435. Scaling Behavioral Economics at BBVA with Quique Belenguer

Welcome to episode 435 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Kike Bellingaire, Behavioral economics global lead at bbva. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Kike Bellinger who is the global lead of behavioral economics for bbva. And I really love the theme of our conversation today. As we were preparing to record, Kike mentioned to me that while preparing for the show, he asked himself what would be most interesting and valuable to Molina and the audience of the Brainy Business. A very behavioral science type of question to ask. And while we could have talked about the results they're getting in the customer facing application of behavioral economics at the bank over the six years they have had their program and team, he thought that the best approach would be to talk about the way they've set up their team internally over those years, what's worked and what they've shifted away from. Tips from others looking to start incorporating behavioral economics in their organizations and some insights into how they've seen success working with other departments. Knowing I get this type of question all the time, I jumped at the opportunity to feature this discussion on the show. And he definitely did not disappoint. Whatever industry you're in, however big your organization, whether or not anyone is interested in behavioral economics at your company, yet I, I assure you that you will benefit from the insights in this conversation really quickly. Before we get into it, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Kike and myself and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com435 now let's jump right in. Kike Bellinger, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Hi. Thank you.

I know. I think people are used to me always laughing when I say someone's name because I always like to ask, just for those who, you know, we're listening. And I will always ask people to pronounce their name the way they would pronounce it. That's what I ask people to do. Especially because I have so many international guests with diverse backgrounds and so pronunciations are different and sometimes it's pretty close to what I was thinking. I would say yours is as well. But then I definitely get in my head about how to say it and I like over enunciate a little bit in a way that feels totally silly, but I just allow myself to laugh about it and you know, I did my best.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's perfect. I mean, it was one of the best pronunciations out of Spain that I've heard so far. So congratulations.

Well, thank you. And we'll go for. We'll just say Kike from now on because that is easy, easy, easy. Well, Kike, we met a couple months ago at the CBO Summit in Toronto along with several other guests that I've had on the show where. And I've said everybody there is like, there's so many amazing people in this room and I can't wait to have be able to share your stories of what you're doing in behavioral science. And so for everyone who doesn't know you yet, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

Okay, so. Well, basically I worked in the Behal Economics unit at BBBA Spanish bank. But we are based, we have offices in different countries in Latin America and Spain and Turkey. And I've been doing this for six years now, more than six years now. And well, it isn't changing. Since we started behavior of the comics per SE in 2018 was different from what we were doing today. But I've been lucky enough to be from the beginning, early hours of the unit. So I've been working from the parts of training and trying to share with everyone what's the herald science and why is this so interestingly amazing? And I'm lucky enough as well to be today working on more specific and concrete elements. Like we are now part of the projects of the bank when they develop new products, when we develop new products and we develop new campaigns, new digital experiences, new protocols for branches. So it's been a long way and well, all those little things that we've done in this path has helped to be where we are now working in projects, working campaigns really around the valuable position of the bank.

Yeah, well, I know we talked a bit about having our conversation be looking at that kind of interpersonal, developing a team, a unit inside of the organization and how that can kind of work as people. I get asked all the time. I don't know if you get asked all the time. Like saying, okay, we want to have behavioral science be more of what we're doing in the organization. Where do we even start? Right? What, what would we do? Can you share a little bit about the journey? I. I'm assuming there's been some evolutions over the years of the way that you've approached things and things that have worked and, and maybe you learn glad you learned from them but moved on from.

