How Alcon created a bingeable compliance campaign for their employees with Labyrinth Training
A scene from Alcon’s interactive compliance training series “The Lens”
Tom Fox’s FCPA Compliance Report, the longest-running podcast in compliance, welcomed Duane Stumpf, Global Head of Integrity and Compliance at Alcon and Peter Grossman, Co-Founder, Chief Strategist at Labyrinth Training.
The podcast focused on how Labyrinth Training, an award-winning interactive storytelling company, worked with Alcon's to reimagine their "The Lens" policy into an engaging, interactive experience for their global employees. The training encouraged modern, binge-able behavior, resulting in the series being taken within first 60 days, 81% of Alcon staff completed all five episodes.
“The Lens” 5-Part Interactive Compliance Series has been recognized with several industry awards, including the Anthem Awards, The Telly Awards, GD USA American Graphic Design Awards for its unique approach to compliance and immersive design.
Full transcript of the podcast
Tom Fox:
This episode, I'm joined by Peter Grossman of Labyrinth Training and Duane Stumpf from Alcon to discuss their joint production of innovative compliance training video for Alcon. I know you'll enjoy this episode.
Hello everyone. This is Tom Fox, back for another episode, and you are in for a treat today, because I'm in for a treat today. I have Peter Grossman and Duane Stumpf, and they are going to talk about a really interesting and, more importantly, entertaining compliance project that they worked on together. So gentlemen, first of all, welcome, and thank you so much for taking the time to visit with me today.
Duane Stumpf:
Thanks, Tom. We appreciate being here.
Peter Grossman:
Thanks for having us.
Tom Fox:
I'm going to start with you, Peter. Could you tell us your professional background and your current role?
Peter Grossman:
Yes, my current role is that I'm one of the co-founders of Labyrinth Training. We make interactive animated compliance trainings for people like Duane. My background is such that I am certainly not a lawyer, anything remotely resembling it. My partner and I have backgrounds in entertainment and publishing and production. I worked for Us Weekly for many years, for Rolling Stone before that, and my background is in that space.
Tom Fox:
And Duane?
Duane Stumpf:
Yeah, so I am the global head of integrity and compliance and the chief compliance officer for Alcon Vision. We're the global leader in eye care across the world. My background, like Peter, I am not a lawyer, which is a little bit different from my role in this industry. I'm actually what I call a recovering sales rep. Spent the first decade of my life in sales, and the next decade plus, that makes me sound really old now, the next decade plus in consulting before I came to Alcon.
Tom Fox:
For our audiences that have listened over the years, they will remember Peter from another event, which I'll not name, and if someone emails me from what they remember him from, they will win something from me. But Duane, I wanted to ask you, how did you find out about Peter, Labyrinth, and really the services he has delivered to the compliance community?
Duane Stumpf:
Okay, Tom, this is where you actually come into the picture. Several years ago, I'm being a compliance geek sitting around on a Sunday morning listening to podcasts and trying to figure out some creative way to get some information out about our compliance program and such. And I ran across your podcast that had Peter and Matt Galvin from AB InBev talking about a creative training program they did that included cows and this reaction that the company had to their cows. And I sat there thinking, "I want my cow moment." So, I called Peter, and it's been a pretty good relationship since.
Tom Fox:
I have to withdraw my offer for a gift, since you've told everyone... Previously appeared. But Duane, for those listening to this podcast and not seeing this on YouTube, behind you is a small wall plaque called The Lens. So, could you tell us what The Lens and The Lens policy is? And then Peter, maybe you could pick up on what your role is, was, with publicizing The Lens policy at Alcon.
Duane Stumpf:
Yeah, The Lens policy is our policy on how we interact in the marketplace, right? We are a medical products manufacturer, and we have, obviously, a lot of highly-regulated aspects about how we communicate about our products, promote our products, sell our products, research our products out in the marketplace, how we engage healthcare professionals. The Lens, we're an eye care company, is a branded policy, right? It's called A Focus on Integrity, and it's really a principles-based policy that helps guide and put context around being ethical in the marketplace with our products. So, that's really what the policy is.
And really, what we reached out to Peter with was, look, we've got really great name recognition on our policy. We've got a lot of really good understanding about the rules and this. The challenge for us, and what we were trying to solve, is we need to put it into context, right? When you've got 30,000 humans, all of them are going to take those principles that you outline in your policy and interpret them in different ways unless you put it into context. And so, how do we create the sticky moments, something that just catches things in their brain? My attitude about it is, if we can just create a nanosecond pause in the life happens moments, right? We have a really good shot at people taking a step back and thinking about it and doing the right thing. And that's really where Peter's brilliance comes and his team's brilliance come in, is helping us put those kind of real life scenarios into this sticky, funny, humorous content.
