Designing for convenience

On making the wrong things harder.

Summary:
Make it easy to do the right thing.
Make it inconvenient to do the wrong thing.

Story time

Back in the day when I started to take trail running more seriously, I hired my first running coach. He asked me to send him my plan and estimations before heading out for a run so we could assess plan vs reality. It felt like justifying when I went out for a run.

As a result, I ran less.

I started skipping the 30 min midday runs, because I just couldn’t be bothered with the admin. Then I stopped longer runs because I felt too conscious about having skipped the shorter ones.

This wasn’t working. So I found a new coach with a very different approach: she’d use an app to check on my runs. She had me justify every day that I did not go out for a run (or do strength training).

Suddenly, it was more convenient to simply do the thing. Running became the default option, and I (lovingly) blame here for the fact that I still run today.

What does this have to do with organizational change?

Beware of where you place the friction

Humans are creatures of convenience. We are lazy by default - not because we are bad people, but because saving energy is part of our specie’s survival strategy. And the brain requires a whole lot of energy.

Knowledge management

If knowledge is closed off by default, you have to make an effort every time you want to share something outside of the original group. It takes effort to share the information, it takes effort to access the info - so most of the time no one bothers to make it public.

You end up with unintentional silos.

It’s not that people do not WANT to share information, it’s simply too much work, and no one is really responsible. So why bother.

It’s not that people do not WANT to be part of specific discussions. They simply do not know that they are happening in the first place, because they weren’t invited (for whatever reason).

On the flipside, when knowledge is open by default, access to that information becomes a lot easier, too. A can read and comment, and learn from each other. And it’s this learning and seeing information, even on flyby, that makes for new ideas - connecting dots you would not know they existed in a closed-off world.

Conversations with an open door policy allow others to drop by. And this is especially important for distributed teams.

Structure and self-service

The next question is: among all of those open-door channels and sources of information - How are you supposed to know where to look, what to learn, how to find the things that are relevant to you?

Structure is an important component here - that’s where labels, naming conventions and templates are helpful. They can feel like a constraint, and they can also serve as cognitive shortcuts. You don’t have to (actively) remember quite as many things if you can fall back on checking what exists.

What does that mean in practice?

Make it searchable, make it accessible, and teach your colleagues how to search. Your goal is to make it easier for them to search than having to ask you.

Make it easy to do the right thing.
Make it inconvenient to do the wrong thing.

And you’ll never have to enforce ever again.