Transcript: Weapons of Social Seduction | How We Make Decisions (EP83)

 

Intro (with music): Welcome to The Culture of Things podcast with Brendan Rogers. This is a podcast where we talk all things, culture, leadership and teamwork across business and sport.

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Brendan: This is my conversation with Phill Agnew. Phill's the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Buffer and host of the consumer psychology podcast, Nudge. Leaders need to understand how people make decisions. Understanding this helps them influence, motivate, and persuade. Psychology and human behaviour is a critical element of understanding how to do these ethically. 

Phill shares many insights on studies around human behaviour. You'll learn terms like survivorship bias, authority bias, anchoring, framing, distinctiveness, as well as nudging and how it helps people make decisions. These are the weapons of social seduction. 

At the end of the interview, Phill shares 3 books you can read to gain even more knowledge on influence and how people make decisions. After the interview, I share my three key takeaways. Let me know what you think of the interview. Good, bad or ugly, we love to get your feedback.

This is The Culture of Things podcast. I'm Brendan Rogers. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Phill.

Phill, why is applied behavioural science important in marketing?

Phill: I spent a huge amount of money and a huge amount of time studying marketing at a university in the UK. For your listeners, £50,000 is what it costs to study marketing. 

Brendan: A lot of Aussie dollars

Phill: A lot of Aussie dollars, yeah. It's a lot of English pounds. I spent a lot of money and a lot of time studying it and went into the world of marketing, started doing marketing, and thought I should be in a pretty good place to be effective at my job. If I'd spent that amount of time and money studying most other professions like how to be a teacher, how to be a doctor, how to be a lawyer, I would be some way to being effective in those roles. 

Yeah, I found myself in marketing quite ineffective. I was doing basic marketing tasks. Things like writing an email subject line, writing a blog, doing a pitch, and creating a sales deck. All these tasks which are typical marketing tasks. I found I wasn't very effective. I found that the content I was producing was dull. It's not getting people engaged and was ultimately not getting results.

At some point in my career, I discovered behavioural science, which is psychology, essentially. The psychology of how people make decisions. A subset of that is consumer psychology and how marketers can use an understanding of how people make decisions to improve their work. As soon as I discovered this field, I wanted to read everything that was on it. I really dived in as much as I could, and I learned a huge number of principles, a huge number of laws, which I think you can apply to marketing. 

Over the course of my career, I started to apply and got real results. I've applied it in my job, I applied it on my podcast. I've run ads, which makes people four times more likely to listen by shifting two words in my copy. I've told people not to listen to my podcast and told over 100,000 people out on Reddit and made one of the most successful ads that I've ever produced. 

I've used nudges like halo effect and the fresh start effect to build habits around people listening to my podcast. I used reciprocity to get over 205-star reviews on the show as well. It's easy for me to talk about stuff because it's all mine. I've used it in my job as well for companies like Hotjar and Buffer, two tech companies. 

For me, behavioural science is important in marketing because it defines how we make decisions. It's the reason why people litter less in Copenhagen due to some of the studies they've done there that stops people from speeding. It stops—obviously, we can talk about this later on—from going to jail and paying their taxes on time. There's a wonderful study around that. There's even an argument that it helped end the Cold War, applying behavioural science as well. 

For me, it's important because it's an understanding of how people make decisions and marketers are in the decision-making industry. They are trying to get people to make decisions. If you understand how people make decisions, you can be a better marketer. 

Brendan: When I actually thought there was no such thing as a silver bullet, but what you've just said, I'm thinking this is the silver bullet. 

Phill: I think it's 100 good lead bullets. But if you know them, it's better than nothing. It's definitely better than the water pistol that I was given after my marketing degree. 

Brendan: Great analogy. Love it, mate. A number of these things that you've just talked about we're going to unpack, and this is a leadership podcast. It's not a marketing podcast so we're going to understand that and unpack that in relation to leadership. But what was it that was so fascinating for you about this topic, this psychology and the behavioural science side of things?

Phill: I think it was evidence. I think this applies to leadership as well. I think we're in marketing and in the world of entrepreneurship and leadership. We should end up seeing an unbelievable amount of content, which is an unbelievable amount of opinions and ideas, which ultimately is based on nothing more than just someone's story. One of the principles of behavioural psychology and behavioural science is the survivorship bias. You might have heard of this before. 

Survivorship bias is the idea that the only story, the only examples from entrepreneurs and leaderships, leaders that you'll hear are the stories from the successful folk because they are the ones who have survived. They've managed to get to the end. We heed their advice, we listen to their advice. 

We may not realise that the only reason these leaders are in these successful positions is really just down to mainly luck. We might follow their routines like waking up at 4:00 AM, having green tea, and doing yoga for three hours before a cold shower without realising that the actual reasons behind that success are far more chaotic and far more random. 

Why I was really interested in behavioural science and psychology is because it's not based on the thoughts of CEOs and leaders and the examples that they might have. It's based on peer-reviewed studies and studies which have been run in a lab and then replicated in the real world and studies that you and I can try too. We can do them really easily by using things like Google Surveys, ads, and whatnot, and you can apply these studies and actually learn what works. 

I think that's what drew me in because I was struggling in my job and I found that the advice I was getting wasn't working and so I needed something else. For me, behavioural science was the answer.

Brendan: How does this apply to leadership? 

Phill: I think it applies in a lot of ways. I think for one, leaders need to motivate, influence, and persuade. If leaders don't understand how the human brain works and why and how people perceive information, they'll struggle to do a lot of those things. There's a leader that I'm fascinated with and I'm sure lots of people are, which is Steve Jobs. 

Steve Jobs is many things. He's a genius, he's also chaotic, unbelievably rude, aggressive at times, and manipulative too. But one thing Steve Jobs had is an unbelievable understanding of how people make decisions and how to influence decisions to get people to take action.

I'll give you one example. Right at the start of his career, when he was, I think, still at school, he and Steve Wozniak, who was his fellow Apple cofounder, developed something called the blue box, which was a tool that you could use to make long distance phone calls. This was back in the day with long-distance phone calls cost a lot of money. You can make long-distance phone calls for free. It was illegal and completely not allowed to create this tool. They went around selling it to people. They used a sales tactic, which is totally based on the science of behavioural psychology.