Tom Fox:
Peter, I thought about you in many ways, but stickiness is not one of them. I thought entertainment and an infectious laugh. But maybe you can explain your process of how you translated a policy into something sticky, but is entertainingly sticky.
Peter Grossman:
That's one of those words that if you say over and over again really starts to sound problematic, doesn't it? Sticky. I'll take it as a compliment.
What Duane started with was actually really far along than what we even typically see. He had a brand idea already, and so this idea that there's this policy called The Lens, which is obviously very clever and catchy, and was already a bit sticky, one might say, was a really good starting point for us because there's this name recognition. We know what we're going to call it, we know where we're going with this. And so what we do, so we're not lawyers, but I did a lot of contract work when I was at Us Weekly, and so I speak the language enough. So, when I read through these policies, I speak the language to the point where I can then translate it into normal speak, into non-lawyer speak, non-compliance speak. And understanding the policies was really fun, a sort of part of the starting point.
But what I always refer to with everyone that we work with is the fun part is tell me your stories. Tell me how this actually... Everyone has a policy that, in some way, says don't pay a bribe, but tell me how this manifests itself in your world. And when you start... An ex-interviewer, just I'm curious, I like to know these things. And so as we start to talk through it, and as I start to hear the scenarios in which these things actually present themselves, the story, the overarching story, starts to appear. And that's what we're trying to do with our programs, with our episodes, as we call them, is we want to have something that's fun and entertaining and it's interactive, and we can talk about that too, but what we really want to make sure is that when the person is watching it, that they see themselves up there. That they don't think that this was just a generic or a general talk about bribery. This was specific to you.
And so the fun of talking with Duane through this process was hearing about the characters that present themselves, the different types of doctors, the different conferences that you're at. Really getting into that world and hearing what do your staff deal with on a regular basis? And so, as we started to understand that, the story started to take shape, and we really understood what we were trying to communicate.
And so, what we came up with was, and we always try and do this with our work, is have some kind of central plot device. Something that we're going to follow that, no matter what compliance topic we're talking about, it'll manifest itself in some way. And I remember one of the early conversations that I had with Duane, as all three of us are glasses wearers on this show here, I am very particular about what goes in my eyes. I can't wear contacts. I couldn't even dream of eye surgery, unless it was life or health threatening. But obviously, Duane and his crew know all about it. And so I heard all kinds of details about what happens in eye surgeries and things, and we started talking about what kind of lenses they use. And so I was familiar with bifocals, and Duane introduced me to trifocals, and what we eventually landed on was, what would be something beyond that that doesn't exist, but would be just fun? And Duane said, "If there was a quadrifocal, but I'm not really sure what that would be, there aren't any more focals left."
And so we decided we'll make up what the fourth focal is. And the whole story of The Lens focuses around this new lens that Alcon has developed called Q4, for the quadrifocal lens. The joke, of course, being that the Q for quadri and the four are the same thing, which we make mention of. And the idea that it's a lens, but it also has a Siri type voice command where you can change the color of your eyes, say, "Okay, I want green now." And you change your eyes. And all of our characters in this training and all of our trainings all have the same eyes. They're the same shape, they're black, no one has colored eyes of any kind. And so this, in that universe was like, whoa, in a world where everyone has the same eyes, now you can have this. And so, we created excitement around this fictional product with breaking news segments and conferences dedicated to it.
But then we asked the question, "Okay, let's say you had this. What would happen?" And all of the doctors start to come out of the woodwork. When you're up and they say, "Oh, we want in on that." And when things start to go wrong, which they do in a pretty significant way, the doctors that you have to bring and just hedge your bets and make you look good, all the different ins and outs of what would happen with a product release, happen in this training series.
And so you get all your lessons. You could have just done slides and shown all the lessons and gotten the lessons across, but what we were seeking to do was deliver those lessons in a way that was meaningful, that people would relate to, they might laugh at a little bit, and have some fun with, and also bring them into it. It's a very interactive piece. You have to make decisions, you affect the narrative based on the choices that you make, and there's a lot of feedback. And so you're constantly engaged and constantly leaning into the screen and wanting to know what happens next, but it's up to you, with all the different buttons and things that you get to click to take you through it.
