Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. Podcast dedicated to figuring out how to do our absolute best, how to grow, how to evolve personally and collectively. And one of the biggest things on our journey there is to learn how to motivate ourselves and people around us to create the conditions, to create the consistency for doing our best and helping the whole world to do its best. Guys, today's episode is a treat for anyone trying to crack the code of motivation at scale and one-on-one. How to get thousands or just a few dozen people to care about the works the consistent and perform at their best. Not because they have to, but because we want to. My guest today, Ricardo Lopez Costa, has spent the past 14 years figuring that out. He is the founder and CTO of Funny Fire, a global gamification platform used in more than 25 countries, helping companies like Coca-Cola, HP, Ink Bank, Banco do Brazil, Caixa Económica Federal motivate people through game design, psychology, and behavioral science. Ricardo is the author of the Fantastic Engagement Factory book, that's how I learned about amazing work of Ricardo, how to motivate people on large scale with gamification. In it, Ricardo reveals the hidden mechanics that make people take action. And why traditional incentives often fail. In our conversation, Ricardo shares how a simple litterboard experiment in his own software company sparked a billion-dollar engagement breakthrough. Ricardo shares why recognition often drives stronger results than money, and what small businesses, not just global banks, can learn from the world's largest gamification case study. That was done by Ricardo. Whether you lead a team or yourself, design culture for a global corporation, or just a few people, or you want to change the world, change yourself, or simply want to understand what really moves people, yourself, your family, your customers, your team to act. This episode will give you practical ideas you can apply right away. So without further ado, let's learn how to correct the code of motivation. Let's dive into the Fantastic Engagement Factory with Ricardo Lopez Costa. Ricardo Lopez Costa, welcome to Change Wired Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today. It's been a while since I had this idea and desire to have you on for many different reasons that we're gonna talk about. But yes, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. It's a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you, Angela.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's pleasures online. We kind of so maybe to begin a conversation, let's give our listeners a little bit of a context. Where are you connecting from, or where are you from? And yeah, maybe introduce yourself as you would to someone who doesn't know you.
SPEAKER_01I I'm from Brazil, born in Brasilia. I have my father used to have a farm, so I I stay a lot of my time playing in a farm, in rivers, jumping and scaling trees when we okay, yeah, for climbing trees. Yeah, I grew up in Brasilia. I ended up studying law, but start very soon some businesses here in Brazil. One of my first businesses was the store to sell furniture in general, and then I moved to technology. I started program. I end up building my my software house. Let's say this, and on this software house we grew quite fast, and I start facing some challenge to keep my team engaged, and that's where I start to figure out how could I keep them engaged and making a bunch of tests and end up falling in love in this field of engagement of psychology. And later I decided to create the Funifier, that's the company specialized on this, on gamification, on engagement, on motivating people. And here you are.
SPEAKER_00And here we are. I I stumbled upon your work after starting reading some books on gamification because I also work in culture and engagement, and it's always a problem to keep people engaged so they perform at a higher level and produce the impact, the results that we want organizationally or personally. And I've yeah, found your book and a lot of the examples of your work that are quite remarkable in terms of their impact. I would say you're probably one of the few people, very few people who actually did something measurable, impactful business-wise with gamification to build like this whole system. Before we jump into everything, can I ask you what's gamification for our listeners and why should anyone care?
SPEAKER_01Uh, gamification is a process to motivate someone to do something that you need them to do. For me, this is gamification, and we give them this name because part of game here sometimes people get lost. Oh, this is uh making games the prefix. But we use this name because in the process of motivating people, we use some techniques that usually you find in games like like badges, like leaderboards, and a bunch of other different techniques. But you can apply this into a workplace process to engage people to use a CRM or engage in customers to purchase or use your product, so that's it. Simple like that. Process to engage people.
