David Grosse on The Unconvention

Speaker A: Welcome to Human Risk, a podcast dedicated to the understanding of human behavior as a risk. Here's your host, Christian Hunt. What happens when two people with an interest in human risk meet in a

Speaker B: pub, start putting the world to rights

Speaker A: and end up talking about the things they dislike about conferences, accidentally find themselves agreeing to organize one? Well, that's what happened to me when I met David Gross a few months ago. And since then, we've taken our, uh, pub pledge to the planning stage. And so this episode is all about the genesis of an event that we're organising on 12th November 2026 in central London, which we're calling the Unconvention. But it's not just an episode going behind the scenes for one event. It's also an opportunity for me to talk to David about his work in philosophy. He's the founder of Behavior, a behavioral risk advisory firm. Uh, now, like me, though, neither of us wants to admit this. David qualified as a chartered accountant, then went into banking and ended up seeing behavioral science as a potential solution to many of the challenges facing financial services and other industries. So, in many respects, he's a kindred spirit. And yet we do approach our work slightly differently. Like me, David has spent decades trying to understand why organizations so often miss the most obvious risk in the room, human behavior. And in our discussion, we talk about why behavioral risk is still treated as a niche topic, why conferences on culture and conduct can feel like, I promise this will make sense, Plato's cave. And why trying to evidence culture with a board pack might tell you more about the organization than the culture itself. And of course, we talk about the unconvention. Um, the event. David and I are creating together an experiment in productive discomfort. Better conversations and doing the opposite of the usual industry conferences. It's not your normal episode, but then we're not planning your usual event and I wanted to share with you some of the insights and thinking that are behind it. If this has got you curious and you can multitask while listening, do head to the event website, which is unconvention.uk either way, please enjoy my discussion with David Gross on the Unconvention.

Speaker B: David, welcome to the Human Risk podcast.

Speaker C: Great to be here, Christian. Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker B: It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. You and I know each other really well. I'm going to come and talk about the fun thing that we're doing together,

Speaker A: but I guess to start us off,

Speaker B: tell my listeners and viewers a little bit about yourself.

Speaker C: Oh, let's start. I won't go right back to my sort of family story. But I um, guess uh, I actually trained as a chartered accountant and uh, went from there into banking, which I understand is a very similar path that you took. Um, and who knew, who knew that such a background of accountancy and banking could lead us into such an interesting area. So I uh, trained as an accountant, then went into banking and I guess what I'd say is virtually all my career, my 30 plus year career in banking, hence the gray hair, was in kind of internal facing risk management type roles. Whether that was in the third line, whether it was in the second line, whether it was in the first line, et cetera. Europe based and Asia based. Um, so that was kind of my career. And the way I always explain it is how did I get into this wacky world of kind of behavioral risk is that I'm just an incredibly slow learner is that took me sort of 20 something years plus in banking to realize that there's something else that seemed to be going on that was getting in the way of my work. And I realized it was these pesky things called human beings. He seems to be quite prevalent to be honest, both in banking and in the wider world. And you know, human decision making, behavior, biases, etc. Seem to be a fundamentally important thing to understand. Sort of more latterly in my career I just ended up by dint of what was happening in the industry of doing more conduct related work. See there was a huge amount of conduct focus from UK, US regulators and others, lots of interesting issues, fine sanctions, etc. And naturally doing that work you end up doing more behavioral work because you're trying to understand actually what's going on here, not just the situation, but actually what's the driver behind why people make such bizarre decisions, et cetera. So I ended up doing more and more behavioral work and I formed a uh, small behavioral team in HSBC as part of my work. I went back to college to study behavioral science at the lse and I was sort of building out that work. I think I did the obvious thing, which was to reach out to anybody and everybody I could find who seemed to be on the same path and doing the same sort of work. And the population wasn't huge, to be honest. Christian, I think relatively early on I was introduced to you people like Vika Scholten who was at NatWest at the time and just anybody out there who was doing this sort of work to try and learn what are they doing, how are they doing at what area of the business Are they working in? What skills are they bringing to the past? So that's the sort of background story. I now run my own behavioral consultancy called Behavior and do consulting into banks on exactly this topic. How do they build a behavioral muscle? How do we use behavioral science and related to tackle some of the gritty issues that are out there on resilience, risk compliance, sml.

Speaker B: Love it. And obviously you and I have a lot in common, but I'm always fascinated, David, and I think the answer lies in there's some clues in behavioral science. But I'm fascinated in your perspective about why is this not obvious? Because it seems to me that when you look at, particularly if you look at a topic like conduct, that the only thing we can really be talking about there is human behavior. And yet it doesn't seem to form a core part of risk management or indeed in many cases the regulation around it. And I wondered what your thoughts on why that might be. Because as you say, there are people doing this. Absolutely. And that we're increasing in number, but on the other hand, it's a surprisingly small number of people doing it.

