Humans are like water—we gravitate towards the path of least resistance. Put a bunch of humans together in a team or an organization, and that tendency just grows exponentially.
So, building systems that depend on discipline and willpower over the long-haul is setting yourself up to fail.
There’s no question that discipline, willpower, and grit are noble human attributes.
Climbing a mountain or recovering from a natural disaster? Yeah, you’re gonna need some grit.
But checking in code to a shared repository or submitting an expense report? Those shouldn’t require heroic levels of willpower.
Want good things to happen reliably for you and your team? Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.
Our systems, our environments, shape our behavior far more than we like to admit. When we recognize this, we can stop relying on superhuman discipline and start designing systems that work with human nature, not against it.
How to Make the Right Things Easy
Here are a few practical ways to apply this principle:
1. Remove friction from good practices
Look at your team’s workflow. Where are people getting stuck or taking shortcuts? That’s where you need to reduce friction.
For example, if your software team claims to value building quality into your product but fails to consistently follow your automated testing standards, maybe it’s just too hard to do the right thing. Look for ways to make your test tools easier to use. Identify places where things take too long or just feel too hard, and experiment with changes.
2. Add friction to harmful practices
Conversely, make harmful practices require extra effort.
If your team consistently falls into the trap of creating overly complex solutions, build in checkpoints that force you to consider how things might be simpler. Make it standard to explain a proposed solution in plain language before implementing it, which naturally exposes unnecessary complexity. Or just make a habit of asking, “How could we make this simpler?” over and over again until you go too far.
3. Make good practices the default
Defaults are powerful. They become the path of least resistance.
If you want people to have more effective meetings, create meeting templates that include clear agendas, timeboxed sections, and defined outcomes. If you want better knowledge sharing, set up team spaces with standard sections for lessons learned and best practices that are pre-formatted and easy to fill in.
4. Make behavior visible
When behavior is visible, social forces come into play that encourage the right actions.
For example, many work management tools make it easy to assign and track individual work but don’t visualize actual collaboration. So, if I work together with you on a task assigned to you, it looks like you were busy and I was slacking off.
If you want more collaboration, find a way to make collaboration visible. This could mean modifying how work gets assigned in a tool. Or it could be as simple as highlighting positive examples of collaboration as part of a daily or weekly meeting.
5. Adjust your environment
Sometimes the simplest solutions involve changing the physical or digital environment.
Want more real-time discussion? Favor tools like Slack and Zoom. Want fewer distractions? Establish notification-free periods and use slower discussion methods like long-form emails.
Too often, teams claim they want one thing and then (often accidentally) set up an environment that gives them the opposite.
The Limits of Willpower
Relying on willpower alone is a recipe for failure. Studies consistently show that willpower is a finite resource that depletes with use.
Consider how many times have you promised yourself you’d follow a process to the letter, only to take shortcuts when you’re tired or under pressure?
That’s not a personal failing—it’s human nature. And it’s why successful teams and organizations design their systems with human psychology in mind.
Start Small
You don’t need to overhaul your entire organization at once. Start by identifying one area where people consistently struggle to do the right thing despite good intentions.
Ask: “How can we make the right behavior the easiest option?”
Then experiment with changes to your system or environment that reduce friction for the desired behavior.
What practices in your team or organization currently require heroic levels of discipline? How might you redesign your systems to make the right things easy and the wrong things hard?
Give it a try and let us know how it goes!
Last updated