Yeah, so simple. Indeed, when you say it like that. And how did you stumble upon it? Like, how did you learn about gamification? Where did you use it first, and then yeah, how did you develop the company after that? Where did you start? Let's start there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I started in my software house. I used to engage my team in person, so I started with two, three people, then we grew to eight and to ten, and it were it was going well. I was training them, I was telling some motivated stories, I was very close to them. But then when we grew to 80 people and we split the company into one site in Brazil and another site in Sao Paulo, then I started to figure out how could I keep them engaged, how can you say online, not in person. And then I tried several different things. I remember that at a certain moment we were trying to make the company very similar with Google sites, like with Bojo to play Judo and Karate. We had that in the company, we had a room just for games, another room with many nice things to do, expecting that people to get motivated and get more productive. People were more motivated because they were getting earlier to the company, but just to play, not really to work. We were trying a lot of different things. One of the things that I was trying to push more people to to engage people was on to motivate them to study some specific technology that we use in the software house. And these were some very specific technology that only our company used, even to teach someone, they just accept to learn if they were hired. I need to hire someone, they want two, three salaries to teach them so they can start working, so it was an expensive process. And even paying a salary, they didn't really engage on the training, especially the people that were outside of Brazilia, because the ones that were in uh on Brasilia, I was in person teaching them, but the others outside they just didn't care. And then what I did, I on these experiments, I said, okay, and if what happened if I just lock all classes of my online training? So I had, for instance, a Java course with more than a hundred classes, so I lock all the classes. This every class was just open, anybody could go there and watch. But then I just test locking everything and leaving just the first class unlocked, and then on the day after, a couple of employees came to me and asked why they have been locked, what happened, they did something wrong, and then oh that's nice. I and then I explained to them, okay, it's locked because you didn't even done the full question, the deck. So for each class, we had some questions to be answered. Yeah, and if they answered, they unlocked the next one, and then oh, okay, I see then answering the questions just to unlock the classes to don't be catched on as a full of lockers in his script. And then I saw that they were just jumping into a into the class, but they were not watching the videos, they were just jumping to what really unlocked the next class, then answer the questions, and then I figure out and what if I give points for people that watch those videos, and then I start pointing them as they watch the video and watch and and put the total points each one has in the top of each screen, and then I see another movement of people hey, what happened? Someone have this number, this big number in his screen, and I have zero. What happened? I explain, oh okay, it's because you are not even watching the videos. So if you watch the videos, you get to this point. And then I vove, I put some leaderboards for each for each course. I put the I did this leaderboard, the leaderboard of the best people in Java, best people in email and the other technologies. And then I saw something interesting happen. I start to receive requests from people outside of the company to get access to this system because they were talking with the employees, friends of these employees, neighbors, and these employees were just proud because they were in a good position in those leaderboards. And these people outside of the company were interested in showing to these friends, the employees, who is really better in Java, who is really better in HTML, and then we start giving access to these people. And at a certain point, I start seeing some people train it on all technology that we use internally without the need of paying anything a sense. And then HR department was able to hire people and put these people directly in a job without a delay of training and get that get people ready. And at a certain point, at a certain point, one employee that has been fired by his manager asked to talk with me. His name was Joan. He got married recently, got a baby, and then I was sure that he were trying to make me how can you say stop that fighting.
SPEAKER_00Okay, yeah, okay.
Yeah, for my surprise, he just asked to don't remove him from the leaderboard. And then I get very surprised. I I didn't understand what happened. I told him, Don't worry. Yeah, we'll stay in the leaderboard, it's not an issue. But that that changed something in my mind why this guy is caring about his position in the leaderboard since he's been fighting right now and he has used to pay a wife, child. What am I missing here? I didn't understood. But I saw that we have done something that worked after a lot of things that didn't work. Then we start to make something nice, something powerful, something that reduces our cost in training, increase our productivity, increase engagement internally in many different processes. But we didn't know the reason behind of this. For me, it didn't make sense why he's caring so much with a leader or today. I know that well, usually people think that the same thing that used to work with you works works with everybody. So if you are motivated by money, for example, you think that everybody else is motivated by the same thing. You are if you are motivated by afraid, afraid or fear, fear, yeah, for the English. So if you are motivated by fear, then usually these people think that everybody else is motivated by fear as well. At that point, I didn't know about this, so I saw that there were something powerful there. It was not about the leaderboard, but what Juan was feeling that was a little bit different from what I was seeing, feeling about leaderboard. And then I decided to study about this. I saw, hey, there is a huge potential here. I want to study more, I want to dive into this field, learn about what's happening here, technology, neuroscience, psychology. I didn't know actually at that first moment what I should learn about, but this was the first start. So it was how can I say learn that it works in trying to solve my own problems. I didn't learn about these game techniques from games. I learned from life, yeah, through the need of solving my own problems, and I find I found this solution.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and fast forward to Christie, you have a book on gamification, specifically on engagement, the Fantastic Engagement Factory, how to motivate people on a large scale with gamification? You also have a company, as you mentioned, Funifier, that deals with engagement at scale and in general helps companies, leaders to engage people for different reasons. So, how yeah, how did you get there and what are you up to these days? How long have has it been since you've been developing Funifier and this body of work?
SPEAKER_01It have 14 years around. I need to check, but it's around this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a lot too much.
