Ascend Adventures: Failing Faster with Behavior Design
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Ascend offers unique team-building and leadership development experiences through outdoor adventures, focusing on meaningful interactions and harnessing nature's benefits to enhance creativity and reduce stress. Despite initial enthusiasm, the business faced challenges including high time barriers for managers and complexity in articulating the value of its services, leading to a pivot away from the originally intended offerings. Utilizing behavior design principles, Ascend concluded that their approach needed adjustment to better align with client needs and focus on more promising opportunities.
Ascend Adventures: Failing Faster with Behavior Design
- 1. Empowering teams with a fresh perspective.
- 2. About Ascend We deliver high-end team building and leadership development exercises through challenging and fun outdoor adventures We’re different from other team building companies because we go beyond the usual ‘feel-good’ trust fall or team challenge We push our customers to have meaningful conversations about how they work together and where they’re headed as a company We also get them way out of their usual environment and into nature, which is proven to increase memory and creativity while reducing stress Our customers not only leave feeling closer to each other and re-energized about their work – they also take away actionable insights to improve their business
- 3. Our Mission Connect people with people Why? Develop strong personal and professional relationships Great leaders have high emotional intelligence (EQ) Happiness! Connect people with nature Why? Boost memory + creativity Reduce stress Fun!
- 4. Our Team Brooks Barron – CEO • Leadership Coach • Management Consultant • Princeton University (BA) • Stanford GSB (MBA) Mike McClure – President • Professional Cyclist • Private Equity Investor • University of Colorado (BA) • Stanford GSB (MBA) Colin Galle – COO • US Navy Officer • NOLS Instructor (Admit) • US Naval Academy (BS) • Stanford GSB (MBA)
- 5. Designing Ascend with Behavior Design We modified our business using principles of behavior design and through several methods developed by BJ Fogg Three key concepts used: Help people do what they already want to do B = M A T BJ Fogg’s Behavior Design Process 1 2 3
- 6. Help people do what they already want to do Our company goal was to connect people with nature and people Managers want to connect with their teams Additionally managers want to increase creativity and create new perspectives; these objectives can be achieved through a change in environment by leaving the office and going into nature We divided our target customers, business managers, into two segments One segment would need educating on the benefits of both interpersonal dynamics exercises and the effects of nature The other segment already understood the benefits and craved these experiences By focusing on those who already wanted our product we were able to be the most effective with our time, effort and money 1
- 7. B = M A T Behavior happens when the combination motivation and ability are sufficient and a trigger (prompt) is presented Motivation is difficult to manipulate (different for different people, changes over time and is in competition with other motivators) Ability is more controllable and is determined by time, money, physical effort, mental effort and matching an existing routine We used these factors to increase our potential client’s ability to purchase an Ascend Adventure Time – understanding the demands on a manager’s time led us to decrease our offering from a 2 day trip with overnight to something that fit within one work day Money – knowing managers’ budgets caused us to experiment with discounts and promotions Effort – mangers wanted everything about the experience handled for them, so we picked up from the office, took care of all meals and dropped off at the office Matching with existing routine – during sales calls we asked about their next offsite or group training session so as to sync our product with their routine 2
- 8. Increased ability to achieve desired behavior High Motivation Low Motivation Hard to Do Easy to DoAbility Motivation B B 2 No Behavior Yes Behavior Inc Time $$$ Inc Effort Unaligned w/ routine Dec Time $ Dec Effort Aligned w/ Routine
- 9. Behavior Design Process We used the Fogg Behavior Design Process to help grow our business. For example, we used the process to help us meet our objective of increasing inbound sales leads Step 1 – Define abstract behavior Increase inbound sales leads Step 2 – Magic Wanding Answered “If you could wave a magic wand and get anyone to do anything that would lead to increased inbound sales, what would you have them do” and generated 20-30 potential target behaviors Wrote these target behaviors on sticky notes Step 3 – Crispification Added detail to the target behaviors by defining who, when, where and how Objective = everyone interprets the target behavior the same way Step 4 – Focus Mapping Used focus map to determine which target behaviors to pursue based on combination impact and ease of execution 3
- 10. Behavior Design Process (cont’d) Outcome The behavior design process led us to pursue two work streams Get a celebrity to tweet about our business Lift our website in Google’s search ranking from non-existent to top 5 Results Celebrity tweet Reached 35k followers 31 favorites and 4 retweets Google search ranking Now #3 3
- 11. We led 3 incredible trips, but then our business stalled… After pushing hard on our business for six months, we learned that the market did not have as strong of demand for our service as we had hoped Many managers and teams expressed strong interest, but very few purchased There is a high ability barrier to getting teams to leave the office for a day Time > Money: No matter the price discount, managers still valued their team spending time in the office above going on an Ascend Adventure Our service lacked simplicity – it was difficult to describe and measure impact Without giving managers a clear ROI and simple message to use in order to defend a decision to go on Ascend Adventure we were unable to close sales
- 12. Why the stall? Despite our efforts to increase ability we were still not able to sell Ascend Adventures Time > Money The time spent commuting to and participating in an Ascend Adventure proved to be more of their team’s time than managers were willing to spend, regardless of price Competition among behaviors people already want to do Managers feel they need to accomplish their required work tasks and when that need conflicts with their want to do an Ascend Adventure, the need prevails
- 13. Conclusion: Fail Faster with Behavior Design Behavior Design helped us make the decision that it was time to pivot away from Ascend Adventures and focus on other endeavors We are happy to have come to this conclusion quickly, so we can focus our future efforts on more rewarding pursuits (thank you snaptesting!) We realized that moving on would save us from investing a significant amount of time, stress, and money in something that wasn’t going to fulfill our vision