 In this episode we'll be talking about how we can use the quirks of human decision making, what if we got it all wrong about experience design and finally how we can help teams to solve problems in less time. If you're interested in that keep watching and here's the guest for this episode. Hey I'm Luke and this is the service design show. Hi guys my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome to the service design show. If you're trying to design services that have a positive impact on people's lives and are good for business then you've come to the right place because here on this channel you get the chance to learn the real reasons why some services fail and others succeed. For that we go beyond the usual tools and methods and deep dive into topics like design thinking, customer experience, organizational change and creative leadership. If you're interested in these topics now that we bring a new video every week so if you don't want to miss anything subscribe to the channel. My guest in this episode is Luke Betty. Luke is the founder of Sprint Valley which is a studio that helps organizations use psychology to create better products and services and recently Luke finished a year-long research project on how fast food brands use behavioral economics to shift buying behavior using manual design. In the next 30 minutes we'll be talking about how we can use the weird quirks of human decision making. We'll be talking about what if we got it all wrong about experience design and finally how can we help teams to solve problems in less time. So that was it for the introduction and now let's jump straight into the interview with Luke. Welcome to the show Luke. Good to be here Mark. Luke awesome to have you on the show because we're going to talk about topics that haven't been on the show that often and we're going to talk a lot about psychology but let me start with the first question I ask everyone and that is you know do you remember your first encounter with service design? Yeah absolutely so I've been in sort of I guess the marketing world for 10-12 years something like that and I grew increasingly frustrated with the agencies that I was in and they were coming up with all these kind of crazy weird and wonderful ways to reinvent the client's business and you know all sounded really exciting but I think certainly over the last five or six years what we found is that the briefs we were working on were changing right we were going from dealing with the marketing department to all of a sudden dealing with IT or HR or operations or finance and all of a sudden you needed to understand how that crazy idea was going to play out internally across all of those different business units and I felt like I guess because I've tended to work in smaller businesses there's been a lot of sort of self-learning and very much kind of self-taught and I guess I just felt like I needed some kind of framework something substantial to kind of structure the way that we were approaching these different problems and I think at the time I probably would have been researching you know customer experience design or customer experience frameworks or or that kind of thing and I ended up getting introduced to LEGO's serious play and kind of thought okay this is great so learn how you know LEGO kind of run their innovation process and went and went and did that and you know really fell in love with this whole I'll call it design thinking but this way of helping teams come together to problem solve and then got introduced to uh the magic black book yeah the black and do you know what do you know what made me feel like oh this is where I need to be when I got this was it's like it's a textbook right so it's not like somebody who's run a business and then just you know wants to share their expertise you know it felt academic and it felt um I don't know it felt really robust and I yeah from there just started exploring other agencies and you know 31 volts and you know I go and uh AJ and smart and all those guys and just immerse myself and I suppose I'd probably been doing service design for a long time but hadn't known it was called that and yeah just you know just for something we've heard a lot though yeah I guess because it touches so many different things you know so many components and parts that yeah expertise and I think everybody's in it in some level if your business delivers a service so absolutely yeah it's it's been even said I think Mauricio Manier said every company is doing service designer by definition so either either they do it consciously or by accident yeah absolutely let's dive into the topics you've sent me because there will be uh super interesting I guess we're going to co-create the questions you know the format you've got the question starters I've got your topics so are you ready let's do it all right topic number one uh topic number one is called decision making okay so which question started will you pick okay so my question is how can we take advantage of all of the weird and wonderful quirks of human decision making um so I'm gonna kind of I don't know how many people are sort of familiar with frameworks like kahneman's system one system two so I'm just going to do like a quick primer so sure go ahead yeah um you know Danny kahneman wrote a book a little while back called thinking fast and slow and the nuts and bolts of that is that your brain is comprised of these two different systems so you've got system one which is fast it's automatic it's low energy it's instinctive so if I was going to say to you mark do you prefer dogs or cats what would you say I would say cats there you go right like no energy at all required to answer that so I'm gonna show you something now that's kind of weird though can you see that okay I think so yeah okay so I want you now just to