Merging Behavioral Science and Design Thinking | Luke Battye | 468

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And today you are joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Luc Bâtier, and Luc is an interesting person. In 2017, he founded Sprint Valley, a change consultancy, and he has transformed teams at Intel, McDonald's, Nike, Gordon Ramsay, ScottishPower, National Grid, etc. So without further ado, let me just first ask, what is a change consultancy?

Peter, it will be easier for me to explain this with an experiment if you're okay to give something a spin.

Sure, I don't have any chemistry set here, but okay, let's do it.

All right, so I've never done this audio, so this might fail completely, but I'm gonna give it a spin anyway. I want you to imagine for a second that you have landed on an alien planet, okay? And you've discovered these two different organisms, and one of them kind of looks like a sea urchin. It's like spiky, and the other one is sort of quite round and bulbous. I want you to tell me which one of those would you say is called kiki and which one is called buba? And don't overthink it.

So Kiki's probably the spiky thing and Buba is probably the bulbous thing. I don't know why, that's how my brain reads it.

Okay, so why do you say that?

Well, Kiki kind of maybe rhymes with spiky or something, and I don't know, the languaging sounds like something spiky would be named Kiki, not Bulby or whatever.

So what's really interesting about that experiment, I'm pretty glad that that worked audio, usually we show an image to bring this to life. And by the way, everybody, 99% of people say the exact same thing, but I think we can both agree that there's no logic to that question. And yet somehow—

So we're hoping it worked. 99% of the listeners might have went to now Malcolm.

Yeah, well, let's see. Yeah, quite. And if you're in the 1% listening that did it the other way around, congratulations to you. But what that experiment does is actually reveal something really profound about how we make decisions as people under uncertainty. And the idea here is that when you say the word kiki, even in your mind, you activate all the same brain regions as you would as if you were saying it too. And if you think about it, you actually bare your teeth slightly when you say the word kiki, right? And this triggers off concepts of biting and sharpness. And similarly, when you say the word booba, you make a round shape with your mouth. And what our brain is doing here is using what we call System 1 to make decision.

Okay.

And so this idea that we have these two systems in the brain, System 1, fast, automatic, instinctive, low energy to use, by the way, and System 2, if I was gonna ask you what's 7.25 times 10.2, whatever. That feeling of mental effort is System 2. And because we have evolved in a calorie-poor environment, our brain is wired to try and use System 1 instead of System 2. And fundamentally what we do is take that same insight and principle, this idea that our context drives our behavior, and we use it to help businesses change environments, change contexts, to get customers doing different things, to get employees doing different things, I love it.

So there's, there's a consultancy and there's a customer experience side of this and employee experience side of this. 100%. Other pieces. That's really interesting. So let me go maybe a half a step backwards to where does, how does the thought leadership come into play here? Because what you just did with that experiment that luckily didn't fail is a form of thought leadership, right? You used an example based on your research. Now you had a probably pretty strong sense of confidence that I would answer that question that way. We didn't set this up. Right. But you knew based on your experience and years of doing this and whatever, that 1 in 100 shot it's gonna go the wrong way. And then you say, wow, you're kind of odd actually, or whatever. But yeah, I guess my question is how does thought leadership help you, you know, build the brand, get the ideas out there, find new clients, solve problems, et cetera?

Now I think I'd probably like wind back to where this business sort of originated. And so we were working with a client back in 2017, I think it was, one of our early clients, and they were based up in Manchester Stadium, and they had— they'd have 60,000 fans who would descend on the stadium at halftime. There'd be 20 minutes and only 30,000 fans could ever get to the front of a queue to order any beer or food or whatever it was. We thought this is a really fascinating problem. And so what we did was analyzed how queues were forming and time and motion studies and all that stuff to understand what was going on here. And we had the very naive insight that, hey, if a typical transaction's 60 seconds, you get to the front of the queue, we that 30, we could get twice as many people through. And we thought, okay, well, like, who's amazing at getting people to make quick decisions about food? So we thought, okay, well, let's go and see what McDonald's are doing, what KFC are doing. And so we went out and ran this big study looking at how they use environment to shift consumer decision-making. We went back into the academic literature, could see all of these patterns that they were using, and then we went back and implemented them into the stadium. Spend per head went up like 8%. We ended up getting picked up by their American partners, uh, who look after AT&T Stadium and Yankee stadium doing the same stuff. Anyway, I ended up publishing an article called, uh, McDonald's Restaurant of the Future, uh, Why We're Loving It, right? And, uh, this then was published on a site called behavioraleconomics.com, and it was like a full teardown of all— I mean, it's still there, it's a great article, but it's a full teardown of all of the different influences that make you go, uh, it's time to switch out of my Big Mac track and try the new Gästeburger, whatever it is. And about 5 weeks later, I had an email from one of the directors at McDonald's in India say, "I read your article. We, we could do with your help with something." And so we ended up then kind of working with those guys. And so for us, thought leadership has always been kind of a core part of what we do, but we're really interested in how do you take these amazing insights out of academia and turn them into news you can use in business.