SPEAKER_01Actually, this story that I told you is previous than these 14 years. So I was trying and study and testing and having my internal lab to study how to work up with all of this years before I really open up Funny Fire and say, Hey, I should create a company to help other companies on this. At the first moment, create a software just to replicate what I was doing internally, and we evolved the software to make something more gonna say even more flexible, something that after I learned more methodologies, more frameworks, more ideas on how to do all of this uh optalysis, flow theory, many other, how could I apply all these theories in my engagement process? So I evolving so the platform itself evolves and have new features and improvements every week over these years.
But if you don't mind, I'd like to maybe jump to applications in the real world, your company, the software you created, and like the whole methodology, what does it help companies to do? What kind of results, what kind of problems you help to solve? So people, our listeners could like yeah, figure out uh how it's applicable to their work or what they are trying to do.
SPEAKER_01I need to say that if you have people, if you need to deal with people, no matter if it's your employee, if it's your customer, your parent, your wife, your child, you, so you are a human as well. So in all these scenarios, you can use gamification. So we have company in many different areas. So we have companies in in let's say in lifestyle, like Gym Club, we have companies in technology, like HP, for instance, you have companies like banks, supermarket, school, government. So it's there is a lot of different areas that you can apply. And yeah.
SPEAKER_00Can you maybe yeah, share specific examples? Because you know, I read about them in the book and then on your website, and uh like specific companies and the problems that you help them to solve. You mentioned WIS, uh yeah, they yeah, and uh the other Banco do Brazil and Caixa. Um, my pronunciation is not perfect in Brazil, it's a Caixa Económica Federal. What did you do for those companies and and how perhaps? Yeah, okay. Let's start with WIS.
Uh WIS is an insurance broker here in Brazil. They have over 1200 sales agents, and at least we have been invited to engage these sales agents, and we noticed something interesting. Those sales agents would almost finish a challenge, a goal, but many of them stopped just before the end. We added personalized message literally in in the voice, in the style of their sales director, saying something like, Hey Angela, you are just two sales away to complete this goal and earn this extra Z bonus. So let's do this. So that small timely nerds made a huge difference. We we make them increase by 150% sales. So that's amazing. Yeah, this strategy is like cheering for a runner who's about to cross the finish line, and at Wiz we did many different mechanics. I I saw another thing that kept my attention. These sales agents kept asking, What should I focus on today? They usually ask this for his sales director, the people around. They these sales agents they were usually they are like between 20-25 years old, so they are young people, and we build a system that looks at their current progress, look at their capacity and monthly goals, and we process all this information every single morning, and we give to them what we call combo of the day. So this is like a suggestion. So basically, they smart this thing to focus on that day, and it was like having a personal uh what uh sales code whispering, hey Angela, here's your next best move. I have to do that. By the way, if you want, I can show a video just to make it more tangible for you. What do you think? Yeah, let's try it. Let me share my screen here.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I can see a screen.
SPEAKER_01Ah, okay. So this is the look and few of the gamification, and they unlock everything actually. It was running in their CRM in sales form.
SPEAKER_00And for the listeners, if you are listening to that on audio, so what Ricardo is showing me looks more like a game. Or if you use Duolingo, also reminds me somewhat of that. There is a character and a sort of globe or world.
Yeah, yeah, we use a start adding here, so the idea was to do your own work. So this screen should be something like a screen of a spaceship, and in the dock, the character is showing to the person where they can go and build some towers. Each tower represents KPI in the company. This first tower represents a KPI related to lead. How many leads the sales agent have called and try to convert into a customer? So here in the in this gamification, we bring a challenge, a challenge related to this activity, calling to a lead, and the person needs to go into Salesforce, get one of these leads one of these leads in a list, call to the lead and fill this formulary saying what happened, and five seconds later, the game receives that information and gives some feedback. So now the user has completed that first challenge and receives some notifications here where he will bring some congratulation message, will explain that he just unlocked a new area of this screen, and also will unlock a new a new power to be incremented in this world. So this is something interesting. We start with this quest to treat leads, and before this gamification, they usually didn't really treat all the leads that they have. They have a lot of leads, but they didn't call to this leads. And after we we pushed this challenge related to the leads here, this activity increased by more than 1000%.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, and it sounds like it's you design a challenge which is has this presentation in the uh in their computer system, but also it's okay, you have this challenge, so get out in the real world and do the thing, and then you get your award and get to build some towers in the computer world.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And and this is interesting because they already have this type of activity to be executed. And and then when we move this to the game, then they start to execute. And also another nice thing here is that you see the towers in the planet. Yes. Each tower represents a KPI, and for gamification, before this gamification, they didn't care about the KPIs. But here, if the cap his KPI, his own KPI, is going, he's producing things you see here, he's collecting elements that is being produced as they do the actions related to this KPI. But if they don't, uh the building, the tower, is start to how can I say get fire and okay broke. Yeah, so to to keep the KPI safe, they need to be always on track with these actions. No, that's that's amazing. Yeah, if this is about change of mindset with this idea, they start to see the KPI as their own KPI.
