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In August 2017, Commonwealth Bank of Australia was looking for ways to differentiate itself from competing banks and was also trying to improve the financial well-being of its customers. One area where this was particularly relevant was in its bank-issued credit card business, where customers routinely selected cards that — although profitable for the bank — could be a poor fit for their needs. This led to low customer satisfaction scores, cancellations, and occasionally, financial distress. The bank decided to experiment: Rather than just presenting the strengths of its various credit card offerings, they proposed also promoting each credit card’s drawbacks. Being transparent with customers might help them make better choices, but would those choices come at the expense of bank performance? Harvard Business School Professor Leslie John joins Brian Kenny to discuss the case, “Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation” and ideas related to her new book, Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. They explore the benefits and potential drawbacks to the bank “oversharing” information with customers.
BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the groundbreaking ideas and Harvard Business School case studies. When companies talk about transparency, they usually mean just enough. Enough to comply, enough to reassure, but not enough to jeopardize sales. Conventional wisdom is: lead with the benefits, keep the drawbacks quiet, and trust the customers won’t look too closely. But what if that’s wrong? What if we underestimate the benefits of openness and overestimate the risks of saying too much? Today’s case explores a moment when a large financial institution considered doing something radical—deliberately calling out the downsides of its own products right alongside the benefits. Not because regulators forced its hand, not because of a crisis, but because leaders believed that radical honesty might actually deepen trust. The leadership team wrestled with a deceptively simple question: if honesty really is good for trust, why does it feel so dangerous to practice?
Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Leslie John to discuss the case, “Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.
Leslie John is a behavioral scientist who studies how people make decisions and the wisdom or error of those decisions. She is also the author of, Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing, I love the title.
Welcome, Leslie.
LESLIE JOHN: Thank you. It’s so great to be back, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: Really fun. This is going to be great to talk about the ideas in your new book. I think when I met with you earlier this year to talk about the book and how you wanted to bring some visibility to it, I for some reason opened up to you about something completely unrelated to work and I went on a 10-minute rant and you’re like, “That’s what my book’s about.”
LESLIE JOHN: I remember that, I know. Writing this book has had that effect for better and for worse. No, I love hearing everything on your mind.
BRIAN KENNY: No, it’s great. It’s great. And so we’re going to talk about the case, but we’re going to use the case about Commonwealth Bank as a way to talk about the ideas in the book. So why don’t we just dive right in? I’m going to ask you why this case was the right one to highlight the ideas. I asked you, do you have a case that would allow us to bring those to the surface and you immediately thought about this one? Why is that?
LESLIE JOHN: Yes, because the crux of this case is what I call a disclosure dilemma. It’s this fraught choice of to share or not to share. And it’s something that we actually face every single day as leaders, as parents, as friends, as colleagues, as CEOs of firms. And here you see a question at the firm level, this question of, do we reveal information that could plausibly hurt us? Do we make salient the downsides of credit cards?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And I think most organizations would say that one of their values is transparency. We want to be transparent, right? We all say it.
LESLIE JOHN: La la la la.
BRIAN KENNY: We all say it, but it’s hard to do it in practice. Why does it feel so risky to do that despite it being part of what we all value?
LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. I mean, it’s super risky. It is risky, right? In the context of this case, making the downsides of a credit card salient, it’s almost like saying, “Don’t get this. Don’t sign up. Stay away.” And so it’s like anti-marketing. It’s against everything, all of the rules we’ve been taught and what we teach in marketing in a way. And so there of course is reservation because the concern is if you make these things salient, in this case, the downsides of credit cards, then no one will want them, which is a huge profit lever for the bank. Now, as people, we often freak out, technical term, about becoming a little bit more open or even a lot more open. And that’s for a very valid reason, because when we cross the line a little bit, we get immediate negative feedback, social feedback. We see the cringe in someone’s face and we just, oh my gosh, we die of disclosure hangovers. I was speaking from experience and I talk about some of my own in the book, you’re welcome, but it’s not just gratuitous talking about some of my own so called overshares, these moments where you say a little bit too much. Because what I realized is that the immediate downside can feel very, very painful, but just as someone can find your comment cringey, they can also admire you and trust you more. And those things, the benefits aren’t really super apparent. And so when we think about revealing, we systematically overplay the downsides in our mind. So we’re not making these decisions in an even-handed way.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. What’s the problem that the Commonwealth Bank is trying to solve by doing this? Is it something that they think customers perceive?
