Build a Business People Can’t Imagine Losing

0:00You know, many firms out there today spend a fortune on perks, culture programs, and engagement surveys, and still sometimes feel like they're maybe one meeting away from their entire team just engaging. Today's guest tells us maybe we've been aiming at some of the wrong targets. The most powerful force in business isn't strategy, compensation, or even flexibility. It's love.

0:30Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John J.S. My guest today is Marcus Buckingham. Marcus is a longtime researcher of high performance at work, a pioneer of the strengths movement, and the author of multiple bestselling books. We're going to talk about his newest book, Design Love in How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. So, Marcus, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So, I'll get the first easy softball question out of the way. I'm sure pretty much everybody asks you this, but love doesn't seem like a business term or certainly hasn't seemed like a business term for a lot of folks.

1:08Are you getting pushback there or are you trying to redefine how people even think about it? Well, no, you're right. I mean, it isn't really a good business term, but my background as a researcher is just I'm always studying extreme positive outcomes. So for teams, it's productivity or retention. And for customers, it's loyalty, obviously, and advocacy for your brand or your product. And when you study people that have an extreme positive experience, the word that people reach for instinctively as humans is love. People will say, I love working on that team. I love that leader. I love that product.

1:44I love that restaurant. I love that hotel. And for the longest time, John, I mean, you know, mea culpa. But for the longest time, I listened to what people say. And of course, there's two different kinds of research. You can do quantitative research where you're actually measuring people's experiences and relating it to performance. And you can do qualitative research. And when you're doing qualitative research, you're supposed to really just listen to the words people use and then take them at their word. And I kept changing it. I kept changing the word love to things like satisfaction or engagement or joy or passion, which are good words, but it's not the words people use.

2:18When people are trying to describe some extreme positive experience they want to repeat, the word we naturally reach for is, I love that. I love it. I love that. And I think for the longest time, I would try to change it in order to make it more palatable. But if you actually look at the data, and I start this book really diving into the data on love, there's no question that love is the most powerful driver of all productive human behavior. If you want productivity, if you want retention, if you want somebody going, you got to come work here. It's the best place I've ever worked. or you've got to come shop here, it's the best place I've ever shopped, then you've got to take them at that word love.

2:53And that's the word that drives our behavior. And the strange thing is, nothing else does. If you say, I respect that leader, that's fine. But I don't know how hard you're going to work on the back of that. If you say, I really enjoyed that movie, I can't tell if you're going to go back and see it again or tell anyone else to see it. Other positive emotions are positive, but they don't drive behavior. Only love is predictive. So that's why I wanted to zero in on this very specific feeling in this book, because it's so predictive of positive human behavior. So I'm guessing some leaders, the next question is going to be, well, how are we going to measure that?

3:30Right? I mean, surveys for measuring connection or outcomes or things like that, I think are pretty easy to do. What's the simplest way that somebody is going to measure? Or is it that they're hearing that word anecdotally? Well, that's a big question because you can unpack that into all sorts of conversations about, you know, mystery shoppers and employee opinion surveys. Probably the best question to measure it actually that we found over the years is I can't imagine a world without. Just finish that sentence. I can't imagine a world without. I can't imagine a leader without. I can't imagine a team without.

4:02And if you get, if people are providing your company name, I can't imagine a world without. I mean, there's very few companies, if you think about it, that actually meet that level. But when you get people saying, on a scale of one to five, on a Likert scale, five being strongly agree, one being strongly disagree, if you put your company name in there or you put your name as a leader in there, I can't imagine a world without, which I know is a very high standard. But when you get people saying strongly agree to that statement about your company or your leadership or your brand or your product, you've reached into their heart and somehow touch them in such a way that you're actually going to drive their behavior.

4:39So all the data on the scale of one to five shows us that fives, in terms of the experience of a product or experience of a team, fives are qualitatively and categorically different than fours. Fives aren't just lots and lots of fours. In fact, if you actually plot it out, John, the relationship between experiences, extreme experiences and behaviors is what's called curvilinear, which basically means moving somebody from a two experience to a three or a three to a four doesn't actually get you any behavior change at all. It's only when you do something with your team or something with your customers that moves them from a four to a five on that scale, you actually see a change in behavior, which of course means that we should never top two box ever again.

