In a recent post, Mike Shipulski shared some conditions for good things to happen. You can read the entire post here.
One of the things that he talks about is to make it easier to do the right things. I have explored this concept earlier in this blog post where I talk about how convenience trumps everything else.
There is another aspect of this very same phenomenon that we can use as leaders – making the wrong things difficult to do.
Every leader worth their salt knows the areas where the potential for mistakes in any given process is the highest. Even if we don’t know that, we can use the process of pre-mortem to identify them.
Once we identify these, we need to find ways and means to make it impossible or extremely difficult to make these mistakes.
In knowledge work, this can be done via intentional choice architecture – introducing guardrails (to make it difficult to make mistakes) or off-ramps (to make it easier to do the right thing) or introducing space or time in the process at this specific point.
This is specifically relevant in the AI dominated world that we live in. By introducing some friction in the process of leveraging AI tools in our workflow, we can ensure that we leverage AI in an effective manner.
This could mean in our workflow of using AI, we don’t just blindly use the output generated by AI tools but, instead have a step in the workflow to check and test if the output is relevant, reliable and responsible.
This introduction of strategic friction can prove to be one of the best decisions we ever make to improve the effectiveness of leveraging and engaging with AI.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to not only do this for ourselves and in our workflow, but also help our teams in put in place these off-ramps and guardrails in place in their individual workflows and also our team workflows.
We need to do whatever is necessary to ensure that it is difficult for anyone following that process to make that specific mistake. We call this making a process mistake-proof.
This is important in not just internal processes but also when engaging with customers and partners as well. The easier it is for our customers or partners to do the right thing and difficult to make an error or mistake, the better is their experience with our business.
When done in combination – making the right thing to do easier and the wrong thing to do more difficult, we increase the probability that people will end up doing the right thing most of the times and the wrong thing the least amount of time.
This improves the experience of the people engaged in the process and also improve the effectiveness of the process too.
