The alternate universe tactic for stakeholders

One of the hardest jobs that applied behavioral scientists have is getting stakeholders to focus on behaviors, rather than emotions or cognitions. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on three tactics for creating a behavioral outcome and while none of them is a silver bullet, at least one of them usually manages to do the job.

They all work on the same central premise: that people find it easier to make decisions through comparisons. They’re designed to be entertaining (high promoting pressure) but also simple enough that anyone in the room can use and understand them (low inhibiting pressure). And they all start with an emotion or cognition that a stakeholder expresses.

For our examples, let’s use an emotional outcome: “I want users to be obsessed with our product.” And because it feels appropriate, let’s say that was expressed by a turtleneck-wearing CEO named Steve.

The first tactic is using Alternative Universes.

“We’ve all seen a sci-fi movie where there are alternative universes. There is Original Steve and Steve Prime, and you know Steve Prime is the bad Steve because he has a mustache. And then he shaves his mustache and they end up in some dramatic fight scene where you have to figure out which Steve is the original so you can shoot the other one and keep them from taking over the multiverse.”

“Now Steve and Steve Prime are identical in every possible way except Steve Prime is from a universe that is obsessed with our product. You’ve got to shoot him…how would you know he is from the universe that is obsessed and Original Steve isn’t?”

Now we’ve got people laughing (entertaining, check!) and everyone can relate (easy, check!) and you can start to push on the behavioral bit. You’ve got two jobs: be the buzzer when someone says something that isn’t observable and provide suggestions of potential behaviors if people are struggling.

So if someone says “Steve Prime loves the phone!” you have to be quick to shut that down. “Bzzzzz, you just killed Original Steve and now we’re doomed.” (Bonus points if you sing “I don’t know what love is…but I want you to show me!”) Be funny but firm on this; you have to shut down anything that isn’t a physically observable behavior.

If people aren’t getting there, you can always make suggestions. “What about owning our phone? Original Steve doesn’t own one of our phones, Steve Prime does…is that enough?” 

The ‘enough’ part of that is key – is owning the phone alone enough to say that someone is truly obsessed? If both of them owned our phone, would they both be obsessed? Why or why not? Provocative questions are key, because disagreement is good. If everyone rushes to the behavior, that is likely a false consensus and will come back to bite you later.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the second tactic I use, Outliers.