April 25, 2024

GPT and Behavioral Science for Leaders

Using Behavioral Science to Enhance Product Design To Save Leaders 90 minutes a day.

In a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business environment, such as we are seeing today, leadership teams are constantly on the lookout for strategies to make their companies more efficient while also boosting innovation pipelines. Incorporating behavioral science (BeSci) into these areas can be a game-changer. Here's how.

Scarcity and Focus: The Power of Deadlines

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Scarcity mindset - A mental state caused by resource scarcity, is characterized by a narrowed focus on the scarce resource - time, food, connection, money - leading to decision-making difficulties, inability to plan for the long term, and a tendency to prioritize immediate needs.

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Scarcity captures our attention in a way that we cannot control. For example, many of us in the early days of a new weight loss plan eat much less, which makes us feel hungry, which causes us to obsess over food. We dream about eating, our eyes will be drawn to images of it in a pile of advertisements on the table. It's an automatic response, even when our willpower is sufficient to stick with the diet. The focus on food caused by the relatively scarcity of food itself is beyond our ability to control.

When faced with resource scarcity, as with food above, or due to an upcoming deadline, our focus sharpens, allowing us to disregard distractions, which at work can be very helpful. However, this narrowed focus might cause us to overlook other matters. In the workplace, this can mean prioritizing urgent tasks at the expense of equally important strategic decisions.

Consider the day of today's senior executive.

They spend approximately 70%⁽¹⁾ of their time in meetings.
35% of that meeting time is inefficient according to PwC’s Global CEO survey.⁽¹⁾
The volume of decisions they are expected to make has increased tenfold in just three years.⁽²⁾

It should come as no surprise that leaders are facing mounting decision fatigue, increasing personal anxiety, and are likely missing important business opportunities. How might behavioural science make a difference here?

Tools can be a big help.

By facilitating idea generation sessions and validating concepts with data analysis and real customer feedback, Generative AI can drastically cut down the time and resources spent on developing and refining business strategies.It can do this by providing real-time, customer and strategic insights live, during meetings, helping them identify unique market opportunities and make informed decisions that would have taken follow-up meetings before. They can accelerate brainstorming based on these insights, reduce the time it takes to come to consensus during prioritization discussions, and it can even provide step by step behavioural instructions.

Behavioural insights from the field.

In practice, these tools speed up the brainstorming and decision-making processes making them more efficient, in our experience they reduce time spent in brainstorming sessions by 30% ⁽³⁾, and such sessions can become much more fun (with the right game design elements). Time to complete prioritization and administrative tasks like collecting and organizing meeting minutes is similarly reduced, especially with larger leadership groups. If Generative AI tools were used only to make meetings more efficient alone, leaders would potentially save up to 1.5 hours per day.

Adoption challenges.

Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence, MIT 2023

Despite tremendous potential and a big splash of excitement around the world, Generative AI products have so far found limited adoption among employees and leaders. Excitement is high at first, generative AI makes the first draft of many tasks much more rapid, reducing task completion effort by 50% ⁽³⁾ but, these tools also double the effort required to deliver finished quality level work. This means that using Generative AI tools comes with a change in how we work, and this change does make many employees feel like they have to do more work and has been shown to result in productivity drops in experienced consultants of up to 19%⁽⁴⁾.

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What we know currently is that GPT tools can be tremendously helpful for new people, cementing knowledge on newly acquired knowledge, but for more experienced workers, the need to polish a rough draft might not meet expectations, unless the Generative AI products are designed properly, or until newer users become competent in the usage of these new tools.

The Role of Behavioral Science

Behavioral science offers leaders a faster path to competency with these new tools and a means to make the products themselves much more intuitive for their needs. Using Generative AI products properly for the right problems is likely to go over very well initially, but weak engagement is likely to follow unless properly rolled out within the company.

To drive this point home, Generative AI products globally are showing weak user engagement following initial usage, retaining only 14% of their users following initial conversion as measured by MAU Monthly Average Usage). Whatsapp is at 85% (versus 85% MAU for Whatsapp) for comparison ⁽¹⁾.

Considering Generative AI solutions for your company? Behavioural science and game design can help, reach out to us to learn more, or follow for more insights.

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