Tom Fox:
Duane, from your perspective, how did this help move the ball forward from your position as a chief compliance officer?
Duane Stumpf:
Yeah, it's like I said earlier, we had great recognition of the rules, but maybe a little poor context of how to deal with those life happens moments. What we got from this was a very engaged audience, right? And so that's the magic button, if you will, from a compliance officer standpoint. If you think about how do you change the culture, how do you change the narrative of the compliance organization? It is come out with something that they don't believe we created. We launched this training and our marketing team was getting emails saying, "Hey, this is brilliant. How did you guys put this together?" And they're saying, "We never saw it before." It was that change in the narrative of thinking about compliance in a totally different way than it's been done before.
Peter talked about all of the things we've already done to brand our policy and such. We launched this program in kind of a Netflix style, five episodes all at once, each episode somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to 11 minutes, so they're not long. But we spent about to three weeks in advance kind of hyping it up. Quietly hyping it, but we basically sent out emails, posted things on our internal social media. We had movie posters, like the ones behind me, for those that can see it on YouTube. We really hyped this up as something new. We didn't talk about it from a compliance perspective, we just threw the characters out there. We had a movie trailer that we launched with it. It was really just getting people curious about what was happening with it.
And from a compliance officer standpoint, I hate chasing people to do the training. We gave people six months to complete all five episodes. Within 60 days, 81% of our people had completed all five episodes, and the majority of those binged all five episodes at one time. Which is just, if I'd come out with close to an hour of training content in a normal situation, I would constantly get all of the pushback and feedback of, "Boy, this is too long, it's painful." All of these things. We didn't get a single complaint about it being that long, if you sat and took all five episodes.
So, from a compliance officer standpoint, it really just took us that next step in creating this culture of, hey, it's okay, there are no villains in here. There are no, if you will, things are a little over the top, but they're just real enough to be something that you can relate to. They're not so real that they're uncomfortable, but they're not so absurd that you sit there and you ignore them, thinking, "This would never happened here."
Tom Fox:
So, Peter, you have one very unique aspect or very unique creation, I should say, for the deliverable, and that was a musical number. Once again, unfortunately for those on YouTube, they will get a teaser of this. For those listening to this audio, perhaps not, we'll direct you to that teaser. But could you tell us about the genesis of the musical number, and how really you can create and incorporate that type of media into something that I'm going to call compliance training?
Peter Grossman:
Oh, you can certainly call it that. I suppose I left one part of my background out, and when you were asking about my background, is that two lives ago, I was a music major. I went to school for voice, I was going to be a music teacher before I ended up working in media. And my partner, Scott Petts, who is the creative director who is in charge of everything that you see on screen, is also a musician. And we're music aficionados, we have lots of theme songs and little things like that woven into our trainings that are catchy and are part of the whole stickiness one, if you might say, of the trainings, just little things to get in people's head so they remember it.
And I remember where this came from, actually. We had done an awareness during the pandemic, early days of the pandemic, an awareness video with Covington about the importance of wearing a mask, this is when these are just being introduced. And there was a little jingle that went along that just said, "My mask is for you and your mask is for me", back and forth, and it was just this catchy little jingle, and there's actually a full song behind it too, but that's for another day.
And Duane had heard that. And on one of our early calls, he asked about it. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's me singing and playing the guitar," and all that. He said, "Oh, that's you? Can we have a musical number?" And I say yes to pretty much everything, so I was like, "Of course you can. What would you like?" And I remember you asked for a '70s style rock song, and I'm sure at the time what you meant was Led Zeppelin style. And I'm a huge fan, but in my head I went straight to Earth, Wind & Fire. I wanted a horn section and a whole to-do. And so, we knew in the back of our heads from the beginning that there was this opportunity to incorporate the musical number, and we just needed to pick the right spot where it would be meaningful and not just there for its own sake.
And so, as Duane mentioned, there are five episodes. Excuse me. When we get to episode four, you meet the worst person that there is. You meet a doctor, Dr. Louis, who is that guy in the room. He is the person that's not there for the right reason. He's amongst people who want to be helpful and take care of other people; he's the one that's just in it for the money. And when you first meet him, he's soliciting bribes of every kind from the salesperson, trying to take advantage of them, because there's been a problem with Q4 and he's a little bit famous, and so he's going to lend his fame. And when they meet face-to-face, at this point the sales rep is like, "All right, I'm going to get this famous doctor to help us and sign off on the products, and that'll move the market."
