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Episode Summary

Rob argues that Black Hat motivation, the urgency and scarcity most designers treat as the villain, is the on-ramp that gets people to act at all. He breaks down the Octalysis Group’s award-winning project with Procter & Gamble’s distributor Navo Orbico, which reached 99.5% voluntary participation on a non-compulsory rollout and a 28.6% revenue increase by starting with pressure and handing off to meaning. Drawing on Ocean Hero as the rare frictionless exception, he shows why White Hat drives like Epic Meaning seldom start action on their own. Listeners learn the Black-Hat-to-White-Hat handoff and two diagnostic questions to test whether their own system can make the switch.

About the Host

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Key Takeaways

• The Octalysis Group’s project with Procter & Gamble reached 99.5% voluntary participation on a non-compulsory rollout and a 28.6% revenue increase, evidence that Black Hat urgency and White Hat meaning work in sequence, not opposition.
• In the Octalysis framework, Black Hat and White Hat motivation are not good and evil. Black Hat (urgency, scarcity, pressure) gets people to act now; White Hat (meaning, empowerment) makes them glad they stayed.
• Relying only on grand meaning and Core Drive 3 (Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback) tends to produce a “someday,” which in practice means never, because wanting to act is rarely a strong enough forcing function to overcome friction.
• The P&G rollout launched using Core Drive 5 (Social Influence and Relatedness) as pressure: getting into the system meant tracking down colleagues for an access code, which sparked FOMO (Core Drive 8) and curiosity (Core Drive 7) rather than belief in a grand vision.
• After the on-ramp, the system handed off to White Hat: reps became captains of trading ships, territories became open seas, and clients became colonies, activating Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning) and Core Drive 2 (Development and Accomplishment).
• Ocean Hero is the rare case where White Hat alone starts action, because switching a search engine is one click of near-zero friction, so Core Drive 1 can carry the behavior with no urgency at all.

Topics Covered

• 0:00 — Opening hook: why products stall
• 1:14 — The P&G result: 99.5% voluntary
• 3:05 — Black Hat and White Hat serve different moments
• 4:53 — The frictionless exception: Ocean Hero
• 6:07 — Inside the P&G rollout
• 7:30 — The handoff: reps become ship captains
• 9:16 — When Black Hat never matures into more
• 10:09 — Two diagnostic questions for your system
• 11:27 — What a mistimed handoff looks like
• 12:06 — Black Hat starts, White Hat sustains

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Octalysis Group case study with Procter & Gamble’s distributor Navo Orbico (Gamification Project of the Year, first presented in Brighton): 99.5% voluntary participation, 28.6% revenue increase
• Ocean Hero, the search engine whose revenue funds clearing plastic from the oceans (a project supported by The Octalysis Group)
• The Octalysis framework: Black Hat and White Hat motivation, and Core Drives 1 through 8
• Episode 446, the airline miles loyalty teardown
• Episode 450, Amazon’s internal AI leaderboard

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Opening hook: why products stall

Rob Alvarez (0:00): Why can some products just get you to act immediately while others never manage to get you past even get to the first step? Think about your favorite game or your favorite movie using the hero’s journey. No game opens by telling you you are the savior of the world and you’ve got this grand mission. It opens with something small and urgent. Defend this village. Save this person now. In motivational and behavioral design, you might hear that Black Hat motivation, that urgency, the scarcity, the pressure is supposed to be treated as the villain. Rob Alvarez (0:45): And yes, we want to build the White Hat systems full of meaning and autonomy, but when you rely only on grand meaning and empowerment of creativity and feedback, usually what you end up with a someday, which actually means never. Wanting to do something isn’t a strong enough forcing function for yourself so you can overcome the friction of an action. You end up with a beautiful system that everybody says and feels that they want to use but never do.

