Neela is the Executive Director of Y-RISE (the Yale-Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale), which aims to develop research around the science of scaling policy interventions. Neela holds an MBA and a PHD in marketing and previously worked in the private sector before her most recent experiences and applications in policy and poverty alleviation. She founded the CSBC (Centre of Social and Behaviour Change) which is based at Ashoka University in India.
From private sector to public sector – learning with Neela
We’re wrapping up our series, BI lessons from the global south with a 2-part blog post informed by our conversation with Neela Saldanha, a well-known figure in the BI world. As someone who has experience in the private and public sectors, Neela’s insights are simply unique and experiences, thought-provoking. We spoke to Neela about stand-out projects in low-resource contexts and how this differs to a more well-resourced context, lessons from the private sector, and how these can be applied to her more recent experiences in the policy space and poverty alleviation.
See here for Part 1.
A useful combination: from private to public sector
Neela shares the great value in having previously worked in the private sector and the ability to apply these learnings in her current work across the public sector. Neela is careful however with placing the private sector on a pedestal – “they have a much easier problem to solve”. The public sector face far more complicated problems, with far more stakeholders.
“It's not just about getting the product service delivery through; you have to do it in a way that…affirms the dignity of people that you're serving”.
Shifting perspective: from beneficiary to customer
In marketing, the first question you ask is, who is my competitor and what is my position, but as Neela explains, “in development we don’t think we have competitors, we think of our end-users as beneficiaries,” assuming that they are benefitting from what we offer them. “But there are always competitors…and if we tend to think of them as customers for our services, rather than beneficiaries, we’d start to think about, what is competing for their time, and attention and limited resources and how can we beat that competition”? We cannot expect people to simply find a service attractive because it is free, and instead need to ask, who are we competing against?
If you activate your customer mindset, you may realise that “everyone has choices, and if they are not using your product or service, it’s not because they’re noncompliant, it’s because they have the choice do something else”. It becomes the public servant’s responsibility to provide them with a better product or service.
Product form and packaging, Neela explains, can have a major impact in this regard, when prioritised. When function and aesthetic are given attention, the customer may be more intrigued by that choice. But often the mentality is that “if we give something it doesn’t matter how we do it”. Neela uses the example of how we eat with our eyes, for example, a colourful packet of chips, yet we are surprised when free nutritional packs have unattractive packaging – we expect people to eat it because of the functional value alone when we wouldn’t do it ourselves. The customer focus can encourage the public sector to think (at little to no extra cost) about creating more attractive choices.
In the marketing world, students are taught to think about four ‘p’s’ or ‘levers’:
“there’s product, which includes packaging, there's pricing, which is really important. There is a promotion which is advertising…and then there's distribution, place”.
It’s common that these elements are not given much focus in the development sector, in service design, particularly from a customer journey perspective. Even pricing is not given much thought when in fact we can ask, “what’s the price of free? For example, I have seen campaigns that say “breast milk is free” but it is not really – the mother pays for it in time, pain, effort. What is the price people are paying? What's the value that people are seeing in your offering?”
Focus on getting things done
Neela reflects on her training and the emphasis this placed on management skills and incrementalism. The key to successful project implementation is not about perfecting the plan, it’s about building it. Referring to the anaemia project in India, Neela says, “there were 100 things we could have done, and we could have spent all day getting opinions” but you realise the importance of getting things done and managing which of those things will happen sooner and which will happen later. For Neela, remaining focused on getting things done, is one of the most useful takeaways from her experience in the private sector, particularly because:
“The problems in the public sector are way bigger than selling a can of soda. So sometimes the problems are so big, we get lost in trying to solve every bit of [them]”.