Speaker C: I would fully agree. And thereby hang an enormous tail. And put it this way, if we knew the solution to that, we would be the world's most successful consultants, et cetera, et al. I have a theory, so I'm going to lay my theory out to you. The answer is, obviously in the world of behavior is it's complex is the obvious answer. But if we try and unpack it, there's something unique about the topic which no other, uh, let's call it risk management topic in banking has the same attributes. It's about yourself, so your own behavior and how you think about behavior. And let's call it a senior executive or a head of risk or a CEO or all this, um, galaxy of stars. How they think about behavior impacts how they consider building a behavioral team or muscle or capability. So it's kind of like a closed loop. It's like a meta risk. Your own behavior influences how you recognize the importance of behavior. Now that doesn't apply to any other realm in banking or elsewhere, I guess in life insofar as, you know, if I was in the world of cyber risk or if I was in the world of credit risk, a, I'd uh, be incredibly dull, but B, as I speak to banks and the people that have their area of expertise, you know, there'd be no sort of threat. It'd be kind of like, okay, we acknowledge that maybe we need to build a new cyber team. We acknowledge the need for budget, for headcount, for resource, for focus, regulators all over it. If we didn't do work in the space, we'd probably get sanctioned, get a section 166, et cetera. It's sort of outside of yourself. Whereas if you start talking about behavior, people go, behavior A. Most of the people we speak to are human beings still, although that might not be the case maybe in 20 years hence. So most people are human beings and therefore they bring all their prior. They go, well, I might be 50 something years old and a very senior executive in a bank and of course I understand human beings. I've been running a natural experiment for the last 50 something years and I'm successful, therefore I'm successful because of this part of my skill set. So I think it's this kind of meta bias. I think there is this overconfidence in understanding and I don't think none of this is deliberate. Yeah. And there are organizational hurdles as well insofar as how does it fit in kind of the traditional departmental silos that exist in banks and other industries. So none of it's deliberate, but the kind of. Interestingly enough, also we're interested in behavior, we're interested in behavioral biases, we're interested in things that get in the way. And I think in our field, it is one of the most important things that either hinders or advances our field. And maybe like all experts looking at ourselves and applying it to ourselves is one of the hardest things to do. Famously, accountants can't do accounting and top investors have got rubbish investments, et cetera. Probably doctors are, uh, you know, often smoke and drink too much, et cetera. So I think maybe there's something to do with, with that as well.

Speaker B: And the bit that does really, really intrigue me is you need the discipline in order to sell the discipline in the loosest possible sense. So one, you have to sort of step back a little bit. And I think there's something. It's a really interesting test because if you want to be successful, you have to demonstrate that you understand the dynamics, but not in a way that shows off. And so I always find it interesting when people talk about behavioral sciences as you might as well be reading from a book of biases. But actually what we need to do demonstrate in the way that you present yourself, in the way that you talk about the topic, making it accessible, not threatening, finding arguments that are, uh, probably emotional more than logical. So there's something interesting for me about deploying behavioral science to sell Behavioral science.

Speaker C: Yeah. I totally agree. And maybe as a, I um, hesitate to call it industry, that sounds really overblown. But as an area of focus and specialty, maybe we traditionally we haven't been as good at this as we need to be. But I think, you know, both myself and yourself kind of feel there's a need to be uh, telling it a little bit more resonantly, if that's the right terminology. Yeah, it's a tricky field. We need to take whatever the biblical quote is. We need to take uh, the beam out of our eye to see the specs in others, I think. Yeah, my knowledge of the Bible is obviously not great enough.