LESLIE JOHN: Right, so the context of the case, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, is of course large, largest, one of the top four banks in Australia. And at the time it was facing a bit of a crisis of trust. People were not very trusting of the bank. And at the same time, the bank also values transparency as a value. But to your point, what does that actually mean? And the bank realized that, well, if we really mean this, what we’re saying, then in theory, there might be a place for us to be open about the downsides of the credit cards because revealing the downsides, the high fees, the high interest rates, their thinking was, if we don’t freak out the customers too much, that’s a big if. That’s the huge risk. It could be beneficial to consumers because they may find better product fit. They might find the credit cards that actually suit their behaviors, which would enhance trust if you’re helping customers make better choices. There’s a whole other level of this case that’s just fascinating, which is, well, credit cards are an interesting product to help people make better decisions because how do banks profit off of credit cards by people’s mistakes?
BRIAN KENNY: Yes.
LESLIE JOHN: Overspending. The most profitable customers in credit cards are called revolvers. They have a name, right? The people that carry the balance. But that’s what makes this case so fascinating. It’s a real test of the values of the firm because it’s incredibly risky and you need to make money, this is not charity, but at the same time, if you really believe in this mission, shouldn’t you find out?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. But there is a lot at stake here. I mean, we’re talking about.
LESLIE JOHN: Completely.
BRIAN KENNY: Right. You could see your sales numbers plummet.
LESLIE JOHN: Completely.
BRIAN KENNY: You could open yourself up to litigation, right?
LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. And the case protagonist, Amy Cunningham, I mean, she really felt this viscerally, this disclosure dilemma, right? Because it’s her P&L. The experiment itself could have cost them millions, hundreds of millions of dollars if it went south. Now, we don’t know how it will. I know how it turned out, but.
BRIAN KENNY: You’re not going to tell us.
LESLIE JOHN: But we’re not going to tell you right now. There was a lot on the line. The stakes were very high. And similarly, in interpersonal disclosure dilemmas on a daily basis like, do you tell your spouse about this annoying habit that’s on your nerves? That’s a dilemma. Do you? It’s-
BRIAN KENNY: If you’re my wife, the answer to that is yes.
LESLIE JOHN: If you’re smart. So these big and small, they’re risky, these decisions.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the ideas in your book and revealing, and congratulations, by the way, on publishing a book. It’s a monumental effort.
LESLIE JOHN: Thank you.
BRIAN KENNY: I’m sure you’re happy to have that.
LESLIE JOHN: I have newfound appreciation for authors.
BRIAN KENNY: One of the things you argue about in the book though is that people usually err on the side of undersharing rather than oversharing, even though we probably feel like we’re oversharing sometimes. How do we see that bias playing out inside the organization at Commonwealth Bank?
LESLIE JOHN: I guess think about this in a couple of levels. One is at the firm level of what does the firm, what’s the public facing or even internal employee communications, but then there’s also another level of this, which is the leadership level, which I think is really fascinating. What we have found in research is that when leaders open up a little bit more than they think they should, they get huge benefits in the form of their employees trust them more, their employees are more motivated to work for them. They even get more useful feedback from their employees because when a leader says what they’re working on or what their anxieties are, like Amy Cunningham, she doesn’t know if this is going to go well, acknowledging that actually enhances trust. And it’s not the most intuitive thing because in many studies when we ask leaders, what would you say to introduce yourself or what would you say if you were in Amy Cunningham’s situation? They don’t express their anxieties, but that’s the stuff that really enhances trust. You have to be careful with it, but if it’s all rosy all the time, nobody’s going to believe you.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. But how do you know if you’ve taken it too far, I guess is the question. Because I would imagine people are worried about being judged a lot. We talk about the importance of leaders being vulnerable, and so I’m wondering a little bit about the psychology of how vulnerable is too vulnerable?
LESLIE JOHN: Yes. So that’s the $64,000 question. I think of vulnerability, revealing wisely, opening up about sensitive thoughts and feelings. I view that as a skill. And like any skill, it’s a skill that we need to practice at it. We need to experiment at it. We need to try new things and we’re going to screw up and that’s okay. That’s the base answer. There is no one size fits all, but in general, there are some things that we often get wrong here. And the big thing that we get wrong is that when we think about becoming more vulnerable, when we think about sharing something sensitive with our teams, when we think about saying, “I’m not 100% confident that this launch is going to work. Here are some things that keep me up at night.” We immediately fixate on the risks of revealing and we forget, that is not a well-balanced, fulsome consideration of the costs and benefits of a decision. Harvard Business School, we teach decision making. You can’t just look at the risks and again and again with these disclosure dilemmas, people fixate on the risks. They don’t consider that yes, those risks are valid, but what about the benefits of revealing? People do not, even when I ask them, “Think about this dilemma, what comes to mind?” They just say the risks. And so this is a real cognitive bias we have.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and that’s built in. That’s understandable, I would say.
LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, it’s totally understandable.
BRIAN KENNY: How does the case illustrate the difference between transparency that feels ethical, like we should do this because it’s the right thing to do, versus transparency that feels like we’re putting ourselves at a strategic disadvantage by sharing, we’re oversharing.
LESLIE JOHN: Right, so you could think of what does oversharing look like at a firm level here in this case. And I think of ethical transparency, well, ethical is a tough term. You could think of legal transparency is what you’re obligated to share, which is really table stakes. And as we know, there’s a lot of degrees of freedom in how salient you make that. I think that the idea of strategically uncomfortable transparency, I think a key thing is the discomfort element, honestly. Because of the discomfort, it’s risky, but because of the discomfort, that’s where the possible huge upside is because whether it’s firms revealing sensitive information or people revealing sensitive information, again and again, what I found in my research is that that act, taking that social risk, enhances trust. If you don’t have the social risk, there’s no opportunity for trust. And it makes sense because if I share something sensitive of you, if I make the downsides of a credit card salient, if I say a sensitive thing that I’m working on a weakness to you, I’m relinquishing control to the universe and I’m showing that I trust you because I’m implicitly saying, “I trust you to not use this against me.” That is so powerful that it causes you to trust me, and so the risk part is really, really central.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So there is a mistake bias.
LESLIE JOHN: Yes.
BRIAN KENNY: You might worry that if you’re revealing these things about your product, the downside of your product, that your competitor’s products don’t have the same downside and they’re not revealing anything.
LESLIE JOHN: Yes.
BRIAN KENNY: Do they gain some sort of advantage or is it?
LESLIE JOHN: Totally, right.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
LESLIE JOHN: Right. No, this is a really important question because I love this case if I do so myself because it really is like share your feelings, reveal more, be open, transparency, vulnerability. They sound so great, but what about the P&L? And so this case forces us to reckon with this. These are valid questions and these are things that the bank wondered because Com Bank would have been the only one doing this if they decided to do it. And so will that make you look bad because your competitors aren’t doing it. And so people aren’t thinking about all the downsides of the competitor’s credit cards. These are very valid realizations. However, even if the competitors are not doing this, it might make us look bad, but also the customers might trust us more. And when it comes to a bank, who do you want to give your money to?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
LESLIE JOHN: But these were all empirical questions, and that’s why it really in a way necessitated doing an experiment to figure it out.
BRIAN KENNY: Did they worry maybe that customers might think they were being manipulative?
LESLIE JOHN: Ooh, yeah. So they did worry about that a little bit, and I think that’s why they wanted to be really careful with the way they revealed these things. So the way they revealed the downsides or the trade-offs as they called them, we wanted downsides, but they were thinking trade-offs is better. So you can see them toeing the line, right?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
LESLIE JOHN: You don’t want to be disingenuous, but you also don’t want to flat out say, “Don’t sign up for this.” And so it really is a bit of a dance. There is a point where people will feel manipulated. They thought about this a lot in designing the experiment. I think one way we can think about a good gut check is what I’m doing manipulative is what is my intent? Is my intent to get people to buy, sign up for products that aren’t good for them so I can make money off of their financial errors? That feels more manipulative.
BRIAN KENNY: It sure does.
LESLIE JOHN: Although it’s the world. Or does it feel something that is sincere and intentional and aligned with the values of the company, right?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
LESLIE JOHN: So what is the intention? I think in a way, everything is manipulative. We’re all trying to get people to do things.
BRIAN KENNY: Of course, yeah.
LESLIE JOHN: So, yeah.
BRIAN KENNY: Let’s say somebody listening to this podcast is thinking, “I should try this. I should try and convince my leadership team that we ought to do an experiment here.” Can you do this a little bit? Can you dip your toe in the water?
