Market Smarter Using the 7 Decision Profiles

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: Today’s episode of the Marketing Moms podcast is called How to Market Smarter Using the Seven Decision Profiles with Kylee Ingram. Kylee is the co-founder and CEO of Wizer, a decision intelligence platform helping leaders design better decisions by understanding how people think, not just what they think. Her career began in international sports television before she pivoted into documentary and interactive media, earning global recognition, including nominations at Con360. Welcome, Kylee.

Kylee Ingram: Thank you for having me, Kelly. Lovely to be here.

Kelly: Let’s talk a little bit about Wizer. You co-founded a product that uses decision intelligence. Can you tell us briefly what it is, but more importantly, what problem were you trying to solve when you built it? In essence, the origin story.

Kylee: Yeah, well, I think my background in documentary brought me here in the sense that when you’re making a TV program, you have to go through what are called commissioning editors and their comments on my ideas for good TV shows bored me a bit. And then you see what’s on TV sometimes and you’re like, how did what? So I ended up doing an interactive project called Crowd TV and we crowdsourced a TV program, went really well.

I got really into the idea of crowd wisdom then, and that was kind of that transition point for me. But also at the same time, I was getting more into the interactive space. I found it really interesting as to how to bring a product to market compared to a TV show which can take forever and a day. Yeah, they’re both hard.

Kelly: So, but the key part of development of Wizer, you were trying to solve a specific problem, were you not?

Kylee: And I think the big thing is when you look around the world, you think, how did that decision get made? And how did it? And when you start to dig into it, it wasn’t always that. It was a lot of gut, usually, or bias that led to the decisions and who’s in the room. And when you look at who’s in the room, there’s a lot of distortion and homogeneity in that room. And so that was the bigger picture about how we spend so much time optimizing so many things but people aren’t optimizing their decision rooms and who are in them.

So I guess it was about, part of it was my interest in digging down to see who’s in the room and how does it get structured that way? And, you know, I got really interested in the book, you know, that went on to win many awards. It was Thinking, Fast and Slow. And when you look at what he’s talking about and then we also use Dr. Juliet Bourke, it’s all about bias, and there’s all these biases we take into when we’re making a decision. So I think it was about, even though we’re trying to make people make better decisions, what we’re actually doing is trying to create structures that remove those biases from the room.

Kelly: Yes, Daniel Kahneman.

Outside of demographics, what are the other types of biases that you look at or we should be looking at?

Kylee: Well there’s demographics, but they show up in different ways in the sense we call that social bias, who gets listened to and who doesn’t. And if you don’t pay attention to that, you end up with groupthink. So groupthink gives you a narrow set of perspectives. And then there’s information bias, which comes with that, which is what information is valued and what isn’t. And teams will overweight the data that confirms their views. And you see that being used in social media, in particular. It’s very easy to silo people because as soon as they hear what they want to hear they’re like, yes, I’m in that group. And that’s a problem for us as a species with our critical thinking. But if you don’t address information bias, you end up with blind spots and poor evidence use. And then the final one is capacity bias and how much complexity can people handle if high individuals will oversimplify and default to familiar again and that is the point that starts to limit your creativity and that quality of outcomes that you have.

Kelly: So your product is built on seven decision profiles. Can you talk us through each of the seven decision profiles and how does each one approach decision making differently?

Kylee: Yeah, and I just might say before we go into this because I think it’s not a personality profile. It’s trying to work out how you go into a decision. And I mentioned Dr. Juliet Bourke’s research. She did a lot of research on this. And so we were able to use the framework she came up with to create these decision profiles. So we have seven. We have a visionary, which is a big picture direction, but their main characteristic is their openness. So sometimes they’ll skew a little bit more because Juliet found you either your primary or your secondary, you can’t go much beyond one or two when you’re thinking about a decision. You’ve got a guardian that’s at risk, looking at risk and is a protector, an explorer who has options and searching for what options are available. A deliverer is very process oriented and an analyzer is looking for evidence. A collaborator is a perspective gathering person. It’s not that they’re a people person but they appreciate that other people’s input can really help a decision. And then there’s an achiever which is outcomes and, you know, orientated people. And Juliet’s research found that in Western society 75% of our CEOs are achievers or explorers—so options or outcomes focused.