Speaker B: It was something like that Sounds good though. I'm not in any position to criticize that. But this sort of joint piece, and you mentioned that we were brought together, we brought ourselves together recently after I think we had, as we often do, sort of agreeable disagreement on LinkedIn about something, I think slightly tongue in cheek, which led us to meeting up for some drinks. And so what we started to talk about there was events and sorts of things that deal with the kind of topics that we're interested in. And um, by that I mean the uh, kind of compliance risk as opposed to the behavioral science piece. And so we started to explore this idea of what do we like and not like about events that we went to. And I think we both reached the conclusion that actually what we've just talked about is often played out in events to talk about things like compliance and conduct. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on that.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I think uh, from memory we were in the jam pot in the city of London for those who know it. And our uh, creativity was encouraged by the fact that we were about six points in, I think to be perfectly honest and therefore we got into full rant mode, which is one of my preferred modes to be honest. So yeah, two things I guess. There's the event side and there's the kind of topic or of, of an event where to begin. I mean what is wrong with events? Many of the traditional industry events I'd say basically it was everything. Soulless venues, soulless format, pay to play sponsors, a regulator, uh, who comes on and has the speech of the day, but they can't say anything that isn't pre scripted. So the whole thing's pre written and they read it from a pre written script, which obviously I, I do feel for them that because by definition they have to do that. They can't go off script. But it sounds like exactly what it is, which is reading from script and it's posted on the website on the same day. So you're not really learning anything new. You know, panels of 4 MDs from various banks who also say that they can say what's on their mind, but they can't really. And by the way, all those panels are also pre rehearsed so they kind of know the questions that come in. Panelist number two, what do you think about this topic? Well, they know about that topic because they've been rehearsing it for the last two weeks, by the way. So I hope I'm not telling tales out and skill here. Maybe the most visceral example I can give. It's always best to give an example is I went to an industry event a couple of weeks ago now which was on, I was going to say purported to be on, but it was on culture and conduct and financial services. Therefore it's exactly in our sweet spot. It's the sorts of things we should be thinking about. Now I often go to these events, not necessarily thinking it's magically going to come up with a solution, but interested in what the framing is and how people talk about it to sort of say, okay, you know, do we have a big problem here? Or how do we nudge the ship? Anyway, long story short, it was sponsored by five sets of lawyers. Now straight away that might be a warning sign on coaching and conduct in financial services that it might not be the full spectrum they're talking about. It was in a subterranean venue, so it felt like we were in a sort of cave during the day, not allowed to see daylight. Obviously the regulator came to speech and I do feel sorry for them because obviously, you know, as per the previous comment, there's not much they can do other than read the pre scripted. Although interestingly enough, obviously in the prescripted currently in the uk, if it's the UK fca, they have to talk about the competition side and not the regulatory side as a kind of forerunner because of the pressure all the way through their organization and from government on down. And so that needless to say, that flavor came through. Hey, you bankers, you'll need to take a bit more risk. Which you know that, that might well be the case, but I'm not sure that they came up with the answer on that. Yeah, so the usual, the usual things. It's like what am m I? You know, what am I doing here? I'm in a subterranean cave, I'm listening to lawyers talk to me about culture. The thing that sprung to mind and I'm Going to go a bit classics here. And it's not my area focused on this, but it reminded me of the, the allegory of the cave from Plato, which is we're all chained at the bottom of the cave, looking at a wall, and all we can see is the kind of shadows of things behind us. There's a fire behind us and people behind us are kind of moving around and all you can see is the reflection of the shadows. You can't see reality. And given I was in a cave and um, the way the spotlights were working on the speakers, I could just focus on these shadows moving around. And I thought, here I am, I'm just looking at the shadows. And everybody in this room isn't really embracing reality. You know, there was no substance at all about the way we think about human behavior, if you like. So I'm going off now from what really annoys me.

Speaker B: No, no, very helpful. Keep going.

Speaker C: But yeah, it was, it was kind of, what do you do on a whistleblowing and what's the best way of handling it? Or what is the FCA currently saying about non financial misconduct? Not that I have any problem at all about non financial misconduct. It's a very, very important topic. But there's a danger that everybody takes it as a proxy for the totality of what we need to think about in culture. And then when the lawyers come in, the lawyers say, ah, the, uh, things you need to do are these 20 things that the regulators have told us that you need to do. So it is the kind of the partially sighted leading the partially sighted purporting to be expertise to an audience. And it's a subset of a subset. Uh, the coffee was terrible as well. Actually, to be honest, it really was bad coffee. And that, that really annoys me almost more than anything else.

Speaker B: So it's very, very human response to these situations. But there's something interesting there about the codification that the law requires. And I'm not for one minute suggesting we don't need laws or that. I mean, but if we think about kind of going to court, the stories that are told there and that one is required to tell for the wheels of justice to turn, uh, are all around logic and looking at things with the naturally, with the benefit of hindsight. And so a sort of account for yourself, tell us what happened, tell us what you saw is often massively clouded by motivated reasoning and a, uh, sort of desire for things to be a particular way and for one to look good in that, in that situation. And so it Seems to me, actually, when you talk about the organization of that conference and sort of thinking about things through a legal lens, it naturally comes into conflict with the realities of human behavior. The law has to be designed for a sort of perfect state. And of course we want logic and reason. We don't just want to send people to prison or punish them if we don't have enough evidence. But we know that human recollections and human decision making, the way we look at the world is of course, heavily biased and influenced by a number of factors, not least the desire to look good. And so I think in many respects, when you talk about it in those terms, it's perhaps not surprising that we end up in the way you've just described.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And let's not forget either that the nature of some of these events is highly conflicted. I mean, by definition, if you're getting five lawyers to sponsor your event, five lawyers will get speaking slots, and they'll want to talk about the topics that are relevant to the businesses that they want to sell. They have their own motivated reasoning. So back to my meta bias thing. Uh, the thing we're trying to talk about is prevalent in the event itself. Maybe sort of slightly tangent, but something else that I, uh, think illustrates the bit of a bind we're in is at the moment there is a big focus in corporate governance on organizations being able to look at, assess, understand their culture. The UK Corporate governance code has new terms in it that says that boards, uh, have a duty not only to assess it, but kind of dig into further detail. And so you're kind of in the kind of legalistic phrase there. Aren't you sort of saying, okay, we must have corporate governance that must cover culture, that must have evidence that we are doing it. And of course, we well know how lots of firms will be responding to that, which is, oh, we must evidence it. In fact, the lawyers are probably coming in saying, yeah, have you seen this stuff? You need to evidence it. So there'll be a board pack and item 6B, um, about 40 minutes in will say, assess culture. And somebody from some area of the organization will produce a detailed appendix with lots of metrics in which purports to show something probably from a survey. And people go, yeah, okay, we're done. We've assessed culture, which obviously is just the kind of iteration of, uh, a, uh, kind of frameworky view of the world, a process view of the world nested in a process view of the world nested in a process view of the world, purporting to solve a kind of behavioral challenge. What's the behavioral landscape in your firm? It's obviously not going to work. It's actually opposite nonsense. And so it has a real danger of even the topic that is supposed to be being covered. God bless whatever it is. The Financial Reporting Council and others who say, oh, uh, we just realized that this thing called human behavior is really, really, really important to governance. I mean, who knew? But there's a danger in then making it the issue. The way the firms respond and the way that the consultancies and lawyers and others respond in trying to then on sell their business just further perpetuates a nonsensical way of looking at it and not embracing the messy, glorious reality of human behavior. Because hey, we've got to put it in a box and say, I've looked at it and I've covered it. Tip. There you go.