When they eventually meet face-to-face, and I will credit Duane with this because it's brilliant, you see him in his lab coat, and it looks like a NASCAR jacket. It's just ads, everything is for sale. It's all over his office, there are ads for every product, and you figure out who he is right away. And he then looks at the sales rep, and now that we've established that this is the most ridiculous person that you're going to meet, we say it in the intro to the episode, the narrator's, "You're going to meet someone a little..." We've set you up for this. And the doctor says to the sales rep, "I'll take all these logos off of my jacket and just have your Q4 logo on it all by itself. And this will, of course, tell the world that your lens is okay," even though there's been just sort of disastrous things happening. And at that moment, I was like, "Okay, what do these doctors do?" And Duane at some point literally said the phrase, "They go into their whole song and dance." And I was like, here we go.
And so in the middle of his office, as he's trying to convince the sales rep, "Hey, sponsor my lab coat." And keep in mind that the rules are you can't even leave a pen behind. And so this is far and away exceeding what you're allowed to do. Dr. Louis just breaks into song. And it's called Call Dr. Louis, and it's him convincing Martin, the sales rep, "Hey, you should do this with me." And Martin starts singing along with him at one point, and you think it's getting, "Oh, this is going to happen!" It builds to this big crescendo. And you realize at the end, of course, that he's a slime ball and that you can't interact with him, but Martin considers it. And we were thinking, how are we going to get him to consider it? Why would he listen to this? And there is that little bit of charm to those kind of people that wears off quickly, but might entice you, in that moment, to do something that you shouldn't do.
And it's about a minute long, it is in that sort of '70s funk style. And I pulled rank, I will say that, and I certainly wasn't going to let anybody else sing it. So, it's me playing all the instruments and singing lead, to the point where we then later reference that in the Dr. Louis takedown, that he was actually lip-syncing the entire time, because someone else was singing. And if you think that doesn't make any sense in compliance training, I invite you to watch the ending, where Martin himself says, "Why isn't this making any sense?" And all is revealed. But it was an enormous amount of fun. Scott, my partner, couldn't believe, I was like, "No, they asked for it. He really asked for it." He's like, "All right, let's do it."
And it's one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences I've had doing this at Labyrinth, because it was silly and fun, but it was effective. I'm positive that no one who sees it will forget that character, and forget what looms, and what the dangers are with someone like that. And so while we're always there to have fun and we'll do whatever, we've had dinosaurs pop up on screen, all kinds of things happen in our trainings, it's always there for a reason though. We can make stuff pop up just for fun, but we're trying to... It happened at the moments where we know the user's here, where they're leaning into the screen, where they're wanting to see what happens next, and that's when their eyes and their ears and their minds are open, and that's when we can deliver your lessons.
It's really easy to say, "Don't leave behind anything of value to a doctor, no matter how much they ask." And people won't really necessarily pay attention to that. But if you've just primed them by saying, "They're going to do this whole crazy thing with a musical number, maybe." You're thinking now, you're paying attention. You're going to remember the next time someone tries to sweet-talk you into it, "Oh, this is like that slimy doctor that I don't want to be around." And that's [inaudible 00:20:44].
Duane Stumpf:
You're downplaying the challenge. You're downplaying the challenge a bit, because the challenge was, you basically told me you were up for virtually anything I could come up with. And I said-
Peter Grossman:
True.
Duane Stumpf:
... "If you can incorporate a 1970s rock and roll music number into this that's relevant to the compliance training, and not just the background music, I'll believe you." And somehow, you did it.
Peter Grossman:
That's right.
Tom Fox:
I have to say, the first time-
Peter Grossman:
It-
Tom Fox:
... you mentioned music, I went to Quadrophenia, but that shows you my perspective.
Peter Grossman:
Yeah, there you go, there you go.
Tom Fox:
Peter, both you and Duane talked about the internal reaction. I want to move to external reactions, specifically award won for this campaign. And I'm a creator, so I have some appreciation of what that means to a creator. But Duane, I really wanted to ask you, what did the award mean to you and your team, and frankly, to the entire organization?
Duane Stumpf:
The first award that came through for us was really the Anthem Award, which really is designed to recognize mission and purposeful works and such. And so, it was really meaningful to us, because it was really about the purpose of it and what we were trying to drive for it. And so we, when we started this out, never thought about it from an awards' perspective, but the fact that we were able to highlight-
Peter Grossman:
He didn't.