Kelly: And your premise is that you need to communicate differently to these different types of decision makers.

Kylee: Yes, yeah and the way we came to that was a charity down here in Australia asked could we use your profiles to work out how to communicate with people. We were like, yeah, how are you communicating with people? And it’s really funny these days, people are personalizing emails, but the personalization is not talking to the way they make a decision. And at the end of the day, you want them to make a decision don’t you? But you’re talking to them about, I don’t know, how is their family or whatever, which is lovely. But actually it might not be lovely to some of these types that you’re not talking to them about how they’re going to make a decision. And so when we chatted to the charity about this product, they were like, there’s no way we would get our bequesters to fill in a decision profile, which you can go and do on our website. It’s free.

So we created a product where I spoke to Juliet—I said do you think we could create a product where we can generate a third party so I could say Kelly this is what I know about Kelly and it’ll come up with a probability of what you’re like and then I put in my correspondence to you and it’ll say look, you’re way off the mark here. This is good. You should adjust this. And what we’ve now analyzed hundreds of donor emails in particular and they’re so far off the mark for analyzers, evidence guardians, which are risk and the achiever, which is the outcomes. And remember the achievers are CEOs. So if you’re not talking to them in the way they—and these emails are all really upbeat or not like save, save whatever, but they’re not giving them either the evidence or the risk assessment or the outcomes that these people want to hear when making that decision.

Kelly: So for example, most nonprofits, let’s give your nonprofit as an example, may have 10,000 people in their database. How would you work with them to resegment that database based on decision profiles? Because that’s pretty overwhelming a task.

Kylee: Yeah, it is and the problem has been thus far is they don’t have a lot of the data that’s needed to work this out to some degree. So we’ve been working with them too, because the good news is you only need seven frameworks, you know what I mean? So if you can spend the time to work out who’s in your database and what they are, you could start with, you can start with their job titles in the sense of CEOs and things. There’s certain things that we can get to that do help them do that. And you know at the moment we’re building a tool where you can pump in your whole 10,000, see what you get. But the results are still low. So it is about data and we’re working with a couple of charities that are like, look, we’re gonna start again with these high bequesters that we want and just start thinking through. And I think it’s just helping them in general rewrite their emails because the other thing I’ve seen somebody do is put a little bit—sprinkle a little bit of something for everybody in there so it’s hitting the evidence, it’s hitting the whatever, and that also can work. I’ve heard people do that in speeches too, like when they’re giving presentations that they make sure that they’re talking to those different cognitive types.

Kelly: So you could go in and make assumptions as to who are the thinkers, who are the doers, who are the connectors, and associate them with decision profiles. But it’s difficult to do en masse, but your product offers that. And then your product also offers the communication component or not?

Kylee: Yeah, no. So it will completely rewrite the email for you. But it will also let you know what’s the strength because we’re giving you that sandwich where we’ve been nice to you and then what, you know, what your risks are and then what you should do. And then it gives you a rewrite. And the other thing we’re seeing, which I think you and I had a chat about the other day, was the other thing we’re seeing is that women are predominantly using it before they go into meetings—not just the charity sector using it. I see women using it before they’re heading into meetings to prepare for the meeting to say, am I meeting? And one of the women said to me, she will now prepare for the meeting. She’s often in a meeting with all men and she preps for a meeting and sees who’s in the room. And then it is like, she focuses on the achiever or at least knows what she needs to deliver to each of them. So they’re hearing what she’s saying. And she says it just gives her such a better sense of preparation before she’s going in to understand how to talk to them.

Kelly: So I did take the decision profile test and I’m an analyzer, which is not a surprise.

So yeah, what would you do for an analyzer, for example?

Kylee: You’d need to give evidence like, you know, you probably want to know if I’m telling you decision profiles or things you’re like, well, did you make it up yesterday? You know, using AI and I’m like, no, well, that was also why I gave you the bit, you know, the background bit. So, you know, if a charity is coming to you and saying, we’re going to save the koalas, you’re going to say, you might want to say, well, how many koalas are there and how many are you going to save or how exactly are you doing that rather than just those blanket statements. And there’s a lot of blanket statements in emails, whereas you would unlikely be satisfied by blanket statements.