Our do's and don'ts. It's not that they don't work, they didn't work for us or they didn't work as we thought. So I guess like everyone, we started with the last mile like tweaking emails or screens and that is what's nice because you are really close to being part of the that you can measure. However, like we were saying before the recording, within the bag we're going to with an agile structure that means that we are structured by projects. So there's no behavioral economics unit like the nudge unit, which you're a team, which you get a challenge, you research, you do your interventions and you measure them and then give back to your stakeholder. That's not our case. We have to work within the project. That means working together with design with the marketers, with the business analysts, with the product, product owners, with the data team. And that requires a different approach. It's not like hey, this is my idea and solution, let me test it. It's more about how. How can I convince you that this is a nice way to think about the problem? Actually that's been something with time has come to be one of the reasons why they involve us in the project. That means reframe the challenge of the team from a behavioral angle. What do we mean with this? If the team is working, imagine like launching a new product. Normally they are more focused on how we get this product to be on this date and meet this requirement. And we are there to say, hey, what are the behaviors that you want to change? Because if you're launching a new product, are you expecting them to get out of habit because it's something they're going to use on a daily basis or weekly basis versus just one shot? If that's the behavior you want to change, how are you putting on the table different elements related with a decision like motivation or frictions and things like that? As you see, I don't come with the solution. I come with the right questions. The right questions, that's more humble with the right questions for behavior. With that we can create a frame in which we can all create the solution. So I would never go and we've done this in the past and it didn't work. Going to the design team say, hey, this is the solution. My little something really simple on that include a social role. They are part of the solution team. It's better to say, hey, I think that in this case people don't know what to do. They don't have a reference. And you know, we have this tool of using a social norm as a reference. When people don't know what to do, they will look at others and say, hey, there's a lot of people doing this. It may be good for me. So with that we discuss. And it's not me saying, hey, put this phrase because maybe it can be not the best option. And then scientific can come well with that idea of being social. What do you think about these are the thing that involves, I don't know, a change in the visuals or a change in the way we approach the client through the funnel. This is a little bit more challenging, as I said, because we don't own the solution. But I feel it's way more rewarding because we are creating these frameworks in which the whole team is thinking different approaches. I know that other teams are not working the same way, but, but for us, this has been our journey. It's been, it's not easy, it's been hard. We need to link a lot of people. You need to sell them that what you know, it's valuable and meaningful and they need to listen to you. And sometimes that means slowing down the delivery of some of the things that we create, digital experiences that we create. But that's, that's what we do and it has been pretty successful. And now as I said, we have like, we have like really good relationship with the design team, with marketers and the business teams and we are involving the key projects of the bank. So after six years we moved from training all the team, some buy some heuristics to hey, we need to understand the decision that's underlaying your product or your experience. And with that shaping the final solution with everyone else.

Yeah, I love that. And here for the brainy business, we're definitely all about the asking good questions, being thoughtful in that process and helping whether it's IKEA effect or whatever else, when people get to be a part of that solution for one more likely to buy in and be advocates of it, of course. But also like you were saying is you only know what you know, they know what they know. And if you're able to say, hey, like social norms, like you're saying, just use that example can be really valuable. And maybe you would have said, so we should phrase it this way. Right? Social norms matter. We should say that 90% of people, blah, Right, we should do it this way. But. And if you would've just prescribed and said this is how you should do it, then it just sort of gets stuck there and you're fighting over one particular phrase. Whereas if you say, you know, looking at the behavior that we've been talking about, social norms feels like a really great tactic to use. There's so many ways to do it. How might you go about implementing this idea of social norms? Like you said, then they can talk about something they didn't even. You didn't even realize existed, but it's something they've been dying to try, or that they're really excited about, or that they just heard this, this other team did something and it gets to revive. They're more excited about it, they're more invested in that process and it just is more likely to come up with, you know, better, more exciting pieces that everybody's really rallying behind.

Yeah, the better solutions and as well, easier to implement. Right? Get me wrong, it's not that technically it's easier, but when you try to fight for the space of attention within a project, that's like sterile use of the time. If I get everyone to share my thinking on, hey, this problem is based on references and if they agree, we can go the same direction. It's easier than saying no. I say social program design team say no, this is about something else. And then we can even run a B test. But hey, it's a lot better if we create a better solution, faster solution, and then we run a B test. And if we are wrong, because when I say social wrong, it's not that I'm super sure this is going to work. This is my theory so far. Maybe someone has this super cool framework, visual science that you can link problems and you solution that they work always. What I hear is that most times we have a general understanding of what's happening, but the intervention sometimes works, sometimes don't work. So if you're pushing for the solution, you test it and they don't work. It's like, yep, you are not right. And I don't want to be there. I want to be like, hey, I have this idea. Let's work together on this idea and see if it works. If it doesn't work, everyone feels part of the solution. So we can iterate it so I don't have to fight again to say it was not social norms, we were something else that we reassess the research that we had done or whatever. So we are all part of the same thing. And as I said for me that's something key that I learned through the years. I don't get tired to say to other people when they ask me, I want to create a visual design team. I want, I want to do human science within the company. Like sure, but try to understand where you are and how you are related through the teams. Because when you get there saying I'm super excited we have on science and I do research and interventions and measuring through experiments, you may find some of the people doing the same thing, immunization, it's nothing you do. Is how you think about those things.

Similar to what you're saying? I have people ask me all the time right about like there the roles don't exist. How do I go find the behavioral, the behavioral science role in the organization, like who's hiring behavioral economists, behavioral scientists setting up nudge units and how do I get that one spot? And I always tell people, you know, yes, there are more roles these days there and there are way more people getting degrees in behavioral science. And so it's, you know, harder and there's a lot of competition for those. But there are still so many organizations that don't yet know that this exists and they wouldn't be hiring for it. But there's such an opportunity there. If you know that you love the behavioral aspect of, you know, employee relations or marketing or design or brand strategy or product development or finance. Right. You can always be incorporating the behavioral science in and building it out as part of a role and helping people to be part of it and see the value of it, kind of organically growing it. And then when people realize the success you're having, can be kind of educating along the way, but at the aspect of accomplishing something. Right. And then maybe it turns into a formal title or a role or something. But if you just love the work you can do that no matter what, you can bring it to any, any role or, or department. What are your thoughts on. On that knowing that you of course had a, a team officially.

Yeah, I mean we have a team and it's a big team. But I completely agree that. And you can see it sometimes you can see it when you talk with other people and makes you think sometimes that where we are is based on our luck. What I mean with this, that if you See the different teams around the world, some of them they're seeing like us with marketing, some of them they're sitting with data or with compliance. So it's about finding the opportunity to use our knowledge. That means sometimes starting in a place that for me it's super crazy like compliance. But then when you start talking with people on compliance, like that makes completely sense. I mean that it's about the behavior of people within humanization. So understanding that and not being from my point of view, obsessed with the idea of creating a behavioral science unit, but creating a culture of behavioral science is way better. That's why I get a lot of now less. But when we start the unit, a lot of people ask me, do you think every company should have a hero size unit? What's life? No, not per se, if. If it brings value, of course. But you can bring the knowledge of the hero science without having a unit. You get everyone to understand hero science and how designers, marketers, the people in data. We have a hero science approach. That's great. I think it's harder. But you can get the company to transform to a behavioral informed organization by being obsessed. That's great. You don't need that unit. It's more about what's the opportunity that you have. If I were the person to create or create a unit, see the opportunity and understand the resources that you have. We were super lucky in 2018. Our former CEO Corin Cheruban thought that this was important and he decided to create the unit. It was really top down but you're an organization and you have to find more resources to say I need two people to create this visual science unit. I think it's way more effective than use of that time. If you're focusing on a problem and try to find behavioral solutions to that problem and then we couldn't grow and name it and shape it as a un but first try to bring the insights to the organization and you have plenty of spaces like compliance, human resources, cybersecurity risks, product marketing. All those places are at the place to start if you have the right sponsor stakeholder.

Yeah, I think one of the things I've learned over the years of talking to different people like yourself and different organizations and hearing the stories of those journeys that having that advocate at the top as high as we can get. Right. But especially when it's if it's a CEO that absolutely believes in it or a CMO or whatever, but somebody that has enough influence in the organization to fight for the team and whether that's a Formalized team or otherwise. But that that approach is really key to getting some of those initial projects moving and being able to show the value that behavioral science can bring. So for one, let's say to those who are listening that have that power in the organization, knowing that that team needs you to be the advocate is one thing, right? And if you believe in it, what can you do to help nudge that along, formalized program or otherwise. And if you are lower down and you're a big advocate for this, who can you convince that's like one step above you, that can then convince one step above them, like what can you be doing to help kind of grow that out? And knowing that it's not like you said, it's not just that we've the field has talked a lot about not being the tool in the toolbox anymore, right. It's not the just like tighten the language at the end. It's not the little adjustment, those still matter. But we want to be further back in the conversation and thinking about behavior as that that lens, that filter that everything goes through. But you got to start somewhere, right? You can get those, those wins and kind of go from there.

But I think it's important when I was saying that we were leaving the last mile to be more than the strategic part like prior designation, it's because we built within the organization trust so they trust that we are doing a good job and we are not completely needing that last mile. And it's something that as well that when I'm asked about why we are successful, at least in terms of resources, we are growing. We have a really big team working on science compared to other organizations and for us, understanding the TKIs of my stakeholders and fighting and measuring them. If you create a visual silos unit with an insight to beat approach, you can only get so far. It's always nice to have insights. Hey, you know this about how people decide. But if you understand that the KPI of your sponsor, it's whatever and you fight for that and you measure and on the other you say hey, I measure my intervention versus the control in your KPI that can be at all savings or cybersecurity or talent culture hiring of different kind. If you can show your impact, you are safe. And I believe that sometimes we forget that we are proud of what we do and we look inside, it's like look how clever I am bringing these super nice insights. Okay, but are they helping to solve the pain points of your C or the organization or is just for you or for a Small group of people to say, hey, they are really clever with this idea. Has that idea come to a tangent? Mover Live solution, Is your final client using it or is someone using it? I think those are the questions that we should ask ourselves when we create the unit, but as well when we decide to grow the unit. And as I said, it's not that we forget to understand the KPIs of our stakeholders.

Oh yeah, for sure. Well Anne, like you said, it's the. I always go, whether we're thinking about looking at customers or internal communication that if you only get one thing, if only one thing will come out of this, what's the most important thing? And like you said early on, if you're trying to prove that the work is worth it and that you should have the budget or the dedicated team members or projects, you know, higher projects to work on or whatnot, understanding those KPIs and if you're boss was going to look good about one thing, what do they care the most about? And sometimes you, you know, just ask them. If we were gonna, what would be the dream, right? If we could prove one thing or we could show some lift somewhere, what's a goal you really care about that would help you look good to your boss? What can we do to support it and just, you know, focus on that first and then move on kind of to the next thing. Whereas if you try to do everything, it's just going to be too murky to prove the value.

And actually if you have these kind of conversations, they can take you to nice places in the sense that you can reframe. As I was saying before business challenges, I remember this case that we were working with the loyalty team and I said, hey, we really like what you're doing. We would like you to help us with increasing the engagement of our loyalty program. I was like, is that completed KPI? What is the loyalty program about? It's about people using more our products in this case was like our credit and debit cards. And we're like okay, actually this is a means to an end. You don't want people to use more in the loyalty program. You want the loyalty program for people to use more your credit card. And that implies two underlying behaviors. That's people stop using your competitors credit cards or migrating from cash to credit card. So those are the behaviors you want to work and those should be your KPIs. Although at the end what you want is to get that engagement ratios up and so on. Of course the number of active credit cards Growing. But if you can map like the different behaviors through the KPIs, it can help you to actually tackle the real problem. Because if not, you are starting with the wrong foot. If I would have just taken for granted I wanted to increase the help, increase engagement with the program will be okay. Let's start sending, I don't know, emails from people saying thousands of people and you're saying it like soil or whatever else. But now the conversation notes sell it something else. Why people are using our credit card, how the loyalty program is pushing this motivation or it's not. We should understand that and how is the whole ecosystem of the decision. And that radically changed our approach. It was not use small thing anymore. It was about working with the marketing team on the campaigns. How people are perceiving the value that we give to the promotions of points, how the programs are structured, people perceiving that's easy to grow through a problem or it's not. Are people frustrated because they are not getting enough points? So all those questions came because we were able to talk about the KPIs and challenge how they were focusing those KPIs. So maybe I'm too intense with the KPA thing, but I believe it's important at least we could cover here. So.

Oh yeah, I was thinking while you're talking. So I used to run a marketing department at a financial institution before I went into fully into behavioral economics. But you're always using it even when you don't have terms for it. You just, you know, you kind of find that. So. But I remember the our loyalty program and you know, trying to increase engagement and one of the perks. Right. So it was this particular loyalty program was about debit versus credit transactions and trying to get people to swipe the card a certain number of times. So you hit, you know, each month, so you get a special rate and whatever and. But the it was all about trying to get people to switch and do more electronic purchasing versus other things. And one of the big perks and like rewards that you got was a free box of checks which you don't want people to be using checks. That's the whole point, right. We're taking them off of it. It was really expensive to give everyone a free box of checks compared to some other rewards that they would rather have. And it's like why would we do this? This makes no sense. But it was that, you know, had always been that way. This is the thing that we've always given people and you know, some people higher up that had Been with the organization before debit cards and things like, no, everybody needs checks. No, but they don't. Like this is just a thing I don't even want. And actually now it's more of a fraud and security risk because we have just boxes of checks sitting around in houses everywh where. So we're able to get rid of that as a benefit. The people didn't really want it and it was expensive and we can invest in something else. When you, but when you step back and you think, well, that makes no sense. But you have to look at the bigger picture like you're saying, right? So if we understand and think about the behavior, who are we talking to, what are we wanting them to do, what's actually who? If we take everything away and we were going to start fresh, you know, if we were going to design a brand new program, how would we, would we do this in the most effective and efficient way? You've mentioned a couple times that you have a large team. Can you share a little bit about, you know, one, how, how big is this large team that you all have there? And I guess going over that six years, you know, who'd you start with? What are some of those really key roles that you think are important if you were going to start a new team? You know, and this is kind of a couple questions in here, but where'd you start? Where have you gotten to and when? If you were giving advice to people looking to build a team, what do you think are some key roles that they should be thinking about?

Okay, so I mean from time, so it's not super accurate up or down two, three people, but we are around 45 internal people. And then we have external consultants working with our teams and that adds up to 100. So this was not always the case. As a disclaimer as well, I have to say that a lot of those people work in Mexico. The Mexican team grew a lot. And because they were able to go to every single department within the organization and find opportunities to work with them. So while some teams have decided to work on specific decided or because of context, they decided to work in specific areas. The Mexican team working with human resources, with everyone. So they grew up. But the thing is that in 2018 we were like five people just in the global team. And now we have, I would say like around 12 in the global team. Then people in Spain and Turkey, in Peru, in Argentina, in Colombia, Mexico. So it grew because structural elements like the bank is structured by countries, so we have local teams. I know some Other companies, they will have this centralized unit. We don't. We have like a central unit that we are, that's the global team, but we have local teams. So that actually increases the number of people that we have. But as well as finding and getting all those opportunities. And again, the team, the different teams, it was not they started with five or six. Most times they started with one or half a person in that team. So it has gone through the process of showing money. Again, like, what's your KPI? What's the impact how you are ensuring that the KPs, the main ones are boosted because you are there. So that has been key to us. But again, sometimes I ask, hey, everyone should have like a unit like yours. Again, no, it serves our approach. And because we are project based, sorry. And that was part of this structural element because of the conscious and as well because of the projects, because we are an agile organization and we want to be part of the projects. We want to have people that are part of those projects. I don't want to work as a small unit of experts doing this one project per year. I'm in 100 projects at the same time. That's why we have 100 people. Because at least we have one person per project, more or less. So if I were to start from scratch on another company, I will try to first of all see, as I said before, where you are sitting and what's your relationship with other teams and how you can be delivering your value because that changes everything. If you are in an audio organization that you want to be working basically on projects. Middle of Moon, need a lot of hands. Think about how you can solve all the demand that you're getting. And with that, this again is hindsight, I would start thinking of the different profiles that you need. Because at one point we realized that we were growing because we were kind of cloning. It's not exactly cloning, but basically cloning the profile. It was just like our behavioral experts many times. But we said, hey, maybe we shouldn't have more people that are specialized on experiments, so we should get people from experimentation. Or there's like this topic on data and we need more people that know some behavioral science on data as well. That makes sense because we did not grow because we hired a lot of hero science experts. But we recycle. I mean, I don't know if the concepts say in English, like when you recycle someone means that you are retraining them, reskilling them, I think it makes more sense. So if you think about that, it's not about getting someone that's super expert. So I'm getting someone who is. Has like a strong perspective on business and then treat them all behavioral science or someone that's coming from data or marketing and training them. That was done and structured in the beginning, but now we are working. Actually something that we're doing today is on the profiles that we need on the rules that those people should have. So should we have like behavioral experts and business? So like business experts, something like that or behavioral experimental experts. Some of the fields, cybersecurity, hr. So I know this is like far away on the road when you are like two or three. But when you are maybe over five or 10, start thinking if you want to have like 10 people doing the same thing and we have all of them to reach to everyone within the organization or you want to have different profiles and start specializing. So maybe one person is going to do all the audits because it's someone coming from market research and knows well how to link those two worlds where you're getting someone from the business so he or she knows a lot about products. So you are training them to get on the nuts and bolts on how products are built. Again, because I said that we were getting people and risking them from all around the organization and even from the outside when we were hiring people. We are hiring people. We want them to understand. We hear from science, but that's not the key skill. Key skill is about are you able to understand and challenge the business. If you have gaps in neuroscience, I will train you to do that. We are good at that. We have a lot of experts within the organization. But sometimes it's hard to teach them about how a project works in a company that works with digital experiences. All those elements for me are key. And again it's hindsight. I would have done differently. But what we have now, and we are moving and learning from that element, iterating the way we structure teams.

