Rory Sutherland, founder of Ogilvy Change
Dr Oliver Scott, anthropologist at Oxford University
- Morality is a set of tools for promoting cooperation. He looked at 60 communities around the world and examined whether the 7 generic moral rules applied to them all.
- He found most morals within the 60 communities; it was simply the priorities that differed.
- Morality is no mystery – there are many types of cooperation so there are many types of morality.
Ed Smith, ex-England cricketer and author
- Sport celebrates and nurtures confidence. But confidence is inversely correlated with being right.
- Living with risk frightens people because we need a clearly successful model to work from. But, we have to be prepared to be wrong, to enjoy being right. That’s the only way we can innovate.
Andrew Sheerin, designer and theorist of political games
- A focus on the persuasive power of play.
- His company, TerrorBull Games, make games that seem as simple as the narrative but are actually as complicated as the reality e.g. The War on Terrorism – first stocked by Amnesty International; has been played by both the MoD and soldiers on the front line.
- The idea of Play Theory is that the laws of the real world are suspended during the game and reinstated once the game is over. This allows people to explore taboo subjects in what feels like a safe space.
Stevyn Colgan, ex-police officer, author, speaker and educator
- He joined the police force because of a £50 bet his dad made that he wouldn’t last six months there. He ended up staying and becoming ‘the worst police officer’ because he changed the game.
- Believed in taking it back to the key principals of the police force: the prevention of crime, not the catching of criminals. But you can’t prove prevention through stats, and it was stats that his bosses were interested in.
- He believed that, if you change the behaviour of the community, it can have a knock-on effect.
Dominic Cummings, co-founder and campaign director of Vote Leave
- Market research suggested that people didn’t know anything about the EU but that three things had changed: immigration, the 2008 financial crisis and the Euro.
- Vote Leave was created as a totally independent organisation to make people feel like they could Take Back Control. It wasn’t allied to the left or right so all parties could unite behind it.
- Vote Leave exploited the mistakes of the other side, blowing their entire budget in the last 3-4 days on 1 ½ billion digital ads and specifically targeting around 7 million people with their message.
Charlotte Pearce, CEO of Inkpact
- Inkpact strips back the simple idea of the power of the pen - takes traditional handwritten letters and uses them as a mass marketing tool.
- It is a technology company but also a social enterprise, allowing companies to send handwritten letters on a mass scale that are written by those less socially able.
- Receiving a hand written letter encourages the feeling of reciprocity, the obligation to give back what you have received.
Wing Commander Keith Dear, UN Military Adviser and RAF intelligence officer
- Currently examining the effect of surveillance on behaviour in a PhD on the psychology of surveillance at Oxford University.
- His theory suggests the simple act of believing you are being watched changes an individual’s behaviour, even if no one is really looking.
- Referenced the watching eyes theory, that humans feel an emotional connection to eyes; they act as a deterrent.
Julia Hobsbawm, leading expert on connectedness in modern life
- Addressed the idea of social health in an age of overload.
- She spoke about the need to change the definition of health, as decreed by the World Health Organisation, because it is no longer universally applicable.
- Modern connectedness is accelerating frighteningly fast. The idealistic world view that people love to cling to is that time is limitless. But every single person in the world has a finite number of hours in a week.
- We are drowning in information and need to curate it and mitigate it.
KEYNOTE Meik Wiking, CEO of The Happiness Research Institute
- Asked the audience, how do we measure happiness? Why are some people happier than others? And he talked about the quality of life, and how we improve it.
- He explained the scale of happiness through six factors that matter, for everyone: health, freedom, wealth, trust, altruism and social support.
- Happiness is hard wired – genetics matter.
Dr. Blay Whitby, philosopher and ethicist
- Outlined what the aviation industry can teach other disciplines about user interfaces.
- The fundamental takeaway was that aviation isn’t forgiving on mistakes, and nor should any other industry be.
Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist
- Examined the idea that virtue signalling by consumers and companies alike has become a common insult and a societal problem.
- But virtue signalling runs deep in our biology - we can ignore it, fight it or simply use it.
