Does Your Strategy Have a Norman Door Problem?

Have you ever pulled on a door handle only to realize it was a push door? I know I have.

Don Norman writes about doors like this in his brilliant book The Design of Everyday Things, and they're frustratingly common enough that people now call them Norman doors. Norman's view is that the door is at fault. It’s a design flaw. A handle signals that you should pull, so you did what the design encouraged you to do.

The same thing can happen in strategy execution. We ask people to work differently, but leave them with processes that encourage them to keep working the old way. Then we wonder why they aren't changing.

I learned a version of this long before I read Norman, back when I was running a Tower Records store. I took over a location where new product sat in the back room for days before it reached the sales floor. One person would open a box, unpack the items, look up each price, price them, and then carry a big stack out to the floor, where it sat until someone else had time to shelve it. The team was working hard with a process that made the job slow, and the stacks of boxes made the store look messy for customers.

So we set up the back room more like an assembly line. Pricing happened in batches at one station, and the next station loaded product onto rolling carts organized by music category and alphabet, just like the sales floor was laid out. Anyone could grab a cart and move sequentially through the store putting product away, instead of going back and forth between sections. With the same people doing the work, product that used to take days to reach the floor got there in a matter of hours, and the store looked a whole lot better.

We didn't need to convince people to care more about getting product onto the floor. We needed to make it easier to do.

People tend to take the path of least resistance, so when the right way to do something is also the easiest way, it gets done more often. I call that a convenience incentive.

In strategy execution, the old way of working usually has the convenience advantage. People have done it many times, and the tools and processes were built around it. New strategic work often gets added on top of all that. And then that work gets extra approval processes because of its importance and visibility, which makes it even harder.

Norman describes several design principles that I think translate especially well to strategy execution.

Affordances

Norman uses the word affordances to describe what something lets a particular person do. For example, a chair affords sitting. In strategy execution, the affordance question is whether people can actually do the work we're asking them to do.

A plan can be clear and well communicated and still ask a team to take on new work without the time, tools, or authority to do it. When the existing work already consumes all the available capacity, the new work is going to suffer.

This is why I spend a whole section of The Strategy Trap on Capacity (shameless plug), and why stopping other work is usually the first design fix.

Constraints

Constraints limit the available actions to help people choose the appropriate one. In strategy execution, that means making the boundaries clear enough that people don't have to reconsider every possible option each time they make a decision.

Suppose part of your strategy is to stop expanding your product assortment. You could ask teams to be more selective about adding products, but that leaves each team to decide what “more selective” means. A hard rule that adding a product requires removing an existing one creates a concrete constraint. They can no longer keep expanding the assortment by default.

Natural Mapping

Natural mapping is the relationship between how something is arranged and how people use it. Norman talks about a stove with four knobs laid out in the same square pattern as the four burners. You can easily see which knob controls which burner without having to work it out.

The carts at Tower were a mapping fix. Their organization matched the sales floor, so the sequence of product on the cart matched the route people took through the store.

Strategy execution often requires people to work across situations that don't match nearly as well. The plan might be organized by strategic priority, but the work is organized by function. Someone has to figure out how all those things fit together, and execution frequently breaks down in the handoffs between teams.

We can make that easier by organizing execution around the work required to produce a result. If an initiative crosses three departments, organize their work in one shared plan, with a clear leader accountable for the overall result and visible handoffs between teams. People should be able to clearly see where their contribution fits.

Conceptual Model

A conceptual model is the explanation people have in their heads of how something works. It helps them predict what will happen when they act.

Strategy execution needs a workable conceptual model too. People need to understand how the plan is supposed to produce results, including which initiatives are meant to move which numbers and why.

If we're simplifying a customer onboarding process, for example, the team should understand why we believe that will improve retention. A direction to “reduce the number of steps” gives them a task, but it doesn't help them decide which steps matter.

When people understand the reasoning behind a plan, they can make better decisions in their day-to-day work. They can also recognize when an assumption may need to be reexamined.

Walking Through the Work

None of this means every part of execution should be effortless. Some decisions need higher-level approval, and some work is just going to be hard. But the difficulty should come from the problem we're trying to solve. We don't need to add a hunt for information, an unclear handoff, or an unnecessary approval to it.

A good place to start is walking through one strategic initiative the way a new employee would. Can you tell what needs to happen and why? Do the people responsible have capacity to do it? Are the boundaries clear? Is it clear how the work moves from one person or team to the next?

Pay particular attention to the places where the old way is easier. That's where your convenience incentives may be working against your strategy.

If your strategy says push but your process gives people a handle to pull, another reminder to push probably won't solve the problem. It's time to redesign the door.