Bespoke Workshops

Workshops and seminars tailored to fit your needs

Our bespoke option offers you the flexibility to design a seminar or workshop to fit the needs and skills of your team, as well as the option to have multiple team members participate at the same time.

It's completely up to you! Whether it's an introduction to behavioural science, or something geared towards the specific challenges your organisation is currently facing, we can design a seminar or workshop to fit your needs. You can pull modules from our off-the-shelf workshops or ask us to prepare new content. Our team has a strong breadth and depth of expertise in behavioural science.  Bespoke options can also include sandbox sessions, where we work with members of your team to tackle your organisational challenges. 
Need some ideas about what you can include? Below are some examples of topics we offer.

Topics we offer

Introduction to Behavioural Science

We can introduce you to some of the foundational concepts in behavioural science, and how understanding the psychological basis of decision making can be put to good use in business settings. We can cover concepts such as rationality, transitivity in choices, and whether people have introspective insight into the reason they behave the way they do. We can show how relying on people to explain their behaviour or preferences can sometimes lead us astray, and we can illustrate how simple experimental tools can be used to better isolate the motives underpinning decisions and behaviour.

Heuristics & Biases

We can show how the way information is presented can influence how people behave in different settings (i.e. framing effects) , and illustrate the power of salient anchor points in price setting and value estimation.  We can introduce some classic heuristics or shortcuts to decision-making and how they sometimes can lead to people acting “irrationally”.

Decisions Under Risk & Uncertainty

We can introduce the most well-known model describing how people make decisions under risk and uncertainty (Prospect Theory), drawing out lessons for understanding our own decision making (e.g., how an aversion to losses pervades much of our decision making). We can introduce a process model (Decision by Sampling), explaining how humans make decisions in line with Prospect Theory, with considerable implications for marketing. We can show how information can be gleaned from the way the information is presented, as well as what is presented. Such an understanding is important when applying behavioural science insights.

Causal Thinking

Decision making is often underpinned by our causal beliefs. Many of the crucial questions in organisational settings require us to estimate the effects of our actions. For example, we want to know whether paying for advertising will increase page clicks and revenue; or how different hiring decisions might affect team performance. We might also want to reflect on decisions or actions we have taken and to estimate how things might have been different if we had acted differently, or if the market conditions (for example) had been different. To address these kinds of questions we need causal models, which allow us to predict the consequences of interventions and to explore what-ifs and counterfactuals. We can show you how to harness your natural propensity for causal thinking and also how to avoid some of the common pitfalls in establishing and exploiting causal relations.

Social Heuristics

Most of the behaviours we are interested in observing or influencing occur within a social setting and are thus amenable to be influenced by the social environment. We can show you how people’s decisions, preferences and actions are affected by other people or by information about how other people behave. We can explore the powerful influence of groups and social identity, illustrating how connection to others can affect our most basic evaluations of what we like and how we act.

Neuromarketing

You can't learn everything you need to know about consumers simply by asking them. We can highlight the potential (and the pitfalls) of using neuroscience to get a better handle on why people behave as they do and how consumers feel about your products. We can show you how neuroscience is changing market research, as well as arming you with the tools to spot neuro-hype and implausible claims.

Social Relationships

Discover the rules of relationships and why brands, as well as people, have to follow them. After introducing you to some of the basic findings in the cooperation science field, we can show when people are likely to behave cooperatively and why this is often beneficial. We don’t have dedicated cognitive machinery for evaluating brands and, instead, we often co-opt the heuristics we use to interact with other people when we are deciding whether and how to interact with brands. This means that successful brands also have to abide by the same social rules as humans. We can show which brands do this well - and when and why they fail.

Decisions in Teams

Good decision making in teams begins with gathering the honest and considered opinions of team members, especially those who disagree with the majority. There are many reasons why team members may not wish to voice dissenting opinions, and in this session we will discuss what constitutes good and bad team cultures. Cultural change takes time, and in the shorter term we will consider a range of techniques for eliciting opinions from your team to minimize the impact of issues such as Groupthink. We can also consider how these moments can be used to improve that culture and help your team members feel safer voicing dissenting opinions in future.

 Bespoke courses can be delivered online or in person (including at your own offices, if you prefer).

We work flexibly with you to design a course that fits your needs. This can be anything from a lunchtime seminar, to a short workshop, to a course spanning several weeks. At the outset, you will meet with a member of our team to discuss your requirements. We will then work up a proposal and send to you for feedback. Once you are happy with the content and scheduling, we will deliver the course. 

It's up to you - we've had as few as 4 people and as many as 60 taking part in our bespoke behavioural science workshops. 

 With all our bespoke courses, you'll have access to reading materials and slide decks, via our online learning platform Podia. With our longer workshops (anything from a few hours to a few weeks), we also include several interactive elements which allow you to put the skills we are teaching into practice

Pricing varies, depending on the length of the course, number of attendees and whether the course is delivered online or in-person. 

 If you're interested in in a bespoke behavioural science seminar or workshop, we'd love to talk to you about what we can offer. Please email changingminds@ucl.ac.uk to get the ball rolling.