LESLIE JOHN: Yes. You can. Now, this is what the Com Bank was: If they were to do it, it would be the biggest experiment they’d ever run. And it’s like baptism by fire, right? So it was a very bold thing, but you can do it in so many ways. In fact, Ryan Buell and I, who co-wrote the case, we’ve done experiments with many companies on testing simple A/B tests of if you reveal are more open about X and what is X? Well, the key thing is it’s got to be something that is a bit sensitive. We’re not saying companies should reveal everything all the time, of course not.
BRIAN KENNY: Open the books. Open it all up.
LESLIE JOHN: But what we’re showing is that oftentimes you can reveal in business, in life, a little bit more than you think you should, and it reaps tremendous benefits. The example that at the firm level, many experiments we’ve done with companies implementing something we call cost transparency where these are simple e-tailers where we just vary the website, the product page, and we vary whether we tell customers essentially the gross margins, the costs to create the goods. And you would think, especially when the gross margins are giant, this would backfire because people would feel like they’re getting ripped off.
BRIAN KENNY: Sure.
LESLIE JOHN: But in fact, in tightly controlled experiments, we find that even with very large margins, when you’re revealing large margins, it doesn’t turn people away. And in fact, it makes them trust you more and it increases sales is what we found in studies. So I love this because I’m a psychologist, I love feelings, but I also love profits and we really, you got to, feelings and vulnerability is nice, but can it actually help the business?
BRIAN KENNY: Right. And we’ve been talking about Commonwealth Bank and relating this at the firm level, but I’m sure your book gets into what this is like at the personal level. And we live in complicated times, let’s just say.
LESLIE JOHN: Yes.
BRIAN KENNY: Views are very polarized, people aren’t sure what they should or shouldn’t say in a certain situation. How would you advise somebody to think about this as they go into work every day?
LESLIE JOHN: Yes. I would say most of us stand to benefit from revealing just a little bit more a lot of the time.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay.
LESLIE JOHN: Now, what does that mean? It can mean a lot of things. I could give an
example.
BRIAN KENNY: Please.
LESLIE JOHN: There’s a lot of small talk at work on the soccer field watching our kids. There’s a lot of small talk. And what you can do to make that more revealing is instead of just commenting on the situation, that’s what a lot of small talk is. Go one step further by saying what it means to you. Here’s an example on the playground, or you’re at the kids’ soccer game, you’re watching your kids play, you’re standing beside a fellow parent. What would you normally say? You maybe say, “They’re having so much fun. Look at how much they’re laughing and smiling.” You can go one step deeper by saying, “I don’t really remember the last time I had a good belly laugh.” And there, they’ll probably reciprocate and talk about the last time and then you’re laughing together. And so it’s not always, or even often, revealing your deepest, darkest secrets, it’s going one step further.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay. So you don’t have to pour your soul out to somebody.
LESLIE JOHN: No. I mean, there’s a time and a place for that too. In fact, I think the people that are best at-
BRIAN KENNY: Kind of like I did with you back in the set there.
LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. Well, I did the same thing, so it’s mutual. But that’s an important thing too, is the mutuality. If you find yourself and you’re doing all the revealing, especially in colleagueships, acquaintanceships, that’s not a very good pattern.
BRIAN KENNY: Again, let’s go back up to the firm level because what Commonwealth Bank is doing is signaling to their employees that this is okay, we’re going to do this. This is part of our culture. We want to be transparent. Being transparent means we need to maybe tell people things that we wouldn’t have wanted to tell them before. How does that cascade into the culture of an organization? We’ve got a generation of workers that are coming up who are on social media all the time. They’re sharing in ways that make some of us uncomfortable even. How does it cascade into the culture?
LESLIE JOHN: I think it is important to have this top down influence, so to speak, of modeling openness, and modeling that we’re not perfect and modeling a growth mindset, to use psychological jargon, of being open about the things that we’re worrying about from a business perspective, if it’s at a leadership in a company level. And that in and of itself, it’s not intuitive, but that can make you more credible because the leader who is on top of the problems, the leader who has the confidence to be like, “We’re a little shaky here, we’re stronger there,” they’re credible.”
BRIAN KENNY: And they’re trusting people to handle that information, but we also have this traditional view of leadership as the quiet, confident leader, like, “I’m going to protect you from the bad stuff that’s going on. I’ve got this covered, so you don’t need to know about it.”
LESLIE JOHN: Right. It’s kind of paternalistic. In a way, you can see a parallel vein in the medical profession of how the old school view that the physician makes the decisions, can make the decisions for you. And now, in a way, it’s weird too much the other way I say to my doctor, “You’re the one with expertise.” But being too paternalistic is it’s not trusting your people, it’s not empowering them. And that’s another buzzword that I don’t like, but it’s true. You got to be willing to put your money where your mouth is and risk.
