Blame the context, not the people

Daniele Catalanotto
Jun 7, 2022

Context

In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear I highlighted this sentence:

« If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system ».

This reminded me of the story of a friend who couldn't get motivated to do admin work as he associated admin work with doing work in his office that was pretty depressing. By changing the environnement where he did the admin work he suddenly was much more keen to do these admin tasks. 
He definitely wasn't the problem, his system was the problem.

Watch my early thinking in video

Side notes

This is the first draft of this Service Design Principle. Once adapted and refined multiple time, this principle will be part of the book "Service Design Principles 201-300"


Do you have other examples where you weren't the problem but the system you had was the issue?

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Daniele Catalanotto
Jun 29, 2023

Second draft

This is the second draft of this Service Design Principle. This one is an edited and condensed version based on the automatic transcript of the video above.

Whenever in a project, I think:

“The people I’m working with are just a pain in the ass!”

I try to remember this quote from the book Atomic Habits that I particularly love:

"If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system."

I can’t change how people are, but as a Service Designer, I can definitely design the system we are both in. (1)

In fact, most of the time, the problem lies in the context that we have designed or, even worse, that we haven't designed, which creates issues (2).

Action question

In which work interactions with users or coworkers do you say to yourself: “These people are a pain in the ass!”? What can you, yes you, do to change the system, the context, and the interaction to improve the situation?

Footnotes

(1) Also, thinking someone is stupid or an asshole doesn't motivate me to work with them to find a solution, so I prefer to use the context as a "scape goat".

(2) The same goes for services. We tend to blame the user for being "dumb," when in fact, most often, we are the problem or the design of the context is the problem.