5:25Never put a four with a five ever because you're lumping apples with oranges. We should, as leaders, we should look at the fives on a question, an extreme question like, I can't imagine a world without. And then only then are you beginning to get to a proper measure of how much love is in the system for you, your team, your product, your company. I'm glad you mentioned the word experience, because as I listen to you talk about it, I'm guessing the companies that I can't imagine a world without are actually creating or at least thinking intentionally about experiences over delivery, over results, over perks, right?

6:04Absolutely. I mean, it's one of the defining characteristics of the best leaders. They have a capability that when you actually look closely, it's been hiding in plain sight. You don't see it taught in any business school. And yet it's really the primary driver of anything productive that we humans do, either as customers or as team members. I call it experience intelligence, which is based upon two fundamental understandings that leaders should have. Number one is that experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. So often as leaders, we think the directives drive behaviors, drive outcomes. That if we set goals and then give corrective feedback to our people, we'll get the outcomes we want.

6:41Or for customers, if we define prices and loyalty programs, we'll get the outcomes we want. And we do in the short term. But if you want sustainable behavior change, if you want people to tie their identity to your team or to your product or brand, you've got to create an experience. You've got to understand how to reach into someone's feelings and create for them an experience which somehow then changes their behaviors. And the second part about that is the part we just talked about. If you really unpack what are the most powerful experiences, they're the experiences that people say that they love.

7:09And that's just part of the human condition. So yeah, experience, intelligence is a much... more powerful leadership capability than we give it credit for. And there may not be any true answer to this other than mindset change, but how do we keep experiences going? A lot of times in experiences, I went to this restaurant I've never been to, amazing experience. Went back the next time, not as good. Next time, not as much because I'd already experienced the experience, right? I mean, so how in a living, breathing organization, do we kind of keep that level of experience something that keeps people wanting to come back or keeps people experiencing something new?

7:54Yeah, it's one of the funny things over the last sort of years I've been talking about experienced intelligence. I thought the hardest lift was going to be, could you please take love seriously? Because love is a predictor of positive human behavior. But actually, John, it's been more that getting people to understand that the driver of behavior is experience. Just getting people to think about, well, what makes up an experience? Because normally we design for process. We don't design for experiences. Even if you have a restaurant, you have a reservations process. You have a food preparation process.

8:30You have a food delivery to the table process, which is really a set of disconnected processes with one handoff after another. We don't actually design for a holistic experience in which a person, a human, is going through that experience at the restaurant. Although actually, that is what's happening. And so the first big lesson for leaders is you are an experience maker. The question isn't, are you one or not? The question is, are you a skilled one? And then once you can get people's mind - Because you could also be making bad experiences, right? Totally. Here's the thing about human beings. We pick up what you're putting down.

9:05Even if what you're putting down, you just dropped. But we're picking up what you're putting down and turn it into an experience. and it's that experience that determines whether or not we come back, whether we tell anyone else to come back. So the first thing is you are an experience maker. Please don't say you're not, you are. The question is, can you do it well? Second is that the raw material of experience making isn't moments. I mean, weirdly enough, a moment is jolting. A moment doesn't change behavior. Like we should have magical, delightful moments. Well, yes, but a moment is like somebody held the door open for you.

9:35A moment is somebody remembered your name, which is someone waved you into the traffic on the freeway. And those are lovely, but they're jolting. They don't change your behavior. An experience is different because it's been internalized by the person. The person has picked up all the different touch points of that experience and made for them a story. And it's that story, the experiential story that changes their behavior. And to your question, the raw material of making an experience are all of the different, and this is why it's difficult, but all of the different touch points that the person's picking up.

10:08And those touch points might be the voice on your interactive voice response on your reservation line. It might be the smell of that restaurant. It might be the lighting of that restaurant. It might be the name, the person that remembered your name, but it also might be the fact that you've designed a system whereby there isn't three or four different people who you get handed off to when you sit at the table from the busser to the host to the waiter to the person who brings the food, which is, if you think about it, a really unloving thing to do for someone because they're being handed off from one person to another.

10:37So every single touch point does work in experience making. And most leaders, frankly, are blind to this. They don't see the color, the smell, the taste, the feel of those chairs against the back of your leg. But actually, if you are a skilled experience maker and you think about the companies that we would almost immediately go, I can't imagine a world without, like, say, Disney. I mean, I'm not saying Disney is perfect by any means, but they have taken the skill of experience making very seriously indeed, so that all five senses and the touch points associated with all five senses are taken seriously by really every single cast member.