Speaker B: I mean it's almost back to if you genuinely believe that this format deals with the issue and gives you a handle on the issue, you've misunderstood the issue. So by accepting the construct. And I recognize that it's very difficult for people to sit in unless you're in a particular senior position. It's very hard to sit there in a meeting where there's a process that's been designed to deliver this particular outcome. But if you sat there and stepped back and went, is this actually answering the exam question? No, it's answering a version of it that's a very simplified. It's almost like a sort of 2D view of the world. Um, and two may be exaggeration here, like 1D view of the world in a, in a kind of, you know, three dimensional world. And so I think in many respects the acceptance of the construct speaks volumes.

Speaker C: Oh, totally. Uh, it's absolutely a 2D view of the world. Back to my Plato's, uh, cave. It's just the shadow of something, the shadow of reality, but not the full thing, you know. And I think there are other things that lean into it. And right back to that sort of previous point about what gets in the way of what seems to be so bleeding obvious, the absolute need to look at this area. We look at 2023 when various banks disappeared and bust Silicon Valley bank. You think that as a reminder to people that human behavior might be quite an important thing, that that would be quite visceral. If you're a chief executive on a bank sitting there and another bank next to you, just like, boom, disappeared you go. Seems quite important. It seems actually existential, maybe I need to understand that in more detail. People start talking about it and then the regulators say, oh yeah, we've got a blind spot here. The Fed reserve system in the U.S. go, yeah, fair point. We didn't spot it. Very big bank disappears over a weekend. That seems problematic. What are we going to do about it? We need behavioral expertise and understanding. We need to weave that into how we think about firms. We need to make sure that supervisors have those capabilities because there are other things going on. For Silicon Valley bank, it wasn't just the liquidity side. It wasn't just interest rate mismanagement. It wasn't just investing in Treasuries for the long and having sort of deposits. It was how on earth can you run a bank without, uh, understanding how a bank works? That seems to me to be quite a behavioral issue. And not have a risk manager by the way. And all these other governance failures is kind of deeply risk. But anyway, there you are. We're at the point where ends banks existence and regulators at that heat, in the heat of the moment recognize it. And here we are only three years on. Yeah, what's it done? The square root of nothing, which indicates that the thing that is the thing that gets in the way must be really big. Because if it somehow stops us learning, even from existential events, there's something we need to unpick in the reasons for it going into a spotlight briefly but disappearing again. Yeah, I think I went off on a complete tangent there. That's not related to the question you asked me at all, Christian. But I just felt I had to get off my chest. It's mad that basically it's complete madness. Complete madness.