SPEAKER_00They yeah, they start own it. A lot of business owners want people to own things. And yeah, it seems like this increases that. But makes me also think like I I use the lingo app for learning languages, and it's like might feel silly that I care about being in some tournament and having like first place or second place, but it works, and I started learning Italian like twice as much.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. We are working with we are not really working with the rational side of the people, so we are talking with the emotional side, with an irrational side. That there is one element in in the end of this video. So here you are, the player just unlocked what we call the combo of the day. So what is focus on the day? Yeah, this is very powerful. Sometimes you think that your team is not really engaged, but actually they don't really they don't really know what to do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're so right. I talk to a lot of people, uh leaders in teams, and they just have this to-do list that is never ending, and they don't really know often what to focus on, and that makes performance much worse than it could have been if they had this clarity. This is what you focus for the day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we consider not only the goals defined by the company, but also the capacity. Ah, there is something nice that I want to show here, but also the capacity of the person. Maybe the person don't have enough capacity for the goal that you have defined. And in this case, if you set up a goal that is just impossible for that person, they will lose, they will lose motivation. Yeah, so we consider that to put as much as possible to the goal of the call. Also, if the goal is too much, we calibrate this to get more close to what is really feasible for that person. But here we have another place here. I thought about the personalized message that was here, summer is the new director. So times the people receive this jika is hint in English. And when they see that and click, they receive something like this Hey Alini, selling two more life insurance, you reach the blue tier tier. Okay, like a status. Yeah. And earn two hundred reyes you have until tomorrow at eight PM to complete the sales. This is something how can I say maybe we can see this as something simple, but this is very powerful because we are really analyzing each step of each sales agent, bringing a phrase calling the same way the sales director used to bring.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I'm curious, and probably a lot of our listeners might get curious about that too. Talk to um, you mentioned a few times personalization. How does it happen? Do you have an automated system to figure those things out? How to personalize it for each person, like whether that's a challenge or a message.
Yeah, inside Fonny Fire, we have some features that allow us to understand the player profile and use this data of all activities of his profile, what he liked, and use this to calculate and calibrate all of this. Yeah, as I told the how can I close here, okay just to stop doing the video. Yeah, sometimes we have some features that make it very easy.
SPEAKER_00But yeah, yeah. Do you use AI these days to make this personalization easier or maybe more faster or even more personalized than before?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we this example that I showed to you was not done with AI as we see today. But definitely AI has been helping us a lot. We have embedded AI into the platform to help our team to get more productivity in some tasks, and also to help the people in the customer that will manage the games get more productivity as well, to give them hints on how to improve the strategy, how to create new challenges, how to create, for example, uh interactive stories, quizzes, all of this. We are allowing our customers to create in a natural language, just asking for the platform, and the platform you did to them to make it easier to manage these strategies. That if the strategy is too difficult to manage, if it spends a lot of time, usually people leave, and I don't know, this is too hard to manage. So some customers don't want more work, they just want to just want people to do the words or whatever it is they need to do.
SPEAKER_00And as I understand it, it can be applied to many different scenarios like learning and development in the company, as you mentioned before, as you did for your company, or hitting sales target, as you also just mentioned. What are some other maybe tasks that you will usually hire for to help companies to forward?
Another case that I like that are running here in Brazil at Banco do Brasil, Banco do Brazil, Bank of Brazil. So this bank is one of the largest banks in Brazil. They have about 96,000 employees, more than 100 million customers, and they hired us to build a recognition culture among their staff. They used to have their own system to do that for years. Recognize people is one of the tests that the managers need to do once a year. So recognition is something powerful, but usually this comes top-down from the managers. That's how it was. And what we did was we flip that around so that employees could recognize each other peer-to-peer. For example, one employee could recognize the president of the bank, if you want. Select your colleague, friend, yeah, colleague, and you select one of these four behaviors that they want to promote internally, and you define the weight of the recognition. Okay, I have to give, okay, I like this, this is one weight, like one point. Let's say this, or no, I wanna give 10 points. So this is a wow recognition. This this is a mate, and it wasn't just about metrics, so the feeling before this gamification was that oh, I need to do that because otherwise I'm not involved in the company. Then, after some small changes that we did, we make this recognition like really creating a way to recognize appreciation. I remember something interesting that happened in this in this project. At the very beginning, this customer had monetary reward for people that have more that was more recognized. And at a certain moment, some we saw some movements in the bank trying to kill the initiative. I don't know how to say that in English, but okay. Never mind. But there are some people out of the bank that were trying to stop the initiative, and they were able to remove all the monetary rewards in this project, and then they thought that it would be after this. Okay, if you if we don't have any money to recognize people, the engagement will drop, yeah, will drop. But then what we saw the engagement just go higher and much with much more power than we thought. And then what's happened? We remove all the money, and now the engagement is even worse. But this is what they didn't understood that we were not we were not really talking about money here. We are we were talking about appreciation. Yeah. And this is the only channel, one of the only channels that bring this to the employees, and then it evolved and became it now. There is other other initiatives that start from this one. So this is just evolving and increasing. And we have another nice case that I think it would be good to tell about Kaisha. Kaisha now, can I talk about this case?
