The X-Mentor | Effort
Issue #20
The Secret: Effort is about Energy.
The Source: In their book, The Human Element, Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal provide a blueprint of The Four Frictions that work against new ideas:
Inertia – The desire to stick with what we already know.
Effort – The energy needed to make change happen.
Emotion – The threat people feel by a new idea.
Reactance – The impulse to resist being changed.
For this post, I’d like to build on “Emotion” and focus on the 2nd Friction, “Effort.”
In the previous post of The X-Mentor on Predictions, I reveal how “Emotions,” the 3rd Friction, is built by your brain, not built into your brain. Each individual human (i.e., customer) constructs their own emotions and experiences in their heads.
As we introduced from the research of Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D. on Predictions, our brain is continuously receiving signals from sensory surfaces that are both outside and inside our body. When these signals arrive, the brain attempts to figure out the cause of those sensory surface signals. Then the brain makes a prediction about what sensory signals will be arriving next. Thus, our feelings (i.e., human emotions) are predictions about the world, not reactions to the world.
Why does the brain do all this predicting anyway?
“It’s metabolically inefficient to process everything as if it were happening for the first time.”
Dr. Barrett said, “Reaction is more expensive metabolically than a prediction.” In other words, there’s a metabolic “cost” to processing all these incoming signals. Most of our experiences are not new, so our brain doesn’t need to treat every incoming signal as if it were arriving for the first time. Instead, our brain is predicting the next incoming signals based on prior experience and attempting to “regulate” the energetic needs of the body by “anticipating those needs and attempting to meet those needs before they arise.” Every prediction starts as your action, your plan for regulating the body.
What It Means: Effort is about Energy, I.e., the real or perceived metabolic cost to make human change happen.
If you have a valuable or important innovation and you want as many people as possible to embrace and use it, then the first thing you’ll need to do is to reduce the human “Effort” needed to make the change.
Here’s the challenge, the brain is working against change.
The most important job of the brain is coordinating and regulating our body in the most metabolically efficient way. It’s always attempting to predict what our body’s energy needs will be in the next moment because that’s the most efficient way to “operate the [body] system.”
The Body Budget
Our brain is “running a budget for the body”, according to Dr. Barrett. The scientific name is “allostasis,” which refers to the process that our body undergoes to maintain physiological stability. For example, our heart rate and blood pressure will go up when we encounter a stressor in our environment. This has been the same ever since prehistoric times when we humans were concerned with sabertoothed tigers. (See Jakob Nielsen, “People, they don’t change.”) And it’s the same today when we encounter a new technological advancement that potentially threatens our current job.
Effort is the source of friction that is causing your body to budget glucose, salt, oxygen, and other resources that help you escape or overcome the threat.
Learning is Metabolically Expensive
Learning something new requires Effort. When combined with an Emotion stressor, it adds an additional metabolic cost. Let’s say for example that AI has the potential to make your job obsolete. You have a mortgage, a family, car payments, perhaps student loans, or child support to pay each month. Now, some new innovation comes along and is creating a threat to your income.
What’s going on inside your head?
Your brain is likely feeling stress because it has predicted that a big metabolic expenditure is going to be essential in the next moment. E.g., “I’m going to have to learn AI and incorporate that into my daily work, somehow.” When this stressor is prolonged over a period without relief, the brain becomes less able to regulate, causing fatigue, distress, or even depression. What your brain is trying to do is reduce its cost by creating fatigue and slowing you down so that you can recover. However, that new AI technology that threatens your job doesn’t need to rest or recover. It just works, non-stop, faster, and very likely more effectively at scale than any human could.
Humans don’t take advantage of valuable or important ideas or new innovations just because learning is expensive. Mid-Career employees who have worked hard to establish their position and teams will see new innovations as potential threats to their identity and livelihood. Some will make an “Effort” to sabotage the adoption of new technological threats to preserve their personal and professional status quo. If your manager attempts to force you to change the way you work, that can create “Reactance,” the impulse to resist being changed. Then you have all Four Frictions working against you at once. Even if the cost of learning a new technology would lead to more joyfulness and less effort, the brain is still working against change.
Even if AI makes your job easier because you’re co-creating with AI (rather than being replaced by AI), your brain is still telling you to stick with what you already know, as it continues trying to maintain body stability.
Good Design Reduces Effort
Effort and Emotion contribute profoundly to humans resisting new innovations and ideas. Worse, these Frictions are very difficult to detect. It requires a highly skilled, and very experienced Researcher to correctly diagnose these sources of Friction. Absent this expertise, these Frictions continually go undetected and are shipped out into the market. Then it comes as no surprise that customers are rejecting these “Effortful” products as fast as an agile team can ship.
A Good Design will first take these sources of friction into consideration and will:
Reduce the Effort required to change human behavior.
Show the Emotional benefits of change and justify the metabolic cost.
Increase the speed of Learning, Understanding, and Adoption.
Good Design lowers the cost of change.
Your customer has no prior learning of your new idea or innovation, and they will act instinctively without conscious reasoning. Most new things are perceived as a threat and an Effort. Good Design makes change happen, with less Effort.