Choice Architecture: The Framework You're Already Using

Every communications campaign you have ever built had a choice architecture inside it. The order you sequenced your calls to action. The option you listed first in a petition. The default you set in an employee survey. The way you structured a crisis response. 

You made all of those decisions. Some of them deliberately. Most of them by instinct, habit, or convention. And the difference between those two things, between deliberate design and accidental design, is the difference between a campaign that moves people and one that wonders why nobody moved. 

This episode was recorded live on stage at the IABC World Conference in Toronto on June 14th, 2026, in front of an audience of communications professionals from around the world. 

Listen For

4:20 What Choice Architecture Means

5:52 The Default Effect

6:50 Printer Defaults Example

8:15 Removing Friction from Sign-Ups

9:31 The EAST Framework

Guest: Ann-Marie Blake

Website | True Website | LinkedIn

Doug

Substack | Website | LinkedIn

Are you a brand with a podcast that needs support? Book a meeting with Doug Downs to talk about it.

Apply to be a guest on the podcast

Connect with us

LinkedIn | X | Instagram | You Tube | Facebook | Threads | Bluesky | Pinterest

Transcript

Emily Page (00:00):

On June 14th, 2026 at the IABC World Conference in Toronto, Doug joined Ann- Marie Blake on stage in front of an audience of communications professionals from around the world. What followed was a conversation about one of the most underused concepts in the communicators toolkit, choice architecture.

Doug Downs (00:25):

When you checked into your room either last night or the night before, everything hopefully was where you thought it would be. The little green light went on. When you click the pass, the door opened, there's a tiny little hallway, the thermostat was there and there's a little bathroom either off to the left or off to the right. Everything was perfect. You walked in, the beds were in front of you. If you're one of the fancy people with the suite, the suite was in front of you and the bedroom was obviously right there and you walked in and you put your suitcase wherever you choose to put your suitcase. Some people put it on the bed. Some people open that little awning, which I've never used and they take their things out that way or they put it on the floor and you do what you do.

(01:07):

The whole architecture was laid out for you because it was exactly what you anticipated. This is a true story. About a year ago I was hired by RBC. I live in Calgary. I was hired by RBC to come out to Toronto and train Olympic athletes on presentation coaching. It's just something I've worked with TED Talkers. I've never marketed myself that way. You get into it, you start doing it through media training and you get hired to do it. So I was in Toronto, I checked into my hotel, the light worked. I got in the door all right. There was no thermostat on the wall, which I go too quickly because I need it warm. The bathroom, I just had a quick glance, but all I saw was a sink. That's all I saw. Okay. So I walked in, had my suitcase and there's two sofas and a couple of chairs in the TV.

(01:55):

I'm looking around for the bedroom because that's where am I sleeping. I didn't see it. So I walk in and I actually backed up and I walked back in because I was out of sorts for a second. There's four walls. There's two couches. There's a couple of chairs. At one point, I even went over to one of the couches and I started pulling at the cushions to see if this was a pullout couch. I'm thinking, am I going to call the concierge? Am I going to go downstairs? Have they put me in a meeting room? What am I supposed to do here? And as I moved around the room, the light was coming in through the window. I could not see around such a small little corner. And around the corner, sure enough, there was another really small, really short little hallway with a door that led to this massive master bedroom with a beautiful bathroom that yes, had a toilet and had a shower and had closet space for fantastic.

(02:55):

RBC had put me up in a suite and it was fantastic. But my initial experience, because it wasn't what I was anticipating, was a little off kilter. And that's the story that stayed with me, not the fantastic suite that they put me in. That was the only thing I talked about and how stupid I kind of felt when I was in the room. In communications, the choice architecture that we lay out for people dictates their experience. So today on stories and strategies, sometimes the best communicator is not the one who speaks the best, not the one who writes the best. Sometimes it's the one who develops the best room. How are you? Welcome to ... I grew up here. So in Toronto, how are you finding Toronto?

Ann Marie Blake (03:42):

I love Toronto. This is my second visit to Toronto and I was kind of pleased. We were in Vancouver last year. So on the other side, I'm an equal opportunities Canadian and I was kind of quite delighted when I heard that we were coming back to Toronto.

Doug Downs (03:55):

Awesome.

Ann Marie Blake (03:55):

Fantastic.

Doug Downs (03:56):

Are you going to see something different this time? Are you going to go to see the Yankees and the Blue Jays or what are you going to do?

Ann Marie Blake (04:00):

Well, the Blue Jays played yesterday and I missed them. I thought it was the evening, but it was the afternoon. So I kind of- We play

Doug Downs (04:05):

Every day. It's

Ann Marie Blake (04:05):

Not like

Doug Downs (04:06):

Footy. We play every day.

Ann Marie Blake (04:07):

Oh, well, I'll try and make some time to go.