SPEAKER_00Yes, of course. And I just want to stop here to reflect a little bit on what you just said. Like this appreciation and recognition is actually one of the biggest uh human motivators, like to be recognized, to be appreciated, and people will do so much more just when they somebody tells them that it was useful, it was really nice, it was really good. And because in big companies, there are only so many managers, only so many leaders, and it's done, I don't know, once in a quarter or half a year or a year, but it's not enough to actually engage people. Exactly.
How can I say that? Yeah, most of the companies they design their engagement strategy only based on their own goals. Here is what we want, and this is what you need to do, but people don't fully engage when they see only the company side of the story. Real engagement happens when you overlap this company's mission with people's personal desires, and people be uh recognize so I often picture this as two circles. So on one side you had the company's goals and on the employees' dreams. So if you find so section, this is the sweet spot of the explanation results. What we did on this case of Banco do Brazil was exactly to show something very personal. So we put one, hey, we as a bank did something amazing. Angela, I want to recognize you because in this podcast you were amazing, you did this and that. So this is something personal, and everybody's looking at that. And before this initiative, people didn't they were not being seen. Yeah, this is where education changed the things internally because we did we touch, yeah, we touch the heart, emotional side of the person, yeah, the heart. So I was in Sao Paulo, I was in Sao Paulo yeah, two two days ago. I was talking with people that are very business oriented, they are amazing, and they are huge, they have a very well-defined goal. So the company goes is this and that, and we define it an amazing CRM to help this, but I don't know why, but people is not using our CRM, and we are bringing these people to class to explain how important it is for the company to use the CRM, how the company will uh benefit from this, so it's very important for them to use the CRM, but for any reason that they don't know, nobody cares. And then oh my god, these guys that are very rational, rational, yeah, yeah, they don't know that the rational side, how can I say they the importance in action is very little, very small. When we see the brain, uh I know in Portuguese cerebral dream, the theory of the dream or brain.
SPEAKER_00I don't know if you oh yeah, like the the theory where the brain has three parts this uh instinctual, yeah, emotional, and logical.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. And when we see the importance in terms of action of the rational side, it's very little, and and the more and the rational is like 97-95% of our actions came from these two other parts. And then I thought to him, you need to touch the other parts of his brains to get people doing that. For example, have you ever imagined on the login page of the CRM you put something like a sound, a thunder sound, something that make people oh, what's happening, and touch that irrational part of the person. Usually this works to make people want to log in again and log in again, just because this that is more sound, like for example, casino. Can you imagine casino without sound? So no sound. Yeah, the casino. It's weird.
SPEAKER_00I've been a couple of times, yeah. They're so designed for human irrational sight. Yeah, yeah, and it worked.
SPEAKER_01And I told this to him, and he oh my god, I I never heard about this, I never thought about this. It was like an Eraka moment. Oh my god, so now I'm a problem with just the sound. Oh, yeah, you can try the sound, but I'm just explaining that you have the humor, the human is much more than than this.
SPEAKER_00A computer, a rational computer with not machines exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, especially. Yeah, I I one case that I I like a lot was the one that we run on Caixa Econômica Federal. Caixa is another huge financial institution here in Brazil, and they have something around 80,000 employees, over 150 million customers. We need to check how many they have, but they are huge. When they hired Funny Five, their main goal was to break the bank's historical, historical, is that correct? Bank's historic record of recurring net profit. That record was 8.6 billion reais, and they were looking to reach 9 billion reais in a single year. Yeah, and to achieve that, they understood that they would need to engage everyone in the bank, so from headquarters to local branches across all departments and things. So we broke that big goal, the 9 billion, into smaller missions, department targets, unit targets, and individual targets for each employee. This is something different because they usually just define goals. The small unit was for teams, not person. But then we move more forward and define even employee target as well. And then we build a gamification strategy that covered all the different core drives for people that don't know about core drives from octalysis, so are different human motivations, yes, yeah, triggers that makes different feelings that makes people want to do things, right? Yeah, so as soon as we start running this strategy, we we saw something very interesting. We were tracking all the previous information, KPIs that they had in the past, and before this gamification, less than 10% of employees voluntarily participated in any engagement initiative that they used to run. And in the first month that we ran this strategy based on all these core drives, the number jumped to 92% and stayed high over the year. So imagine they never saw people more than 10% of people participating, and for any reason that they didn't know why, they achieved 92%. And the result were stunning. The goal was to surpass the profit record by 400 million, and we achieved that in just three months, and at the end year they exceeded by over 4 billion reais. So just to give a perspective, because I know not everybody knows what reais means. Most of the people know what dollar means, right? So just to give you an idea, consider the quotation between reais and US dollars in that age. This increase was around a bit more than 1 billion US dollars that we increased. So they were extended 500 million, and we achieved more than 4 billion. Yes.
SPEAKER_00When I read about that, actually, yeah, I thought, like, why aren't you a billionaire? Yes, a big company next to him, like Funifier.
SPEAKER_01Can you repeat?
SPEAKER_00No, when I read about this in uh in the book, in your book, The Fantastic Engagement Factory, I thought to myself, why this company, Funny Fire and Ricardo, or why aren't they billionaires yet? Like, why aren't why isn't everyone talking about this? Because it's such an amazing result. And like for listeners to maybe relate, also, imagine if all of a sudden 90% of people on earth started accessizing, right? It's that kind of like difference.
Yeah, I think that this happened because I was completely involved on the work of all of these and never stopped to tell to anybody, hey, we are doing this and that. So then at a certain point, I actually last year, let's see, yeah, last year I started working with a couple of an entrepreneurs here. Of them told, hey Rika, you tell that a lot of people say I'm gonna say bullshit, bullshit, yeah. It's a bad word, but yeah, say things that are not correct, uh when engagement, but you don't talk, you don't tell what you know of the lessons that you learn. You are not helping. And then he he challenged me. Let's write a book in one month in one month, let's do that, and then we make a challenge between five friends. And the one that didn't write a book should pay 1000 reais for all the others that have done this. And then I came back to my house and said this to my wife, and she said, I want to see this book in one month. Yeah, use the gamification on yourself, and then I yeah, and then I start to talk about these cases. I I divide the book into three parts. You got the book, right? So the first part I told about how I learned about this gamification, how I use this to solve my problems, and how I I start loving this process. And the second part, I put all not all actually, but some of the cases that I learned something new, showing the problem of the customer, the strategy that we use, the results that they get to help other entrepreneurs. That's correct, the way to say entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, yeah. Entrepreneurs to help other entrepreneurs have a good start point on thinking about these strategies and getting different different examples that could help them in different areas of the company. And then at the end, I bring some of the steps that we use here internally to build that, some of a list of game techniques, list of features, tools that we use to build that, and the process behind the work that we do, just to help these people that are leading a lot of people and need to engage a lot of people and need to extract the best from their team and from their customer. Yeah, we all yeah, and also uh as I was showing and talking about the case of Kaisha, if you want, I can show to you how we print how we promote the gamification in the very beginning for the employees of the bank. We build a video that we show to all the 80,000 employees of the bank just to say, Hey, this is new initiative that we have internally.
SPEAKER_00Okay, now tell us what it was exactly. As I saw it as an student, so you had this. I also read about it in the book. You had like a competition or where you complete challenges and you could have those cards, and then you can get some marketplace prices, and then you had even car and I think a trip, right? As a prices, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01This strategy, as you see here, was a big problem for them after three months of the gamification start. Because as I said, you saw in the video, they were planning to give four five hundred travels, pack package of travels to Cancun, to the direct to everybody, but they were thinking that this would happen just in the end of the year. Imagine, right in the beginning of the year, boom, in the the beginning, beginning of the year, people were willing to travel to Cancun. Then wait, what's happening? No, we achieved the goal, we need to rew the Cancun. Yeah, and not in that, did you solve the idea of them to give some cars? Did you saw? Yeah, uh, we're going to give cards, uh, cars, but for what they call agencies, it's a bank unit. In my town, I have one bank unit of cash from federal, so they're going to give one car for this unit, and they will split this car, they will make whatever they want with the car by all the I don't know, 150 employees. They will split one car for all the other people. But they start with with defining the strategy that a small percentage of the money they that exceed the goal be worth it in more rewards, and then they start to have so much money that they were I was gonna say it was hard for them to give a lot of rewards, then they start to give in cars for people directly instead of I want to I will give you one car, you Ricardo, take one. Do you want a car? Here you are.
