Why behavior science is the new data science in Consulting

Every day we see a plethora of news on machines, robotics and how automation is going to change how we work, shop, consume, play…. well just about how cognitive is going to change everything. One challenge that we need to soon solve for our clients is how all these technology changes will affect the behavior of their customers and employees. Human behavior science is going to be a key feature of experience design in ways that are yet to be discovered.

Here are just a few observations that represent an underlying but significant change:

The New York times recently featured an article on how Uber is using behavior science with their drivers. The company said publicly that they had “under-invested in the driver experience,” and so has been developing the driver side of their application for improved experience and revenue. To do this, they’ve rolled out features that allow drivers to set goals, see incentives for driving more, and also make it easy to start/ stop a shift at the touch of a button. Everything has been very carefully thought out to engage drivers and get them to do more work, faster. Many commentators say it is manipulation, others could argue it is purely legitimate behavior management, whatever your perspective it is undeniable that we will face many new ethical challenges associates with managing human behavior.

The new and rapidly growing insure tech company Lemonade recruited Dan Ariely, a renowned behavioral economist to its senior team to develop its use of human behavior in its business processes. Ariely will be called the Chief Behavioral Officer and will be focused on building a better process for insurance, one that focuses on trust, honesty, and and eliciting the best behavior from both company and consumer. Lemonade claims to have settled a recent claim in 3 seconds, using AI, API’s and behavior science — they are disrupting the insurance industry full force. The addition of Ariely is just another spoke in their wheelhouse.

As human behavior is considered more carefully as part of a business strategy, it’s important to think about possible ramifications of using technology to influence human behavior so that they can be avoided, and companies can move forward ethically. We humans are just full of biases, this is a simple fact. Thus, we need to be concerned about humans programming bias into the new world algorithms’. Consider that most of the developers and programmers are likely to be male, and this must be a major worry.

Also, add to the equation that we don’t yet even know about the new paradigm of humans and machine working closely together. How is that going to play out? My observations from the early work is that as humans we are keen to humanize machines, giving them human names and human looking logo’s almost as substitutes for faces. We have so much to learn in this new and fascinating area. So I would place a big bet on behavior science as a consulting practice growing in the next few years, probably as sharply as data science grew in the last few years.