The sales tactic was they would go into different dorms in the university or something like that. They would go in and instead of saying, hey folks, can I sell you my blue box? They just said, "Is George here?" Ask that question, "Is George here?" And people have said, "Oh man, I don't think George is here." "Oh, it's just that he wanted to buy this blue box. We're going to sell this blue box today. We were just wondering if George is around." They say, "No, no. But tell us what the box is." This opener would massively encourage people to actually listen. 

The reason why is due to something called social proof. Social proof is the idea that we follow the actions of others. It's an evolutionary trait. When we saw a caveman running out of the cave, we wouldn't go in. We would run out with them. We follow the actions of others. If you hear someone called George is looking to buy this product, you naturally think, oh, I should check. This is clearly something useful. I should check out what this is as well. 

Steve had this understanding for a lot of his career and he applied it in leadership positions as well. He would often use anchoring to get better deals in the leadership world. For example, when he was leaving, he worked at Atari for a while and he wanted to go to India to find himself. This is all true. He said, "I'm leaving to go find my guru." And in classic Steve Jobs fashion, he said, "I want you to pay to send me to India." Ridiculous, right? He's leaving his job and he tells his employer, I want you to pay to take me to India. What this was was a smart use of anchoring. 

Anchoring is the idea that when we hear a bit of information, we are anchored to it. We might not agree with that information, but we're more likely to agree with information which is nearby. If you go to court and you say I'm suing McDonald's for a billion dollars because I spilled hot drink on myself, you will get a bigger compensation than if you said I'm suing for $1,000,000 or $100 million. Not because necessarily just the economics of it, simply because people are anchored to that choice. It's why our RP prices and sale prices work so well in the store. 

Steve says, "Send me to India," and they say, "Absolutely not." He said, okay, all right. Well, why don't you send me to Munich instead? I could do some work on the way there." And they agreed to that. He's very good at manipulating and understanding how to push people's buttons in order to get what he wants. He applies this to his leadership roles with lots of different scenarios. I think most famously for the presentations that he does. He's able to convince people that his products are fantastic. 

I'm ranting, Brendan, and you're probably thinking, when is he going to shut up. One final example, which was when he released the iMac. He's very good at framing. He says, when he releases the iMac, this is the biggest innovation since the printing press. "I'm happy to show you the future of technology." This classic leadership—being able to frame your ideas, frame your projects in a way that makes them interesting for other people.

They also understood distinctiveness. This is effect called the Von Restorff effect, which was understood by a researcher called Hedrick Von Restorff back in the 1930s. What she did is she gave participants texts that they had to remember. The text was just three letters and they were random combinations of letters. You would get 20–30 of these combinations to actually try and remember. WER, UIY, and so on and so forth. You have to remember as many as possible. 

But within those bits of text, there would be one sequence of three numbers just within that. It didn't matter. You just had to remember as many of these sequences as possible. It turns out, people are 30 times more likely to remember the numbers. If you swap it, the letters are the unique thing and the numbers are common, people are 30 times more likely to remember the letters. 

The very simple thing here is that distinctiveness stands out. Something that looks different amongst the set of competitors is more likely to be remembered. What does Steve do when he launches the iMac? Behind him by the way is the iMac under a black cloth, which is very smart. That's going to make people want it. 

He shows up on screen a picture of a popular desktop computer on the market at the moment. Grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey. All of them looked the same. All look identical. He said, I'm happy to introduce you to this.'' He said something along the lines of these are the computers that are available up until today. I'm happy to show you the computer of the future. Whips off the cloth and you see this bright blue iMac. The crowd goes wild and gets very excited. 

It sticks in the mind. Why does it stick in the mind? Because it's distinctive. Now, everyone knows this today. This is commonplace. You can't make a phone blue and get sales. But at the time, he was leveraging a bias that he knew about. The idea that if you distinctly stand out in someone's mind. 

He's a classical leader who applied loads of these effects to succeed in business, to get what he wants, to win in negotiations, and to market his products in a way that gets them to sell to billions of people. There are lots of ways you can apply this. I think Steve Jobs is a fascinating example. 

Brendan: Yeah. Obviously, he was a trailblazer in so many areas. You actually speak in a way that I have to ask this question. Either you've studied him and stalked him crazily or you've been close to him at some time. Not stalking.

Phill: Definitely not, definitely not close to him, definitely not stalked him. 

Brendan: What have you done? 

Phill: What have I done? He's been written about in movies and whatnot. There's a great podcast on him called How to Take Over the World. They did an episode on Steve Jobs. A lot of that is based on that. What I'm doing is I'm applying my knowledge of behavioural science to unpack what Steve is doing and really figure out what he's doing. 

For example, another thing that was interesting about Steve, he loved to put skin in the game. Skin in the game is the idea that you can put yourself ahead of other people if you showcase your interest. When he tried to get a part from Intel, I think it was, he was making computers at school. That was Hewlett-Packard. The only people who saw this part was Hewlett-Packard. He was a school kid. What he did is he calls up Hewlett-Packard as a school kid. Just found his phone in the phone book, called them up every night for a week and managed to get the part. 

The way he does is because he puts his skin in the game. He does things other people won't do. He continues to call and creates consistency and showcases this skin in the game. There are lots of examples of this, but I just learned this through reading about him, listening to podcasts, and watching videos. Seeing how what he's done in his life and the leadership positions he's made, if there's evidence that backs up that that was the right thing to do or the wrong things to do. There's lots of evidence that says what he was doing was the wrong thing to do. Interestingly enough, he's definitely not the perfect case. 

Brendan: At least you've clarified that you weren't in the inner circle, you weren't stalking, and you just had a man crush. 

Phill: I could seriously benefit from the halo effect.

Brendan: Absolutely. Great learnings. What I think my listeners and watchers will want to know, certainly I do, is that if you look at Steve Job as an example and lots of stuff out there, but I get that. But he was also unconventional in some of these things that are now conventional wisdom, but also in his behaviours around that stuff. Where does that line sit in some of this behavioural change aspect and what we'll later unpack around nudges that steps over the line from doing things with the right intent versus that word that you mentioned earlier, manipulation? Where does the line sit? 