imagine that you've landed on an alien planet and I want you to tell me which of these organisms is called kiki and which one is called buba is it the one yeah the people who are listening to the podcast you need to watch the episode I would say buba is the one with the rounded edges okay and kiki's on with the sharp edges yeah okay so let's just stop there for a second was that difficult to answer not at all how is it that you can answer a question with no logic whatsoever that easily like I just find it absolutely fascinating I mean do you have any thoughts on like how you how you were able there's no logic to that so how do you think maybe we're able to the only thing I could say is that it's based on your the experience you've had in the past so it's like conditioning your brain something like that yeah kind of kind of it's actually it's actually a little bit weirder than that so like 99% of the people across the world make the same response so they say that the spiky one is kiki and then you some people think maybe that's because like the the letter k maybe that's got sharp edges but they've actually tried it with with communities that don't use the roman alphabet at all so it's nothing to do with the shape of the letter actually what they say it's to do with is when you say the word kiki in your mind even if you're not saying it out loud you activate all the same muscles that you use to say that word so when you say kiki you actually bear your teeth slightly and the idea is that that triggers off concepts around biting that triggers off other concepts around sharp and therefore able to use that to try and answer the question about which one feels like a spiky sounding word or a soft sounding yeah and I just you know it blows my mind you know it's like what our body is doing there is using system one it's saying hey there's no rational way to answer this question I'm going to dive in and just use whatever data I can to try and form an opinion the flip side of that would be system two so if I said to you what's 9.24 times 13.32 like yeah that that kind of feeling of mental effort is is system two and I think what what we find generally when we're working with people is clients usually accidentally are trying to get their customers to make a system two decision and our job is to try and find ways to make more of that feel like a system one decision and there's some I don't know I guess I just feel like there are some really interesting peculiarities that come out of this system one system two things so you know take the example of you know within a service experience how do I decide whether you know a price feels good value or not that's like quite a system two decision to make right yeah yeah so you know give you an example of that you know when Apple launched the iWatch they had a real challenge they were bringing a brand new kind of category to life essentially and as a consumer how do I decide whether the pricing on that product feels like good value I don't really have a benchmark to play against and their solution you'll probably remember was to tell everybody that well it could cost as much as $17,000 at the at the top end and this is a a really interesting one because what it does is it it frames that bottom end price of $349 and it's a concept called anchoring you know a lot of people are familiar with that that the first piece of information that we get creates a lens that affects the way that we view all subsequent information and I just think there's some really fascinating exciting ways that can back up as other things that happen as well so another rule of thumb might be that they're called heuristics another heuristic could be that numbers with more syllables are bigger now that's true if you're talking in the billions but if we were going to take a price like 56 pounds 99 that's seven syllables if I actually increased that price to 56 pounds that's got four syllables actually even though it's a higher price because there's less syllables we'll feel that the number is easiest processing or it won't feel smaller we've run experiments where we've improved sales like 15 16 percent just by increasing the price just a little bit to change the number of syllables in the that's scary yeah well it is but I think it you know I see all of these things like paints right you know when you're being creative and you're thinking about building a service experience or designing a product these are all things that you need to have an awareness of to make sure that you're making the experience as as kind of powerful both for the customer and you know ultimately for the business as possible so yeah yeah for me that this whole area about how we make decisions I think yeah I think it's just really fascinating and you've already gave an example how this applies to services but what are some common examples that you think of how the service design community could benefit of this because pricing is of course sure yeah so pricing is one thing so albeit you know obviously an important one but okay let's take another example so there's a guy called Charles Spence at Oxford University and he does a load of work on how certain sensory information triggers other sensory kind of perceptions and I'll explain I'll explain example so he ran an experiment in a restaurant where he gave all the different diners different weight cutlery and after their meal he asked them to just give some scores and some ratings on the quality of the food and what he found was that diners who had heavier cutlery tended to rate the food as being higher quality than diners who had lighter cutlery and so I guess this is the idea that we've learned over time that generally heavier stuff tends to be more valuable material but because of that it's doing this it's essentially creating this lens that we use to