The Experimenter Series: Ethics with Chris Rider at Novartis
The Experimenter Series is a collection of six interviews with people pioneering scientific experiments in large organisations. This time, we speak to Chris Rider, Senior Behavioural Scientist at Novartis, about his work on Ethics and Risk.
I’m Gus Lindemann and this is the second part of my exploration of experiments in the wild. I’ve recently finished my Masters in the Psychology of Economic Life at LSE and joined MoreThanNow, and am curious to understand how experimental research is being pioneered in the real world. In this interview, I talk to Chris Rider from Novartis’ Ethics, Risk and Compliance team and one of MoreThanNow’s collaborators. Chris, a great behavioural scientist himself, is so generous to share his knowledge on experiments and the barriers to challenging the status quo.
“Behavioural science is at its best when it’s a collaborative effort.”
— Chris Rider
Gus: Hi Chris! Thank you for doing this, I really appreciate it. I’ll tell you quickly about myself, so you know who you’re talking to. I’m Gus and I’m currently leading this exciting interview project at MoreThanNow after having just completed my master's degree at LSE.
Chris: Lovely to meet you! I can empathise with finishing your master’s whilst working, I did the same thing. I joined Novartis about 14 months ago after I took a career break to do a Masters. I was at KPMG before working in risk and compliance consulting. But I was always very curious about psychology and behavioural science so decided to take a risk and go to Bath University to study behavioural science and economics. My Masters was the first time I've managed to get a sense of real experimenting, as well as some of the challenges that go alongside it! I ran an experiment on restaurant menus and environmental choice. Specifically, I was interested in the impact stating the carbon footprint of a meal might have on the food choices people were making, as has been done with calories in the past. To cut a long story short, carbon footprint labels worked! I joined Novartis about 14 months ago in the ethics, risk and compliance function, where we are growing our behavioural science team. It was a perfect coming together of my past world of risk and compliance and my passion for behavioural science.
G: The footprint labels are very clever! It sounds like you enjoy running experiments? How do you find conducting them in the workplace?
C: Definitely! I really enjoyed running an experiment in my masters. Now at Novartis, I have found a good fit with this in my wider team as we seek to bring a behavioural science approach to tackling ethics, risk and compliance problems. It is funny because Novartis is a big pharma company and so we’re used to running all these RCTs (Edit: Randomised Controlled Trials) for drug development that are experimentally robust and follow a really mature experimental approach. But when it comes to experimenting on the people behaviour side, it’s still relatively new - like with policies and training and the actual effectiveness of all these things at influencing behaviour.
One of the things I truly enjoy at Novartis is that we do partner with behavioural science consultancies outside of ourselves, as we’ve done with MoreThanNow. When we have a particular specialist project in mind, if you want to do it quickly or just share the workload because there is so much going on, it really helps. After all, behavioural science is at its best when it’s a collaborative effort. Especially for experiments, as there's a limit to how much one person can do by themselves. The best outcomes come when you have open thinking sessions where you can challenge one another, think more critically, and bring different perspectives together.
“It’s funny because Novartis is a big pharma company and so we’re used to running all these RCTs for drug development that are experimentally robust and follow a really mature approach. But when it comes to experimenting on the people behaviour side, it’s still relatively new.”
G: That must be tricky in such a big organisation, getting around such barriers. Do you think there is a certain hesitancy to using experiments in the private sector?
C: There are certainly challenges in large organisations, and Novartis has over 108,000 people worldwide. The main one for me is people’s willingness and capacity to challenge the status quo. Especially if the current way they are conducting business has helped them get results previously. For some people who run their own programmes, coming in and wanting to do an experiment might seem very risky, as it examines their current way of doing things and can seem like a challenge to their state of being. Another barrier can also be that people have not considered experiments early enough in the planning process. So, they will commit to doing things by certain deadlines, and unless they have actually factored running an experiment into the project plan, they're like, oh, we just don't have the time now. This shows it is also about changing people’s mindsets to shift the way people think. But I would say, the curiosity and willingness are there in most instances.
G: And why do you think we should solve these challenges? As in what is the value of running experiments in the workplace?
“ To me, the key value is being able to challenge... to get people to pause for a second and reflect on what the actual problem is, rather than automatically going through the same process.”
C: To me, the key value is being able to challenge. To challenge previously held assumptions and be like okay, you think this is the way you want to do something but why don’t we measure it first? Or hey, yes, this is the current solution to a certain problem, but we have a way of testing if it’s truly the most effective way of doing things, and if something else might be better. The key thing is to get people to pause for a second and reflect on what the actual problem is, rather than automatically going through the traditional process.
There is also a bit of a dichotomy between how we want people to think about experiments. On the one side, we want people to be free-thinking when coming up with ideas to test. But on the flip side, when it comes down to running experiments we want people to follow fairly structured approaches to get meaningful results. As such aligning the blue-sky ideas with robust research design can sometimes be difficult. In this way, it can be challenging to strike the right balance between empowering people within the organisation to try experiments themselves, while also ensuring they’re run with enough rigour. But it unquestionably feels like it's coming.
G: Well, that kind of ties in with one of my final questions, which is: what do you think is the future for experiments? How do you see it developing in the workplace?
C: I think experimenting will become more normalized. With that, I mean that there will be more of an experimental structure in the workplace. At the moment, every experiment feels like you're starting from a blank sheet of paper and you're having to get all the right approvals, get the right people or the infrastructure to deliver the experiment. As experimentation grows, then it should be the case that many of these pain points for experiments in organisations will be ironed out. Once the infrastructure to run these studies is there, experimenting itself should be quite straightforward. I don’t think I'm being overly optimistic when I say that establishing a more streamlined experimentation approach is the way things are going. As more and more people in organizations develop an experimental mindset, more people should in turn also see their value, and (hopefully!) this will inspire more and more experiments across a broad range of business areas.
G: I can imagine that the current lack of that infrastructure must be so frustrating, but completely agree I think once it’s there, people will see how simple running experiments can be. That is truly a great insight into how it works in organisations because it’s so different from lab experiments, so thank you for that great answer. Is there anything else you feel I have forgotten to ask about on this topic?
C: One last challenge we’ve not touched upon, which is more psychological, is people’s fear of failure, and with experiments we need to be prepared to fail. This is really relevant for managing expectations within organisations, by making sure that the stakeholders realise there’s a possibility we don’t prove what we wanted to and this is not a bad thing in experimental research. You’re not always going to have an insight every time. Rather, it is like taking lots of small bets and you just need one of them to come in to get a big payoff. The more experiments you conduct, the more you can hopefully showcase these big payoffs to support future experiments.
“One last challenge we’ve not touched upon, which is more psychological, is people’s fear of failure, and with experiments we need to be prepared to fail. It is like taking lots of small bets and just needing one of them to come in to get a big payoff. ”
Many thanks to the amazing Chris Rider for sharing his insights and sharing with us why it is important to do experimental research in the world of ethics, risk, and compliance. Very note-worthy to find that the willingness and curiosity of people to do experiments in the workplace is often there, but there might be some hesitancy to challenge the status quo and the lack of infrastructure might make it more daunting. My team are right, there is definitely more to making this approach work in the workplace than meets the eye!
MoreThanNow are specialists in applied behavioural science in the workplace, partnering with organisations including Ericsson, Novartis, Citi, Nationwide Building Society and BT. If you would like to explore a partnership, get in touch below: