← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
450. The "G" in NUDGES: Mastering Feedback for Behavioral Success
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In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer revisits a key topic from the foundational series on nudges, emphasizing the importance of feedback in correcting expected errors and guiding decision-making. Melina explores how thoughtful...
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Hey there Melina. Here, I'm excited to share. I'm teaching two virtual courses in applied Behavioral economics which are enrolling now. Advanced concepts of behavioral economics and internal communication and change management. So if you're interested, don't delay, learn more and enroll at HBL. Like Human Behavior Lab dot TAMU. Like Texas A&M University EDU. Again, that's HBL dot TAMU. EDU and click on Certificate program when you're ready. Let's start the show. Welcome to episode 450 of the Brainy Business. Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about the G in nudges give feedback. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer. Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Can we take a quick moment here to celebrate that this is the 450th episode of the podcast 450. Amazing. Whether this is your first time tuning in or you've been here since the very first episodes were released in July of 2018, or anything in between, I want to thank you for listening and supporting the Brainy Business. We would not be here with more than 1.3 million downloads in over 170 countries without you. So thank you. I always like to commemorate milestones whenever possible and sometimes it means refreshing a landmark episode from the back catalog. That is why today's episode is from the foundational concept of nudges, a real staple in the field of behavioral economics. Nobel Prize winning work. In the first year of the show, I did a series on all the different kinds of nudges and this episode is one of the last of those concepts to be refreshed, but one that I think is so central to that work, so it feels really fitting to refresh it for you today. That concept is the G in nudges to give feedback. And considering so much of why nudges are even needed is because people make mistakes and the E in nudges to expect error, giving feedback to keep people on track is key to making any of this work. Sure, it sounds easy, but of course you have to know what you want someone to do, what they're likely to do, and therefore the context of the decision to be able to anticipate the error and provide the right feedback at the right moment in the right way. And this is why thoughtfulness is so key in every aspect of applying behavioral science, and why we end every episode with be thoughtful. But it's also why why it's so worth it. As you listen to this episode on the G in Nudges today, I encourage you to have a specific process or system or opportunity in mind. Maybe a goal or a key moment in your experience journey where might you have opportunities to give some feedback to keep your nudge targets on course. Don't forget there are links for my top related past episodes and books waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 450 all right, let's talk about the G in Nudges Give Feedback As I already said, we went out of order and talked about errors last week because it's important to understand what errors can occur before we build out feedback for someone. As I mentioned in that episode, the error is the foundation of choice architecture in many ways. When you know the errors that can occur, you can build your choice architecture to accommodate for that and then nudge people back onto the path using feedback. Last week I talked about errors people make on things like getting their oil changed or placing the filter on the refrigerator. The light that comes on to alert you it's time to take care of this task is essentially the feedback mechanism, the little nudge that's placed at the point of expected error to help the customer get back on track. Similarly, the sound your car makes when you don't have your seatbelt on is the feedback, the nudge to help the driver or passenger overcome their error. Yes, it truly is that simple. However, it's important to make sure you choose your feedback wisely. If your car dinged and beeped and had flashing lights at you for every little thing, it would get to be too much. You start to ignore the alerts. So none of them have any impact. And that is a bad thing. That's why you only have alerts for real safety issues or and things that could severely damage your car. Like if you don't get your oil changed or if you have a check engine light come on. You know, it's impactful and really important to pay attention to. And you know, because there's only one real ding that happens when you don't have your seatbelt on, your brain automatically checks for that and every car has that. So it makes it really easy for the subconscious to understand the feed feedback and what it means. This is where Understanding mapping the topic of episode 37 is really important when you understand the welfare the best outcome for the chooser. You can properly structure the choice architecture and a few important pieces of feedback to help them understand why it's important and have a map to get there, even if they don't register it on a conscious level. Giving feedback is more than beeps and lights though, and while we've talked about examples from within the car, some of my favorite examples come from other