The P&G result: 99.5% voluntary

Rob Alvarez (1:14): And as you know, I’m Rob. I work at the Octalysis Group as the head of engagement strategy in Europe. And there’s this project within the Octalysis Group. I didn’t participate there myself, but I saw it presented for the first time in Brighton, where it won the Gamification Project of the Year. And it’s a project with Procter & Gamble’s distributor, Navo Orbico. They obtained a 99.5% voluntary participation on a non-compulsory rollout of. The new system. And of course, it’s also translated into a 28.6% revenue increase. And they did not get there simply and only by relying on great meaning or empowerment of creativity and feedback. That was our Core Drives one and three. And I’ll show you the exact system, Rob Alvarez (1:59): the sequence, the top programs are able to use to actually get. from that initial perhaps urgency scarcity that gets you to act immediately right now to transition into the place where you can actually be using a lot more of the Core Drives that are white hat and more intrinsic as well. So what will I show you specifically? What’s the plan that we’re gonna go through? How you go from an on-ramp essentially built with Black Hat stuff, handed off as well to White Hat motivation and strategies. And you’ll be left of course with a few diagnostic questions to tell if your system is actually able or even interested at this moment in doing a handoff or if there’s even a handoff at all. Rob Alvarez (2:44): And if you’re interested in getting a better read on motivation design, I put together a free sequence of emails, Core Drives in the wild. One email per day, real cases that are decoded through this exact same framework with my experience, others’ people’s experience, and of course my own commentary You can just find it on the link in the description.

Black Hat and White Hat serve different moments

Rob Alvarez (3:05): In the Octalysis framework, Black Hat and White Hat, they’re opposites, but they’re not like good and evil, or evil and good. They aren’t just opposites, they’re actually fulfilling a different moment, a different function. White Hat is the kind of motivation that makes you feel good about the things that you are doing, that you’re being motivated. If you do them, you feel great. Black Hat, on the other hand, creates urgency and makes you act right away. But of course, if you use it for the long term, it also generates burnout. So even when the intrinsic motivation is there, you already are intrinsically motivated to do something. If you’re not already taking action on it, oftentimes that someday is gonna turn out to be never. Rob Alvarez (3:51): So what you’re looking for. When you are starting a project, is that you need some urgency for you to start? You need people to say, Wow, I need to take action and I need to take action right now. After some time, you also want to stop pressuring them and creating that constant urgency before you burn them out and you use meaning, Core Drive three. Empowerment of creativity and feedback. You want all these things, but but you want to make sure that they start first by getting your users to get start taking action, start building into the habit, and then feel good about that taking action. There are very few exceptions where White Hat alone is able to get Rob Alvarez (4:37): you started on taking action. And there is, of course, some situations, and there I can tell you of an example where that works. Where the action is very small, very tiny, the friction is minimal, immediately available, then urgency might not be needed.

The frictionless exception: Ocean Hero

Rob Alvarez (4:53): There is no friction that it needs to overcome. For example, switching your search engine so that the revenue that it gets is clearing plastic from the oceans is not really a big frictionful point. One click, no real cost for you. And Core Drive One is able, Core Drive One Epic Meaning and Calling is able to carry that motivational structure all by itself. That’s exactly what Ocean Hero does, and it was helped by the Octalysis Group. A while ago, helping people use that Core Drive One Epic Meaning and Calling to switch some people, and they’ve gotten fantastic results. I’ve they’ve collected literally millions of bottles outside of the ocean because the action for users to take is small, Rob Alvarez (5:38): very small, very low, low, low friction, and gets them these incredible feeling that they’re actually helping clear out the oceans from plastic. So the principle is that you oftentimes need some sort of pressure, some sort of urgency or scarcity. to get people to start acting, except in situations like the exception I mentioned. And then you use White Hat strategies and motivation to sustain the action so people feel good about what they’re doing.

Inside the P&G rollout

Rob Alvarez (6:07): And I mentioned at the start of this recording that there is this case from Procter Gamble that I wanted to discuss a bit more in depth. There is a public case study that you can find on the Octalysis Group’s webpage, and you can look at all the details. Some of the details I’m commenting, some that are not specifically there. You know, there’s just enough space. So I’m focusing on a few things that help me build on the point that I am bringing you right now. How did they actually start? At the launch, nobody Was in need to believe in this grand vision that was being brought in with the new system. Actually, getting into the system meant you had to track down fellow colleagues to get together and find your access code. Rob Alvarez (6:52): So there was Core Drive 5, social influence and relatedness, but there was pressure. It was not warmth. There was pressure, there was immediacy. This was, you know, Core Drive 5 and Core Drive 4 can be used. As Black Hat or as White Hat. In this case, it was a lot more of a Black Hat thing because it there it created urgency. You needed to do it and you needed to do it right away. Then, of course, not everybody joined. You know, some people were holding out and so on. But what happened? They started fearing missing out FOMO, Core Drive 8. And then, of course, they had started having curiosity. So Core Drive 7, nobody really joined because they believed in this grand vision that the system was bringing for them.