interpret the experience that we've had yeah another example would be a great experiment where they had a bunch of people coming in for an interview and the person that they met on the door greeting them to the building they escorted them up to the interview in the lift and while they're in the lift half the people the lady said to them hey could you just hold my cup of coffee for a moment while I get something on my back took the coffee back carried on through anyway after their interview they brought them back and they said hey look we want to know more about how we can improve the experience for people coming for an interview and just wanted to know how would you describe the personality of the person that met you and they found that the people that were holding the warm cup of coffee tended to describe the person as having a warm personality and so I think you know it makes sense to start thinking about not just about how do you activate people's expectations of what's going to happen next in an experience as a lens but how might you activate like the mindset that you would want them to have you know if a customer's got a problem solved or has to be quite visionary and imagining a future outcome what could you do to uh yeah kind of make that more likely to happen by activating a concept so yeah I just this whole area for me I just think is you know really really exciting and the interesting question for me becomes at at at what the word authenticity you know I right at at which moment they actually deliver better experience versus experiencing a better experience but look we we we gotta move on so maybe uh maybe we'll touch upon that later in the uh in the episode but for now let's leave it up for this for this topic one and move over to topic number two right that's good all right this one is just as interesting I guess as the previous one and it's called memory formation okay so we have a question starter yeah totally so uh my question is what if we've got it all wrong about experience design so that's a quite interesting question yeah so uh I've seen I think a couple of your guests have touched on this but you know maybe I can sort of help pad some of this out a little bit so um you know if I was going to ask you uh where your perfect holiday would be where would you say like I would say yeah it depends sure like a location like I did like the dream holiday like a lot of people might say like on the beach or yeah but if you were then going to think about the kind of situation where you couldn't leave that holiday with a memory of it you know would you really choose the same place and and it's this concept of the you know you have the experiencing self and the experiencing self is concerned with this 300 millisecond window of reality called now and then you've got the remembering self and the remembering self's job is to tell stories about what's happened and what's going to happen and I think so much of the rhetoric in service design and design thinking is really focused on improving the experience the now how it feels in the moment and actually I think what a lot of the research suggests is there might be a sort of a shortcut to that because ultimately it's not the experiencing self that's deciding whether or not they're going to come back and spend money with you again it's definitely not the experiencing self that's deciding whether they want to recommend you to friends it's the remembering self and right as a way that you can design services and experiences to optimise for people's memory of the experience that ultimately it is as important as making the experience feel good in the yeah so this is this kind of concept of peak end so yeah you know you've kind of heard about it before right you know absolutely we build our service maps it's all about those individual discrete chapters in the journey and we optimise for those but the reality is when it comes to remembering we think about the biggest departure from our expert our expectation positive or negative and how that chapter ended and we sort of we form our memory based on those two data points and I give you a give you an example of I think a brand in this really really well so a few years ago I went to a restaurant called The Fat Duck in Bray by a guy called Heston Blumenthal really creative chef and people often ask you know what was the kind of the standout experience of that and you know we arrived at 1235 when we were told we got greeted by name felt great but obviously nobody else was arriving at that particular time so you know simple simple service magic if you like the food was great but the expectation is already pretty high for that they ended really strong they gave us a nice little signed card so that was great but actually the biggest departure from my experience or sort of my expectation was the 45 minutes that you spend on hold trying to book the restaurant and what they did was they actually played somebody narrating Alice in Wonderland down the phone while you're waiting on hold so by the time somebody picks up the phone 45 minutes in you're actually kind of annoyed that they're breaking it like a really and I just you know I love that because it's this idea of finding something that's just mundane and it's almost I'd say those mundane parts of people's expectations the experience those are the places where you can have a lot of fun and actually probably shape quite a lot of memories so yeah yeah precisely I just I love it I absolutely love it so so what's needed to be aware as a designer of these moments how do we we tune ourselves into yeah being more aware so I think what I'd say is I think you need to be quite conscientious about how you're designing your peak and your end moment so normally what we would do is take sort of a whole service journey and break them up into we would