Thinking Big and Acting Small
There’s an exercise that I love to do at the beginning of my human centered design workshops. I give the participants a small amount of time to put themselves in order of their birthdate. There’s one catch: they can’t speak. Invariably people begin to hold up their fingers to indicate the months and days they were born. When the timer goes off, there’s always someone who is out of order.
I never told the participants they couldn’t sing their birthdates. Or write them down. Somehow the quickest default is fingers and everyone goes to it. It’s an exercise to vividly illustrate how easily we make assumptions we don’t even know we hold, which constrains our solution space. Guess what? We do this with the vast majority of not just our problem solving, but how we live our lives overall.
As a society and as individuals, I think we need to push ourselves to think bigger. Question the defaults that the world we were born into has handed to us. This applies to things as big as our institutional structures of economics and governance to things as small as how we interact in a fleeting moment with another human on the street. It’s pretty insane that I spent two years at one of the best development master’s degrees in world, and we never questioned the fundamentals of capitalism or discussed the philosophical foundations of our work. It’s equally insane that I walk by homeless people on the street of San Francisco, eyes on the ground to distance me from their humanity. How might the nature of my work and my personal behaviors shift if I start recognizing and challenging my default assumptions?
As I’ve turn my designer lens on myself, the impact has been swift. Where am I accepting the norms instead of defining how I live my life from first principles? What adjustments do I need to make to embody the change I want to see in the world? There are some big shifts underway as a result of this inquiry (big post coming on that soon).
But there have been tiny little shifts too, and they feel pretty profound. Largely this is due to the fact it’s in those little shifts that the seeds of behavior change are sown. I now eat vegan all but one or two meals a week. I don’t buy bottled water, I carry around a titanium bottle. I stopped using Uber and converted to Lyft. I meditate every day to help me bring my best self to my family, work, and friends. I put down the phone, get down on the floor, and give my kids my full attention. I stop my car and smile as I give another driver the right of way. These minor little acts of kindness, they spread. What if we made it our default to let cars in when someone wanted to change lanes, instead of getting pissed off and honking our horns or flipping them off? This frequent act of aggression agitates our physiology and those it is directed towards. Likewise this small act of consideration can make us feel good as well as those who receive it.
These little acts, of course, they add up. Not just because they contribute to a slow and steady behavior change for ourselves, but because if we all did them, things would get better.
What’s the one little thing you can do, today, that challenges an assumed behavior pattern and points you towards change for the better?
