Tweak The Environment

I recently started reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. On the first chapter, the authors described 3 surprises about change. One that stuck to me was:

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

The authors talked about a study where moviegoers were all given a bucket (large or small) of stale popcorn. The study showed that moviegoers with larger buckets tend to eat more popcorn than those that had smaller buckets. If we want people to eat more popcorn, then provide larger buckets! Conversely, smaller buckets made for healthier moviegoers.

It’s super easy to over-complicate the problem and give suggestions to the gluttons on how to curb their appetites, when in fact it could be solved by giving them smaller buckets. Likewise, it’s very easy to point out issues with a person (or group of people) than to point out the environment/context of the issue.

We need to have a closer look at our systems and organisations, and see how we can stimulate change.