Speaker B: But I think that almost illustrates the point because your tendency, quite understandably, insensibly, is to move into stories sort of. How do we make sense of this? Because this is how the human brain works. And so, you know, if I go back to the board packs you were talking about, they very rarely contain stories. They typically contain statistics, generalizations, averages that might be absolutely meaningless because there is no such thing as the average employee. And actually if we looked at other contexts and love them or hate them, Amazon. I go back to my favorite Jeff Bezos thing, which is he talks about, I don't know if he uses this exact term, but it's what I call anecdote. So anecdotes and data, data tells you what happened. Anecdotes give you the context and stories around it. And if the two don't match, go, go find more. You uh, know more of both until you can resolve that. That mystery. And so I think there's something really interesting about what you've just done, moving into stories and, and sort of almost saying, well, I've just taken us off on a tangent, but that's how humans think. We do dive off into rabbit holes, particularly humans that are curious. And the industry that we're talking about is hiring smart people, then that's how their brains are going to work. And so this idea that we look at the world through a logical lens, uh, that's not how we think and that's not how we operate. So I agree with you, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think it beautifully illustrates the kind of. The meta point.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And I'll go off on another tangent now as well, just to even further prove the meta point, which is really interesting. And again, this kind of unpacks, if you like, the really kind of complex situation we're talking about here is. I totally agree. Obviously we are storytelling creatures. Yeah, we like narrative. We like to say, how does it weave from A to B to C? And there's kind of resolution. We, uh, like things to be in control. Um, we like stories that kind of can be repeatable and we can go, okay, if you take that story, it ports across into this one. Deep, deep within our, uh, ah, soul. That's what we are. There is a danger, of course, though, so we need to lean into storytelling. And obviously we naturally do it because we want to communicate with people, like on this podcast. So I will lean into more stories, but there's this differentiator which I think is often missed, which is the difference between what I'd call the kind of keep it simple, stupid thing, which is, you know, don't overcomplicate it, make it straightforward, give people a kind of way of understanding it. That is a communication technique is obviously absolutely on the money. Yeah, that's, that's the way communication works. But sometimes due to the meta nature of the kind of behavioral thing, people then take that narrative and, uh, assume that is actually truly what reality is. And they'll say, oh yeah, people over complicate things and we need to make it very, very straightforward. You're going, okay, but if it is actually a complex adaptive system with all the properties of a complex adaptive system. So let's say organizational culture, tens of thousands of human beings interacting with each other in all sorts of bizarre sorts of ways. If we pretend that that thing itself is linear, straightforward, fits into the neat narrative, we're absolutely kidding ourselves. So stories for communication are great, but let's not then accidentally think that the story actually truly explains the reality of the messy complexity belief. And I think that that dichotomy is actually plays out all over the place and is probably key to many of the problems we have both in banking and in wider life and probably in UK politics currently.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I was going to say global politics, but yes, absolutely, absolutely. And I think there's something nice there about if one sort of looked at it and say stories work as metaphors. They're not necessarily detailed in depth explorations where you can understand all the nuances. And as you say in the simplification, by default you lose things. And so I think that's a really interesting way of looking at the world. It strikes me that we should probably get to the point as well, around where we started out talking about where we'd got to. So we had our conversation that was revolving around some of these issues. We talked about some of the events we'd been to. I don't think you'd been to the one you talked about, but we had enough data points of other ones that we'd been to. And so we decided in a moment of exuberance, and I'm always a big fan of sort of moments of exuberance that even the morning after one thinks are a good idea. We came up with this plan, talk a little bit about the thinking behind the event that we wanted to run, and we've given some clues. But what was driving us in that discussion?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think we shook on it, Christian. So, yeah, we were definitely quite a few beers in and then we shook on it and said, you know, we will do it and we will, you know, co fund it, et cetera. And then there was no backing out because, you know, once you shaken it,

Speaker B: uh, my word is my bond, as they say.

Speaker C: Um, absolutely. So, yeah, I think broadly speaking, it was almost to unpick everything we thought was bad about an event and do the opposite. Let's go 180 degrees away from each thing. And what could we do if we did it the other way around? So you can start with the real basic, which is like, okay, well, where are you actually meeting? Um, and what is this venue? Is it another dreadfully soulless big ballroom in a corporate hotel? No, let's go somewhere completely different. What sort of venues can we go to now? Obviously, I don't want to. We have a sort of. We know a venue that we're going to go to which we haven't yet released into the world. So I'm not going to say where it is, but it's very, very resonant. It will definitely create a different vibe as people walk in and as, uh, the day progresses. So I think you can start from the venue and then you can just move through every other step. You can say, okay, if we rail a bit against big corporate sponsors from saying that that'll be part of the funding model, then we can't really have them because by definition you're conflicted. By definition they will then A, be there and B, expect some sort of something, a quid pro quo, which doesn't work. So it kind of needs to be natural content from people who we think have got something really important to bring, resonant content, etc. So, yeah, we're sort of each thing unpicking it. The nature of who do we bring into the room? We could say it's just like literally anybody. And maybe if we get really desperate by selling our tickets, it will be just, you know, be out on the streets with a big, big board, say, come to this event. But actually, I think it's important to think, you know, what, what are we trying to do here? So, you know, there's the, the nature of the event. There's also the content, which is of course kind of human risk, behavioral risk topic, broadly speaking, I think we said in financial services and the city. So all kind of surrounding ecosystems are quite a broad population. But, you know, how do we mix those who are already on the journey, what I always call the coalition of the willing with the, with the skeptics? Because if it's just an echo chamber of me, you and, you know, a bunch of our friends who curiously agree with us, we will have a fantastic time, we'll have a great day, but we won't necessarily nudge anything forward. So, you know, how do we, how do we kind of get a mix of cynics? Well, people are just not convinced. I think you used the word productive discomfort, which is actually two words.

Speaker B: Um, you can hyphenate it to make it one, if that's helpful.

Speaker C: Well, what other contextual things are we thinking about? I'll throw it back to you about the other ways we're thinking about the content.

Speaker B: So I think for me, one of the key bits here is to say, okay, let's recognize that there will be some elements of traditional conferences that make sense on some level. You want to give people an opportunity to talk to each other and to get to know people they might not otherwise go. If you're going to drag people to a physical location, better make sure that there's some opportunities for them just to talk and not just listen. So I think taking the bits that we love of existing things, the very. There are relatively few of them, but there will, there'll be bits of it. And then I quite like sort of remix logic of if we look at things like panels, for example, back to your earlier point, there's almost no point in having pre cooked discussions where people effectively turn up with the equivalent of a hostage video and kind of come out positions we already know. And so how do we create those? And panels tend to agree wildly on things as well. So I'd say another example there would be how does one create something that's genuinely interesting, where you might get. And again we don't want to sort of performatively say we must have opposing views on these things, but how do we create genuine proper conversations? So for me it's looking and kind of plundering what limited amounts of existing conferences we like that we think work. And then there's a huge component of trying some things that are different. And I would say it's very, very experimental. And I think one of the joys, I think of sort of thinking around the, the funding model as being not so much about buying tickets to something we've already sorted, but actually saying come along with us, uh, invest in this,

Speaker A: we're trying something here.

