Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change
von Matt Wallaert
What made the iPhone work is really two whys that together bridged what psychologists call a counterfactual world—the world that doesn’t exist but could—with the one we live in. Apple imagined a world in which people used their phones everywhere, all the time, to honor a vast range of motivations. Then it built a device that guided people to do that, not by “challenging the status quo” in every aspect but by asking “Why would people want to do that in the first place?” and “Why aren’t they doing it already?” Daniel Kahneman (and his partner Amos Tversky, who could not receive the prize posthumously but was a true partner in all the work) discovered a psychological construct we call prospect theory: equivalent losses hurt worse than equivalent gains feel good. What that implies is that a reduction in inhibiting pressure will generally be more effective than the equivalent addition of a promoting pressure, particularly when it eliminates an inhibiting pressure entirely.
To do that, we write a behavioral statement: an articulation of the world we are trying to create, written from an explicitly behavioral perspective. This description of the counterfactual world, which we realize exists through our insights and insight validation, lays the foundation for our next steps on the IDP yellow brick road, namely pressure mapping and eventually intervention design.
When we want to change behavior, we start with a potential insight—an observation about the distance between our current world and the counterfactual one in which we want to live. We then validate the insight and flesh it out into a behavioral statement, which we use to map the pressures that are creating the current state of the behavior and thus are the levers we push to change it.
First—and hopefully this is obvious—you have to be transparent. Put it up on the wall where everyone can see it, mention it at every town hall, orient your planning process toward it. The whole point of a good behavioral statement is that it can allow for strong decision making because you can explicitly compare available options against the behaviors they are likely to produce.
In addition to the benefit of one behavior not outweighing the cost to another, the same can be said of interventions. So our statement becomes If your outcome behavior is not the result of any of the motivations of the population or the benefit of that behavior or intervention does not outweigh the cost to an alternative motivation, it is unethical.
The observations jibed with the data, giving us what scientists call convergent validity: evidence that is greater than the sum of its parts because disparate sources support the same conclusion. Getting data to agree with data is all well and good, but being able to observe qualitatively what also appears to be true quantitatively is better.
"What made the iPhone work is really two whys that together bridged what psychologists call a counterfactual world—the world that doesn’t exist but could—with the one we live in. Apple imagined a world in which people used their phones everywhere, all the time, to honor a vast range of motivations. Then it built a device that guided people to do that, not by “challenging the status quo” in every aspect but by asking “Why would people want to do that in the first place?” and “Why aren’t they doing it already?”"
"Daniel Kahneman (and his partner Amos Tversky, who could not receive the prize posthumously but was a true partner in all the work) discovered a psychological construct we call prospect theory: equivalent losses hurt worse than equivalent gains feel good. What that implies is that a reduction in inhibiting pressure will generally be more effective than the equivalent addition of a promoting pressure, particularly when it eliminates an inhibiting pressure entirely."
"Even among Americans, people with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be more oriented toward uniqueness than their low-SES counterparts. Because when you’re high-SES, you tend to be secure in your sense of belonging simply because you have what everyone else wants, so you spend your resources trying to differentiate yourself from other high-SES folks. Vice versa for low-SES: you already stand out, so you’re looking for a tribe to fit with."
"It took almost a year from insight to scale, but the core of the process, from insight to pilot, was about eight weeks. This is fairly typical: roughly a week to get your arms around the insight, two weeks of validation and exploration of potential pressures, a week of intervention design and selection, two weeks to get the pilots up and running, and two weeks to get back some early quantitative and qualitative signals for validation."
"The tendency to focus on processes over outcomes is actually a natural psychological operation: because we spend the majority of our cognitive resources on what is happening right now—which makes sense, since we do actually have to act in order to create change—we’re biased toward focusing on those immediate actions and how we’re doing them, rather than on their outcomes. Means over ends, or whats and hows over whys."
"Because we typically are creating behavioral statements that are about getting people to do something more and not less, we have a natural tendency to gravitate toward promoting pressures. Which means that one of the reasons focusing on inhibiting pressures tends to be so powerful is that it is the set of pressures we have most likely ignored. This ignorance means it is fertile ground for new interventions."
"Now we’ve got a sentence that is easier to read if we bullet it out. If: your outcome behavior is not the result of any of the population’s motivations or the benefit of your outcome behavior or an intervention to produce it does not outweigh the cost to an alternative motivation or you are unwilling to publicly describe and take responsibility for the outcome behavior or intervention it is unethical."
- →The observations jibed with the data, giving us what scientists call convergent validity: evidence that is greater than the sum of its parts because disparate sources support the same conclusion. Getting data to agree with data is all well and good, but being able to observe qualitatively what also appears to be true quantitatively is better.
- →Whether an intervention succeeds or fails depends on how we define our behavioral goal. If the desired outcome was cooking Indian food, my Thai-seeming cuisine failed spectacularly. But if the goal is bringing people together, first you decide on the people you want and then, like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, you build it so they come.
- →The beauty of this process is twofold. First, there is a clear and direct line between what each individual person is accountable for and the behavioral goal of the entire organization; everyone knows why what they do matters and has an autonomous zone that they can entirely own. Second, it creates clear hierarchies to that accountability.
- →That’s all a potential insight really is: the recognition of some potential split and the opportunity to move closer to the utopian end of the spectrum. A potential insight expresses the distance between those two universes and, once validated, allows us to start understanding the gap and how to design interventions that bridge it.
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