The Winning Question
If you’re going to win at the game of Life,
you’ve got to ask the right question.
I finally couldn’t stand it. I had to ask the question.
30 minutes earlier.
Nine of us were savoring each sip from our cup of beautifully crafted fresh-brewed coffee; intoxicating was the deep aroma of roasted beans and freshly ground coffee. We were at the roasting plant of Peet’s Coffee to craft sponsorship opportunities. As Head of Marketing for the Golden State Warriors, I didn’t usually join the sponsorship team for their discovery meetings, but we needed to up our game on our sponsorship activations and, let’s be honest, I love Peet’s coffee. I was there primarily to observe, but after 30 agonizing minutes of what I can only describe as a Jackson Pollack-like spewing of random thoughts and ideas of how we could provide value for Peet’s, I asked a simple question. Here’s how it went:
Kenny: Would it be OK, if we brought the conversation up a level?
Everyone: “Sure”
Kenny: “Peet’s People, what behavior do you want to drive”? [a]
< a moment of extended quiet rumination (curiously impressive considering our level of caffeination)>
Peet’s: “We want to engage your fans”
Kenny: “That’s more a mission and less a behavior. What specific behavior do YOU want to drive — what behavior would have real value to Peet’s?”
Peet’s: “We want to drive your fans into our store.”
Kenny: “Great and, once in the store, what behavior would you want to drive?”
Peet’s: “To buy something, spend money.”
<bingo>
Kenny: “Since we know what behavior we want to drive, let’s now, design for that to happen.”
<heads nod>
And we did. We looked at motivators and abilities and when to prompt fans. We leveraged the fact that we were both two iconic brands born and bred in the Bay Area, leveraged fan participation, integrated the community, created player-as-barista experiences, and ultimately crafted a custom blend: “Warriors Grounds”. Warriors Grounds became Peet’s best-selling blend, and we shouldn’t be surprised, we deliberately designed for that to happen.
Tasting notes for our custom blend are at the end, for those interested. Note: The SF 49ers produced their own Peet’s blend after us; copying is the biggest form of flattery, right?
It is surprising how many times we don’t design for an identified behavior to happen. If you don’t understand what behavior you want to see, it becomes hard to know if you were successful; how do you know if you won? Think of it as a game. Remember the old board games like The Game of Life, Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, chess, and Scrabble? What was the most important section in the printed rules? For me, it was always: “How to Win.”
If I didn’t know how to win, how could I play the game? Why would I play the game? Not only that, but every time I played the game, I would revisit the behaviors I needed to drive (design my play) to do just that, win.
Here’s a typical scenario happening in companies every day.
1. The team needs to enroll someone in something (new product, new partnership, new opportunity)
2. Let’s brainstorm (because that’s what you do). So, they list a bunch of ways to do it (tactics). Then from that list, they pick the ones to execute.
{Picking tactics is not designing for a set of behaviors to happen.}
3. They activate on those tactics basically hoping something happens
{Hope is, in fact, a strategy, just a bad one}
4. The tactics led to action — basically something happing {but we didn’t identify the desired behaviors (aka outcome), so we’re ok with what we got.{
5. High-fives all around for a successful execution of tactics and call it a win
6. Plan celebration party
You don’t need to be a behavior designer (or hire one) to design for behavior to happen. We can all be designers. You just need the right tools. Here’s a proven model that I have used for many years. It was created by the behavioral scientist, Dr. BJ Fogg, who started and runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford. Although the Fogg Behavior Model (FBM) is very understandable, the underlying concepts are very sophisticated. The model is anchored around three elements happening at the same time: Motivation (core motivators), Ability (Simplicity Factors), and types of Prompts. I will take you through the basics, but I put a link at the end to explore more about it. [b]
The formula is: B=MAP: Again, the FBM shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability, and a prompt.