Speaker B: And I think recognizing the bits of what we. This is not about rolling out tried and tested formulae that have been on forever.

Speaker A: It's let's try something new.

Speaker B: And I'm pretty sure that some of the things we try will be wildly successful and some of them will fail, but that doesn't matter. And I think that's a good illustration of it. So I'm looking at sort of where can we get inspiration from, not just from conferences, but other things. And maybe we look at things that we don't like and say let's try and avoid that and try and see where can we, where can we sort of cobble things together. So I'd like to think of it as a little bit of uh, a remix, if you like, of things that are out there. But I wouldn't want anybody to think that we thought we had this sorted. I think part of the discomfort that I'm looking for and I'm hopefully you

Speaker A: agree is to just try some different things. Maybe we learn something tremendously from the

Speaker B: way a format fails, what that does to our ah, thinking or doesn't do to our thinking as much as the content.

Speaker C: Yeah, I fully agree. And I think that, you know, we, the concept of the IKEA effect, you know, we want people to become on the journey with us. We are as people will sense as they watch this podcast or clips of this video. They go, these guys got absolutely no idea what they're doing. Correct. Okay. We are trying and we know that many of you share our ah, concerns, uh, about the absolute pain of many industry events. And we know that maybe there's the topic, the specific topic we're talking about as well is maybe not addressed sufficiently. So we have to mix these things up. So the IKEA effects, you know, help us building. If you've got some great ideas, come along, um, and, and be prepared when you're there on the day not to just be sitting there hoping to listen to, you know, speech after speech after speech and taking a few notes and you know, then going to post event drinks and that's it, you're done. Participate, uh, make your voices known, be interactive. Um, so yeah, I think it's, you know, if we, we're talking about people coming and uh, paying some money to come, considering it as co investing with us in what we're doing. You're investing in this event. You're not just paying an amount which is just an expenditure line. You're saying, what am I investing in? What are we helping build? If things haven't been working previously, either in the nature of these sorts of events or in the subject matter, how can I be part of something that builds something different? And I can absolutely guarantee you'll have much more fun than you have in the other industry events. And you'll certainly get better coffee than I had two weeks ago if that tempts you in.

Speaker B: It's a key component. I agree. And I think it's probably worth stating as well, David, that uh, we're not looking at this as a uh, money making exercise. So any profits in inverted commas will be reinvested into future events. So I think the start point of this is fundamentally different as well, which is we're coming at it from the how do we put in a great event, the kind of thing we would love to go to and the kind of thing we think that there's room for. And it doesn't start with the how do we maximize the money we take out of this? It's exactly the opposite. It's actually just going, we're seed funding this thing in the hope that we have other people who want to come along. And I think the pricing structure that we've come up with. Again, we had to be behavioral about it on some level. But we've started sort of taking the early Bird concept, which lots of people have. So the earlier you buy a ticket to help build momentum, um, the cheaper the price. We've gone one further. So as well as having early Bird, we're going to be launching Blind Bird tickets, which is basically saying you kind of have a feel for what the event is. But we've not announced any details, we've not told you where it is. We're giving you the date and we're giving you a rough sense of what we're doing. If you want to come in at that point, you can have a hefty discount. And that's the trade off there to support us, to give us momentum and support it. So we're hoping that with a little bit of sort of behavioral pricing, we're kind of putting money where mouths are and really getting people that are interested in this and believe in it. So for me, that's quite an exciting prospect there as well. And we'll build as we go. And one of the things I hope we can do is talk a little bit as we evolve is also, I think there's a lot of dynamics behind the scenes that events kind of try and hide to have this polished, slick exterior. And I think we're, you know, we're going to run it professionally. We'll do all the things that we need to do. You know, insurance, for example, is one of the things that we think about. It's boring, but sensible and necessary. But we're also, I suspect, going to share some behind the scenes thoughts and views. And as we're able to reveal more, there'll be an opportunity to really bring the human side of organizing it. And therefore it's not just going to be, you know, the marketing definitively won't be slick all of the time. We may explore, if we think it's interesting, explore some of the things that didn't quite work out the way we expected because I think that's honest. And so I really want to bring the human into the organizational aspect. And undeniably, since we're not professional event organizers, stuff isn't going to go according to plan. And that's okay because I think again, that's thematic to the, to the event. It's like we can. The best laid plans will go horribly wrong when they come crashing to. There'll be stuff we haven't thought of. There'll be stuff that unexpectedly happens. Who knows what the weather will do. It's in November, so it shouldn't be the sort of heat wave that we're getting as we record this, David. But, uh, you know, there'll be unexpected things to happen and we'll just, we'll manage those in a very human, uh, way. So I think that for me, that's also part of the fun.