BRIAN KENNY: What do you say to somebody who is over revealing? Somebody who’s taking this just a little bit too far, maybe at the individual level, maybe even at the firm level. If you’re an investor and you’re like, “What are we doing here? Why are we putting all this information out there?” How do you handle that?
LESLIE JOHN: Right, totally. I think there are certain categories of things that you need to be extraordinarily careful about. Trade secrets would be one of them, right?
BRIAN KENNY: Sure.
LESLIE JOHN: But it’s not just the content of the information. You also have to read the room, right? Are these people allies or are they judging you? You need to be very situationally aware. In fact, this was what I was going to say. The people that are best at navigating this bound this line between TMI, too much information, and TLI, too little information, which is often gossip or thin. The people that are best at that are actually the people that have the most, what I call this, well, not what I call, what Sidney Jourard, one of the founders of this field, calls disclosure flexibility. The ability to modulate between extreme openness. Think about emotional intimacy with your spouse. To me, a really intimate marriage is one where you can tell your spouse anything, right? Pretty much anything, anything that’s worrying you, right? Your feelings. Total openness on one hand, but that same leader in front of a buttoned up investor call, they are going to be very guarded for good reason. But even in those situations that feel like this should be a hyper guarded situation, we have found in our research that being a bit more open can reap enormous benefits. In fact, when I interviewed to become an academic, when I was a baby academic, I was interviewing at a very fancy university and I walk into the interview room. It’s this phalanx of senior professors. It was very intimidating. I was very nervous. One of the profs was valiantly trying to make me feel comfortable. He made some small talk. He noticed I used to do ballet. He said, “Oh, I used to be a ballet dancer too.” He was joking, but I didn’t register. And in that moment, I just stood there, looked him up and down, cocked my head and said, “Clearly.” And it was like with one spontaneous blurt overshare, there my job was gone, but I actually got the job. It was Harvard. And so a few days later, even though I did get some cringey faces, also a few days later I got a phone call that I gotten the job. And in fact, I don’t think it was in spite of it, I think I know actually it was partly because of it, because my dear, the prof who I made fun of inadvertently, unintentionally, became one of my closest mentors. And he said, “When you sassed me like that, we thought she’ll fit right in.” And so the point is, and studies have shown this too, that be showing a bit of yourself, which takes a bit of risk, even in these competitive tough contexts can be really beneficial.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. How did you come up with the idea to write this book? I mean, you study behaviors, so there’s a logical dot to connect there, but I’m wondering, it’s such an interesting topic and I think so timely, what prompted you to do this?
LESLIE JOHN: Thank you. Well-
BRIAN KENNY: Reveal whatever it was.
LESLIE JOHN: I know. Yes. Well, it was very meta writing the book because I mean, how can you write a book about revealing and not reveal about yourself? And so I was constantly grappling with, is this too much? Is this too little? And so you can see me trying to navigate that in the book. And that’s part of the point. I probably don’t always get it right and that’s okay. But I actually did a 180 because the book I was going to write probably seven years ago was about how much we overshare and how bad it is, because at the time my research was really focused on the mistakes we make on social media, like the Virgin Atlantic flight attendants who were venting about their boss and then they get fired because all of these stories. And then I realized those aren’t wrong, but it’s not right, that take. And the single consistent thing from my work was when I make people feel comfortable, when I make it fun, when I make it relational, they love revealing and it’s really important. So then I became obsessed with opening up and some of the mistakes we make in not opening up enough.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Yeah. I can’t wait to read it, by the way. I’ll admit to our listeners, I just got my copy as we walked into the studio, so I can’t wait to read it. We’re almost out of time, but I have one more question for you, if you don’t mind. And I guess that would be, what do you think the case and the book should say to somebody who is thinking about not revealing? What are the hidden costs of actually not revealing?
LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that question in and of itself is really important because we think of silence as neutral, but it is not neutral, silence is not inert. Silence is a choice and silence comes with its own benefits and its own downsides. If you hold something back, there’s rumination, the thing you hold back and can come out in other ways. There’s all kinds of costs of silence and we need to become more aware of those so that we can make better decisions.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s great. Leslie, thanks for joining me.
LESLIE JOHN: You’re welcome.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
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