just call them chapters so a chapter might be you know I don't know your first purchase as a as an example and then thinking about mapping what's the expectation line throughout that experience and then thinking that where are the points where expectation are either negative or low and is there anything that we could do here that would just kind of flick the needle on that so I suppose an answer to question it's be intentional about where you want the peak moment to be and play around how you could create that and just make sure that every chapter has a strong ending and if you can work on those two parts about that moment I'd say those are really the first bits to really consider I think two people that pop into my mind who talked about this is Adam Lawrence who of course talked about the dramatic structure and the storytelling and the whole theater experience how that's designed and in a quite recent episode Cheryl Lee Ryan touched upon the remembering designing for the remembering self right that's a yeah absolutely yeah good episode what are the things that possibly you're regarding this topic what questions do you have when you think about memory formation probably what the most important question the most important question it is of kind of memory formation probably how do you think about using it's actually probably how do you make sure you end strong at each chapter I think that's the most challenging part you know it's it's easy to find those areas where you know expectation is really low but trying to find those moments where you can end a particular chapter in a particularly positive way certainly where you're doing something more transactional without it being kind of just gimmicky for the sake of it I think it's actually really really complex and and just takes a lot of trial and error to get right so yeah it would be interesting if people who are watching or listening this episode would leave some comments you know from examples case studies which they see these things because I really I have a lot of projects that go through my mind right now you know with how the ending could be even more positive we're moving on we're moving on to topic number three and topic number three is and there we go it's called problem solving in group dynamics look look has gone so it's picking up there's look again okay so my question is you know how can we help teams solve problems in less time that's what we all want which is what we all want and we're all expected to do at increasing speed um so I'm kind of throwing experiments that you hear I hope you don't worry I hope you don't mind but so there was go ahead there's a guy called Ash in the 1950s in the States and he ran an experiment around conformity where he brings a bunch of people into a room and you're invited in and what he's going to show you on the wall is a whole bunch of lines that are different lengths and the task is pretty simple you've got to tell him which of these lines is the same length as this one um and what you don't know is that everybody else in the room is actually in the experiment as well and they're going to say the wrong answer and see how you react and what they found is that on the first question your answer as you think you'll give the right answer but on the second answer when you see everybody else answering differently people tend to just kind of go with the group and um I find it it's quite incredible when you watch some of the footage of these experiments because you can literally see the person totally confused why the group are answering wrong but they still you know they still go along with it anyway and so um I guess I'm really interested in how things like hierarchy affect how teams work so this concept of the you know the 80-20 workshop or 80-20 meeting where 80% of the contribution comes out of 20% of the people in the room and people don't speak up because they're afraid of what their boss is going to think or they don't think their ideas good enough and I think when I got into the whole service design world I started understanding why a lot of the methods work you know from a psychological perspective you know the concept of asking a question to a room getting people to work on their solution in isolation and then reporting back as a really simple way of getting around that conformity piece I just think is I think is really beautiful you know really really really smart that was the question that was playing through my head is you know what does this mean for co-creation that we hold so there in in our field right well I think I think the answer is you without maybe without knowing it you're you're kind of applying the psychology in a really in a really creative way it's you know if it's a problem to solve don't ask the group to solve it together get everybody in isolation and and come back and you know it's that when when groups come together you tend to get convergent thinking and a certain part of the problem solving you know you need you need divergent thinking so um yeah don't let people talk about it too much we had a guest on one of the previous episodes Elaine and I think and she was talking about co-creation in the Asian culture in China specifically and she said that they had to redesign some of the service design methods to actually fit in in the culture for instance she gave an example of what they called as a method the anonymous posted so everyone could up could put up ideas that would be thrown in a big hat and nobody would know who formulated the idea to get around the hierarchies and stuff like that yeah that's yeah really interesting I do wonder whether they use things like how successful things like lego series play or yeah some of the other methods might be in uh you know in some of those cultures I'm sure they I'm sure they work yeah yeah but again with