Phill: In terms of manipulation, I think it sits in are you doing things that you would happily have somebody do it yourself? A very famous example which is the Google Cafeteria. Google, they understand nudges, they understand psychology and behaviour, and they realised that they could change how the cafeteria was organised to dramatically decrease the amount of unhealthy choices people made in the cafeteria. 

They could put the carbonated fizzy drinks behind opaque glass rather than clear glass. They could move the salad to eye level and have it as the first thing you see as you come in. They could put the naughty desserts and metre further back than they were. They can make the plate slightly smaller. They ran all these tests and found they could dramatically improve the quality of the food. 

But they had a real dilemma about whether or not they should implement this because they weren't sure whether it was manipulation or not. They weren't sure whether okay, is this something that we would want to tap into ourselves. We want to be subtly nudged towards healthier eating. And they eventually decided to do it. The reason they decided to do it is because if they don't do it, they're still nudging people in the other direction. If they don't make these changes, they're just nudging people towards unhealthy choices. In a way, everything's a nudge. 

But I think that's always something you should ask yourself is, if this is something that I would like to happen to myself. If it's not, then it's probably bordering on manipulation. I think that's important to consider. With Steve as well, a lot of what he did, no other leader would get away with.

There's something called the Pratfall Effect, which is quite interesting to analyse. It's this idea that if we showcase a weakness or flaw, we are actually more liked than more likeable. This was done in a study by Elliot Aronson in the '80s. He filmed actors answering a series of quiz questions correctly and showed those videos to participants and said how likeable this actor is? 

In one of the variants, the actor spilled coffee down himself after he had finished answering all these questions correctly. What Aronson found was that people ranked that actor as the most likeable, the one that showcased the weakness, his clumsiness was considered more likeable than the others.

What's interesting then is if that actor had fewer questions right and spilled coffee down themselves, they were ranked as less likeable than the same actor who answered the same amount of questions right. It's not that spilling coffee down yourself makes you more likeable. It's that when you are seen as competent, showcasing a weakness can be really beneficial. 

Same has been proven in job interviews. Jo Silvester got research applicants to apply to dozens of jobs, got to interviews, they all showcased the same experience, skills, and qualities, and used the same script, except some would showcase a weakness and those who showcased weakness would get the jobs unless they didn't have the competency to back them up. 

This really applies to Steve Jobs. A lot of people read that he was aggressive and would shout at people. He'd say their work is—enter explicit words here. Genuinely did when he hired someone from Xerox, I think it was. I think he said, everything you've done up until now has been s-word. That's the way he hired him. 

Leaders can't get away with that. The only reason Steve Jobs got away with that is because his competence level was at a level which is [...] amongst pretty much every leader out there and he only got aware of that because of that level. He could showcase that weakness because he had competence in other areas. As leaders, there are a lot of things he did where you think you actually can't take that on board because you don't match that level of competence and it won't be seen as beneficial. 

Brendan: I really like that reference. I haven't actually heard of that study. But what's going through my head was you mentioned the word competence a number of times. Two factors of trust are character and competence. Let's focus on what's ringing in my ears, people need to be competent. But where the coffee potentially comes in is the character. They become relatable characters. We all spill coffee from time to time or something on a shirt or get in an awkward situation. But it creates a level of relatability and vulnerability, which all factors around trust building and becoming likeable, as you say. 

Phill: Yeah. It's bang on. I've had similar ones. I've heard it being competency and warmth as well. That sounds very [...] about it and I really like that. I think it's a really smart way of looking at it. You can't just be an arrogant asshole and expect everyone to follow your dream. You have to be warm as well if you want to influence people and bring them along. 

Brendan: Yeah, what do they say? People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It sort of links to that, doesn't it? You mentioned the word nudges. You've got a podcast called the Nudge Podcast. I've listened to I think three episodes as part of my research for this. Pretty cool podcast. It's on my to-listen-to list now, so thank you. What are nudges? 

Phill: Yeah, so nudges are really a subset of what I talk about on the podcast rather than the whole thing. Nudges are small tweaks, small changes you can make that could encourage fairly big changes in behaviour. Let's do some classic examples. Changing the choice architecture of the choices is a classic nudge. 

In the UK previously organ donation was opt-in. If you wanted to be an organ donor you had to opt-in. Basically, you just go in the [...]. I know only about 15% of people did that, which was a problem for the NHS, for the health service.

They decided to change it to opt-out. People who I think if you got your driver's licence you basically automatically opted into being a donor unless you unticked the box. There are endless reminders to allow you to opt-out. It's not hidden, it's not manipulative in that way. It's just we're changing the choice architecture to opt-in. The levels of people opting in to donate their organs went from about 10% to about 90%.

A tiny tweak, tiny change—just changing the default as it's called—had a dramatic impact on the amount of action. The same has been done for pensions in the UK. Pensions were previously an opt-in. You had to opt-in in order to get a pension. They changed it to opt out so everybody by default would be opted into a convenient pension and you'd opt out if you didn't want to be. Again, that's dramatically improved the amount that people save for their pension. There are small things as well. 

There's a wonderful study in Steve Martin's book, The Small Big, which looks at Australians and trying to get them to pay their tax on time. So the problem that the Australian tax collectors had is that millions of Australians weren't paying their tax on time. There were plenty of issues, plenty of reasons why people don't pay their taxes on time. But one of the reasons that the team identified was that the letters that they were sending were just too bland. They blended in with every other letter. Simple white envelope. You are just less likely to open this letter because it wasn't distinct. 

All Steve and his team did was put a stamp on it. A red stamp which said something like urgent. It's a really tiny, tiny thing really if you think about it. Of all the leaders you could pull to get people to pay tax on time, putting a red stamp on a letter is a fairly small one. But that one stamp increased the open rate and I think had saved Australians millions and millions in dollars in late tax repayments and did something like saved tens of thousands of Australians from actually going to prison, going to jail because they would have not paid those fines. Otherwise have not been able to actually pay their fines and actually end up in court and potentially jail. 