That was yes, and again, such uh an I don't know, mind-blowing case of how gamification can be super effective for yeah in motivating people to do more of the work, to do those like different challenges and activities and work-related, obviously, not just playing, I don't know, some games. And then yeah, you get productivity increased so much that the institution economic they overachieved their goal in just three months. That is yeah, mind-blowing. So again, that's why I'm like, why aren't everyone talking one isn't everyone talking about uh funifier? So, yes, we'll do our best to promote you more. But here, I wanted also to ask about so you talk about these companies and they look like big institutions. What about smaller companies, smaller businesses? Is it like usable for them? Does it make sense to use funnifier or just gamification techniques in general to engage employees internally, or is it yeah, incentivize different behaviors maybe of customers? In in small companies, for instance, you mean can you repeat that you said if it yeah, because is it can they uh is it just for big companies, or does it make sense for a small company as well? Yeah, it makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Actually, big companies can they they use gamification because one of the beauties of what we did today is the possibility to uh scale this a lot, right? So we can a lot of people, but gamification is not just for big companies, gamification is not about budget or technology, it's about creativity and understanding human behavior, as we were discussing here. So I've seen some small businesses using it brilliantly. One one example that I love here in front of my house, there is a church, and they used to run some parties where you can go there and purchase hot dogs, soft drink, and popcorn, things like that, just to make some money for the church. And uh in one of these parties, I saw a cupcake stand that they were making something completely different from the other stand. The other stand was were selling the uh ready products. Ah, I want to buy a hot dog, okay. Here this is your hot dog, and that's it. But this stand was with three, four times more customers. Instead of selling the ready cupcake, they were giving the customers a big cardboard dice to throw, and depending on the number that you receive in the dice, you could choose how many toppings you you receive to customize your own cupcake. So my daughter saw that and she said, Hey Daddy, I want to I I want to make my own cupcake. Okay, she threw twice, got some toppings, customized, and she was proud of that. She takes some pictures and then she gave the cupcake to my wife and said, Ah, I want to customize another one. Okay, you are and then she customized, she gave it to me again, daddy. My god, okay, so that's enough. No more. But I she don't cupcake this much, so actually, this was just because of the game, just uh just because of the plate, and people love it, so they they turned buying a cupcake into a little game, and another example that I like. I here near my town, there is a small town called Virginopus, and sometimes I go there, it's a very nice town. When uh Yukai came, I bring him to visit the nopus. There is a lot of waterfall. Whatever.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, by the way, for guys, for listeners, guy is one of the leaders, also like thought leaders in gamification who created this callysis framework or framework for using the theory of human drivers and what motivates people in different settings, like from business to education, etc.
SPEAKER_01In this town, I visit an ice cream shop, and the owner added a mystery flavor to the menu. I went there with my daughter, no one knew what it was, and that curiosity made people want to try once and another time, and I guess. So I asked to him, hey, what is this ice cream about? You made this with what fruit? Uh, you need to try to try I never discover, but this this is one of the ice creams that sell more, the flavors that sell more, and that's the instance of gamification. So triggering emotion, curiosity, participation, and at the end, you bring more sales, you make people more happy, they want to interact more with you. So you don't need an app or a big system to do that. You just need to understand what makes people act, and definitely any small business can use it. And today, these days, for example, as I told, I'm using a lot of AI here internally. I used to help people to understand how they can use AI to find ideas. And if, for example, you want to experience how simple it can be to start in your own business, you can go into Chat GPT and try a prompt prompt, for example. Hey Chat GPT, give me, let's say you sell pizza, okay, corn, whatever. You can go there and ask ChatGPT, give me creative ideas to gamify my pizza delivery business, for example, in an offline way, using no technology, only human interaction and customer experience. If you ask this to ChatppP, they will bring you some ideas of how to gamify your business without any any high technology. Of course, in these two examples that I told the cupcake stand, they solved the problem. How? I saw that B cardboard ice. This did the AD did that with what a box, tennis shoes box. Show people box and yeah and stuff handmade. So it was just create TV.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Very simple, yeah, not costly or anything.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01When you go into a big company, then yeah, knowledge helps a lot to communicate to make something personalized, something yeah.
SPEAKER_00And just makes me think of so many opportunities. Like, for example, I'm running an event in a week and I'm like, okay, how can I use gamification to promote it to more people to actually show up? Because a lot of people sign up and never show up. And uh just the way you communicate or send messages, it can already change how people like how many people show up, for example, using this like different gamification techniques and that have to do with uh human motivation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, that thank you so much for the example of Chat GPT. Maybe the next question I could ask you is if a leader or an entrepreneur wants to start with gamification, like where would you like how would you suggest them to approach it, like the beginning?