Speaker C: Oh, definitely. And I think there'd be a proportion of people who definitively want to come along to see David and Christian do a pratfall. To be honest. I think that was almost a selling point, I'd say. And just the one thing I'd say on sponsors is, as we've said, we're not, we're not having big headline sponsors with pay to play. But if anybody out there wants to help fund their evening drinks, you know, by all means, we'll, we'll happily receive, uh, a bit of drink funding after the event because we, you know, well acknowledge that, you know, you get to whatever time in the afternoon it is, sort of 5pm etc. And then you start to wind down, you form the end and then there's a whole load of other questions that people have and then the ability to sort of then further the conversation. So I think, you know, it'll be a full day event. But then we also want to work out how to keep the vibe going. Not just in the evening, obviously, because I keep, I've just realized now as I've been talking, just keep on talking about us meeting in a pub and you know, we'll have drinks afterwards and it makes me sound, you know, like I, I can't, can't enjoy myself and it's got a pint of beer in my hand. Um, but you know, I think that go forward vibe, you know, I, there's something, you know, obviously leaning in again into these kind of behavioral techniques, the commitment device. I think there's something there about as we go through the event and we come towards the end of that day, what is it that that takes the people in that room on a continuing journey that they haven't just forgotten two days later, you know, why they were there as well as what they learned, hopefully, or how much fun they had. I, um, think, you know, I think we want to bring people along a bit. That sounds a bit grand but, you know, we can but try.

Speaker B: What intrigues me is the number of events I've been to and conferences would be the flagship but there lots. But I can think of away days off sites, pick your sort of construct where you kind of go through it, you go through the motions and it all sort of blurs into one. And I know sometimes the point of it is just to get people together and the content is merely a construct to get budget and to allow people to be spending time together. But I want this to have some sort of resonance. And to your point that it's actually you come away and something has changed as a result of it and it might be that you've completely changed your mind on something, it might be that you believe more fervently than ever before in something and never. But uh, it gives people something that's much longer term and therefore it's not just a one off thing now grandiose ambitions and of course things will come in the way but I'd like to start with that spirit. And so as one looks forward and I mentioned that we'd be reinvesting in future things that as one does it, this wouldn't necessarily become a sort of rinse and repeat thing. We try this, we see what happens, see what works. If uh, it turns out to be the worst idea we've ever had, then maybe we try something else going forward. But we iterate and we evolve things and so the venue, as you say, we're not going to mention it now we know where it is, it's definitely going to take place there. We've put money down to book this venue. So this is definitely happening on that date in that venue. Central London is I think what we will reveal with good transport connections, but we'll reveal more later on. We don't want to uh, put too much on the table at this point in time but I think you know, it's going to be, it's just going to be hopefully interesting and hopefully something that is not your standard run of the mill. And it struck me that actually as sort of independent freelancers, self employed, pick your terminology, that we have uh, an ability to say what we really think and do things that perhaps one can't do within a larger organization where you need back to your pre cooked speeches, where you need approval or you need some sort of clearance or it has to fit within a certain strategy. We have that freedom and I feel very much the weight on me, as I know you do, to use that and to speak out on things and particularly where we're dealing with a complicated issue where conventional wisdom might not necessarily work. I'm hoping that what we can do is bring a bit of that and a little bit of an alternative perspective and a willingness to go to places that other conversations haven't yet. Because maybe people feel they can't.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I fully agree. I think we are, as you say, we're in a lucky position. Uh, there are challenges sometimes of being independent, et cetera. But, yeah, we're not beholden to the big regulator, we're not beholden to the big banks, we're not beholden to the big consultancy companies. And this sort of need, uh, to follow the sort of formulaic thing, which, again, you know, interestingly enough, it goes back to the whole meta thing, doesn't it? That's probably why we're well positioned to try and work out how do we kind of break out of the cycle a bit, because others are somewhat doomed to repeat. Whereas we can bring some people together and say, look, there is a different way. Uh, and if we think about the topic, we think about behavioral risk in financial services, we think about what's being done and what's not being done, and we think about it in very broad terms about the sorts of things we might need to think about, uh, which could be anything from neuroscience to organizational psychology to any spread of things. We have, as you say, the kind of license, I think, to bring it into the room, whereas others would probably be too conservative to do that.

Speaker B: I'm really struck, as you're talking there, that often when one has presentations, it's a particular view of the world or a particular solution that's being pushed. And I think one of the things that really strikes me here is that we both have a belief that exploring human behavior and understanding it is the key to unlocking, I would say, not just this, but many other business problems and challenges. And I'm quite excited by that because gives us, I think, a little bit of latitude on the, uh, on the agenda and how we structure the agenda and so looking for, I guess, interesting voices that are just going to come from whatever perspectives. And I think that's part of the joy of this is I would hope that as people see more of this evolving, it's not going to be a case of going, oh, yeah, I can see, I understand the format. It's almost a little bit of, oh, uh, wasn't expecting that. And there'll be some things that obviously we won't reveal until the day, and there'll be some things that we reveal over time, but hopefully it'll be a sense of this is not your standard event. Because there isn't a standard. We're not following a playbook, I guess.

