Good news on my personal research, with new publications coming up. Plus, the everyday work of managing stakeholder relationships with senior executives and partner agencies.

I’m super excited because I’ve got the next two days off from my paid work. I’m going to use that time to work on my own research. I’m doing an analysis of public discussions of vaccination. I also got some really great news yesterday that a book chapter of mine that was included as part of a book proposal was accepted for publication. That’ll be coming out next year.

Today in my paid work, I ran two behavioural insights clinics. These are 30-minute time slots where other agencies can come to us with a behavioural problem and we give them advice on the run. We have no time to prepare. The advice we give relies solely on our pre-existing knowledge, rather than additional research. I’ll share a couple of case studies in coming weeks.

The rest of the day I worked on our cyber security project. We had a meeting with our partners about how to divide the workload. It’s a really great outcome for me. I’ll be doing two days a week. I’ll be mostly managing the stakeholder relationships and our contract and our partners will mostly manage the I.T. requirements.

I organised our governance group meeting for late September. It was a feat of human endurance to line up 11 executive diaries! They are senior executives whose calendars are booked up weeks and months in advance.

I had to present on the progress of my cyber security project at our team meeting. One of our team members asked what it’s like to manage challenging stakeholder relationships. My advice was to position our work as being complementary to the good work that’s already been done.

Our team uses a lot of novel methods, while a lot of other teams rely on traditional ways of doing things. Sometimes, our ways of working can be confronting. I try and show that we’re not trying to replace those traditional ways of working, we’re simply trying to boost and enhance what everybody else is already working on and drawing on evidence to find new ways of shifting behaviour.