Beth Morley is a behaviour change expert. She supports organisations to build relationships and partnerships, to communicate big ideas to target audiences and to bring global concepts into everyday living. Beth has worked on a wide variety of projects in the Environmental, Early Years, Play and community sectors. She is Human Insights Manager at Cenex, and responsible for building and managing Cenex’s work portfolio in transport equity, behavioural change, and ethnography. She manages a team of experts who advise public and private clients on the development and delivery of effective policies, strategies, and implementation plans to help them reach their net-zero goals. Beth also oversees the use of behaviour science and human insights expertise within projects delivered by Cenex, where she has worked for over six years.
Can you give us an overview of your current role, please?
I work for Cenex, which is the UK’s first Centre of Excellence for Low Carbon and Fuel Cell technologies. The work that Cenex do is very much on an engineering innovation and technology theme including data analysis modelling around trying to facilitate that shift to zero emission transport. Our focus is generally around electrification.
I’m Human Insights Lead at Cenex, which is kind of unique. Most of the work is from an engineering data perspective, looking at vehicle-centric or technology-centric data. In the last few years, we have become increasingly conscious that if you only consider the vehicle and technology perspective when you’re trying to move to zero emission transport, this really doesn’t give the whole picture; you need to account for people too.
I oversee anything that has to do with people, and that can include working on technology demonstrations and the behavioural aspects of that or making sure that any pilot or demonstration of technology has its best chance of success. Often the problems that come when demonstrating are because no one has thought through how people are going to interact with it.
How did you come to be involved in Strathmore and what were you doing there?
The project in Kenya came about through the Rapid Response Fund speaking to Strathmore and Kenya Power and Light Company about issues they wanted investigating.
Then the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero International team secured funding for Cenex to help. One aspect was to provide training at officer level on e-mobility, and the other was to produce a grid readiness model for Nairobi. I led on the project management of delivering the training element. Strathmore has a really great team there.
Tell us about how this role matches your skills and qualities as a woman. How do you think being a woman helps you do this job?
It’s an interesting one because a lot of what I do is about listening because I’m much more of a qualitative researcher. It is one of those things that you could interpret as a typically feminine soft skill. It sometimes annoys me that I’ve fallen into that. I’d quite like to be more of a hard scientist because I dislike that genderisation of those skills, but it is actually how we live in society.
Also, in some respects, the skill is devalued, but it’s a really important one. Yes, and I think one of the challenges we have is in proving the value because so often people in transport prefer a clear number and a spreadsheet. The transport sector has spent many years calculating the speed it takes to get somewhere and the cost. It gets excited about the vehicle and the tech, but transport doesn’t exist for its own purpose. It exists because we want to do things and live our lives, but that’s quite a hard thing to write in a spreadsheet.
It’s interesting that all of my team are women and that social scientists tend to be women. But I think that’s as much about boys being encouraged towards STEM subjects as it is women being encouraged away from them. So, being a woman is probably a big factor in what I do, and I would like it to be valued more highly.
Other women interviewed in this area have said similar things.
One of the most interesting things I found working in Kenya and doing the session in Strathmore is that the gender mix of the room was far more equal than I think it would be in a similar situation in the UK. It was much, much further at the forefront of people’s minds to have those discussions. I think in the UK, because we feel like gender equality is much closer, we don’t necessarily discuss it as much. Whereas because there’s a sense of a much bigger gap in the Global South, it needs to be talked about more. I found it interesting that everybody was much more comfortable having that conversation than perhaps people in the UK. Because the problem is more extreme in say, Africa, the conversation is much louder.
The headlines about climate change are very much about money and fossil fuels and continuing to “drill baby drill” – a very masculine type of agenda. What are the messages we need to counter that narrative?
People can feel very despondent that the amount of behaviour change required is just too much to ask of people. But if you can understand people’s decision making better, you can work out a way to make those changes easier for them. It can feel like a big uphill struggle, but I often refer back to other changes that we’ve had in our society over time. If you get it right, people can do it. One of the reasons humans as a species are so successful is we are so adaptable. We need to remind people of that.
I used to work in waste and recycling and people were very angry when we changed their bins and the frequency of collection – it was a huge thing for them. But now, it’s just accepted that you recycle and that your rubbish bin is not collected every week. So it is completely possible to make changes.
I think the conversation about climate change has been mishandled by many people. If you try to frighten people into making a change they just switch off from it. It’s better to break it down to actionable things and show everyone playing their part. The other thing that people get wrong is insisting that people have all the information and all the knowledge. Actually, we don’t always need them to have that. If they are a motorcycle taxi driver and getting an electric motorcycle taxi is cheaper and more efficient and safer they’ll do it. So, we don’t need them to endorse climate change so long as they may a change that is beneficial.
So, they’re acting in self-interest.
Yes, and they are many situations like that, for example managing waste better, reducing air pollution, generating jobs.
One more thing that I’d like to work on is that area between government level and the individual – at the community level; how do family, friends, social interactions influence everything? I think that’s a key area for change that can drive forward action.
That’s interesting because one of our projects is about decentralised energy planning and my colleagues were working with the chieftains and chieftainesses of the district and wards rather than with central government. I can’t think of a parallel structure in the UK.
I think that’s the other fascinating thing about getting to do any work in the Global South or across a culture, seeing some of the things that we’ve lost in the UK and things that they do really well, and we could learn from. I always said to the people that we spoke to “I’m learning far more from you than you are from me.”
Beth was speaking to CCG’s Peter Allen