lego series play would be also quite challenging because you're on stage designing your uh things right through yeah very true very true the anonymities may be important yeah and have you found that this is specifically um uh related to problem solving or is this um do you see any difference uh if you look at this from um I don't know ideation or research phase um yeah so I think um I think the convergent thinking part working on problems in isolation then reporting back yeah absolutely yeah there's that that that early ideation phase is really important I think the other thing is you know Parkinson's law is that the task that you have fills the time that you have so um this idea that I just loved from you know the design sprint methodology around time boxing and actually just give people less time than they really feel they need on certain parts of the problem solving because do you know what you'll make progress it might not be perfect it might not be comfortable but actually you'll sort of force the team through some of that um deliberation uh because I think it's also really really important and I think the other thing that I'm really interested in and I haven't I haven't quite cracked is like mindset so I've sort of mentioned earlier about how you activate mindsets and there's been experiments that have shown that you know you show people uh the apple logo and then show people the windows logo and ask them to kind of work on a creative task generally the people that have seen the apple logo will come up with a higher volume of ideas I don't know it's really stupid but it's just because people have the mindset of being more creative than that kind of for whatever reason helps unblock that I do think that it would be really interesting to think about a a product or a service that systematically gets people into the right kinds of mindsets for kind of workshops but may and maybe that's for a future project but I think there's definitely something there I think there's definitely something I'm thinking about athletes you know they they have a sort of ritual to get in a sort of specific mind mind state yeah and I did the same thing so it's the whole conditioning piece so if I've got like a a piece of work that requires real focused thought I always drink Earl Grey and I will always listen to classical music only only when I'm doing that particular piece of work so that I know the next I've got to come into it if I can complete that ritual I'll kind of get in that in that mindset more but I just wonder how you could help teams do the same did the same thing look as everyone else on the show you're getting the opportunity to ask a question to the people who are listening or watching this episode is there something you'd like to ask us yeah it's a bit of a big question is that okay go ahead all right okay so um so we're doing some work at the moment around sort of the future of work and uh in five years time you're going to be able to buy for a thousand dollars a handheld device that's got the same computing power as a human brain like we're five years away from that the UK government are currently predicting that by 2030 unemployment will reach 40 to 50 percent okay so this is automation the rest of it really big stuff and really not very far away and I'm really interested in what that's going to feel like you know when you've got half the population unemployed in reality it's going to be universal basic income so they're not going to need to get a job I would love to know if anybody else is interested in that problem and if they've done any thinking on it and also what kind of services and products are we going to need in a world where you don't need to work anymore that that kind of pressure isn't really there I think that's just a pressing interesting complicated problem if anyone's got any thoughts yeah definitely definitely get in touch I'd love to hear what you've got what you're thinking and I guess if this is your mindset then you make you definitely make different decisions in your design process right totally yeah absolutely yeah when that that kind of money constraint pieces removed I think there's a whole bunch of other stuff that becomes important about you know your sense of self when that becomes uncoupled from what you earn and what your job is boy we're going to think differently about how we make decisions and how we fill our time and yeah what kind of things and tools and experiences we want to achieve whatever goals we're going to have in that world so yeah yeah so I would love to know what people think about that any as a final question you know if people are interested in learning more about the topics we talked about what kind of resources which you recommend what are some of the go-to things uh so I'm actually finding that there are some amazing Facebook groups at the moment on this so um few different places so behavioraleconomics.com is great I would try reading Thinking Fast and Slow it's not a very interesting read the Daniel Carnival one it's a bit heavy going but there's some really great videos and Ted talks about it so I definitely I would definitely start there um but then there are some yeah I maybe I'll share some links in terms of some of the Facebook to be relevant yeah well Adam is a happy sharing knowledge and yeah good ones to try out so what is your biggest insight from this episode let me know down below in the comments and if you enjoyed this video I'd really appreciate it if you give a thumbs up and if you know someone who might benefit from what we've just discussed share this video with them if you'd like to learn more check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.ServiceDesignShow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show thanks again for watching and I look forward to see you in the next video