Another really small example. I'll give you one more and this is one that probably most of us experience is commitment devices. We find that we are more likely to commit to doing something if we have made a declaration that we will commit to do it in the first place. If I asked you, are you going on a run later? Brendan, you say, yeah, I will. You're probably quite likely to do it. You probably will. 

But if I say, what time will you go on your run, what shoes will you wear, and what route will you take? And you talk through all of that. Potentially, even if you write it down, you're far more likely to actually do it. It's been proven in studies. The best applicants for this are dentists. 

When you leave the dentist, you're not told, by the way, will you come back again? And you say, yeah, yeah. That's not what they do. They say what is the exact time, what's the date, when will we see you again, can you write it down on this card, can we book it in, and can you take this card with you so you can remember that you've written it down? That must be increasing the amount of people who end up going to the dentist. 

Same has been done, Todd Rogers, I think it was the researcher that did the exact same for elections in the US. He would call people up and not say, are you going to vote? He said, what time will you vote, what polling session will you go to, and how will you get there? And that again increased the likelihood that somebody would go and vote. 

All these tiny, really small things, if you think about it, in comparison to big marketing campaigns or other things that you could do, small tweaks that you could make to the way you communicate to improve the effectiveness of communications. Really, that's what nudging is. 

Brendan: How does nudging apply on social media? I just want to ask, I know that doesn't sort of fit in specifically to the leadership side but I just want people to really understand. You mentioned some examples, they're really good, but social media is just everyone's thing, I suppose, good or not good? Where do those nudges apply so they can actually recognize, oh, that's a nudge. I can really be related to that. 

Phill: Yeah, that's a good question. I think one thing that is useful in most of us knowing is that these social media apps, almost all of them, were built by people who had a good understanding of nudging and behavioural science and what gets people hooked. The apps are specifically designed in a way to make them addictive. That's not by a fluke or by accident. It's intentional because it improves the retention rate of the app. 

Brendan: Maybe I should be asking you, when are they not nudging? 

Phill: That would be less time, probably not at all. There's one example which I think really stands out. Nir Eyal talks about it in his book in Indistractable and also in his book Hooked. He also came on my show to talk about it. If anyone wants to listen to that, they're welcome to check. 

He talks about variable rewards. He shared this fascinating study with rats. In the study, the rats are basically taught to push a button, push a lever with their paw. When they push that lever, sugary water will come out of the little drop. Which rats love, so they're learning that pushing the button creates sugary water. 

There are two variants. There's one variant where the rat pushes the lever and the sugar water comes out every time they push it. Action equals reward every time. What they found is over time, the rats just got bored. I don't need to keep pressing this. I don't need to keep coming back to this lever. I can go and sit somewhere. I'm not going to get hooked on this. I will come back eventually and get some more sugary water, but I don't need to keep coming back.

In the other variant, when the rats pressed the lever, the sugary water wouldn't always come out. It was set to come out at random frequency. You might press, it might come out, you might press it 10 more times and it might not come out. It was variable, this reward. 

What they found was the rats who had the variable reward got hooked on the action of pressing the lever because the reward wasn't consistent. It didn't come out every time because it was variable. The rats got hooked and they would spend every minute of every day pushing the lever trying to get this sugary water to come out. They were getting pretty much the same volume as the other rats. They just had a variable reward. 

This is how our social media apps are built today. If you remember the good old days of social media, arguably, we had a news feed which was chronological. It would just show everything that had been published over the last few days. There's still variability in that way. You load up and you never know what's going to be there. 

But the apps have purposely changed the way they showcase content to benefit from variable rewards. When you load up today, you could get shown anything, especially if you load up on something like Instagram. Your feed could be a picture from somebody you know very recently or it could be a picture from somebody you know from a while back which is performing well. It could be a reel from an influencer, it could be a picture that one of your friends has liked. 

There's huge variability in what you'll see. That's not by accident. That's because it's shown, it's proven to get you hooked on that content in the same way that the rats were hooked on the sugary water. 

It's one example, but one of the main things I think about when it comes to social media is these apps were designed in a way to get us addicted to them, to get us using them in a way that would boost the performance of the company that was creating the app. I think it's important to remember as users because sometimes we look at the good sides of social media, not so much anymore, but it's important to remember that they're built in a way, which encourages us to get addicted. 

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Brendan: Can nudges make us humans do stuff that we don't want to do? 

Phill: I think so. There's a study called the Milgram Study done by Stanley Milgram.

Brendan: I find it fascinating. Sorry to break your train of thought. Have you done studies yourself?

Phill: Yeah, they're not as good as the professionals. 

Brendan: Pretty good enough, mate. I'm sure. 

Phill: This one is interesting unless you want to ask something else. 

Brendan: No, I don't. I'm personally fascinated. I'm sure the listeners and viewers will be keen too. You've answered yes, you believe that nudges can make us do something we don't want to do. 

Phill: There's a leadership link in this one. This is a bit of research done by Stanley Milgram back in the '60s. I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have heard of it. In the study, he got normal participants off the streets to come in and their job was to administer electric shocks to a fellow participant who was sitting in another room based on whether the participant got questions right or wrong on a test. 

What the person administering the shocks didn't know is that the fellow participant receiving the shock wasn't actually a participant. They were actors. The only person who was actually a normal person in their study was the person administering shocks. 

The study says that as the fellow participant gets more and more questions wrong, the Harvard or Yale professor standing behind them in a white lab coat says, please continue, please keep upping the voltage. The outstanding result of this was that 66% of the participants involved in the study administered shocks to a voltage level that can cause cardiac arrest and potentially kill the other participants. They were willing to do something to administer these shocks which were of extremely dangerous levels. 

It's not like they had no idea. They purposely made the walls so thin that they could hear their fellow participants screaming and yelling in pain every time they pressed the button and administered the shock. What this showcases is this power of authority bias and this is something leaders need to be very very aware of. 

As a leader, if you have authority, you can tell somebody what to do and that can completely override their own cognitive ability to critically think about whether what they are doing is right or wrong. You have an unbelievable influence over that person. 

This example is encouraging 66% of people to administer lethal electric shocks. If you asked those participants would you ever consider giving a lethal electric shock to someone you don't know for nothing more than an experiment? I guarantee you, 100% of them would say no. I would never do that. Yet here is an example where the majority of them got to doing this. 