The handoff: reps become ship captains

Rob Alvarez (7:30): However, there was a point where they started bringing in that thing that we call the handoff. Once they were through the door, they were already taking the actions of this new system. Then you had this theme taking over. The reps became captains of their trading ships. Core Drive One Epic Meaning and calling. Territories became open seas, the clients became colonies, and they upgraded their ships. And chose their own strategy. So Core Drive 2, Core Drive 3, Drive 2 accomplishment, and Core Drive 3 empowerment, creativity, and feedback. And they shared a port city. So that meant that missing these collective targets brought in natural disasters. So these strong performers in the team were pulling the weight. Rob Alvarez (8:15): They were pulling the strugglers up through this Core Drive five. That was in this case not Black Hat, not pressure, but Warmth, they had to do it together. They were collaborating to get it. They were not competing. They were not pressurized. They were not, I’m gonna be missing out what other people are doing. In this case, is how do we manage to do this together? And as I said, the proof that it worked: 99.5% of voluntary participation on a non-compulsory rollout. People could have just said no or not said anything, and they would not participate. They said, I want in. And that’s how we know that 99.5% of the people got to participate. So look at your own onboarding. What does it look like? Are you asking people? Rob Alvarez (9:01): to carry out this grand vision of the company, of the product, whatever it is that you’re doing. before they’ve actually taken any real steps in that direction. Where could you introduce just enough urgency or scarcity to really get them moving, get them going?

When Black Hat never matures into more

Rob Alvarez (9:16): And of course, in past episodes, we’ve also seen how Black Hat all by itself and stretched out through a long period of time can also make you fail faster than not using it. The airline miles situation that we talked about, Amazon’s internal AI leaderboard. It was urgency that never matured into something else. The relationship was just a calculation for people, so they eventually defect when there is a better offer. Or they’re able to game it flawlessly. When you’re not able to on ramp, to hand off from Black Hat only to introducing other intrinsic and White Hat motivations, you turn it into a treadmill and people are able to step off the treadmill very, very quickly. It’s expensive, it’s fragile, it corrodes whatever intrinsic motivation people might Rob Alvarez (10:05): already have for committing those actions. So these are two questions I invite you to ask yourself.

Two diagnostic questions for your system

Rob Alvarez (10:09): And they are going to depend on where your user, your colleague, your employee is. At the start, is there enough urgency so that they act today, this week, not next year, not when the time is right, right now? Rather than them you trying to get them to agree with a big vision, never do anything, and eventually just leave. And later, is there enough? White Hat kinds of motivation. So you can just almost entirely switch off that pressure. And people would still come back and continue to do those actions. If you lose everybody the day you turn off the point system, then you never had the effective handoff that you need. Rob Alvarez (10:54): You’re basically like paying a rent on getting a certain behavior. And as you might have realized, the this concept is, I would say it’s almost easy to grasp. You see urgency, yes, with urgency I act and I act now. And then I turn this into motivation that becomes a lot more sustainable, feel good, stuff that people actually want to commit to. But this is the kind of thing that is easy to understand conceptually, but it takes years to master. You probably understood the sequence in the few minutes we’ve spent together. Executing on this is an entirely different game.

What a mistimed handoff looks like

Rob Alvarez (11:27): So what would you say an inexperienced implementation looks like? Applying urgency that was never released, urgency applied at actually a proxy instead of the real outcome. A handoff between the urgency and greater meaning that is mistimed. If do it too early, nobody’s moving. You do it too late and the pressure was too much and people already started leaving. And a very difficult one as well. Urgency can buy you time for meaning to emerge. It cannot create meaning that was never there. If you never created something that is worth doing, this on-ramp, all this urgency is never going to work.

Black Hat starts, White Hat sustains

Rob Alvarez (12:06): So remember, Black Hat gets you to start, White Hat gets you to stay and be glad that you actually stayed. The mistake was never to use urgency. Black Hat Black Hat and White Hat are good motivations. They’re not good and evil. So, once more, if you want to take a stronger look at this, see a few more cases, get a more of my take on what this looks like. If you’ve been interested up until this point, I invite you to click below on the link that will lead you to the Core Drives in the wild guide. It’s free. All you have to do is put your email. You’ll get an email per day for a few days. You’ll see some each of these Core Drives analyzed through a real case, a real interview in the past. You’ll also get my take on what happened in that situation. It’s free. All you have to do is click on the link below. Rob Alvarez (12:53): at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription