Nudge Theory With Ziba Goddard

Ziba Goddard is a behavioural scientist and Chief Consulting Officer at Cowry Consulting and joins Gary Williams on this episode of Work Winning Ways. Ziba specialises in human behaviour and how we make decisions. If you've ever heard of Nudge Theory and wonder why we make the decisions we make particularly in the context of buying, this is for you!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• People are wired to make snap judgements and rarely are making decisions based on having all of the information available. Thinking is often less rational than people would assume. 
• Nudge Theory is the idea of using encouragement or suggestions to change people's behaviour while still giving them freedom to make their own decisions. For example governments have used this recently to encourage people to socially distance during the pandemic. 
• We have two systems of thinking, the cerebellum based thinking, which is subconscious and primal. Then there's the prefrontal cortex that allows us as humans to deduct and reason and use language. Think of them as the Homer Simpson brain and the Dr Spock brain. 
• 90% of our decisions come from our Homer Simpson brain. 
• There is a toolkit of around 200 shortcuts that scientists use to connect directly to our primal thinking. 
• Ziba has done some work with construction companies to increase health and safety. After 4 days on site observing, Ziba's team painted the canteen area a shade of pink that essentially has a calming effect and reduced the amount of people taking risks. She also changed the card system used for keeping track of safety to one of reward rather than punishment. This reduced unsafe behaviours by 85% at this site. 
• reframing sales to a personal relationship makes it easier for sellers. It's not about using clients to achieve goals, it's about forming a bond and doing a favour for one another. 
• We have an inherent bias towards those people we think are specialists, for example we trust doctors with stethoscopes around their necks more than doctors without one. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘People aren't rational and don't have perfect knowledge' 

‘We don't want people on building sites thinking quickly' 

‘The key to sales is relationships' 

‘When people are credible enough and show a weakness, we like them more'

EPISODE RESOURCES 

Questas Academy
More about Ziba Goddard

ABOUT THE GUEST 

Following an undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology and a Masters in Clinical Psychology, Ziba was drawn to business and spent time working in organisational effectiveness at Bank of New York Mellon.

 

Ziba is Chief Consulting Officer at Cowry and leads the client 'Pilots and Programmes' within the business. Ziba spends the majority of her time identifying the cognitive friction in the current customer journeys to help inform the creative process within Cowry at the key Design stage.

 

ABOUT THE HOST

Gary Williams has been in sales and marketing his entire career. The past 10 years have been dedicated to helping technically minded non-salespeople become skilled and confident in selling themselves and their services.

http://linkedin.com/in/garyquestas
https://www.questas.co.uk
Instagram: @bdcoachinghub

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