Author’s note: In our latest podcast episode we chat with Adam Ferrier, founder of Thinkerbell, consumer psychologist, and one of Australia’s most recognised voices on brand, behaviour and creativity.
Adam built Thinkerbell on the premise that marketing sciences meets hardcore creativity, and has spent his career making the case that brand belongs at the centre of the business, not the marketing department.
We cover:
- Why brand should be understood as a behavioural contract that sets the tone for the organisation
- The case for the CEO as Chief Brand Officer
- Why the gap between what a brand promises and what its people deliver is wider than most CEOs realise
- How Thinkerbell built its internal operating system, including the rituals, language and roles that bring “Measured Magic” to life inside the agency
Listen to the episode on Apple or Spotify.
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In May 2020, Rio Tinto destroyed two 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, despite having three alternative mine plans that would have preserved the site. Rio Tinto’s 2019 sustainability report had named working with Traditional Owners “a fundamental part of how we operate”. A parliamentary inquiry later concluded that “Rio Tinto knew the value of what they were destroying but blew it up anyway.”
The gap between what a company says it stands for and what it actually does is where many risk, safety and HR failures live. It is also where most organisational energy is wasted. Values posters, town halls, lanyard cards, induction videos: a generation of artefacts aimed at shifting motivation, almost none at shifting ease.
Adam Ferrier, founder of Thinkerbell and a consumer psychologist, thinks organisations pull the wrong lever. On a recent episode of Rely On, he set out the diagnostic he uses: behaviour is a function of motivation and ease. Motivation is the product of social norms (what others are doing) and individual incentive (what’s in it for me). Ease is the product of cognitive effort (can I understand this?) and physical effort (is it practical?). All four lenses matter, but one matters most:
“The harder thing, and the thing that I think organisations don’t put enough thinking into, is how to make it easy for people to act in the way that you want them to act.” — Adam Ferrier
He is not alone thinking this. BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Model and the COM-B framework from Michie and colleagues make the same case from the academic side.
The evidence is settled. A study by researchers Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales of 679 S&P 500 firms found that “proclaimed values appear irrelevant.” Only perceived integrity — whether employees believed leadership lived the values — tracked with productivity and profit. APRA said the same about the Australian financial sector in 2019, after reviewing 36 regulated entities: “Risk culture is not well understood, and therefore may not be reinforcing the desired behaviours.” The weaknesses were industry-wide.
What “culture for real” looks like
Ferrier’s favourite example is an econometric modelling firm called Mutinex, where no one is allowed to say “nearly done”. You have to say (something like) “78% complete”. The firm values precision, so it has engineered a ritual that makes precision the path of least linguistic resistance. Nobody needs a poster.
The canonical corporate case is Paul O’Neill’s first act as CEO of Alcoa in 1987: every workplace injury had to be reported to him, personally, within 24 hours. Plant managers installed direct phone trees to unit vice-presidents because the information had to flow. Lost-workday injuries fell from 1.86 per 100 workers to 0.2. Market capitalisation rose from roughly US$3 billion to US$27.5 billion. O’Neill did not raise motivation. He removed the option of not reporting — which is what a real speak-up system looks like.
Toyota’s andon cord runs the same play: any worker can stop the production line on spotting a defect. The default is “stop and fix”, not “escalate and hope”. Closer to home, BHP requires its leaders to physically verify critical controls on a set cadence — Field Leadership visits booked into diaries, not paperwork signed off in an office. The same logic applies to psychosocial reporting: a channel that requires a courageous email defaults closed; a scheduled, confidential one-to-one defaults open.
Why this matters now for Australian leaders
The regulatory ground has moved. Safe Work Australia’s 2022 Model Code of Practice on psychosocial hazards defines the risk in terms of work design and management, not individual resilience. NSW and Queensland have enshrined psychosocial risk as a duty-of-care matter equivalent to physical hazards. ISO 45003 takes the same line internationally. Translation: “we ran the training” is no longer a defensible answer.
The cost of getting it wrong is on the record, and there is a pattern in it. Westpac paid A$1.3 billion to AUSTRAC in 2020 — the largest civil penalty in Australian corporate history — for anti-money-laundering reporting failures. CBA paid A$700 million in 2018 on the same pattern. ANZ paid A$250 million in 2025. Deloitte Access Economics estimated workplace sexual harassment alone cost the economy A$3.8 billion in 2018. Griffith University’s Whistling While They Work 2 study of 17,778 Australian and New Zealand workers found 42.1% of employee reporters were treated badly by management or colleagues after speaking up. Each of these was a failure of ease, not motivation. Speak-up culture is a system, not a slogan.
One thing to do on Monday
Ferrier paraphrases a principle from Professor Mark Ritson: if a consultant gives your organisation more than one thing to know about the brand, everything else is a waste of time. The same discipline applies to culture. So one recommendation:
Engineer one ritual that makes the desired behaviour unavoidable. An O’Neill-style reporting rule. A Toyota-style stop-the-line trigger. A Mutinex-style language default. A BHP-style field verification. One is enough to start, and it is more than most organisations currently have.
Three small moves support it.
- Audit ease, not motivation: for each of your top values, identify the one daily behaviour that expresses it, and ask whether that behaviour is the path of least resistance or the path of most.
- Measure retaliation, not just reporting: a rising report rate alongside a rising retaliation rate is theatre.
- Stress-test the gap: ask an outsider what your organisation looks like it values, based only on observed behaviour over a week, and compare with what it says it values. That delta is your work.
Edgar Schein put it best: “If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”