experiences while driving. In most cases, you know the speed limit, right? And if you're like most drivers, you probably drive about five over, even though it's a speed limit and not a minimum speed. And you may drive even faster than that, especially when you think no one is watching. But what happens when you see red and blue lights flashing behind you, or hear a siren, or see a police car parked off to the side of the road up ahead? You likely feel a moment of panic, hit the brakes, sit a little straighter, align your hands where they should be and watch the speedometer like a hawk to make sure you're right on the line of 60 miles per hour. And it probably feels like it's agonizingly long and cumbersome to get past the point where the cop is watching and you feel comfortable enough to speed back up to your regular cruising speed, appreciating your good fortune. Sound familiar? There are a combination of concepts at play along with the nudges and choice architecture, including optimism, bias, and time discounting. This is also a time where you can really feel what it's like when the conscious brain takes over for the subconscious and then you transition back again. You know you should drive the speed limit. Your subconscious has taken over the main tasks of driving, and while it notices the speed limit signs, it doesn't alert your conscious brain of all of them because they aren't important enough to take up those 40 bits of information that your conscious brain can evaluate per second. They aren't different than what you're used to seeing or what you expect. There's a rule for them and you're fine. You speed because you're optimistic about your unique ability to be an amazing driver, better than everyone else on the road, and that you will be able to stop yourself quicker and respond if you ever see a cop, and that you are unlikely to get caught even though people get tickets every day. And of course that would be a problem for future you. Present you wants to get to the place you're going as quickly as possible and get around that really annoying Prius, where they learn to drive anyway. This error is expected. And when you feel the heat from the lights or see them flashing, or get a glimpse of a cop in the distance, you're receiving feedback to alert your brain to stop making the error you're making to drive safer. Unfortunately, it only helps for a minute or two until you're safely past the cop, at which point you start speeding and are back to your old ways almost immediately. If you get a ticket or are in an accident, the change of focus may stick around a bit longer, but eventually your subconscious will get enough reinforcement that you'll drive without getting a ticket or being hit. Availability bias, allowing you to relax a little. As I said, speed limit signs don't really help because they blend into the background. But what if they were dynamic and had flashing red and blue lights? If you live in the States, I'm guessing you've encountered these. As you drive toward the sign. It flashes bright red lights if you're above the speed limit and also will flash your actual speed back at you and it starts to flash faster and more urgently if you're above the posted limit. Whether you intend to or not, your subconscious has been trained to see flashing lights, especially red ones, and have a response, in this case to tap the brakes or take your foot off the gas. It's much more affordable than having cops posted, and it can be really useful in places like school zones or construction areas or other locations where people are known to speed. And it can be particularly dangerous. However, you wouldn't want those to be every single speed limit sign, because our subconscious would write a rule and say, no, no, no, you're not going to trick me. I don't need to slow down. That's just a sign. Nobody's going to catch me. There's no consequence for continuing to do what I've been doing. And so it kind of counteracts itself and makes it so all those other lights are less impactful if you overuse it. This flashing light speed sign is feedback from an expected error, something that has been created based on the way the brain actually makes decisions to help make the roads a little safer. And it's brilliant. And the good thing is, traffic nudges don't need to include speed tracking and flashing lights. Sometimes all you need is a little strategically placed paint. Along the waterfront at the curve of Lakeshore Drive and Oak street in Chicago. The turn is tight and was once one of the most dangerous curves in the city. People's optimism bias told them they could make the curve without needing to slow down and their conscious brain was not flagged early enough, resulting in a staggering amount of crashes and injuries and deaths. We know the problem, the error People do not slow down and drive safely even when they know they should and how to do it. The question is, how can we help them to be safer drivers? There are tons of expensive programs that may or may not work, but what happens when you use a little visual trick? Remember Back to episode 24 on the Sense of sight. I talked about the difference between sight and vision. If you remember, sight is in the eyes, but vision takes place in the brain. Our brains take in all those pieces of data and put them together with alerts and tasks based on rules of thumb and what it has seen before, especially when driving. The brain is predicting what will come next and much of our vision is actually based on expectation and not true sight. Our actions or reactions are then formed based on these expectations. To test the visual cues back in 2006, the City of Chicago painted a series of lines on the road. Unlike normal road lines which separate the lanes, these went perpendicular to the direction the cars were moving and got closer and closer together as the car would approach the sharpest point in the curve. This gave the illusion of speeding up, which created a subconscious response to tap the brakes or at least ease up on the gas. There's a link to the Nudge blog in the show notes if you want to see an aerial view of the road. Again, those show notes are@the brainybusiness.com 40. There are also links to past episodes I've been mentioning here, optimism, bias and all these other concepts which you can check out there. So how effective were these perpendicular lines? Early studies found that crashes were down 36% in the six months after painting the lines, compared with the same time frame the previous year. The city then looked to find more opportunities for feedback without overdoing it and making people ignore everything. So they added a series of overhead flashing beacons and some warning signs which resulted in an additional 47% decrease in accidents. A fantastic nudge to make Chicago a little safer. Before I jump into our rapid fire examples of feedback, let's revisit the air conditioning example I've been using throughout the series. Last week I gave a lot of examples for error with air conditioning, including the expectation that most people will forget to get their filters cleaned in the proper timeline of every three to five years. A light on the system would not likely be a good notification because we don't look at our AC units very often. For example Ours is kind of buried in the garage. There could be something on the thermostat, but that might be ignored as well. It could have a beep instead of a light like a smoke detector that needs its battery changed. Another error expectation feedback mechanism. But those are annoying. I don't know of anyone who doesn't hate a smoke detector beep and I would not want that sort of negative energy associated with my brand. So I would recommend my client to go in a different direction. As a side note, it's important that the smoke detector have a really annoying beep because of the very, very important job it does. And if those were to fail, there are very dire consequences. So that's a good choice for them. It doesn't mean it's a good choice for for everyone just because it would be alerting the people that you're trying to notify. This could be another reason to encourage a customer to get the WI fi enabled unit. Consider in this case that the system, the air conditioning system would notify them when it's time to schedule their maintenance. And because it has smart technology, it could be created to do the work for them. Remember, people are lazy and don't like to do these small things even when they should be able to do them without too much difficulty. Difficulty? When you take the opportunity for error out like someone forgetting to schedule even after being given the alert, it increases the likelihood the meeting will actually take place. Let's say instead that the person gets a phone notification with a red exclamation point and the little number in the circle in the upper right hand corner. I hate that thing which says it's time to schedule their duct maintenance appointment. It could then recommend a day and time or provide them with a selection of of no more than three options at a time to choose from because we don't want to overwhelm them. There can be a number to call if needed, but in this case the error is likely to come up again. So you want to make it as easy as possible to get an appointment scheduled. Another time that would be likely for an error to occur is in the actual selling process. I'm guessing that many people do not buy their air conditioning unit on the spot when the rep comes out and instead there is a lengthy follow up process. This can be expected with any big investment and it could be an error, but it's sometimes important for consideration. The nudge this company could put in place, which is using a combination of feedback and loss aversion, is to strategically create their sales process to encourage the person to overcome the error of over analysis and make a decision the day of if you remember episode nine on Loss Aversion, I talked about my experience with buying my wedding dress. Wedding shopping and specifically dresses are a time where people are known to overanalyze and take forever to make a decision. The fear of regret is just too much. The store I went to had a very smart policy that provided any guest with an opportunity to get a 10% discount if they purchased the dress before leaving the store on their first appointment. It only applied if I bought a dress before walking out the door. If I would have called on my way home, it would have hypothetically been full price. This is a feedback nudge to help someone make a choice in case their error is over analyzing. If that's not the error, if I don't feel like it's the right dress, if I didn't find anything that I really fell in love with, then it doesn't apply and I still have the free choice. I don't have to take it. It's not worth getting 10% off on a dress I don't really like. But it's a really great opportunity to interject that opportunity to nudge somebody to make a better choice and to buy then which is best for the company, best for that person. They don't have to keep debating and they can check one thing off their to do list. The H Vac company could do the same thing and have all their salespeople implement this in their pitch conversation. It may seem like a lot of money to leave on the table, but you can adjust your prices to accommodate for this if need be. And it's important to consider all the real costs a business incurs in the follow up process. Phone calls, emails, extra visits, mailers. It adds up quickly. And if 10% is too much, it doesn't have to be that exact discount, it just has to be enough to create a nudge. In our case the rep included a 10% discount in our pricing. So he said, he said it was because we were a returning customer. So they obviously work with this sort of discount already and it would not be too difficult to make this conditional to help encourage day of sales and you could use this in both cases. So as a returning customer would say, you know, because you're a returning customer, we have an opportunity for a 10% discount. If you commit today, I would be happy to put that onto this pricing for you. In the other case, maybe for a non returning customer it's a 5% discount or something along those lines, this can also help with a salesperson's error of assuming their potential customers can't afford to pay for the unit or will gawk at the price or not be willing to pay that. If a sales rep has this flawed mentality it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that can reduce sales. It's better to assume someone can afford it and save prices unapologetically. If a discount for prepayment as I talked about last week or for committing on the day of could help them feel more confident, it could also increase sales. When the salesperson gets the feedback of the positive increase in their own paycheck, they will get the nudge and continue to excel, which again is a win win win for everyone. Now let's talk about some other examples of giving feedback in businesses and how they can help people to feel satisfied and fulfilled. It doesn't have to be life changing to be important and simple things can make a big difference have you ever wondered why your phone makes a clicking or shutter noise when you push the take photo button? This isn't necessary, but it helps the user feel like they completed the task and prevents them from hitting a button 85 times in a row saying did it take it? Did it take it? This is also why websites change the color of links when you click on them or hover over them or Our phones and laptops have pinwheels turning to show us that the machine is thinking we are impatient creatures and our error would be to expect it hasn't worked if we do not get immediate feedback to the contrary to show that something is happening. Many people need to see to believe and this is important to build into your processes and materials. Digital photos take this back even further, incorporating human error expectation from things like leaving the lens cap on, having a blurry photo or a thumb in the way. Those were all problems on traditional cameras that could not be properly satisfied before digital cameras. Now you can get immediate feedback and see the photo before you leave Machu Picchu or the Great Wall of China instead of hoping for the best and realizing when you get home that you didn't properly capture the memory. While this is a nice feature to add onto a camera, it isn't a requirement of a digital camera. Think back to when the first company was creating this and they wanted to add that feature. It probably cost a lot of extra money in research and development and it doesn't add at all to the ability for the camera to physically take the picture. Your ability to see that image in the moment added probably a lot of expense to the process back in the old days. So why do it? Because happy customers become repeat customers. They give referrals and recommendations and have positive associations with your company instead of irritation. Who do you think the amateur photographer would blame when they got back from Rome and realized their head was cut out of the Coliseum picture? Would they blame themselves? Maybe a little, but they would mostly curse the name of the camera company and how bad they are. This is optimism, bias and regret combining. To avoid this, it's best to provide the feedback and help keep them from having a negative association association with your brand. I think it's important to note here that a lack of a negative reaction does not necessarily lead to an overly positive feeling. Sadly, the equal and opposite reaction rule of physics doesn't totally apply. Let me tell you what I mean. In many cases, a negative interaction or lack of something that's considered a bare minimum or table stakes can create a red hot anger in customers. Remember when I talked about this on the sense of smell episode? It doesn't matter how beautiful a room is in a hotel if it smells like dead fish. This is a very negative experience. But removing the scent or even having a pleasant scent doesn't result in an overly positive experience. I'm willing to bet no one has ever written out a comment card saying the experience was superb because of the lack of scent, but many people have probably complained about a bad one. In many cases, providing feedback is going to help keep the table stakes and avoid a negative experience more than it will create an overly positive one. But that is still incredibly important for any business. If someone is all caught up in the negatives or missing expectations, they will never appreciate all the other items that are exceptional, even if they cost your company a ton of money. In your company, look at the opportunities for providing feedback to a customer to help show the table stakes and bare minimums are met. What would that look like? Feedback allows people to know they're doing a good job or where they're going astray. Many companies say nothing should be a surprise on an annual review, a sentiment I agree with. Constant feedback as close to the time of an action taking place is important in everything from job performance to applying for a mortgage when we don't know how we're doing. When there's no feedback, our brains tend to spiral, which leads to overwhelm and increased errors, and this can often create doubt and lead to self fulfilling prophecies. This is where a business can nudge to help people to do better and be more confident. Before I launch into this next example I have a question for you. It's pretty random, but I promise there's a good reason I'm asking. Here goes. What color is your ceiling? I will not even make mention of the fact that you probably looked up involuntarily at that question. Subconscious scan alert. Anyway, if you're like most people and most homes, you probably have a white ceiling. Newer houses or paint jobs likely have an extension of whatever neutrals on the walls, but many homes still have a crisp white ceiling. Or maybe it's gotten a little bit dingy. Maybe you looked up and saw oh man, that's not looking like it's the same white it once was. Maybe it's time for a new fresh coat of paint. So now I ask you the follow up question. Have you ever painted a ceiling? It is a terrible job for the weekend warrior. Strange shadows and light playing tricks on you while you fight against drips of paint splattering on your eyes or in your mouth. Struggling against the cramp in your neck from trying to look up for so long. Pain building in your arms. Did I already paint that spot, you think? As painting white over white is hard for our eyes to perceive the difference between wet and dry. Until the next day or a week later when everything has been put away and you see a big giant patch of old faded paint sticking out like a sore thumb against the fresh coat. Ugh. Wouldn't it have been nice if you had a little feedback during the process? This is exactly why the geniuses at Glidden created a ceiling paint that goes on pink and dries white. You can see where you've painted already. It isn't a pale pink and ensure you don't miss a spot. Simple feedback to help during the painting process, but which goes away after the job is done without any extra work. Fantastic nudge. Many of us want to be more green and energy efficient, but when we don't realize how our actions stack up, and as I've said in an earlier episode on this series, when our actions are far removed from the feedback of a bill or the outcome for the planet, it's hard to actually make the changes we want to. This is why Nissan came out with its Eco pedal to help drivers use less fuel and drive greener. If you're not familiar with the pedal, it provides more resistance so it's harder to press down when you're burning a lot of fuel or driving in a way that is less eco friendly. This gentle pushback is easy to move past so you can floor it when you need to get out of a dangerous situation, but it nudges your subconscious brain to drive a little better, press a little softer, and do its part to save the planet with a little easy feedback. Similarly, there are energy orbs you can place in your house to show how much energy you're using. They glow red when you're doing badly and glow green when you're using less energy. Pretty cool when you think about it, and a great way to uncover hidden spots to use less energy that don't have to impact you that much. And color coding is really helpful for our visual brains. The episode on Color Theory is coming soon, I promise, but know that our subconscious picks up on the colors and knows what it should be striving for. Green is good, red is bad. It will be looking for little ways to do and be better without having to alert your conscious brain in the same way as another channel without feedback would. How can your business incorporate the senses color, pressure, scent or sound to provide feedback to your customers to nudge them into better behavior? There are links to the series on the senses and each of those products I just mentioned in the show notes atthe brainy business.com 40 feedback can also be useful when things take a while, and there are a lot of steps happening behind the scenes when we have nothing to do but wait and wonder. Time seems to slow down and as I already said, we start to spiral even over simple things like wondering when our pizza will arrive. Enter the Domino's Pizza Tracker. You can see when your pizza is assembled, when it's been placed in the oven, and when it's on the way to you. Sure, this might seem silly and unnecessary, but if it helps people who care about their delivery to be able to check and quickly know where it is in the process, that's helpful feedback back. I've also heard this concept pitched for programs like mortgage applications or other apps with financial institutions or companies that take a long time. If a potential home buyer was able to go on their own whenever they wanted to check for updates on their mortgage process, do you think they would use that function? They could know what the next step was, where things were stalled. If things have moved since they checked 12 minutes ago without having to bug their