Behavioural engineering and building experiences with Morris Pentel

In this Candid Craic, Morris Mental takes us on a spiraling journey into the realms of experience design and behavioural engineering, providing a quantum overview of the micro, macro and mesa elements of the disciplines.

We learn how Morris draws upon years of cross-disciplinary work to build experiences for customers and employees; how he employs his therapeutic training to make micro-interventions in conversations and interactions that can create long-terms shifts in behaviours, habits and perspectives; and how such moments of change can be scaled into organisation-wide transformations.

We then examine the darker side of behavioural engineering; learn why Morris is very careful about sharing his knowledge in case it is employed in ways that harm or exploit employees, customers and citizens; and look at how he plays in the tiny margins between organizational demands for compliant behaviours and the highly-specific emotions and experiences each individual needs to understand and reflect on in their day-to-day organizational existence.

We close by examining Morris's critique of "data fetishization" and the belief that if we could only get enough data we could design an AI that perfectly predicts human behaviour; why Morris believes that this is misinformed; and how we might correct it by looking at different, simpler elements of the human experience.

Timestamps:
00:10 Hello Morris
01:04 Just what is it that Morris does? Building Experiences
02:44 What is Experience? A Quantum State Analysis
07:00 Short-Term Therapies for Long-Term Habitual Shifts
13:27 Micro-Interventions and Moments of Change
22:16 Going Darker - The Ethical Dilemmas of Behavioural Engineering
29:18 Tiny Margins - Reflective Behaviours & Compliant Behaviours
36:00 Enough Data produces Perfect Artificial Intelligence - or does it?
39:20 The Complex Simplicity of Human Emotions in the Workplace
47:55 The Difference between Speech Analysis and Conversation Analysis
52:00 The Nine Trillion Dollar Question