11:21And I suppose that's the last thing I would say about experience design. Everybody's got a voice and a responsibility in it. It's so amazing to think that there's so many businesses where the frontline people who are touching the customer every day, no one's ever told them that they're actually making an experience with every single glance, every single behavior change, every single look in the eye or not look in the eye. All of those things are experience making. You have that power. We don't ever really talk about our frontline roles in that way. And yet that's exactly what they're doing. And, you know, it's interesting.

11:57A lot of our clients, a lot of the work we do is really digital. It's not necessarily, you know, human interactions. But it's interesting because it's still an experience. I can't tell you how many times we've, you know, gone in to look at organizations. It's like, well, this is broken. And when somebody clicks on this thing, they don't get to where you thought they were going because nobody's looked at it for five years. You almost could make the case, and I hate goofy titles, but couldn't you almost make the case for having an experience maker title that somebody who is looking at all the way a customer goes through our business?

12:30Yeah, it's interesting. You are beginning to see chief experience officers. Yeah, yeah. You're beginning to see that because people are beginning to realize that if you want sustainable behavior change, then you have to be a designer of experiences. Because the opposite of design is drift. and we drift a lot because we design for process. I mean, to take a silly example, which isn't a digital example like some of your clients, but if you take the restaurant example, or you could take a hospital example. If you think about how we've designed hospitals, the person who checks you into the hospital is not the person who takes your vitals, who is not then the person who makes sure that you're okay during the middle of the night, who's a different then doctor who you see in the middle of the night, who's then a different healthcare provider or practitioner first thing in the morning.

13:17you are you're handed off through a series of vertical processes and yet you the human you're the poor person who's supposed to hold the coherence of your narrative through all of it trying to remember all the details that matter when in fact you have no flippin idea what details really matter and then we wonder why our health care outcomes are so poor relative to the amount of costs we put in we've designed health care experiences that are fundamentally unloving because we haven't designed them as experiences. We haven't seen the human going through all of them. That's true in healthcare. It's true in schools.

13:49It's true in restaurants and hospitality. And to your point, it's certainly true in the digital environment. We've designed for the wrong, well, not the wrong thing, but when you just design for process, you become blind to the actual holistic experience of the person and you drift. And then we wonder why we don't get any loyalty or we don't get any advocacy. We don't get usage. It's like where humans are experienced feelers and our behavior is changed through the way in which we pick up what you're putting down in terms of experience. Yeah. It's almost sometimes feels like, you know, friction, you're, if you're designing for like, what's easy for us, you're almost automatically going to make it harder for the customer.

14:32Right? Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's, I don't know if you're capable of doing this because every business is different, but let's, let's take one step in a typical customer journey, like onboarding a new customer. Again, that's another one that's typically done for efficiency sake. How would you design love into something like that? I know that's a random example, but give me a thought of how somebody would think about onboarding a new client having love in it. So when you, this is going to sound really weird, but love isn't a coating. It's not a, if you're leading lovingly, it doesn't mean that you're being nice.

15:08Although you may. So we're not going to, there's no hugging going on yet. There's no kumbaya. Yeah. What you're trying to get to, if you think about something like onboarding a customer or an employee. What you're trying to do is you're trying to have that onboarding process, do the work, a big part of the work of getting a customer to go, I love that. I love that. Okay? So if you reverse engineer that, how do you get someone to that outcome where they actually would walk around with love in their heart, which I know sounds like a weird expression, but they're walking around with love in their heart going, I love that.

15:36Not like it was fine, not a four, not a three, but a five. I love that. Well, if you reverse engineer that, John, you bump into a sequence of five feelings. which are sequential. This is not Maslovian. It's not hierarchical. It's sequential. And that sequence of five is like a blueprint for your design process. The first feeling is control. So if you imagine this, a person is trying to lean into an experience at which point, at the end of which they go, I love that. So the first feeling they're bumping into is control. I don't mean control over someone else. I mean, they want an answer to the question, what is this world and how do I work it?

16:16Anytime you are unclear about what this world is that I'm walking into, anytime you lack vividness about what's there in the world and how can I use it, I as a human, I lean out because I tend to go through life like all humans wrapped up like an armadillo, protected against the world. If you can show me what is this world and how do I work it, I take off one piece of armor. The next feeling is harmony. Basically, as I move into an experience, most experiences are emotional experiences first. So I need to have an answer to the question, does this experience know what I'm feeling and does it care?

