28. Tim Houlihan

The Iowa Idea: Tim Houlihan

“We don’t know our own motivations very well.”

In this episode of The Iowa Idea Podcast, I sit down with Tim Houlihan. Tim is intensely curious about why people do what they do. His understanding of human behavior and his applied experience help policy makers, marketers, human resource executives, and sales leaders make better decisions about their constituencies.

Tim founded BehaviorAlchemy, LLC, a strategy, training and design consultancy, to focus the behavioral lens on productivity, team effectiveness, retention, sales effectiveness, compliance and the customer experience. Along with co-host Kurt Nelson, Tim runs the wildly successful Behavioral Grooves podcast and Meetup.

I really appreciated Tim’s insights and spirit. We dig into monetary vs non-monetary rewards, the power of music, biases, and motivation; as well as Tim’s journey into the world of music and behavioral science. Thanks to Tim for joining me. I hope you enjoy the episode.

About Tim

Tim Houlihan is intensely curious about why people do what they do. His understanding of human behavior and his applied experience help policy makers, marketers, human resource executives, and sales leaders make better decisions about their constituencies.

Tim founded BehaviorAlchemy, LLC, a strategy, training and design consultancy, to focus the behavioral lens on productivity, team effectiveness, retention, sales effectiveness, compliance and the customer experience. The consultancy works primarily with organizations based in the United States and Europe and helps clients solve business problems through a behavioral lens. He also guest lectures at colleges and universities – including Carnegie Mellon University, Monmouth, Quinnipiac, Iowa State University, the University of St. Thomas and others – to bring real-world experiences to the classroom.

With partner, Kurt Nelson PhD, Tim co-founded Behavioral Grooves. It is a meetup based in Minneapolis, Minnesota with outposts in other cities. The meetup enables curious minds to pursue their interests in the application of behavioral sciences with TED-like talks from both academics and practitioners. Kurt and Tim also record a Behavioral Grooves podcast that features world-renowned researchers and practitioners by diving deep into the why-people-do-what-they-do question for listeners in more than 100 countries.

Before he launched BehaviorAlchemy and the Behavioral Grooves, he was the Vice President of Reward Systems at BI WORLDWIDE.  There, he was responsible for a $300,000,000 global portfolio of innovative reward systems, a thought leader in behavioral sciences, and was the chief liaison with academic research partnerships around the world. His research collaborations have included projects with Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, Saurabh Bhargava, Francesca Gino, Scott Jeffrey, Victoria Shaffer, and Patricia Norberg, among others.

Tim’s crusade is to help us all realize that we are underestimating the role of the unconscious in our behaviors and to help address what we can do about it.

BehavioralAlchemy – https://www.behavioralchemy.com/

Behavioral Grooves – https://behavioralgrooves.com/

Credits

Episode produce by Spark Consulting Group (www.inspiredbyspark.com) in Iowa City, with support from Executive Podcast Solutions (https://www.executivepodcastsolutions.com/)

The Iowa Idea Podcast music written and performed by Paisley Bible (https://paisleybible.bandcamp.com/).