Yeah, I love that. And I think, you know, bringing it full circle to what we were talking about before with the design team or whatnot. If. If you have a bunch of people that really know behavioral science and then say, okay, go do something for the compliance team. And the compliance team is looking at you like you don't know any of what we do. You don't understand our problems. You do not get. And the questions. So sometimes in behavioral science it good to ask the dumb questions. Right? Because of the things like why are we giving a free box of checks? That makes no sense to be able to Come from the outside, there is value there and really understanding what is possible. Where there have been problems before, where there are some opportunities where you're having a bunch of friction or you know, what would be the biggest lift for a first project and having that internal advocate that totally gets the department and what it needs and how it can be helpful. And then you layer in that behavioral stuff and it has this good, you know, like synergy between those groups that then can be a spark for that team to then want to learn more about behavioral science. And then it goes to the next and the next and the next versus, you know, if it's the wrong project or the wrong behavioral person that goes into that one team and it doesn't quite land, then I mean, you've potentially burned some bridges. That'll make it much more difficult in the long run to get them to buy in because they'll say we tried that behavioral stuff once, it didn't work. You don't get us. It can't, can't happen here. Right?

Yeah. Being able to have the right conversations and the right conversations are not about behavioral science. And part of my things that I do is that I'm the person working for the behavioral science hero economics team in payments. And I like to say that when I'm there, I'm not kike from behavioral science or hero economics. I'm kike from payments who knows about behavioral science. And that changes the thing because my main focus is about payments or savings or whatever problems that you are involved in. And I should know a lot about that because guess what? PO or the pm, they don't really care overhearing science per se. They may find it interesting, they can read it when they are home, but they are focused on how they solve the problems. And you should be able to bridge the gap between what you know and what's useful for them. So you get people that they are too focused on the what do you say for either insider or the behavioral science per se while they are super smart and they could add a lot of value if they don't find the right opportunity. It's like you said, you're going to burn that bridge. Normally they don't open that for the second time. Okay, it was nice. Thank you for coming. We are doing something different. We'll call you later. I mean normally people is polite. We'll call you later. We are not at the stage now which you can help us. Normally they are always in stage and we can have them because we can help in every state.

For sure. There's still humans involved everywhere and decisions being made. Right. So there's the spot for us there. Well, as we go to close out our conversation, I'm curious if you have. So you talked a bit about social norms. Of course. And we talked about various different aspects and concepts from behavioral science along the way. If you were going to advise people of one like a key concept or a couple. Right. That you think come up a lot in those internal conversations, you know, areas where you know, if you really think about and understand motivation or think about framing and how you say something or you know, lead with that social proof, social norms. Are there a couple concepts or one that you think is a really good go to as you're looking to build out a team?