This study is quite old. There have been replications of it, maybe the replications haven't got to the level of 66%, but there is no doubt that the authority bias is true. There is no doubt that people take action on whatever people told them to do. There's no doubt that this stuff can influence you to do things that you don't want to do. As leaders, especially, you have to be careful with how you wield this influence.

Brendan: I think maybe there are a few leaders going around to buy taser guns now thinking they might be able to change behaviour pretty quickly that they want to change. Being realistic, I have heard that. It is fascinating to understand that. Being serious, they can't go and buy tasers as much as they want to. Let's put that into context of behavioural change in an office environment.

Can you share an example that you may have been involved in, you may have utilised, or you may have seen used where these nudges, these small changes to get into an ideal or a better outcome from a behavioural perspective would apply?

Phill: There's a lot of small stuff. I could give dozens of examples of small tweaks that leaders can do to improve their effectiveness in their work, but we don't have all day. 

Brendan: You don't. You have to go for a run after this. 

Phill: That's right. Friday afternoon.

Brendan: [...] I can sleep around.

Phill: Fair enough. The one thing that comes to mind is Daniel Pink's work on motivation. I think this is something the best leaders I've seen have incorporated into how they run their business. Daniel Pink is a New York Times Bestseller. He has done an awful ton of research on all sorts of things from regrets to sales to motivation. 

He identified three core pillars of motivation and the pillars are autonomy, being able to dictate what you do in your job; purpose, having a job and a role that you think is valuable that is matching your values; and then mastery, the feeling that what you're working towards is building skill and you can see evidence that skill is improving.

This I think is important for leaders to consider. They should be looking at their workforce and thinking, are we able to apply autonomy, mastery, and purpose to each of these individuals? Can we build a career for them that will push all of these values up and encourage them to take hold of them?

If we can't, evidence suggests that this will make somebody less likely to stick on their job and make them less likely to perform at optimum output. It's very general there, but I think definitely something all leaders need to consider is those three things. Are they creating a workplace where there is purpose? Are they creating a workplace where there is the ability to get mastery? And are they giving the autonomy that people need to feel motivated? 

Brendan: Think of your own journey in relation to purpose, autonomy, and mastery. You've worked and are still working for some high-level tech companies. If we put that framing around it, in your own mind, is there any one of those three important to your satisfaction in what you do? 

Phill: Good question. I have definitely picked companies that rank highly on those three things. I think there's no coincidence. It's clearly a big motivator. Buffer, where I work at the moment, is hugely autonomous, completely 100% remote. A team of people from around the world. You can work hours when you want. You work on the project you want to some extent.

They actually had a period of their existence in Buffer, I think this was five years ago now, where they got rid of all management and you just decided what you worked on and you didn't report to anyone. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work very well. It was a bit too radical, but interesting that they are pushing the needle in that sense. Unlimited holiday and time off, all of that stuff that we are just about to do in a week's time. 

All of us stopped all of our work and just worked on projects that we think will help the business, so clearly pushing the autonomy part and very good on mastery. The idea here is not just a budget to go and learn new things. They really highlight that you should be using the time that you need to get better at your job both on inside work and outside.

Buffer runs a four-day work week. What I would call a gold standard of a four-day work week, which involves full pay but for 32 hours, not 40 hours. One of the main reasons behind that is to let people get the mastery, to give people the space and time to do stuff outside of work that might help them get mastery.

A huge percentage of us at Buffer have side hustles, other businesses, podcasts, blogs, and email newsletters where we are studying things and learning them that are genuinely our interest in sharing them with the world and allowing us to get mastery. I've been harping on for an hour about studies so you know that I'm doing that as well. 

Purpose too. I think Buffer really nails down on that. They have core values. They stand for something so they don't really believe in VC funding. They believe in it and understand the value of it, but they also understand how negative it can be in terms of VC funding is an investment you get from big companies which can be really disorienting for a company because suddenly, you aren't in control of your own destiny and might now be doing what an investor tells you to do. 

If it grows, it grows. If it's fire, it's fire. They spent a lot of money buying out the investors to get complete ownership, but also solely focused on helping small businesses which is a very motivating thing knowing that you are supporting the underdog rather than supporting big businesses is a way to generate purpose. 

I don't think any single one of them has stood out, but I can see in my career that there is no surprise that I ended up picking companies that showcase that they are really pushing the needle in each of those areas and Buffer is a great example of that. 

Brendan: On that autonomy piece and then the other side where five years ago you said that they got rid of all management and stuff, were you at Buffer then? 

Phill: No, I wasn't.

Brendan: You were at Hotjar? 

Phill: Yeah, I was in Hotjar back then. Actually, I would have been in Brandwatch before that, but yeah. 

Brendan: Okay. I guess that's not the lived experience with Buffer, but you probably heard stories about or maybe scenarios where there was no management. It's sort of almost like full autonomy without management, but then there's a level of autonomy now, but there's still some direction needed through management and some sort of, I guess, data organisational structure. I shouldn't say data because organisational structure or structure around things is important. 

Where does that balance it so that we get the effectiveness of yourself as a, I'm assuming, fantastic employee at Buffer, but have that level of autonomy needed that works for you, gives you that motivation, and all that sort of stuff but still a direction. There's still somebody that ultimately has some sort of control over what you're up to? 

Phill: In terms of autonomy, think about it this way, what's the opposite of autonomy? The opposite of autonomy is micromanagement. It's telling people exactly what to do and how to do it. That's a demotivator, so don't do that. 

Now, autonomy isn't telling them nothing to do and not telling them any way of doing it because that's too much. You can't be autonomous there because you don't even know what you're working towards. I think that's why Buffer's period of no management failed. 

Good autonomy is maybe showcasing to people where you want to go, but letting them decide how to do it and more importantly, asking them how to do it. There's a wonderful book called Poles Apart which really analyzes how to change people's minds and also how to get people involved in the project. They really understood the power of questions.

If you are doing a pitch or asking somebody to work on something for you and you just talk about all of the reasons why you should work on this thing, you will struggle to get many people to buy into that. If you make one change to that pitch and you start with a question, maybe the question is how would you go about doing this work? You're dramatically more likely to increase performance. 