16:49Have you designed any touch points that could communicate to me, I know what you're feeling and I care about it. Third feeling is significance. Every human being at some point in an experience wants that experience to know my story. Do you know my story and do you care? I don't want you to start that way. I want you to start with control. Tell me the rules. I don't mind the rules. Tell me the rules. But at some point, I want you to know, do you know who I am uniquely? And does that then change anything about my experience? The fourth feeling is the warmth of others. Humans don't do well in experiences where they're isolated.

17:22At some point, they pop their little head above the parapet and they go, who is here to help me? Either as a person going through an experience together or as somebody on the company side of things who's helping to guide and navigate me. And then the last feeling is growth because love is a forward-facing emotion. If you love someone, you never think they're finished. You are always aware they're going to have to wake up tomorrow and go and experience the world again. And so the last feeling answers the question, am I slightly more capable tomorrow than I was today? Well, if you use those five feelings as your blueprint, you would start to design an onboarding experience incredibly intentionally so that you would deliberately in sequence cultivating those feelings.

18:06Now, to your question, right? How you do that would depend upon the exact onboarding experience you were building. But what we need to give leaders is like, this is a blueprint for experience design. To get to a place where a person's going to go, I love that. Without the design, it's a bit hit and miss, really, in terms of what you're trying to create for people. So, you know, as I listened to you describe those, I mean, that's, we were putting it in the context of onboarding, but frankly, you know, when somebody's out there looking for a new resource, you know, that's probably a process they go through, right?

18:42It's like, I want to know who's out there. I want to like them. I want to start to trust them. And it is sort of sequential, right? Before we're even going to pick up the phone or, you know, fill out a form. Yeah. Yeah, well, that sequence of feelings, I mean, you're trying to, as simply said, you're trying to just get people to say, love that. Whether you're trying to sell them something, whether you're trying to get them to join your community, whether you're trying to onboard them into a company like an employee process, that outcome is a very strong, super vivid human outcome. What we could do in every situation, like if you were trying to design a sales process, you'd go, well, we should actually design it around those five feelings.

19:23Control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth. If we could design a process, we wouldn't get it right perfectly every time. We wouldn't get every single, but we would at least be intentional about experience design. And we would see it as a person moving through that sequence of feelings. Well, gosh, if we could do that, we wouldn't feel like we do so often today, John. Today we feel transactional. The world feels extractive. Leaders are directive, which put it another way. We're living in an increasingly unloving world. And what we know from everything to do with human psychology is humans don't flourish in an unloving world.

20:04And I think the data would suggest very strongly, neither do businesses. So if you really want a flourishing business where you've got a lot of customers are a lot of people walking around with love in their heart for your brand or your company, you got to design it in. And you'll only do that if you take love seriously, which frankly, at present, we don't. You know, as I listened to you describe that, and given the state of the world that you just described as well, it sounds like it's also a very significant potential differentiator. Because if I'm not getting that in eight out of 10 places, the two places that are giving me that are probably really going to get my business.

20:42No, that's a great point. It's a huge, I know this sounds really strange to say it because love should be a genuine intention toward another human beings flourishing. But that aside, it is a huge strategic advantage. because if you've got a whole bunch of leaders who have experience intelligence, who know how to intentionally try to design love into the experiences they make, then they will stand out because frankly, so many other companies, so many other organizations are loveless, where human beings who work there aren't even called human beings. They're called headcount or FTEs, full-time equivalents, or customers aren't a real human.

21:19They're their average basket size or their lifetime customer value. We have been reduced as humans to amoral elements of financial equations, which isn't terrible. It's just super uninspiring and not very intelligent. So for the best companies, they'll look at the current playing field, if you will, John, and go, yeah, we could, even if we began to think about how to design experiences that people would say that they love, we would be so materially different in the feelings that we would be creating in our people or in our company. customers. Experience intelligence is one of those strange capabilities that's easy to start, hard to master, fine, but easy to start.

22:05And as you said, if you did start, gosh, you'd stand out from the crowd. Yeah, 100%. So Marcus Buckingham is the author of Design Love In, How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. I appreciate you taking a few moments to join us. Where would you invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work and Design Love In? Well, rather unsurprisingly, if you go to designlovein.com, you can find everything to do with the book there. We've also, in partnership with Harvard Business Review, we created a discovery series for folks that ordered or pre-ordered the book that basically describes the 10 key discoveries underpinning it.

22:38So if you're interested in learning both from books or from video, go to Design Love In and there's a whole discovery series for you, and as well as everything that you might want to know about the book itself. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you spending a few moments with us. Hopefully, we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. I'd love that.