Okay, so as a concept I would say the thing that I use the most is things related with cognitive overload. But I do think it's a simple way. It's like everything with the behavioral science it can be simplistic like cognitive overload. There's just like give a lot of options but that means way more than that. So when I'm bringing that to the conversation, it's he cognitive overload. Actually it's nothing. Something that other people use like the UX designs. What would it mean with coding overload? So people have a lot of options? Well, it can be many things. They can have like too much information or. Yeah, too many options or the options that they have, they cannot compare them because you have like six options that are really easy to compare. You have overload, but you have like three with 10 different dimensions. They have to compare and they are not comparable. They are coming overload. So it's about how we think about the process in which people is understanding the information that's given and the micro decisions that go through the funnel. So if you work anything related with corporate business, it's there, but you need to think about it. So if I take that for the thing that I use the most, probably the thing that I'm taking most credit within the organization is when I brought this idea of a Rubicon model when I was doing the LSC Master. I was taught that model. I never thought it would go so far, but it helped me a lot because I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's basically dividing the goal setting moment from the goal striving. So we are band, we talk a lot about savings. I asked, hey, you need to think where your client is. Why? Because if you sound like throwing social notes, whatever message you want to Them, but you don't understand if they are in a goal setting or goal striving, you may be actually doing something that's going to backfire. Why? Because if you're in the goal setting, you need to have them to understand why this is important. Feasibility, undesirability. So work that is on the concept that this is important and you can do it. But many, they already know that when someone is telling you that you need to go to the gym and you know that, but you don't have the time or you don't find opportunity, so you just get more frustrated. And that's something that the bus needs to be for Telling people you need to say, when we do interviews, I say, I know that. Stop telling them to say, just like, it's really hard. So it's not a goal setting problem, it's a goal sharing problem. So maybe the message should be different. I know it's hard. Let's do baby steps. Let's do something that's simpler. So this idea of the Rubiko model that I thought it was really simple when I explained that actually is really persistent by the different teams because it helped them focus on what's really happening, what's the behavior they want to change. It's about people wanting to change that they can or because they thought they think that this change isn't worth it. So those concepts, I would say, are the main things that I use.

I love it and really, really great points. We haven't actually talked about that separation of the, like you said, the goal setting and striving and whatnot. So thank you for pointing that out for everyone. I'm sure a lot of people are going to go be looking more up on that and, and looking for how they can be separating that out. So thank you so much for everyone who is now so excited to learn more from you and to connect and, you know, follow what you're doing. You know, what's their best path to. To follow your journey and maybe to connect with you.

I mean, if you want me on LinkedIn, so it's easy to look for Kiki, I know that if you are adding me as a contact, please write any notes. So I know that you're on here because I get like a lot of requests, random people, but it.

Yes. Say I heard you talk to Molina on the brainy business and you said.

I'm someone who's interested to be here on science because if you're interested in behavioral science, I'm always happy to connect. Just I don't accept all the random people that try to contact me.

Yes, there's some serious issues in those LinkedIn connections to be sure. So perfect. And we will of course link to that in the show notes to make it easy for everyone. So thank you again, Kike for joining me on the show. It was really, really delightful to chat with you today.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Thank you again to Kike Bellinger for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I really love how Kike and his team have been testing, iterating and learning within their department departments throughout the years. As we talk about often in behavioral science, it isn't just a tool you pick up out of the box at the end to tighten a bolt or two, but human behavior should really be considered at every aspect and phase. Whether it's in internal communication or how you create your materials, where you pitch them, how you learn from them and everything in between, there's always an opportunity for being a little bit more thoughtful. I also love that he shared about how their initial instincts to be the internal thought leaders and share their expertise hasn't been as effective as including people in the experience and helping them to shine along the way so everyone can grow together. And it's okay to start with some. Go to concepts to get that conversation going, whether it's social norms or understanding aspects of motivation, framing, or whatever else resonates with you. You have to start somewhere and you can always continue to learn and grow, especially as you get results within your organization. Remember, influence is something everyone has in general. You don't need to wait for the title or the specific request to incorporate behavioral economics concepts into your work. You can be a little more thoughtful and share what you tried, increasing your influence and being a more thoughtful leader along the way. You may eventually get Behavioral Economist or Behavioral Science in your title or for your department, but you don't need to wait for it. And if you make your efforts more about leveraging an understanding of human behavior to improve the organization as a whole, I'm willing to bet that will all happen a whole lot faster as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes, which include links to my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Kike and myself, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 435 and thank you again to Kike Bellingaire for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.