up what later became known as the Nudge Unit. The team applied theories and ideas from behavioural science to government policy, guiding people towards advantageous outcomes such as transitioning from benefits to employment or paying their taxes on time.

Watch the highlights or read the full interview below

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you?

It’s about understanding the world from and through the eyes of your customers. This could be people who are buying your products or your services, or citizens of a country, but it’s especially important if you're sitting within a large organization.

Moving beyond that understanding is thinking about how you can then change the way that you design a service and offer a product that is going to help your customer - the citizen, the consumer - to do more of the things that are in their own self-interest, or that you would like them to do as part of your own mission as an organization.

How do you balance doing what's right for customers versus nudging customers towards particular decisions?

I have a clear rule of thumb which is that it's not appropriate to think about using insights from the academic literature of behavioural science to manipulate individuals. So by that I really mean encourage them to take a decision which isn't in their own self-interest.

But this poses another high-level question: how do you know what's in the interest of an individual??I think that requires you to operate and undertake your work with a degree of humility about what you know and what you don't know.

This also links to lots of research that shows that individuals are very happy to be supported and encouraged to take decisions that they see as helping them in one way or another, and they tend to be understandably opposed to similar interventions that might not necessarily be in their own self interest.

For example, when you ask people if they are okay with the idea of being automatically enrolled into a pension plan that will ultimately cost them a little bit more money month to month, but will help them to save for their future, many people are in favour of that.

But if you ask them whether or not it's OK to undertake the same process to help them to contribute more to charity by automatically enrolling them onto some kind of plan that links to their payroll, people tend to be opposed to that because it's not necessarily in their own self-interest. They want to have a bit more control over those sorts of decisions.

What do you see as the biggest similarities between government and organisations in terms of understanding people?

When you're working in a complex policymaking environment, your starting point should be ‘How can I achieve the best outcome given the constraints that I face here?’.?However, decisions often happen behind a desk in a government department, and politicians don't routinely think: ‘What does it feel like for the person who's at the end of this service?’

The same is true for any large organization. The individual who is making decisions about a product or service might be several parts removed from the individual who is ultimately going to be using it or buying it. There will also be several layers between the person who's undertaking the work and the individual who needs to sign it off, so that means you're having to think a lot about the internal decision-making processes, which distracts you from thinking fundamentally about the people or customers who you're seeking to serve.

It's also why sometimes startups with fewer resources find it easier to focus more quickly on understanding the needs of their customers. I think you see that especially in areas like FinTech where you have lots of large incumbent providers of a service who find it more difficult to change the way that they work, compared to a startup FinTech company that doesn't have those same constraints.

When we set up the Behavioural Insights Team it was almost in the spirit of a startup within government. The UK government is actually quite unusual in its ability to create small institutions at the very centre. The strategy unit was similar in that in that respect, a small group of people with specific sets of skills and expertise who could think about challenges and problems from a different perspective. You're not fully removed from the pressures of a large organisation, but you can give a small group of people a different set of tools and parameters through which to develop new ideas and don't constrain them in the way that you might in another bit of that large organisation.

What do leaders in organisations get wrong about using behavioural science to understand customers?

The main thing is context. You might read a couple of books and want to put theories into practice, but what works in one area may not work in another. I think that’s the main thing that takes some people astray in that regard, as the context is really important. The other thing is that you really need to test and trial.

That’s why our approach at CogCo is very experimental, in the academic sense of an experiment. You need to find out whether an intervention actually works, by running a test to find out what happens when you introduce a new practice or intervention. This is much easier to do now than it was a decade ago, as you can run experiments in the online world, but it also takes a degree of expertise to execute well.

Find out more about CogCo here: www.cogco.co