You Are the Architect
Here is something worth sitting with this Monday morning: most of us, most of the time, experience our choices as things that happen to us rather than things we design.
Choice architecture — the structure within which decisions get made — is one of the more quietly powerful ideas in behavioural science. I was listening to a podcast yesterday featuring Eric Johnson, Professor at Columbia Business School and one of the leading researchers in this field. His work on how the framing, sequencing, and presentation of choices shape what people actually decide is both rigorous and, once you have encountered it, impossible to unsee. But what his research also surfaces, and what I think matters most for the people reading this, is that we are not merely subject to the architecture of our choices that are created by others. We can also be its authors.
The Supermarket Knows This Better Than We Do
Consider the supermarket. The milk is never near the entrance.
It is in the back corner, deliberate and unapologetic, because the designers of that space understand something fundamental about human behaviour: roughly 65 to 70 per cent of purchases are unplanned (depending on which research you read). You did not come in for shredded coconut. But you walked past the baking aisle on the way to the milk, and there it was.
That is choice architecture working on you, elegantly and without your noticing. The structure of the environment is doing the heavy lifting — not your willpower, not your intentions, not your values. Just the layout of the aisle.
Nobody blames the shopper for buying the coconut. They designed the shop.
The Neighbourhood That Stopped Working
I was reflecting on this recently after a conversation with someone close to us. They had been living somewhere that had gradually stopped fitting — the neighbourhood just was not working for them anymore. And the response, when they named that feeling, was a question I found fascinating: What do I do about that?
Not “what are my options?” Not “what would have to change?” Just: what do I do? There was even some high emotion associated with this difficulty — all very normal, I would say.
I recognise that feeling. The Green-Eyed Beauty and I went through our own version of it — a slow but steady realisation, after 26 years, that the neighbourhood on the mainland where we had built a life, transformed a rickety old house into something beautiful, and put down roots, was one we were probably going to have to leave. That realisation, when it arrived, was confronting. It can feel like being stuck. It can feel like being lost.
But it is also, if you can catch it at the right angle, a moment of genuine freedom. Because embedded in the discomfort of “this is not working” is an invitation to do something most of us rarely do deliberately: design the architecture of your next choice.
What fits your budget? What fits the life you want to live? What work options, what social geography, what kind of community? You start constructing those parameters, and the architecture of the decision begins to take shape. The fog does not lift immediately, but the structure gives you something to move through it with.
The Organisational Implication
Leaders face a version of this every day, and most of them do not frame it this way.
If your organisation is underperforming — struggling to make its numbers, or struggling to make the difference it exists to make — the conventional response is to look for the explanation in the people. Good performers versus poor performers. Engaged versus disengaged. The committed versus the checked-out. You get the idea.
That framing is almost always a dead end. It locates the problem in individual character rather than in the structure of the environment those individuals are operating inside.
The more useful question is this: what is the architecture of choice that your people are working within?
Some organisations have it nailed down tightly — process, procedure, and expected behaviour specified to within an inch of its life. The choices are narrow and the system runs consistently. Other organisations leave so much undefined that behaviour becomes entirely dependent on the individual in front of you on a given day.
Neither extreme is the point. The point is that you get to design it. A leader who understands choice architecture does not have to rely on hiring the right person and hoping for the best. They can design the systems, processes, and environmental conditions that make the right behaviour the easy, obvious, natural choice — and make the wrong behaviour harder to stumble into.
That is not manipulation. That is what good organisational design looks like.
Where in your own work are the choices you most want people to make also the easiest choices to make? And where are you leaving that to chance — or to character — when you could be building it into the structure instead?
Get some fresh air in your lungs today, and give that question a proper five minutes. It's worth it.
— Barry Hemmings |
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