The power of execution, systems, processes, and accessibility
“Multinational corporations are relentless when it comes to customer focus and execution,” Neela says, as she refers to the great training ground the private sector offered her and the influence it has had on her approach when working with governments. After her MBA, she joined Nestle and for the first months, was sent, as were other MBAs, into sales. She worked with distributors, managing them, looking at inventory, supervising the distributor salespeople, accompanying them every day to visit 40-60 retailers, rain, or shine. These visits were to take stock who had the company’s products or needed them, how the products were displayed, and to ensure that retailers were aware of new products and offers. One takeaway from this experience is simply: the importance of knowing your customer (in this case, the retailer). Another is that “all the fancy things [branding, brand management] don’t work unless distribution and on-ground execution works. It really taught me the power of execution”.
Neela’s first-hand experience in the market further taught her the power of systems and processes. In those days, everything was manually recorded (no tablets), and although a simple process to fill in sheets, 100% compliance is required.
“It taught me a lot about how process is just about doing these things day in and day out… [it’s] not the most exciting thing, but it’s often the glue that holds, especially as you scale an organisation”.
Finally, Neela links the power of accessibility and the role this plays in the private sector to her thinking and approach when working with the public sector and as a major theme/ insight in behavioural science. “People are not going to walk more than 5m to get a Pepsi. You [must] make sure it is as close and available as possible”.
Preparing for hard work: financial costs and beyond
Making sense of expenses
“I think we've done ourselves a disservice by saying experiments are cheap”. Neela explains that experiments themselves may not be too expensive to run, but overall expenses can be high when for example setting up the lab, or training people. It creates assumptions and expectations around how much BI-related work costs. “I think we have to do a little bit of education, even with donors,” says Neela.
Prepare for long-term partnerships
Beyond financial costs, understanding culture and recruiting people are further challenges when it comes to funding. Finding funders who are prepared to set up long-term partnerships that last up to several years is key. These funders are not always common, but as Neela suggests, all it takes is “a little bit of social proof” which leads into her advice: “try the smallest project you can just to show people” – start to act and show people as opposed to talking about it.
Secure your project - planning cycle
For anyone trying to land a BI project, understanding how the system and budgets work is key. Neela remembers her time in the private sector when she was trying to set up a sort of nudge unit in the organization. She met with a Vice President who listened enthusiastically and said, “where is it in the Annual Plan?” That made her aware of the criticality of the planning cycle, and the need for a project to be included in the system of the company’s planning & execution processes.
Instead, it may be worth first seeing how BI can inform existing organisations and their work before an entirely new BI project is initiated. Again, the behavioural scientist requires the skill to make sense of an organisation’s funding and planning cycle, “so that you can sort of understand and pitch BI accordingly”.
A BI concept top-of-mind: Defaults
Just as Neela doesn’t have one top author, similarly, she does not name one favourite BI-informed public policy or innovation. Instead, she expresses her intrigue around the power of defaults as a BI concept. This intrigue stems from a conversation she had with a professor who named defaults as one idea or area in behavioural science that any ‘newbie’ should begin with. Neela remembers thinking, “really? Not you know, all this fun stuff about gain and loss framing or cool stuff like that?”. But as she has discovered, spending time thinking about defaults is worthwhile.
Neela clarifies that defaults are not simply like a single on-off switch or as has been used with organ donation. When she was asked what the default was with respect to a certain training programme at one point, she recognised that there was not just one, but many. “It could be the default is the length of the program…who you’re pitching it to, [or] where you run the program”. There could be 15 defaults built into a single training programme, and the skill behavioural science offers is to ask, “if I change this, what would happen”?
In line with this intrigue, Neela shares her temptation to conduct an audit of her daily life to figure out what are all the defaults that exist within it. Every aspect of life in fact has a default setting, and taking time to examine this, and how it influences behaviour, and then consider what would happen if a particular default was changed, could be a very insightful exercise.
BI knowledge on the move
Enthusiastic about the growing behavioural science community and the increasing number of BI experts moving from private to public sector, Neela says, “I think you know you can't have too many of those”. We believe Neela to be a true testament to this.
In conversation with Neela forms part of our blog series: BI Lessons from the Global South. See here for an overview of the conversations BI4GOV had with various leading BI thinkers and practitioners.