Knowing One Thing and Cueing Another

Organizational change takes something stronger than information alone.

In a professional environment, the greatest barrier to learning is the desire to look smart in front of others.

We’ve been conditioned by a lifetime of rewards for sounding right, rather than praise for honestly admitting ignorance. This is a reflexive response, a habit. And humans run on habits. Encoding a routine is an efficient way to save precious cognitive power for novel situations and potential threats. Every morning, your hands can make the usual pot of coffee while your eyes and attention are free to follow Snowball, the cat who attacks from above.

Routines, once established, are notoriously difficult to reprogram, even if the habit undermines higher-order goals or if the familiar environment secretes a glitch. You check your phone, or chew your nails, or eat too many fries because it feels good at the time. You know you should floss, but never do, because there’s no enticing cue or immediate reward. Sometimes, you end up putting catfood in the coffeegrinder because you went though the motions and didn’t bother to look.

Organizations, for the time being, are made up of humans, which means they are complex collections of intersecting habits. Habits in an organization are called practices, processes, or “the way we do things around here,” if they are explicitly noticed at all.

The greatest barrier to organizational transformation is the tension between new information and existing practices. Having the former tells you nothing about how to get the latter to change. It’s essential to acknowledge the role of the underlying environment, routine, or reward.

A lack of awareness is easy to blame, habits are hard to fix

This became clear to us when we were designing our workshop for women that came to be called Cut the Bias. We asked ourselves why workplace gender bias was pervasive even though it’s been a known issue for decades, even though corporations have been throwing money at training for years. Nothing seemed to change, because environments and incentives continued to reinforce the status quo.

Organizations were treating a habit problem like a knowledge problem. Getting people in a room and telling them what unconscious bias is, that’s simple. Rooting out the associated habits, rewarding different behaviors, and replacing familiar routines, that takes a lot of time and attention and collaborative work.

Habit problems present an obstacle to so-called knowledge workers, those of us who work with information. When confronted with the situation of people doing the wrong thing (for many values of “wrong”), we want to think that more information is the solution. We have so much of it and it’s so satisfying to apply in a thick paste.

The distribution of information scales in a pleasing (and sometimes terrifying) manner. It’s fast and easy to share a fact with 10 or 100 or 10,000 people. It is daunting to consider changing a multitude of habits. And one of the most pernicious habits is deferring to authority or tradition rather than evidence when making decisions about what needs to change.

Often the approach backfires. Being reminded of what we should do can elicits bad feelings that drive us to do the bad thing that feels good.We know this in our personal lives. When it comes to flossing, smoking, exercising, eating better, wasting less time noodling around online, we know that habits are devilishly hard to break. If you’re running on rails, a map can’t help.

We also know this when we are talking about our customers or the users we’re designing for. People who design games, apps, and social media platforms talk about habit loops, cues, and rewards.

“[The] truth behind my being perpetually late was my addiction to the adrenaline rush I got from speeding to my appointment.” — RuPaul

But when it comes to changing how we work, everything we know about human behavior hides behind our professional high self-regard. We don’t want to acknowledge how much emotion plays a part. It’s unseemly that even the behavior of the most analytic people solving the driest problems of technology is rooted in avoiding bad feelings and seeking good.

“Knowledge sharing” and “best practices” operate on the principle that the only thing standing between an organization and greater effectiveness is the right information. And this easy myth makes it harder to change. Solving a problem requires the right definition. Admitting you have to change habits means admitting you have a very hard problem on your hands. When you start to examine the cues and rewards that perpetuate behavior in an organization you are at the level of the culture, compensation, and the business model itself—there be monsters.

Change Begins With True Understanding

“Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure.” — Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit

We realized that the common thread running through all of our workshops was reframing the problem, and then tying it to collaborative practice. Even improving one’s own presentation skills requires the support of colleagues over time. New information is the least part of the instruction.

We try to help each participant identify a new set of cues and rewards in their habitual context, and give them a set of tools, and a way to support one another over time. With Cut the Bias we aim to create systemic change and enhance fairness by cultivating individual selfishness. Design with Words upends the traditional relationship of language to design. Research Together reveals the personal and political barriers to evidence-based decision-making, rather than accepting the premise that data changes minds. Presenting Work With Confidence could be retitled “Reflecting Their Concerns.”

Getting to Lazy

In a culture of productivity, we need to elevate laziness. The question to ask is “How do we make the right thing to do the easiest?” Requiring people to remember new information is not it. If people were good at remembering to do the right thing, office kitchens would not need signs reminding people who work there every day where to put their dishes.