This has been proved by a study by Katy Milkman from Penn University. I think this is her. She got college students at the start of the semester, two variants of college students. One was told to think about how they can improve their work and to come up with ways to be more productive. Another was asked the question, how would you give advice to fellow college students on how to improve your work?

Those that were asked a question were sort of brought along in the journey, given that autonomy and encouragement to think on their own two feet, got better results. Not C to A student, but consistently better results. The results that would be akin to dozens of hours of additional tutoring, stuff like that. 

Autonomy for me is really bringing people along on the journey and letting them take part in it. I'll finish with a wonderful example, which is from Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan knew how important autonomy was in getting people to vote for him.

As a leader, he had two choices when he was going for the election back in the '80s, I think. In the televised interviews, you can watch this very famous speech, he does this closing statement. The context behind this, by the way, is that the economy is in the tank and that the economy has been in a downturn for the last couple of years. 

He doesn't say the economy had a downturn in the last couple of years. We're in a recession. This is awful. You shouldn't vote for the incumbent, you should vote for me. He says, ask yourself, this is the question, are you better off now than you were four years ago or are you worse off? 

That question sticks in everybody's mind and has been argued that it helped win him the election because it turned the listeners from a passive, I'm just watching Reagan give a speech to the active. 

I think I've gone a bit off-topic, but it's another example of autonomy. The idea that if you draw people into the discussion, if you get them involved in the decision-making, maybe you showed them the way to go, but you ask them questions to ask how they would go about getting there. You increase performance, you'll increase persuasion, and you'll dramatically increase the motivation that people have to do the activity. 

Brendan: Yeah. It says to me, it's really that coaching mentality guiding along, and it's getting some clarity about where we need to get to sort of direction, but even how to get there, that's where the autonomy sits. Would that be fair to say? 

Phill: Yeah, I think that's very fair. I mean, it's not my field of influence, coaching, but I think showcasing how to get there, I think that's a good way of putting it. 

Brendan: Let's talk about actual performance in the role. You talked a little bit about behaviour, actions, and performance in the role, and if you've got somebody who is not performing at the optimum level, what nudging would you do? What guiding would you do to help them move to this optimal performance level in their role? 

Phill: A lot of things you can do. I'm going to pick something which is just top of mind. I spoke to Dan Pink last week on my show and he's written a brilliant book on the science behind timing and when you should get somebody and ask somebody to perform. He's really shown that the time when you decide to take action can have a big impact on how motivating it is.

There's some fascinating research around midpoints of a project and he says midpoints are really important. It's a really important process to get people to be motivated for the second half. Often, there's a lot of motivation at the beginning, then it wanes, and then you can have a really bad second half if you don't acknowledge the midpoint. 

The study is really interesting. It looked at NBA basketball teams and it found that basketball teams that are one point behind at the halftime break have a higher percentage chance of winning than basketball teams that are one point ahead at the mid-break. 

Now, statistically, that shouldn't happen. If you're a point ahead, you should be more likely to win than if you're a point behind, but there's something behind, there's something in understanding at the halfway point during your team talk that if you're behind, it is a motivator and encourages you to work and to take action. 

If somebody's not performing, it's really important at the halfway stage of the project or between performance reviews to acknowledge that and to say you're behind at the moment and use it as a chance to motivate them for the second half.

There's a lot of evidence that suggests if you're able to highlight that at the halftime point, you'll improve performance in a way that if you're one point behind at a different stage of the match, when you don't have a half time team talk to talk about it, it doesn't give you any, there's a negligible advantage there. I think that's really important, thinking about motivating during points and the timing of motivation as well. 

Brendan: Yeah, it's interesting. I had a recent example with a client who actually did some financial review at the start of the year and our financial year is from July to June. They were a bit behind where they needed to be or where their budget was saying they should have been. 

They had deliberate moments and we had conversations around where they needed to go and bringing the team together and they've had the best five months that they've ever had. A lot to be said for what you just said. 

Phill: Yeah, that's good to hear. Good to hear a bit of validation, but it makes sense as well. 

Brendan: Absolutely. I guess what we should say is, hey, don't underperform for six months and just hope that someone's going to have a half-time talk with you so you can bear on for the second six months. That's not the idea, is it? 

Phill: No, exactly. It's acknowledging it if it is the case, but not making it the case in the first place. 

Brendan: Absolutely. There were a number of things you mentioned at the top of the show in regards to nudges and some behavioural changes that happened. I want to refer to a couple of those because I think that's going to help reinforce the messages were really good practical examples. You mentioned how Copenhagen stopped people from littering. Tell us how this happened. Every city needs to listen. 

Phill: Happily. Copenhagen is very simple. Utilise distinctiveness. We spoke about it at the top of the show, the Von Restorff effect. The idea that distinct assets stand out more likely to be remembered. It's the same reason why those letters from the taxman in Australia were more likely to be open. They were distinct. 

What did Copenhagen do? They painted their bins neon. They made them stand out. They're originally grey. They couldn't be sort of seen amongst the background. They painted the neon, so they stood out. They even painted little neon footprints on the floor in high litter areas so people could figure out where these bins were. They could see the roots of them and it reduced littering by 30%. Massively decreased the amount of littering. 

This is a wonderful example of you could spend an extra £100,000 a year to employ garbage collectors to go and clean up all this litter or you could spend $100 on some paint and get the same result, arguably may be a better result. It's a wonderful example of a nudge. 

Another one I love, again, this is an experiment done by Richard Shotton, who's a British behavioural scientist, who applies this stuff to marketing. He went into a local pub and he asked the bartender sounds like sort of a joke, doesn't it? It's not. It's a study. 

He asked the bartender, what's your best-selling beer? And it was in London. It's a beer called London Pride, typically. It's this ale. Richard Shutton said, do you mind if I slap a banner on this keg where people would see it which says, this is our best-selling beer this week? The bartender said, yeah, and what they did is they monitored the sales before and after the sign went up. 