Okay, so let's stay there for a minute, 'cause there's 2 different threads and they're both fascinating. So, In my work, what I see a lot is sort of this battle, right? This us versus them. And the us versus them are the academics are the purists, right? Everything jives to the 11th decimal point and they've studied it and studied it and studied it. And then you put their ideas out into the wilderness and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. And then they'll say things like, well, you know—

Need more research.

We didn't— we couldn't control the variables in the ideal world and da da da da da. And then you've got the business people that are maybe have a validated instrument, maybe they don't. They're working more on intuition, on gut feel, on tradition, or whatever. And the academics look at them and go, "Oh, poo-poo. There's no science under there." And what I find more infrequent than I would like to is, wait a minute, why don't we both give a little bit? Like if, you know, wise business people understand the limits of academics, but also the power. And I think you are in a rare place where you're an academic that realizes, wait, you have to do a translation job. Because most academics are trained, and, and it's a self-reinforcing piece, to do really, really, really good at speaking to other academics and therefore really, really poorly at communicating to the other 99.9999% of the universe. 100%.

So how we see that is there, there are two worlds that we are continually struggling to bring together here, and one of them is behavioral science. And over the last 15 years, this whole, uh, space about what influences human behavior has got really robust, like super, super robust. We understand the levers pretty well now, and a lot of them are very repeatable, right?

Thank you, Freakonomics. Thank you, Dan Ariely.

Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a lot of the partners in Sprint Valley have been part of sort of sparking the nudge units all over the world and all that kind of stuff. But the, the problem though, as exactly as you pointed out, is The language gets so specific in academia, it's— clients can't take part in the conversation. And when it's about human behavior, I think everybody should be able to take part in that conversation and understand it. So our job is to translate it. Now, the second part to this, though, is really looking at methods and process that leverage co-design and co-creation. And so Sprint Valley is bringing together this world of behavior change science with this sort of art of innovation, if you like, you know, design thinking, co-creation. How do you work hand in hand with people to develop new solutions to complex problems. And it's those two pieces of the puzzle that are really shifting the needle for our clients. And that's why a lot of our clients now are private equity backed, because we can create results. But we have this constant tension, as you pointed out, of forcing academics to take a position, but then really leveraging this sort of more experiment iterate mindset to kind of work through the teething problems as you get into execution, which happens.

If you're enjoying this episode of Thought Leadership Leverage, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. And I would also propose or think that there's also a piece of your culture as an organization that I would imagine, whether it's stated or not, one of your values is to not intimidate, right? Because oftentimes unintentionally, an expert, be that on the business side of consultants or an academic, when they come to a layperson, they don't mean to, be patronizing or intimidating, but they start to get into, oh, and the research shows this, and they get really technical because they're so used to jamming with their peers and they're like, whoa, you've now— Yeah.

So one of our principles, but I think you picked it up beautifully, is take the time to teach. And that's just one of the things that we've learned. And we use our own medicine on our own business. And one of the things that we've learned in spending lots of time interviewing customers and understanding what we're doing well and what we need to change, all that kind of stuff is they say they come away from the project smarter. And, and it's because what we do is we take these complex challenges and use frameworks to make them simple enough people can start taking action on. But we're super hot on trying to cut the jargon out of this. And that's the fun I have is bringing together people who get it, but then forcing them to really work on a problem within a time limit, which in academia you don't necessarily have, right? We can always end our our paper with needs further research. That's great, and that's acceptable. But, you know, when you're charging for your consulting services and a client has a problem to solve, it doesn't quite work the same way. And so we've got to get somewhere good and hedge our bets.

And I think that's a good—

that makes for an exciting dynamic, you know.

Yeah, I think that's a great sort of mantra for any expert, thought leader, etc., to say, have you taken the time to teach, right? And I think when I think about like some of the greatest business books of the last 20 years, they're not the highly technical. They might not have been using those exact words, but they are approachable. I'm a somewhat intelligent person, right? So I could understand it. I could read it. I get the approach pretty quickly and I understand the outcomes and the benefits and why I would consider it. So I think that's really interesting.

But it's like these ideas are only useful if you can use them, right? And for me, If I can engage with a client and have a— be on a level in what we're talking about, and they can take part and have their own ideas about how that concept could be applied, then we get to leverage all of their perspective in a way that we don't have. Like, they're the experts in their business, not us, right?

When you look at both of those things, when you look at what's happened, you know, particularly in the UK, and now it's starting to happen elsewhere with these nudge units, they in essence took concepts from behavioral economics that said, wow, there are little things that we can do to change the way people make decisions, not unnecessarily persuade them, but influence, right? So we're not, you know, it's not manipulation. It's not go by the—

You're changing the context.