Doug Downs (04:09):

Last

Ann Marie Blake (04:10):

Time I went down to Niagara, I took advantage of the jet lag and I had a driver take me down to the Falls, which was lovely, but I won't have time to do that this time.

Doug Downs (04:18):

Awesome.

Ann Marie Blake (04:18):

But I will try and see again.

Doug Downs (04:20):

So Emory, you are a chartered fellow with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, CIPR, the Center for Strategic Communications Excellence. You're the co-founder of True, which is a consultancy helping organizations unlock real potential using behavioral science, which I think that's a lot of strategic communications with AI out there. We're starting to use more and more behavioral science. Choice architecture. What is it and how is it that each one of us intuitively or using our cognizant brain is actually using it already?

Ann Marie Blake (04:51):

Oh, wow. Okay. So I need to preface this by saying I'm not a doctor or a scientist or a Nobel Prize winner.

Doug Downs (04:58):

But you're going to play one in the podcast.

Ann Marie Blake (05:00):

I'm going to play one in the podcast. I am a practitioner. And the reason that my co-founder, Howard Craig and I set up True is because we have this whole concept of people- centered change. So the way that we had seen a lot of change go on in organizations is, I mean, I'm paraphrasing now, follow this process from one of the different change models and change will happen. Or if you just make the poster a little bit bigger, then change will happen. And so one of the things that I've been quite interested in for the last few years is two things, neuroscience and behavioral science. And choice architecture is something that comes from behavioral science, which is all about, if I'm kind of paraphrasing, the systems we put in place to help people make decisions. I think that's kind of what it is in a nutshell.

Doug Downs (05:52):

Okay. And there's this mechanic called the default effect. When I went into my hotel room, my whole default effect got thrown off the thermostat, the bathroom, the coaches, that's kind of what ... What is that?

Ann Marie Blake (06:04):

So the default effect works on the premise that we take the path of least resistance and that we basically go to default, which is why if anyone else like me has been caught with their subscriptions because you don't cancel them, a lot of the subscription companies, the default is that you will kind of sign up again unless we hear otherwise

Doug Downs (06:26):

From you. Auto renewal. Yeah.

Ann Marie Blake (06:27):

And actually it's quite interesting because there are some ethical things around that default concept. My background is financial services and we weren't allowed to use some of that kind of default concept in some of the work that we did, but you can actually use it to your advantage actually in terms of the default process.

Doug Downs (06:43):

Give me an example where the default effect has changed within a communication strategy and how that turned out.

Ann Marie Blake (06:50):

Oh, I love this. And I had to dig deep for a few examples, but this is another example of if you make a bigger poster, then change will happen. So I just want you to all think about printers that you have within your organizations and they cost, I don't know whether this is visible to everyone, but all the paper, the printering costs a lot of money and people were doing single-sided printing in color and we didn't want that to happen. So the comms goes out, only print this if you really need to and let's do double-sided and let's use black and white because it's cheaper. And what happens? You can guess nothing much happens around that. And so then the posters went up, do you really need to print this? And the posters went up slightly bigger, et cetera. And again, nothing really much happens.

(07:39):

Not because people are bad people, but because they tend to do what they're used to. You kind of just press print, don't you? And then the printing goes off. When we spoke to the IT teams and put the default as actually the default is on every printer double-sided black and white printing, then guess what happens? People don't change it back to single-sided color, do they? So that's kind of a really simple example of how you can use defaults.

Doug Downs (08:06):

Is it important to keep tabs on, this is partly user experience, right? Customer keep tab because it's not static. It's forever changing, right?

Ann Marie Blake (08:15):

It does change. And even things like signing up for events, for example. So as I said before, I'm not a behavioral science, but I do really like to understand how it works in terms of making user journeys easy for people. I think what a lot of organizations do is they design experiences about what's most convenient for them and not necessarily thinking about the whole user experience. So if we think about signing up for an event, for example, I want that to be as quick and easy as it is. If I use Eventbrite, but others do exist, Eventbrite's got all my details. I click, I want a ticket, and the ticket goes into my Apple wallet. Whereas if some organizations have put friction in that because what they want is to collect data or they want different choices and therefore I'm less likely to sign up because it's a bit of a FAF and I'm busy and I've got lots of other things to do.

(09:08):

So that's kind of an example of where we need to make sure that we're designing with our audience in mind as opposed to with the organization in mind.

Doug Downs (09:17):

Okay.For someone in the room who wants to be deliberate about implementing Choice Architecture or the concept of Choice, what are the good initial steps or to recognize what I'm already doing and maybe didn't put a label to that?

