Christian Hunt - Humanizing Rules: Bringing Behavioural Science to Ethics and Compliance

CHRISTIAN HUNT

Copyright 2023 by Christian Hunt. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 9781394177400 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781394187287 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781394187294 (ePub)

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Humanizing Rules is a practical guide for anyone whose job involves managing human risk or who is interested in understanding more about it.

Human risk is the risk of people doing things they shouldn't, or not doing things they should. It's an intentionally broad definition that covers the full range of risks posed by human decisionmaking. It includes wilful acts such as I deliberately set out to commit fraud and human errors such as I was tired and made a mistake.

Human risk is the largest risk facing all organisations and society as a whole. When things go wrong, there is always a human component involved. People either cause problems in the first place or make them worse by how they respond.

Humanizing Rules is designed for anyone responsible for influencing human decisionmaking to reduce risk or ensure compliance with a set of rules or principles. It can help managers and senior leaders to be more effective in influencing the decisions of their employees and therefore deliver desired business outcomes.

It is also directly relevant to professionals in disciplines such as risk, ethics, legal, and compliance. But it is equally applicable to people in other functions who need to ensure that their fellow employees comply with rules, policies, or procedures. This includes but is not limited to functions like audit, legal, human resources, internal comms, procurement, and health & safety. If your role involves mitigating human risk, then Humanizing Rules is for you.

The book is written for a lay audience with little or no previous knowledge of either theoretical or practical behavioural science.

Humanizing Rules suggests an approach to managing human decisionmaking that fuses creativity and behavioural science, the study of the drivers of human decisionmaking. By bringing behavioural science to compliance, we can be more effective, mitigate human risk, reduce employee frustration, and get the best out of people.

Traditional approaches to managing human risk typically rely heavily on two presumptions. The first is that employers have the right to tell their employees what to do and that employees will therefore comply. The second is that compliance can be motivated via incentives and noncompliance can be deterred via punishment. These presumptions are theoretically correct, but often fail in practice. If we really want to influence human behaviour, we need to humanize our rules.

The book is designed to be practical. As we explore human behaviour, I will share stories and case studies from various industries and contexts. The ideas and suggestions I share have all been developed in the field. Either when I was working at UBS or in collaboration with my Human Risk clients. All of these ideas and suggestions are presented, not so that you can slavishly copy them though if you think they might work in your environment, do feel free but rather to inspire you to come up with your own ideas.

The book is not a stepbystep guide to managing human risk. Nor is it a technical guide to behavioural science or risk management. It is designed to inspire you to think differently about how to approach the challenge and to identify new solutions to old problems.

This book is split into four Parts. begins with a story of a minor error with major consequences that, for reasons I explain, helped to inspire the book. I then explore why we need to humanize rules and how behavioural science can help us to do that. I also explore some basic behavioural science principles and highlight why these are relevant.

introduces HUMANS, a simple, practical framework that will help you to deploy behavioural science techniques in your organisation. If you're introducing something new or refreshing your programme, it'll help you think about how your employees will likely react. If something isn't working as expected, HUMANS can help you diagnose why and improve things. Finally, HUMANS can also help you to predict where other parts of your compliance framework might be under stress and are worthy of your attention.