Kelly: In terms of what people are using now, how are these seven decision profiles different in terms of frameworks versus what marketers and business leaders are using now? Like DISC or Gallup or CliftonStrengths or Big Five, what’s the difference between that and traditional tools? And then I’m going to talk about AI next.

Kylee: Well, most of the frameworks are designed to describe a personality. So they tell you something about who somebody is or how they might prefer to work. And from my understanding, I was reading an article yesterday, it was like, I don’t know how many tools are in that space. And I try not to let us be anchored beside them, but I think it’s normal to be so. And I think the big ones, the DISC and Myers-Briggs, and both of them are, you know, their evidence is sketchy.

You know DISC was made by the guy that made Wonder Woman who was in a polyamorous relationship. You know D stood for dominant and S stood for submissive initially and then DISC. And Myers-Briggs was made by a lady that didn’t—was Jungian theory who I believe has been disproved. And she didn’t like her daughter’s new boyfriend. So she made that one up and she thought, he’s not like us. So I need to explain this. And so the origins are a bit sketchy too. And the Big Five, my understanding, has the most science behind it because it also gives you a rating. Like it’s not putting you in a box, saying you are like this. So I think it’s that. So it’s telling you how you prefer to work. Whereas all that we’re trying to say to you is this is how people approach decisions in the context. So we’re staying in our lane of decisions, but it’s trying to help you understand different people prioritize different things when they’re coming to just decisions and you understanding that cognitive difference will help you in how not just how you communicate with but our other tools are in business trying to show you—don’t—there’s no bad decision profile. You want them all when you’re making a decision. If you can, you want all seven of them in the room plus a number of other things. So none of them are bad and it’s a cognitive type so it’s just a matter of you understanding that so you can talk to them better and your outcomes become better. We’re seeing up to a 15% lift in some email campaigns just by using it. So that’s great. Yeah.

Kelly: Wonderful. So what I see advertising strategists and marketers using is taking these audience profiles that are developed for different products and services and then plugging them into AI and creating these, in essence, AI generated audience profiles and then talking to them as if they were real people and asking questions that way. Talk to me a little bit about that model of how people are using AI, and I know it’s updating on a daily basis, and there’s new things that it can do, but people are really depending on AI now to kind of, in essence, become this persona, or even become yourself, a duplicate of you, and how you would think. What are your thoughts on that, and using that as a tool for decision-making for selling products and services?

Kylee: Look, there’s so many different uses of AI. It’s great. I think AI can help you write a better email potentially, especially if you don’t like writing, but you still have to, yeah, you still have to know what that person’s thinking to get a better thing. So first of all, once again, you’re asking, describing a personality rather than a decision style, but—

The thing is, you know, I was talking to Dr. Bourke about this the other day, even if you’re in a meeting and you say, cause you can see it, you say, look, we’re in this meeting, Kelly, we don’t have anybody that worries about risk. Let’s just pretend. And it’s the same with AI, saying, let’s pretend you can think about this. I think AI and another person can only go so far. Whereas there’s a nuance and a complexity to a person. And that even that imagining of the future is different with a real human than, you know, AI. If you can get—I think AI can get you a way to that but if you really want to interrogate something you need somebody that thinks like that to, you know, help you. But still, like, yeah, sure, say if you don’t understand how somebody with a risk profile talks, you could ask them that. But I would be asking about how they make decisions. Well, you’d obviously just use Wizer because we’ve built it for you. But if you’re not going to do that, you could just go and, you know, you’ll get somewhere with it. But I think it’s that deep interrogation when you’re making an important decision, you need to interrogate it from different angles. I just analyzed a board in Australia that was at a writers festival and I was like, they made such an interesting decision. They all got fired and the whole festival was cancelled. You know, there were millions and millions of dollars of mistakes right there. And I looked at them and I found eight out of nine had primary and secondary profiles in risk. So you’re thinking how did they get this so wrong? And I thought our tech had failed because a guardian, a risk person, is the profile least likely to come up. So I was like how did these people find one another? But that’s the other thing—you see the cognitive types like to talk to one another so they can pull together if you’re not careful. And what ended up happening was they could only see one risk and they doubled down on it and it was the wrong—it was sure it was a risk but it was the wrong risk. And they didn’t have an explorer in the room to go hey there’s this over here, a visionary to go hey whatever. They could—they all went down this rabbit hole together and it exploded. You know, nationally—wasn’t only in Australia so it wasn’t that big, didn’t make international news, but it was a really interesting case study to look at what happens when you don’t have any of that diversity, how hard it is for people to actually think beyond the way they actually do.