Duane Stumpf:
... and from a compliance standpoint that could go out and win an award that's not a compliance award, right? This wasn't something geared towards compliance, it wasn't a training award. It was really around the purpose of it.
Internally, it's interesting because Peter swore me to secrecy on it until the announcements came out. The announcements came out and he took about 20 minutes to notify me that the announcements were out. In that 20 minutes, our CEO got a notification that we had won it and sent a note saying, "Hey, congratulations, this is awesome." And I'm sitting there thinking, "Okay, how in the world did you get this before me?" That's really the impact of it, of the awards for us. The attention it brought to our function as not just this stodgy police state group that's there to catch people. We've worked really hard to create a business partnering aspect to it, be there as advisors and helpers to the organization and such. Obviously, we have roles in monitoring and other things, but it just added on to the reaction. And we had great reaction to the training. The fact that it got this external recognition for work like this just fed into the fact that this is a different organization than we were the 10 years ago I started.
Tom Fox:
Wow, I could not have written a better answer than that. Peter, what are some of your thoughts there? I have to ask you, like I said, being a creative, I understand. What did it mean to you and Labyrinth?
Peter Grossman:
Yeah, my partner, Scott, he worked for HBO for a while, and he's the one that designed the Game of Thrones website, and he has an Emmy for that. And he was the one that was like, "This thing should win an award." And really, I need to credit him for, was pushing that at us. He was thinking about it from the beginning of, "Wow, this narrative is really coming together, the interactions are really cool." And so the Anthem Awards were the first one where we thought, "Yeah, this is what... It's a little off, because it's compliance training, but it is mission and purpose-driven, and it fits." And the health industry was one of the categories represented. And we were floored. I think the people that won the award in the category that we won this past year, the year before it was Google, and we're not quite Google yet. And so to get to go to that awards show and be surrounded by people who are really doing some amazing work was incredible. And just to say, "All right, we belong here."
And then we followed it up with two Telly Awards, one for the narrative and one for the interactive design. And for us, with our background, that was pretty meaningful, because it was the reverse question of what Duane is saying. Duane is saying, "Can you make compliance training that's entertaining enough, that's entertaining?" And we were speaking of it the other way, of, "Can our compliance training, from a video standpoint, is it good enough just as a video, just as entertainment?" And we think it is, and so it's meaningful to have the both sides of that, to say, "Yeah, this is really engaging, entertaining, and fun. But also, it delivers on its purpose, it delivers on its mission, which is to get people to just stop and think before they engage in some of these activities. That just a little mindfulness, just a little bit of, 'Wait a minute, should I be doing this?' Goes such a long way."
And that's why the musical number, and that's why the cartoon, and that's why all the interactive buttons and things, and that's why the crazy storyline that takes place, it's because these are really important lessons. And they need to be delivered in a way that people will remember, that people will enjoy and take notice. And for us, it was just really meaningful to be recognized on both ends of it; that the mission was there and that the quality of the work, the artistry of it, was there as well.
Tom Fox:
Gentlemen, unfortunately we are near the end of our time for this episode, but before we leave, I wanted to ask both of you, if our listeners wanted any more information on you, Peter and Labyrinth, or Duane, perhaps, to reach out to you for some counsel on how to have this sort of campaign and work with a creative, could I ask you, what would be the best way for them or listeners to contact with either one of you? Peter?
Peter Grossman:
You can find us on labyrinthtraining.com. Certainly, you can schedule a demo there, you can email me at Peter@labyrinthtraining.com. I'm the guy that's going to walk you through it. And yeah, absolutely. You can also find the case study for The Lens there.
Tom Fox:
Duane?
Duane Stumpf:
Yeah, look, you can find me on LinkedIn or you can email me. My email's very easy, it's just Duane Stumpf, like on the screen here, with a dot between it, @Alcon.com. And I'm happy to respond to any questions.
Tom Fox:
Gentlemen, I wanted to thank you again for taking the time to visit with me. It's been a ton of fun.
Peter Grossman:
Thanks for having us, Tom.
Duane Stumpf:
Thanks a lot, Tom.
Tom Fox:
All right, we're off recording. So, give it a minute, we'll finish uploading.
Hello everyone, this is Tom Fox. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the FCPA Compliance Report. If you've enjoyed this podcast episode, I hope you'll subscribe, rate, and review wherever great podcasts are listened to. The award-winning FCPA Compliance Report is a production of the Compliance Podcast Network.