They found that the sales of that beer increased by two times, and interestingly, the sales of other beers and other alcohol didn't decrease, so the net sales of the whole pub went up. Again, the idea there is social proof. We're more likely to follow the actions of others. We're more likely to take action if others take action. Great example of you seeing that beer is best selling, you might buy two rather than one when you go. 

The final example, we're talking about some of the real key nudges here. We've done social proof. We did distinctiveness. It's a very famous one, which I'm sure all your listeners know, which is scarcity. Scarcity is the idea that we take action if an item is scarce.

If you're trying to buy tickets to Glastonbury, you will act in a way that you won't usually do, simply because those tickets are scarce. This works in your messaging as well. For KFC, they ran this incredible campaign. This is another Australian campaign, actually, this is KFC Australia, and they had a deal which was chips for a dollar. 

They wanted to find what was the best slogan they could use to sell chips for a dollar. They got their marketing team, which is one of the best paid and biggest marketing teams in the world. They spent over a billion dollars on marketing every year. They got them to write 90 different slogans and they came up with incredible slogans, creative genius, stuff like the Colonel's never been so generous. Chips for a dollar, from Perth to Brisbane, they're loved, or Australia around chips for a dollar. More stuff like that. I can't remember it all.

They tested all of these ads, they put them all side by side, sent them out, and did it on Facebook for a huge audience they could advertise to, and then saw the amount of people who actually clicked and then ordered chips on a delivery app.

They found that the most successful message was just pure scarcity. It said chips for a dollar, limited to four per customer. That was the one that encouraged people to take action the most. If you ought to think about it, it's kind of stupid because no one is really buying more than four chips for themselves. Four portions of chips for themselves, it's a useless anchor, but it kicks in the scarcity and encourages us to take action. 

Brendan: It's amazing how many mates come out of the woodwork when you're shouting chips though, isn't it? 

Phill: That's very true. 

Brendan: Chips, they're beautiful. 

Phill: Yeah. 

Brendan: Around nudges again and messaging, is there some bias around what I would say negative nudges work better than positive nudges? 

Phill: There is some evidence behind this. Daniel Kahneman, who's a Nobel Prize winner for his work on behavioural science, author of the book Thinking Fast and Slow, which many of your listeners will know. One of the principles that he discovered and has been championing is loss aversion. This is the idea that losses—something negative—actually feel worse than the equivalent gains. 

An example here is if you win £100 and you're asked how that affects your happiness, you'll save a certain amount. If you lose £100 and you're asked how that affects your happiness, the effect on your happiness will be two times greater than the equivalent gain if you had won a £100. Losses loom larger than gains and they affect us in a worse way. 

There are ways that people apply this. There are lots of examples of leadership. The one that always comes to mind for me is when you try to leave Amazon Prime. If you try and leave Amazon—Amazon is famous for applying lots of these principles and they really apply loss aversion when you try and leave. Most subscription services, when you leave, will say something along the lines of, we're sad to see you go. By the way, if you ever want to come back, we offer all these great things and list them in bullet point order. 

Amazon could do that. They've got a number of great things that they could list that Prime offers, but they don't. Instead, they say something along the lines of, Phill, you've saved £315 in savings from delivery fees since you joined Amazon Prime. Are you sure you want to lose those savings? From now on, if you ditch Amazon Prime, you will lose those savings. 

They're just playing on loss aversion. They know that losses feel painful and so telling me that I would lose out on £315 if I continued purchasing the same amount and didn't have Prime is an incredible influencer. Not all of them have to be negative, but I think there are a lot of good examples of how highlighting losses can be far more influential and motivational than highlighting equivalent gains. 

Brendan: Geez, mate, I just thought I have to cancel my Amazon Prime account in about 28 days because I bought some stuff and I wanted free delivery. 

Phill: Don't forget, you'll be hurt, honestly if you get rid of.

Brendan: I better psychologically prepare myself, otherwise I'm going to [...]. 

Phill: Write down exactly when you're going to do it, what computer are you going to do on? Make a little commitment device for yourself.

Brendan: Here you go. Shout out, Mr Bezos. You're not going to get me. You've got my wife, but you're not going to get me. Phill, what I'd like you to do is if we think about leaders and listeners of this podcast, all interested in leadership or our leaders themselves, what would you say to them? What advice would you give them as an entrée? This episode is obviously an entrée. 

You've got a Nudge Podcast, which is absolutely fantastic. What would be the entrée for them that if this has resonated understanding them and they need to influence, they need to have effective messaging when they're working with their teams and influencing people? What would that entrée suggest for them to go into? 

Phill: First thing to remember is as a leader you are influencing naturally. You can't get out, you can't get away from it. We shared that Stanley Milgram example of there's no way around it, you will naturally be influencing. It's actually, I say, in your responsibility to educate yourself on that influence and to understand how it works in order to understand how people make decisions based on your influence. 

There are a few things I'd recommend. I'd recommend picking up a copy of Robert Cialdini's book, Influence. Robert Cialdini is sort of the godfather of a lot of consumer psychology. In his 1984 book, Influence, which has been republished in the last couple of years. It's up to date, don't worry. 

It's a fantastic resource for any leader to really understand the seven ways that people influence one another and particularly how leaders influence as well. If you read that cover to cover, you'll learn an awful lot about how people in your organisation make decisions. 

There's a wonderful book called Joy of Work by Bruce Daisley and he looks at lots of different things but leadership being one of them. He takes the same approach that I've applied, which is looking at the evidence behind how people make decisions and the evidence behind what motivates and shares that. I definitely recommend looking at that. 

I also recommended Drive by Daniel Pink as well earlier in the show and I think that's a great one. But definitely looking at Influence. The book Influence is a good stepping stone and understanding that. 

There's a course that I run, it's a free course, completely free to take part in. It's called The Science of Marketing course. It doesn't seem particularly relevant for leaders but it does basically a more detailed thing that I did today which is showcasing each of these principles and showcasing what they are, how they work, and how people apply them sometimes in marketing settings but also in leadership settings as well. 

If that's a tool of interest, you can go to nudgepodcast.com, click the course, and you'll see it there. That's probably not number one. I would say go and read some of these books first and if they tickle your fancy, then maybe go check out the course. 

