Nudge to Comply — Brisbane Metro Utilities' 90-Day Behavioural Pilot

A four-round, intermediate behavioural-science and customer-transformation simulation set inside Brisbane Metro Utilities Ltd (BMU), a Queensland multi-utility serving 1.4 million water and energy customers on A$1.9 billion in annual revenue.

A heatwave water-restriction breach has gone viral — 4,200 automated fines, a pensioner wrongly fined, a hardship family disconnected in 39°C heat — and the state utilities regulator has opened a 'punitive and ineffective compliance' inquiry with up to A$5M in penalty exposure and a binding remedy.

Non-payment affects 11% of accounts (~154,000) and ties up A$47M in receivables; restriction non-compliance ran at 18% during the heatwave; enforcement costs A$6.8M a year while complaints rose 34% and Net Trust fell 12 points.

As the new Head of Customer Transformation you have one quarter (90 days) and a capped A$3M pilot budget to prove a behavioural approach beats enforcement before the regulator's interim report lands.

Working through Dootson's deviant-consumer-behaviour lens and COM-B, you must: Round 1 — diagnose WHY customers misbehave for each non-compliance type, separating 'can't comply' (hardship, friction, confusion) from 'won't comply' (deliberate, opportunistic defiance), and choose the target behaviour, because misdiagnosing the two is the costliest error.

Round 2 — design the intervention: pick a choice-architecture mechanism (social-norm messaging, opt-out default, friction reduction, salience/timing, commitment) and a human or digital channel matched to the audience's reachability, with an ethics check that avoids disguised coercion (the failure mode that caused the crisis).

Round 3 — set the rollout scope and test design within budget and 90 days, choosing between a controlled randomised pilot, a multi-arm human-vs-digital test, a single-suburb trial or a fast broad rollout, and deciding whether to run a control group as advocacy-group pressure mounts.

Round 4 — read heterogeneous pilot results (some nudges backfire on the won't-comply segment via the boomerang effect), then scale, redesign or stop each nudge and present a behaviourally grounded, ethical compliance strategy to the regulator.

The math rewards diagnosis-led design, channel-fit, experimental discipline with a counterfactual, and responsible scaling — and punishes the five classic errors: a one-size nudge, coercion in disguise, channel mismatch, no control group, and over-scaling a backfired nudge.

Final KPIs track projected compliance uplift (percentage points), the behaviour-change index, adoption rate, cost-per-conversion against the A$3M budget, and regulator and trust standing.

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.