Elevator explanation: For any behavior you want to drive, three things must happen at the same time:
The customer/fan/guest/prospect must have the:
• (M) motivation: The desire/willingness to do the identified behavior
• (A) ability: The ease in doing the new behavior
• (P) prompt: The cue or trigger to do the identified behavior
So again, the formula with the actuations:
Here is how the model plays out graphically:
FBM basically says, if the motivation and the ability are, in fact, in accordance with doing the behavior, when you deliver the prompt, they will act with the desired behavior. Think of the “action line,” which delineates success, as a smile. Any prompt given above the smile line succeeds in driving the behavior.
In addition, the FBM beautifully illustrates the inverse relationship motivation and ability have to each other; the easier something is to do, the less motivated you have to be to do it. Intuitively, that makes sense. If I prompt you to, right now, simply walk across the street to get $50, would you do it? Probably, assuming you had the ability to do so. Now, what If I prompted you by saying, fly to Daton, Ohio now and get $50 bucks? You probably wouldn’t act on that. Why? Because the ability is hard, and $50 isn’t enough to motivate you to do it [c]. As a designer of behavior, you now have two levers, make it “easier to do” and/or increase my motivation to do it? There are a whole bunch of ways to do both of those. Dr. Fogg purports (and it makes logical sense) that it is a better strategy to focus first on making things easier, and only after you have exhausted all opportunities there, focus on increasing my motivation.
Another way to look at motivation vs ability is value vs pain:
Let’s say you have signed up for a webinar 3 weeks ago. You forgot about it until you are reminded in an email that it’s starting right now! Are you going to attend? What value/pain calculation do you perform in your head before clicking on the Zoom link? If you were super interested in the content and/or knew it wasn’t going to be available on demand, then the perceived value is likely high and you’d likely go through the pain associated with the opportunity costs of attending: value > pain (above the action line). However, if you aren’t really that interested in the content, have a recently moved-up deadline, or just don’t have the energy (ability), then you convince yourself that you’ll watch it later (which, btw, is not the behavior desired): value < pain so you don’t join (below the action line). We all like to avoid pain.
This is just an example, but the FBM applies every time you want or need for a specific behavior to happen. What if a phenomenal business partner didn’t sign up, one or more of the elements wasn’t happening — they weren’t motivated, it was too hard, or the cue/ask was at the wrong time. What could you have done to affect those elements? It applies to your personal life as well. What if, for example, you asked your partner to go see the movie Fast and Furious 324. She says no. One or more of the FBM elements wasn’t happening at the time of the prompt. Either she wasn’t motivated, didn’t have the ability, and/or you asked her at the wrong time or in the wrong way (in the middle of her meditation). You clearly didn’t design for this behavior to happen. Note to reader: don’t ask your spouse to do anything during meditation.
One final thing: for any behavior you want to drive, the FBM model would suggest targeting in this order (easiest to hardest):
1. Target those individuals who are already motivated and have the ability to do the behavior, but have not been prompted.
2. Target those people who have the motivation to change, but it is too hard for them to do so.
3. Target the people who have the ability to do so, but are not motivated to do so
Start with the right question and make sure you have a “how to win” in your campaign instructions. I’ve found the sooner you understand what behavior to drive, the more often you’ll find yourself “winning” the game of Life.
All, of course, only after you’ve enjoyed your coffee!
For more about Dr Fogg’s model, go here.
— — — -
Tasting Notes for Warriors Grounds (as promised)
A heavy-duty blend based on the earthy, syrupy, teak and tobacco-like qualities of Sumatra, plus the balance, full body, and brightness of Java and Papua New Guinea with a finish that is silky smooth from the sweet magic of Kenya.
End Notes
[a] This is similar to the Five Whys technique originally created by Sakichi Toyoda and used within Toyota Motor Company. When a problem occurs, you drill down to its root cause by asking “Why?” five times. Each answer forms the basis for the next question until you get to the root cause.
[b] A map is only useful if you know where you are AND know where you want to go
[c] Motivation is slippery, i.e. you may get someone motivated enough to do a behavior one or two times, but soon that motivation will wane if the behavior is too hard to do. Instead, making a behavior easier to do is a much greater investment. Keep in mind that motivators change. You may be less or more motivated later to do the behavior for whatever reason. How many of us are motivated to work out to lose weight, until it gets hard, then the motivation to work becomes less?
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