The mandatory learning arrived in James Healy’s inbox with a deadline attached. It was a compliance module, one of those e-learnings staff are required to complete, confirm they have understood, and promptly forget. This one had been commissioned after a competitor firm was fined by a regulator because its people had been caught cheating on their compliance training. The response was to issue a mandatory learning about how and why mandatory learnings should be taken seriously.
Healy sat down to complete it on the final day. His boss pulled up a chair and they worked through it together, sharing the answers. The irony still makes him laugh.
Healy found himself thinking a thought he had had thousands of times before, in organisations of every size and type and ambition: does anybody seriously think this is going to work?
He has been asking that question for the better part of two decades. He has arrived at two possible answers. One is that the person senior enough to commission the intervention genuinely believes it will work, which leaves you with a problem of judgement. The other is that nobody believes it will work and they are doing it anyway, which leaves you with a problem of system. He has never been able to decide which is more depressing. He suspects that may be the point.
Healy came to behavioural science through fourteen years on the trading floors of investment banks in London and Singapore, watching a particular breed of person try to will themselves into rationality.
The trading floor, he says, is like the Masai Mara for anyone interested in human behaviour. The species on display had absorbed classical economics so completely, efficient markets, the rational actor, price as perfect signal, that they had built a whole vernacular around performing it. If someone was going to buy coffees, colleagues would say: I’m long an oat latte. Beneath the disgust sits the observation that came to organise the next twenty years of his practice. Trading exists precisely because people are not rational. If the rational actor model were true, prices would be perfect and trading would be impossible. The language people used was one of the tools that kept that fact invisible.
He had been given an early version of the same lesson by a university economics tutor who did not, as Healy notes with some precision, particularly like him. Healy had been sailing through his first year by reverse-engineering the graphs from his intuitions about how people actually behaved, rather than working from the equations forward. The tutor took him aside. “Stop thinking about what people do,” he said, “and start focusing on the equations and the graphs.” At the time, Healy read this as a damning verdict on him as an economist. He has since come to read it as a damning verdict on economics.
He keeps ending up inside systems that prefer the map and keeps dragging attention back to the people.
He describes his method as participant observation. He studied a few modules of anthropology at undergraduate level, not enough, he is careful to say, to claim the discipline. What he took from it was a single idea: the ability to be inside a system while still seeing it as a system. Not fully, never fully, but enough.
In practice, this means spending the first part of an engagement learning the language. He sits in the early meetings as a listener. Every organisation, he says, is like wandering into some tribe in the middle of the Amazon, with its own ways of saying things, rituals, costumes and roles. The job is to ask the stupid questions. Particularly, he says, the really, really stupid ones. The ones that turn out not to be stupid at all, but that everyone else has agreed, without quite deciding to, to leave unasked. This is the core skill of Healy.
Language matters to him because, in his view, it is never just language. It is a way of excluding people, of guarding position and identity. Academia does it. Organisations do it too. Behavioural science, he says, is not immune. Every place develops its own dialect, its own terms of seriousness, its own odd ways of naming what it values and what it wants to keep out of reach. He uses behavioural science broadly, across behavioural economics, psychology, sociology and neuroscience. He does not sound especially interested in policing the border. He is interested in what the language is doing in the room, what it makes visible, what it keeps hidden, and who gets to sound authoritative while using it.
For practitioners trained in formal frameworks, this can sound like soft method. Healy uses it as a way of getting to the real diagnostic question before the briefing document has even been agreed: is the organisation genuinely trying to change something, or staging the attempt? From the outside, those states can look similar. In practice, they call for very different responses.
While working at a previous firm, Healy was part of a retrospective on a proposal they had lost, one they had convinced themselves they were going to win. The work was in organisational culture change. The analysis pulled together several years of win and loss data.
What they found was uncomfortable. On large pieces of culture work, they had an excellent win rate. On smaller pieces, far less so. Once visible, the pattern was hard to ignore. Clients came for expensive culture-change engagements primarily in the wake of a scandal, or when they were in difficulty with a regulator. Beneath the brief sat a different problem statement. It was not “change our culture.” It was: “allow us to demonstrate to the regulator that we are taking this seriously.”
The product was the performance of action, the action itself was another matter.