SPEAKER_01If you are a leader and you want to start, my advice is simple. Start small, pick one area where motivation is low in your company, maybe I don't know, onboarding, sales, YouTube. Then ask yourself what would this look like if it were personalized for each employee, for each customer? And also, how can I make it more fun? If you answer these two questions, and then we'll give you some idea on how to start on that area. Start with small things like personalized message, as I show you in week, or a moment of recognition. For example, the way that we did in Baco do Brazil, right? People get excited when they see that they are in Steam and get recognized, and a meaningful channel or something.
Yeah, can I just interrupt you for a moment here? Actually, research on in leadership and what helps people to like feel well at work and be the most engaged, like recent research around that showed exactly that people feel the most engaged when they are seen, they are recognized, and they feel like their work matters because of that, and they matter.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. And yeah, we need the travel that I did to Sao Paulo, as I told walking with this goals-oriented guys. I think the real shift here is in mindset, they are always looking into numbers, the company, and the goals and the system and the process, and that's excellent. But we need to start designing experiences for our humans as well. They did the the hard part of this, but they when we move to a designing experience for our humans, it's it sounds like something that they cannot see, something untangible.
SPEAKER_00In tangible, yeah, yeah, something you can't touch exactly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I think this we need to help people see that humans are much more than just numbers. And if you if you understand that, well, you your results will be much better.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're already far ahead. So yeah, Ricardo, thank you so much for sharing all these examples and insights and for your work as well. Just yeah, I'm super happy that we have you on Change Wired Podcast. I think the last question is how do people connect with you, like leaders, entrepreneurs? How do people connect to learn more about your work, what you do, maybe social media, maybe website links? Where do you want people to go?
SPEAKER_01I think a good start point is the same one that you take. You have a good opportunity to get a book and book, you have a lot of very powerful callbands for you to understand the power of this uh engagement process. I've seen I've read a very nice book a long time ago called Restita Previsio, but I don't know the name in English, but it's predictable revenue, something like that.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Have you ever heard about this book?
SPEAKER_00You'll send me the link, I linked it in the show notes.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, I'm talking about this because usually people, especially business people, they don't take too much attention on this engagement side of the company. I I think that engagement is an asset just like money. So most of the companies and departments, they manage finance, legal, market, but engagement, most of the time nobody really manages this. And the truth is that engaged employees or customers produces completely different results compared with disengaged people, right? So even if you think so, for example, you have two employees, one you pay them both receive the same salary, the one that is engaged will produce much more than the one that is not engaged. I think, and my customers evolve to this understanding, to this mindset, that you should treat engagement as a strategic process on your customer, and getting this book, the name of the book, predictable revenue. You need to have a predictable engagement. So it's not about making work more fun, it's about unlocking the human the human, is that correct? Human human protection that is already there. So the book gives you a very good idea on how you can apply this on the company, give you very good examples on how we solve different problems in different areas using these techniques. And you can also go into my Instagram to find this guy there.
SPEAKER_00Very good. We're gonna link it in the show notes too, guys. So yeah, check it out.
SPEAKER_01And also you can jump into funny fire.company. So if you just want to see more my face, go to Instagram. If you want to uh understand a little bit more, buy the book, the amazing this is the book.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the amazing management factory. How to motivate people on a large scale with gamification.
SPEAKER_01This is the dopamine symbol, symbol, yeah, symbol. But this is stuff. If you buy the book, you understand what each of these letters mean. And if you want to, if you are a business owner of a big company, of a bank, of you have millions of customers, you have thousands of employees, and you want help to run this on your company, you have funify, so you have different paths to go.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and if you want to make engagement another asset that unlocks pretty much everything else, then yeah, talk to Ricardo and Funny Fire, and you'll be in good hands and on you on your way there. Yeah, again, thank you so much, Ricardo, for coming as a guest on the show for your time and your work. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with listeners?
Study about engagement, yeah. Not only for your company, but also for your own life. I see that uh this helped me a lot with my daughter, with uh people around me, so with me as well, understanding how my brain works, how my heart guides me sometimes. Yeah, it's something powerful that influences you, even if you don't, even if you don't understand, it will influence you. So use this knowledge to influence you for the best.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's and because you have now uh you can ask, okay, how can I do that myself? So I get motivated to do what I need to do. So yeah, thanks Ricardo again for this amazing conversation. And people do find Ricardo to engage yourself, your company, your employees, and your customers. And have till next time, keep growing and stay engaged.