agents and loan reps, which means those people will have more time to dedicate to their jobs, making all the mortgages move more quickly and efficiently. Awesome. Do you have any processes where a lot of things are happening behind the scenes, where you get questions a lot from people frustrated without having being updated for a while? Think about all the times you have appreciated feedback like this. Maybe checking the tracking data on that widget you ordered from Amazon last night to see if it's on its way to you yet. Feedback is appreciated and can help your customers to quell an anxiety they may not be able to articulate beforehand. But once they know they can check, it provides plenty of relief and a greater affinity with your company. And it's important to note that the feedback doesn't have to be fancy or expensive. Many apps include video ads now, especially on games. Some of the ads have a timer or wheel counting down how much time is left in the ad and some don't. Which ones do you think people get more frustrated with and start to feel anxious when they're watching the ad? That's right, the ones without a tracker make people wonder if they did something wrong. Is this broken? Is my game ever going to come back? Should I close the app? How long has this been? This is not the goal of the creator of the app. They want you in there as long as possible, nor of the creator of the ad. If someone is stressing about all that stuff, they're not paying attention or retaining anything from your advertisement. So you should provide that little bit of feedback. Oh, and don't try to be sneaky and hide the X in really pale colors that blend into the background. People will find it eventually and be irritated with you, which is also not positive for your brand. This pain of waiting is also applied to There have been studies looking at how long it feels like somebody's waiting in a line for something at the bank or financial institution or at a grocery store. And perceived wait times can be really impactful where if somebody's able to watch TV or see something else that's happening, be a little bit distracted. They actually feel like it takes less time and they tend to over exaggerate how long they're waiting in line when they don't have something to distract them. That's the error and the feedback that that you can provide for them as well. What about when feedback is removed from a process? That's a place where some people can get into trouble. Consider credit or debit cards. A lot of people get into debt when paying with plastic because the pain of the payment has been removed from the physical act of buying things. Paying with cash is a different experience because you have immediate feedback of how much money you have left. Maybe you opt to put something back and buy it later or not at all because you don't want to break a $20 bill and have a lot of loose change or smaller bills then to deal with. This is of course completely arbitrary and built up in our brains. This is the concept of mental accounting which has an episode coming up soon as well. However, there is a lot of benefit to having credit or debit cards and and not everyone goes into debt. Is there a way to provide feedback and a nudge for those who would have issues without forcing them to carry cash everywhere without inconveniencing those who do not need the nudge? Many financial institutions have started using text alerts or email alerts to let people know when their balances are low or below a certain threshold the individual can set to help help them out. This is also using the concept of a hot and cold state which I talked about last week in the episode on Expecting Error. Remember, the point of feedback is to get as close to the action as possible, whether it is a benefit like earning reward points for an action taken, or a nudge to help someone avoid an error like reminding them of their overall balance or goals about saving when they want to put put an unnecessary item on the credit card. Speaking of the visual power of money, if you remember back to episode nine on Loss Aversion, I talked about a method of putting cash in a glass jar so you can stick to a goal. This is using feedback to overcome an expected error. Say you have a goal of writing a book and you've pledged to write write 1500 words a day for a year. This is one of those things that is easy to say you will do, but when push comes to shove it can be hard to stick to. And this is time discounting in action as well. When there's no one and nothing to hold you accountable, no carrot other than your own desire to have a book, it's easy to get distracted and productively procrastinate and maybe negotiate with yourself and and say, well, I only wrote 500 words today, but I'll write 2,500 tomorrow. And this negotiation that never really does you any good. So if you make this your big goal for the year, to write this book, and if you know it's important and you're going to do it, you can use a jar. Every day that you do what you said you would do, you put $5 in the jar. It needs to be clear so you can easily see the money inside at all times and the jar should be in a place where it's within your view, often not hidden away in a closet or something. By the end of the year, when you've reached the goal? You get to keep all the money in the jar. In a non leap year that would be $1825. Not too shabby. Plus you would have a lot of words written toward your book. I'm guessing at some point your goal would need to shift from just writing 1500 words to editing and refining things things. But you know, you get the idea. The trick of course, and where the loss aversion comes in is my requirement that if at any point you miss a day and don't meet your goal, you lose everything that has already accumulated in the jar and have to start over. The dollars in the jar are feedback of your progress and incentive to keep moving forward. You can use this trick for any goal, from eating better and exercising to reading books or spending less time online. It's a simple way to provide yourself feedback to stick to goals. How could you use a tactic like this with your employees or customers? Is there a carrot which does not have to be cash to help them to do better and achieve their goals and make the right choices that they want to be sticking with? There are some products and services out there like stickk.com, which helps people keep commitments. Note stick has two K's in it and there's a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. There are opportunities for businesses to provide feedback in all sorts of areas. The key is of course, to know why you need to give feedback by understanding the mapping incentives and looking for expected errors as we've outlined in this series already. So take a look at your company, customers and the products or services you offer for opportunities to provide feedback. Also, think about all the times you wish you had feedback where you check your phone regularly or keep yourself from calling and following up up as an inspiration either for ways to make your own business better or perhaps to create a new product. So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about the give feedback nudge today? For me, this truly is one of my favorite aspects of Nudges because when combined with its partner expect error. It is, in my opinion, one of the easiest places for people to start. You don't have to understand mappings or dig in on incentives or structure complex choices. This is about getting micro about taking those things you probably notice all the time but don't pay enough attention to those moments where you say well, I bet they're going to miss the deadline but. Or I'm guessing they forgot and letting it go right then. But why? Why do we let it go instead of designing the right interventions that can keep people on track. The good news is, if you start to incorporate the right feedback into your communication and experience journeys, it will put you leaps and bounds ahead of most people out there, which is a big win in and of itself. It's also likely to make it so people appreciate and like working with you more, which is another big win. You, of course, want to be sure you communicate in a kind, thoughtful way. Don't have that condescending gotcha attitude. Know that people get busy, humans make mistakes. Be kind in your choice to reach out, and people will appreciate it. Over the years, I've found that this comes up most often for people, especially if you work in any sort of sales where it feels like someone ghosted you. They haven't responded in a day or a week, or sometimes in over a month. And it's so easy to let that voice in your head tell you that they hate you or you messed up or the deal is absolutely dead. More often than not, I found that this is not the case. It just got busy. And if you think about all the times you had an email in your inbox that you felt guilty about or meant to respond to, but debated about whether or not it had been too long and didn't want to look like you dropped the ball so you put it off, but that just made it worse. And how could you possibly reach out now and not look like a jerk? Better to just move on to the next vendor to avoid that awkwardness. This. You've been there, you know what happens. But we do this weird mental flip when we think about the behavior of others, that we don't think it's the same sort of stuff going on for them. But often it is. So don't let people get to that point, know that that's an error. And you can be following up in a kind and thoughtful way to give some feedback, to remind them that you're still there and not upset with them, even if they've chosen to go in another direction. That type of message can make all the difference. Now your error, because there's two sides to this nudge. So your error is to assume they're ghosting you and that you should let it go after just one email, one time. Do yourself a favor, get out of your own way and follow up. Don't be a pest, of course, but at least reach out a couple of times before you let it go. And even then they probably don't hate you. So you can still send a check in in six months from now to see how they're doing doing. Things change constantly. It's good to just stay in the loop. Remember, business and life are long games, so you know, keep on checking in in a thoughtful way. And since we can expect that you will likely err and forget when you're supposed to follow up, set up a system with a reminder. Whether it's a CRM or the snooze function in your email or anything else, it's a good opportunity to give yourself some feedback on your connections. As we close out the show, don't forget about those show notes with links to my top related past episodes, books and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 450 and just like that, episode 450 on the G in Nudges is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Dr. Robert Kurzbon, author of what why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite. Love that, don't you? It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.