Foley’s first task running the joint program, which was called “Our Water, Our Future,” was dealing with what he calls “I reckons” coming at him from several directions.

“Everybody thinks they are an expert on behavior change,” Foley said. “My challenge was, how do I respond to the chief of staff in the minister’s office who’s got a great ‘I reckon’: ‘Aw, I reckon we should go to the ad agency and get them to do something sexy around a three-word slogan that rhymes.’ That was literally what was happening. It’s easy to spend a lot of money and get a sexy campaign, but we actually needed this to work.”

So Foley went on a tour to learn from experts across Britain, Canada and the United States, and then hired two Australian psychologists who specialized in behavioral change, to help identify which behaviors to target, and how.

The psychologists, Rob Curnow and Karen Spehr, from a small consultancy called Community Change, began by suggesting that all members of the steering committee — made up of water industry and government employees — examine their own water use, to help them understand that wholesale change would take more than a few pithy ads.

Next, the psychologists held community forums and conducted in-depth interviews and ethnographic research with residents about their water use. This helped the committee to identify barriers that needed to be overcome if people were going to save water, and to avoid wasting resources by trying to encourage changes that were unpopular or unviable, Pullen said.

One example is showers. “We found that women in particular said, ‘I’ll do anything except for having a shorter shower, especially if I have children and it’s the only time in my day that I have to myself,’ ” Pullen said. While the campaign eventually did tackle shower times, the research led the committee to prioritize easier goals first, like encouraging householders to switch to water-saving showerheads. There were about 1.3 million homes in Melbourne at the time; more than 460,000 showerheads were replaced at no cost over four years.