Right. And you still have the agency to opt out of these decisions. But when we see it used for good in things like 401 savings deferral rates, you know, I've read studies on organ donation. Making default when you get your driver's license, yes, I will versus no, I won't. Because I forgot what the numbers were, but something like 90% of people said they would donate their organs after they passed, but only 20% of people have actually gone through the effort to do it because there's a lot of steps you got to take. If you make that the default, more people will accept the default. So I love seeing, because there aren't that many domains or practices where you can see such powerful and compounded benefits of people making better choices, better choices for them, better choices for society, but, you know, on and on and on. I mean, it's pretty amazing.

And so what we're doing now after that experience, sort of, gosh, we're a 5-year-old business now with the stadium and seeing this can really drive business outcomes. We've kind of been looking at how do we take that same methodology and mindset and apply it to lots of different classes of challenge. And one of the ones more recently we've been getting really good at is how do you get employees in a large complex organization leaning into innovation. And so for us, there's this formula for behavior change that underpins all of those nudge units you've just described. It's called COMBI. The idea is that for any behavior, there are these 3 necessary prerequisites. I've got to have the capability, which might be psychological skill, confidence, or it could be physical skill. I've got to have the opportunity to do that new thing, which could be around systems, process, tools, but also peer support. And then there's got to be motivation. I've got to know why I'm doing it, what's in it for me, and I need the feedback loops to know whether or not I need to kind of course correct how I'm approaching this. And so we take that formula then and can apply that into a particular business challenge and say, okay, great, well, where are we now? What are the pieces of this puzzle that we have or don't have? And then we can start using some of this framework to start going, okay, well, what could we do differently? What are some of those key levers we're not pulling right now that could make the difference?. And we're finding that, yeah, this is really fast-tracking the adoption of innovation skills and the application of innovation skills inside a larger organization.

So coming back to the thought leadership piece, because your business is based on the thought leadership.

Totally.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's it. Yeah.

It's— give me a sense of, and if you're looking over, let's say the next 12 or 18 months, where you're going to be using thought leadership to number one, elevate the brand because your brand punches above its weight. You're attracting big, big large companies, you're a small entity. So where, where do you use it to elevate the brand? And then where and how do you use it for net new client acquisition? Two different use cases for the thought leadership.

Yeah, so I'd say they actually combine. So we're doing a lot in terms of executive education, creating partnerships with, you know, organizations like Warwick Business School, and really trying to take our methods as a kind of quite practical consultancy, and then get those into business leaders who are looking for new ways of thinking about solving some of the, the uncertain problems that they have. And so for us, our big focus is really around that executive education piece and looking for ways to help people get to grips with applying this stuff. So trying to take that learn and implement gap and close it and have teams take a concept and actually start applying it instantly on challenges that they're trying to work on in their own business. And for For us, our method is very experiential and so it's a difficult thing to properly communicate. And so for us it's really around how do you get people to experience it? How do you get people involved? We do a lot now in terms of publishing and we've open sourced, I'd say 80% of our methodology. Like your listeners could go grab it right now. All the resources we use to bring on board new members of our team and train them, you know, toolkits around how to build high-performing teams, toolkits around how to solve complex challenges, toolkits around behavior change. And that's another way that we're seeing is, has been pretty valuable in connecting with people who are trying to solve the problems that we're really focused on.

I love it. So great example of a business, you know, A, you mentioned sort of eating your own dog food, but really putting out the thought leadership to attract people the right people in the right way, cost-effectively into the firm. And I would imagine that when someone reaches out like that, you mentioned the gentleman in McDonald's India, from a sales process standpoint, they're on third base, right? Like it's—

Yeah, they know a lot about what you're doing and they understand it really, really well. And I think, you know, there's been lots of internal debate about to what extent should we open up and give away our method and my thinking on that's pretty rudimentary, which is just, hey, if we put it out here and we see that there's, you know, 20,000 downloads of this stuff, then maybe we would decide to paywall that. But equally, if there isn't and it's pretty small and people are coming in and it's attracting the right people, frankly, it's not too much of a concern. The other thing that it creates, though, in the business is it forces innovation because what we're doing is getting ahead and saying, okay, this is what we're seeing work. You can use this. But in order for us to have a point of difference, we then have to continually reinvent and add to that. So our toolkit's called Springboard. That's all available now. That's kind of version 2. We're now operating in our consulting projects on version 3. And so again, we can kind of push out the stuff that we're very confident with, but we're always then having to look ahead and work out, okay, well, what's, what's the next thing that we're gonna be doing to, you know, strengthen this and make it work harder?

Got it. Excellent. Great stuff. Well, I appreciate your time, Luke. I appreciate your, your energy and your sharing your work with us. And wish you the best. Thank you so much. Cool.

Thank you, Peter. Good stuff. Enjoy.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.