Kelly: It’s such a challenge because I think it’s hard enough to get boards and corporations to think beyond gender and ethnicity to people’s cognitive diversity.

Kylee: Yeah, you know, Juliet—you look at it, Juliet and her book Which Two Heads Are Better Than One? wrote a piece on Enron. And Enron, you know, they got a woman in the room. Got an Asian man and they were like, whoa, you know, we’re box ticking here left and right. But they were almost the exact same cognitive diversity. I think there were two. I went back and I analyzed them all. I think there were only two, maybe three. So they’re missing.

And what happens is when you’re the same you go there faster. And one of the really interesting things that you read in the book too is outward-facing diversity. So when you’re talking about outward-facing diversity in a decision you’re looking at age, gender, and ethnicity. And when you’re talking about ethnicity, it’s really interesting because there were all these jury studies that they did. Now if you’re a homogenized group, say we’re all white people in a room and a person of color comes in. It’s not just that there’s a different perspective. White people will check themselves and produce better outcomes. So it’s a really interesting way for people to realize, once somebody else walks in, they’re like, we’ve got a different perspective in here. We need to do whatever. And the jury outcomes were much increased. There wasn’t a huge delay in deliberation, but the outcome was much better.

Kelly: What are the biggest things that marketers can apply right away from the decision intelligence that you’ve learned in terms of their campaigns or client work or communications? You talked about how 75% of CEO profiles are achievers and deliverers, which changes how you pitch and how you communicate. Are there gender differences? What other kinds of things can give us insights for marketers?

Kylee: There aren’t gender differences really. I mean, people would think that women are more collaborators and, you know, we do see a bit of a skew in marketing teams that there are collaborators. And I think the emails are written the closest to a collaborator. So that’s something, but it’s a 5% difference. Maybe 5% more women are collaborators is what we’re seeing and that’s what Juliet saw too, but she never put it in a book because she didn’t want it to be a gender thing. So it’s not so much a gender thing. Look at Margaret Thatcher—a woman can just lead the country the same way a man can. So it’s definitely about cognitive diversity when receiving an email. So I wouldn’t put rigid ideas on gender or ethnicity or necessarily age. There’s still a little bit of work to do to work out how they like to communicate.

Kelly: Are there any other insights that you can provide from some of the case studies of clients that you’ve worked with or aha moments that are worth sharing?

Kylee: Yeah, I think what you can see is in companies too, so you’ve got this 75% at the top of the one of the two. By the time middle management comes through, they’ve all—what we call cognitive drift—they’ve all drifted towards this. So in a way, if you knew what a company was, by the time you get to middle management, you get that because they’re not protecting. They’ll have diversity when it’s young and, you know, there’s a lot of different people, they’ll have a lot of cognitive diversity down here but it starts to narrow into that cognitive drift. So if you can kind of work out what your client is, there’s a good chance that you can start speaking to them in their predominant language because people aren’t protecting themselves against this drift and that’s how, you know, they start to—they really start to struggle at innovation because they can’t innovate. I mean look at the Apple Watch—the Apple Watch didn’t work on people with darker skin because they probably had no one in the room to test it. Like there’s so many stories like that and you’re like, they did what? It’s just, yeah.

Kelly: The one that drives me nuts is cars, car designers. I mean, no one has thought about where women put their purse? Has there been one car that’s been designed to put our stuff? No, they put a place for men’s sunglasses, but nothing else.

Kylee: Yeah, well… Didn’t women—there wasn’t there—women did the rear revision mirror. They did all sorts, like the women in cars did also created all sorts of design elements that are interesting that men wouldn’t think about. But yeah, it’s different perspectives, isn’t it?

Kelly: Well, I appreciate your insights and I’m going to direct everyone to your website in the transcript here so they can take the test to see what their own decision profile is and maybe even send other people there to check it out as well as your website to take a peek at your tool. Thanks so much for sharing your insights today, Kylee, and don’t forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for joining.

Kylee: Thanks, Kelly.