Ann Marie Blake (09:31):

Okay. So one of the frameworks I use, and there are multiple different frameworks that you use if you're interested in behavioral science, but one of the ones that I tend to use in a lot of my work is the EAST framework, which EAST stands for easy, attractive, social, and timely. And again, it's a framework that works because it actually works on people how actually people behave as opposed to how we think they behave. So when I think about easy, for example, is are we making the process easy for people? So think about the staff survey that many of us will need to get people to fill in. If you've got catcher codes and emails and passwords, then you're adding friction to the journey, so you're not necessarily making it easy for people to do that. So it's about looking at that. Attractive is this, how do we make this something that people actually want to do?

(10:21):

Social, which is the one that I really love, which is maybe because I spend too much time on social media, but this is about we do things when other people do them too. So again, 90% have completed the survey. Do I want to be in that 10% that hasn't done the survey, for example? And then timely, making sure that we're putting in those cues and interventions at the right time when people are thinking about making those decisions.

Doug Downs (10:46):

And this is a decision-making room. This is a room of people that can implement change at scale. What are the obligations, including the moral and ethical obligations that go with that? Because change architecture and defaults can be used for good and they can be used for maybe not quite as good.

Ann Marie Blake (11:05):

So when I think about behavioral science and choice architecture and defaults, this isn't about coercion. This is not getting people to do things that they wouldn't normally do because that's not really ethical. Well, it's not at all economical.

Doug Downs (11:20):

What if I'm getting them to eat more salad? What if I'm changing where the salad is available

Ann Marie Blake (11:26):

In

Doug Downs (11:26):

The cafeteria lineup?

Ann Marie Blake (11:27):

What you're doing is helping people kind of ... People need to still have autonomy, but you're helping to influence choices that they want to make, if that makes sense. But we're just making it easier for people to make their own choices. I think that's a difference to having a default, which is it's taking that whole choice away. So if I look at things like salads, for example, am I making ... I think about my gym, is it easier to get the salad or is it easier for me to get the chocolate and sweet? So that's kind of all about placement and framing and stuff like that.

Doug Downs (12:06):

Okay. And I'm thinking about how you almost can't do an episode these days without talking about AI. Oh, no. AI is changing the way we interpret things. There was a comment earlier about half hour earlier about a very senior communications leader meeting at the C-suite table and the leaders are saying, "Well, your strategy doesn't correlate with what I'm hearing from ChatGPT or from Claude." That's default architecture at the same time because the LLMs are making things fairly easy for us and they're sycophantic and they tend to agree with what we already think.

Ann Marie Blake (12:46):

I mean, where am I going to go with this? I think organizations and people are running headfirst into the Wild West because of this whole fear about missing out. And what I would encourage people to do is take a step backwards and think, just because you can doesn't mean that you should. So for things like AI, I get people to think, what is it okay to take that away and AI can get on with it and crack on with it on its own? As we're speaking, I have AI agents doing things for me because I'm happy for it to crack on and do things. What are things that need AI and humans in the mix and making sure that you're really quite deliberate about saying this needs humans and AI in the mix? And only the other day, I'm not going to name them, but there was a big four consultancy that have got into trouble again for giving to their clients AI generated stuff without humans in the mix and what are the things that only humans need to be in the mix for?

(13:46):

And I would suggest things like advice and guidance and critical thinking and knowledge are things that you can't abdicate to an L&M or an agent. I think that you do need to have them because if you don't, I mean, who knows what's going to happen? We're kind of opening ourselves up to things that we don't even know are going to happen yet because AIs take their cues from lots of different places and they can't think for themselves even though we pretend that they can think they don't really think for themselves. So we do need to be really deliberate about what it is that we're using AI for.

Doug Downs (14:22):

Okay. And last question, a broad question, and we'll go to questions in the room. How important is it that post-secondary institutions offering communications and public relations courses are implementing behavioral science into the curriculum?

Ann Marie Blake (14:36):

All right. Okay. So I sometimes feel a little bit sorry for teachers because we expect them to do absolutely everything for us. But I would say that you can't work in communications unless you understand how humans behave. It's not about the bigger poster. It's not about if you take people through this change management process and change will happen. It's about understanding how humans behave. And humans are not logical beings. I mean, we're partly logical, but we are emotional beings. And so if you want to be a great communicator, you need to understand how humans behave, operate, make choices and not default to some of the lazy thinking, which is people don't like change. Of course they like change. I change my hair, you change your partners, you change your dinner, you change your outfits, but it's about how can we make it easier for people to change and to do the things that we want them to do, particularly in PR and communications where we have the power to influence.

(15:36):

We need to be doing that for good. And we're all kind of IABC communicators in here that have signed up to, I've signed up to not only the IABC code, but the AI Global Alliance Ethical Code and we just need to be making sure that it's not just a piece of paper that we've put our signature to. It's something that we are incorporating into how we do our work.

Doug Downs (15:55):

Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

Ann Marie Blake (15:58):

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh,