One of the most notable lasting shifts in public mood to result from the financial crash and recession is a greater awareness of economics. OK, so it's not up there with our new-found loathing of bankers, but taxi drivers and the boys down the pub are all suddenly comfortable with ideas such as a double-dip recession, or an L-shaped recovery. But greater exposure has also coincided with hard questions being asked of traditional approaches to economics.
Maybe it's because so few economists called the bubble correctly, but there is a growing resentment towards what Johnson Matthey chairman Sir John Banham described to me recently as "too many bloody micro-economists with too much time on their hands". Whatever the reason, this scepticism has been one factor feeding the boom in behaviourial economics.
Rather than assume, as traditional economists do, that consumers and markets are rational (a silly idea for which there is little evidence), behaviourial economists start by monitoring how people actually operate. Past behaviour may not be a perfect predictor of future behaviour, but it's more accurate than economic models based on equations requiring often volatile variables to remain fixed in order to make sense.
This is not a new area, but it's an idea whose time seems to have arrived. David Cameron is busily recruiting for his "nudge" unit, with policy wonks influenced by the book of the same name by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In the US, projects based on the ideas have achieved excellent results.
It may be faddish, but it's an approach and a way of thinking that is increasingly having an impact across UK boardrooms. It's particularly noticeable in marketing departments, where everything from market research to brand messages are being devised around the idea that people actually respond better to certain types of communication. As Jane Simms says, it represents potentially the biggest revolution in marketing for 50 years.
It also explains why brands such as Apple generate so much consumer love they are able to overcome product failures that would destroy others. Perhaps most significantly, as David Woodward argues, it could determine what influence you have over fellow directors.
Richard Cree