Speaker C: Yeah, so totally m. And I think, uh, you know, this, this thing, the productive discomfort thing, again, I think is just worth reiterating. And again, it's just the very nature of the topic we're talking about and the very nature of this thing about linear narratives. To a certain extent in my mind, my view would be if people come in with maybe lots of sort of priors about way they think things work or don't work. And, you know, like all human beings, we have our kind of views of the world and by the end of the day, we've made people much less sure of many positions, which is kind of almost a complete reverse of most events. Most events or stories or narratives or plays, say you start from a position of not being sure and you kind of end up with this lovely resolution at the end, which is neat and it's great for plays and stories. But again, leading into what we're doing, if we want to lead people on a journey where maybe by the end that you've kind of unspooled, um, a lot of beliefs, views and left people going, oh, my goodness, there is quite a lot more out there than I was considering. I'm, uh, now not as sure that's good. Yeah. Having that sense that, that everything is not as clear hopefully leads into the kind of ongoing curiosity to then where do we go from here? So, yeah, the reverse narrative is what I'm thinking about. Take people from a place of comfort to one of kind of. I was going to say messy despair, but let's not use the word despair. Messy, sir. Messy. Uh, with the hope of then how do I move forward from here?

Speaker B: Absolutely love it. Well, look, I'm very, very excited about this. So remind people not where it's happening because we're not going to reveal that yet, but when is it? And give them the headlines again.

Speaker C: Right, headlines. 12th of November 2026. So only about five, four, five months away. It'll be in a really interesting resonant central London location with excellent transport links. Timings. Well, we're not entirely sure yet, obviously, because we're making up as we go along, but it's likely sort of 8:30 for nine through the day till five part, you know, something on that. And then obviously we hope to have some sort of evening things thereafter. There is a site to register interest, unconvention.uk I think, but we are soon to release tickets. Uh, Christian, over to you on that. You're. You're the maestro on that side.

Speaker B: Yep. So. So via that website there will be a link to acquiring tickets and if you're watching a post of this or the podcast, uh, links in the show notes or in the post accompanying this so it'll all be obvious as to what to do. David, before I let you go on this show, tell people where they can get hold of you.

Speaker C: Where they can get hold of me. Uh, obviously they can find me on LinkedIn. I have a website, behavioral.co.uk and usually I'm noisy enough so people can find me anyway, to be honest. But yes, obviously. Welcome any conversation on any of the topics we've talked about. Behavioral risk in financial services or other.

Speaker B: And while I've got you actually tell us so the name behavior. Because it's not behavior with an I, it's behavior. Tell us about that quickly.

Speaker C: You see, the truth is, and you've definitely been on this journey, Christian, is that when you decide that you are, you know, you have a company that you're forming and you have a, uh, name, you look out there and see what's available, what's not already been taken. Every single combination that I could possibly come up with in relation to the word behavior had been taken. So I came up with the. One of the closest looking word and that was it, to be honest. But then when I once had formed it, then you do a reverse narrative and let people weave in the story as to what it is, which is obviously basically made up. Some people would say it looks like behave with a capital or so it must be related to operational risk, operational resilience. Fine. I'm happy to pretend that was the case. It wasn't. I sometimes say that I deliberately didn't include the I and the you so that British people and American people couldn't argue about the proper way of spelling the word behavior. Or there is no I or you in behaviour. There's all these different things you can come up with. It was none of those things. It was the only word available.

Speaker B: Love it. Brutally honest as ever. Messy, interesting. And allowing people to create their own adventures, which I think is a spirit of life. David, really looking forward to doing this event together with you. I think we have a ton of work to do, but we are going to. You know, the I love about these sorts of collaborations is we are going to learn. So we are already learning lots about each other, about what it means to organize events, about how to screw things up and how to not make the same mistake twice, hopefully. So really looking forward to that. But I've also, as ever when we get together, thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Links to all the things that we talked about in the Show Notes. So I want to say one thank you for the collaboration, but most importantly now David, thank you for being a great guest on the show.

Speaker A: Thank you Christian so that's it for this episode of the Human Risk Podcast. My enormous thanks to you for listening and of course to David for appearing. To find out more about David, his advisory firm behavior, and of course the Unconvention. Have a look in the show notes. There are links to all of those there. As you've heard, the Unconvention is not intended to be a polished, sponsored pay to play conference where everyone nods along and leaves with their opinions unchanged. It's an experiment in bringing human behavior properly into the room. Messy, awkward, funny and hopefully useful. It's taking place in central London at a venue to be revealed, but I promise you it's not one of your standard conference venues. On 12 November 2026 you can register your interest and find ticket details@unconvention.uk links to that, to David and to Behavioral are all in the Show Notes. If this is your first time listening to the Human Risk podcast, thank you so much for joining me. You can subscribe wherever you get your quality audio content. It's available on all of the major podcasting platforms. If you like the show and have yet to leave a review for it on whichever platform you're listening to it on, please do so. It really, really does help. To discover episodes of the show that you might have missed, and there are over 350 of them. Visit the show's website, which is humanriskpodcast.com I'll be back with another episode of the show and who knows, we may return to some more behind the scenes at the Unconvention. But in the meantime, stay safe and I'll see you very soon for another episode of the Human Risk Podcast.