Brendan: Yeah, fantastic, mate. Thanks for sharing with us. You've given us the entrée, the main meal, the desert, and the second dessert as well. I did notice your free course. I haven't done it yet. I plan to do it, absolutely, and even after this episode has made me even more intrigued about going into it and understanding it a little bit more and how we apply it through leadership. 

Phill: Thanks for that. 

Brendan: Who or what has had the greatest impact on your own leadership journey? 

Phill: It's an interesting one. I think for me, it's probably a choice that a lot of people wouldn't give, but some of the leaders that I really admire are sort of fellow people who are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to educate people and showcase that there's a sort of world of psychology that you can apply. 

For me, the leader in that field at the moment is Rory Sutherland. He's head of the behavioural science team at Ogilvy in the UK. He's just a wonderful character, showcases all these irrational ways that we make decisions and showcases them in a way, which is just incredibly engaging and really gets people to sort of stand up and take action.

I think I consider him a bit of a leader. I've had him on Nudge as well. He's brilliant. One incredible mind and an incredible person to talk to and he's able to frame things in a way to really help you understand them. I definitely would consider him as a good leader in that regard. 

Brendan: In your humble opinion, what's his greatest quality? 

Phill: He's a storyteller. We have a bias for stories, obviously. We've evolved to share stories from around the campfire at the movie theatre and they're just more memorable and more engaging. Rory is wonderful at telling stories that have evidential backing and are valuable to listen to and telling them in a way that gets people to remember them. 

I think one of the problems that definitely marketers have but leaders as well is that so many of the good principles that you should follow are a bit bland, a bit vanilla, and difficult to remember. It means that all too often, we just follow our gut rather than following the evidence. 

Whereas Rory will share the same insight in a way that makes you remember it. It's a story. It's a tale, it's a word of caution, and that's really valuable because if you can craft something into a story that sticks in the mind and if it sticks in the mind, it means people are more likely to take action on that.

Brendan: Yeah, absolutely. You've had some fantastic experiences through your journey, and we're going to wrap this up very soon, but is there anything in your own experience framed around the leadership subject that we're not talking about that we should be?

Phill: Definitely something that surprised me is this idea that weaknesses are well worth sharing. There's so much evidence that highlighting weaknesses is a valuable thing to do to build warmth and to motivate people. I think you see a lot of leaders, and this is especially true for politicians who really everybody sort of takes them as the ultimate leader and works down. You see these leaders who just only ever showcase strengths.

It's a classic politician thing to do. Never ever admit weakness, even when you clearly have a lot of weaknesses. I think it's a huge mistake because there's endless evidence that says if you're competent, showcasing that weakness will dramatically increase how much people like you, how much people engage with you, and how much people motivate you. 

I think as leaders, something to take on board is don't feel like you have to always be highlighting strengths and positivity. Understand that weaknesses are ultimately your friend and if you flaunt them in the right way, you'll massively increase your motivation and your influence. 

Brendan: Mate, fantastic insight. Thank you very much for what you shared today. It's been absolutely fascinating from my side. I know the listeners and watchers will find it fascinating as well in their application across their own leadership journey. I should articulate too that when I refer to leadership, I'm not just talking about organisational leadership. I'm talking about you may be the leader of your friendship group, you may be the leader of your family, you may be the leader in a volunteer organisation, or you may be the leader in some community organisation you're involved in. 

There's such a broad aspect around leadership, and ultimately, it's about how you work with people and the right intent about working with people and helping elevate people, which is my belief in leadership. You've shown fantastic insight into those thoughts today, mate. You may be a Chelsea supporter, but I think you're a pretty decent bloke. Thank you for being a fantastic guest on The Culture of Things podcast. 

Phill: Right back at you, Brendan. You're an epic case. It's been great to come on. So happy to chat, so really appreciate you inviting me on. 

Brendan: It's been an absolute pleasure. I have to say, at the end of this podcast, a nice place for our YouTube channel, but it's been fascinating listening to you because when I've heard your podcast, you've got a really great voice for podcasting as well. It's been a pleasure for me just hearing this lovely voice come through the earphones, mate, so great job. There you go. I've got a man crush now, haven't I? 

Phill: Just on the voice. Yeah, a voice for radio, I think. Thanks, mate. Cheers.

Brendan: You're too far away, mate. I'm not into long-distance relationships. I'm sorry. Thanks for your time, buddy. 

Phill: Thanks for having me. Cheers.

Brendan: Phill is a Chelsea FC supporter, but thankfully, he turned out to be one of the decent ones. A lot fascinated me about the conversation with Phill, but above all, it was his depth of knowledge around psychology, human behaviour, and the weapons of social seduction. 

For more information, check out Phill's podcast Nudge. It's a great listen and you'll learn a lot about the science behind great marketing. Leadership involves taking action. What have you learned today that you'll take action on in your leadership journey? 

These were my three key takeaways from the conversation with Phill.

My first key takeaway, leaders understand their influence. Educate yourself on the influence you have over people on how people make decisions. Influence is powerful and with great power comes great responsibility. To use responsibility wisely, leaders must understand their influence. 

My second key takeaway, leaders are likeable. Rita Pierson did a Ted Talk titled, Every kid needs a champion. The key line I remember most is kids don't learn from teachers they don't like. Guess what? Employees won't follow a leader they don't like. Be confident in your role and show your weaknesses, that's how you increase your likability as a leader. 

My third key takeaway is leaders motivate people. To navigate the journey to motivation, follow the map, mastery, autonomy, and purpose from Daniel Pink. Mastery is a desire to improve and seeing your potential is unlimited. Autonomy is controlling what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with. Purpose is connecting your role to the greater cause. Leaders follow the map and motivate people. 

In summary, my three key takeaways were, leaders understand their influence, leaders are likeable, and leaders motivate people. What are your key takeaways from the interview? Let me know at thecultureofthings.com on YouTube or via our socials.

Thanks for joining me and remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation. 

Outtro (music): Thank you for listening to The Culture of Things podcast with Brendan Rogers. Please visit thecultureofleadership.com to access the show notes. If you love The Culture of Things podcast, please subscribe, rate and give a review on Apple podcasts and remember a healthy culture is your competitive advantage.