That is not just a clever consulting read. It is the live thing he keeps running into. Organisational self-deception. The gap between the stated brief and the operative one. The harder question underneath it is his own: what are customers actually buying from consultants? Often it is not the best possible solution. It is something more socially useful to the institution than that. Cover. Signal. Legibility. Proof of effort. Time. For practitioners who have watched a programme get signed off because someone needed to be able to say it happened, the analysis lands with particular weight.
That question helps explain more than one client brief. It also helps explain part of the field’s own rise. Healy thinks appetite for behavioural science is lower now than it was before Covid. Some of that belongs to the consulting world’s appetite for the next shiny thing. Some of it is harder and more uncomfortable. Behavioural science did not become popular only because it was useful. At a particular political and economic moment, it could be sold as cheap magic.
He talks about the UK around 2010 as close to perfect conditions for that sales story. There was a change of government, no money, and a growing appetite for interventions that seemed cheaper and cleverer than the expensive, usually failing approach of telling people what to do. Something like behavioural science had existed before under other labels. Then the Behavioural Insights Team story took over and the public framing became cleaner than the reality. What mattered was the promise: low-cost interventions with outsized impact. Healy is blunt that the discipline “couldn’t really deliver” what that promise implied. The sales story was elegant. The work itself was slower, messier, and harder. As behaviour tend to be.
Even thought Healy has spent most of our chat pushing back on ‘magic bullets’, there is one he says: make it easy. When Healy tells an organisation that if you want people to do something, you need to make it easy, the room laughs. The point lands because it is obvious and because they have not been doing it. That moment of recognition, the “my god, yes”, is where the diagnostic work begins. Organisations are good at demanding one behaviour while constructing systems that make it nearly impossible to perform. The most useful intervention is often not a new programme. It is the removal of whatever is already in the way.
He talks about work as “the theatre for so much of human nature”, full of strange rituals, costumes and roles that people stop noticing once they live inside them. Hierarchy matters. Identity matters. Salary matters. People do not want to rock the boat, and why would they? The boat is paying for people’s way of life. “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” as he puts it. That is why his central question is not just practical. It is disruptive. It asks the room to stop acting for a second.
“Half the time,” he says, “I feel like the job is to help organisations un-f*** themselves slightly. And that’s a very cynical bar for success.”
The tension Healy carries is not the comfortable kind. He is in the system. He takes the clients. He writes the proposals. The proposals require him to scope things that are ambitious, sometimes overexerting answers. “It is a lie to say that you’re going to do that,” he says, of the standard pitch: here is your problem, here is my solution, pay me and I will deliver it. “That’s what people want.” People do not want to hear “it depends”. A line that most of us behaviour people have uttered more than a few times to clients.
That scepticism extends to the label itself: “behavioural science”. Asked whether he still walks into rooms calling it behavioural science, he says, “a bit of both.” Some rooms are still wowed by it. He mentions a senior technology leader who responded to “applied behavioural scientist” with a kind of startled awe. He will use that reaction when it helps. He prefers a cleaner framing from Matt Wallaert: behaviour as a lens, science as the method.
He talks about AI being sold in much the same magical register behavioural science once was, with promises that it will be cheaper, smarter, and more transformational than the messier work it is replacing. He sees the same pattern in the way adding “neuro” can make almost anything sound more credible than it is. Labels sell authority. The substance is usually slower, more conditional, and less miraculous than advertised. Labels sell authority, until that is, the label is hard to get heard.
His position in the field’s ethics problem is comparative rather than absolute. There is no option not to influence, not really. The question is whether that influence is done in a more informed and ethically considered way. He does not sound like someone defending innocence. He sounds like someone trying to stay honest while working inside conditions that reward performance, certainty, and overclaiming. “Behavioural science’s competition,” he says, “is almost entirely charlatans.” He also the first to say that this is not an especially high bar.
It is 8:30 on a weekday evening where he is. He is getting up early tomorrow to watch his “dreadful” football team. A topic for another day…
Most organisations survive by making certain questions hard to ask.
Healy keeps asking them.
James Healy is a behavioural scientist and author of Behavioural Science at Work. He hosts the Human Risk podcast.
Explore more of his work:
Latest book:
BS At Work
Podcast:
The B-Word
Website:
The Behaviour Boutique
