Your organisation is in the behaviour change business
Whatever it does, whatever goods and services it provides, your organisation is a collection of humans interacting with other humans.
All the challenges and opportunities your organisation faces ultimately come down to influencing those humans: your staff, your customers, your suppliers, your investors, or your regulators.
Whether you want customers to buy more of your services, your staff to adopt new technology, be more collaborative or innovative, operate more safely or effectively, or adapt to new processes, policies, or organisational structures…
…you’re trying to understand and influence human behaviour.
How well does your organisation do it?
But when it comes to changing behaviour, almost every organisation adopts the same old playbook: tell people what to do, tell them why to do it, and teach them how to do it.
Does it work?
If it did, you wouldn’t be reading this.
That playbook is built on implicit assumptions about how people think, how they make decisions, and how they behave; that Humans are logical, Organisations are predictable and ordered, and that Technology will solve every human and organisational problem.
All those assumptions are wrong.
Modern advances in the social and behavioural sciences have transformed our understanding of humans, human nature, and human behaviour, yet most organisations still operate on the basis that humans are logical calculation machines, walking information processors.
All my work explores the same basic question:
What if we designed organisations for humans as we really are: social, emotional, tribal, storytelling apes?
I help organisations understand and influence human behaviour
I work with organisations to answer that question in four main ways:
Speaking – Main stage conference keynotes, team offsites, Executive meetings. Whatever the setting, I’ll be funny and provocative, challenge assumptions, and tell stories that leave your audience thinking differently.
Consulting – From workshops to ongoing partnerships, I practically apply behavioural science to help solve your organisational and technological problems.
Capability – I help build your team’s capability to better understand and influence humans in the workplace.
Media – I’m available for interviews, podcasts, articles, or research collaborations at the intersection of humans, organisations, and technology.
About me
I’m James.
I’m fascinated by humans and human nature: how we think, feel, decide, cooperate, compete, organise, tell stories, and how, just occasionally, we make a complete mess of things.
I work at the intersection of humans, organisations, and technology, helping clients tackle problems like:
- Adopting AI
- Implementing digital technology
- Boosting cybersecurity & compliance
- Improving performance & wellbeing
- Making better decisions
- Changing culture
I’ve worked in every industry imaginable: my first job was auditing industrial manufacturers in the north of England; my second was teaching people to scuba dive in the Florida Keys. I then spent 14 years in big banks in London and Singapore, before 6 years as a consultant in Australia, where I co-founded and led Deloitte’s global Behaviour First offering.
Along the way I’ve led projects in more than 60 countries on 6 continents in industries including banking, insurance, mining, oil & gas, construction, transportation, government, education, health, human services, and aged care.
Equal parts philosopher, historian, organisational anthropologist, and behavioural scientist, I tend to approach familiar problems from unfamiliar directions. I’ve lived all over the world, speak five or six languages (badly), and was once arrested for espionage by the Rwandan marine corps.
It’s a long story.