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.

Think you don’t make emotional decisions? Think again.

It turns out that without our emotional brains, we wouldn’t be able to make decisions at all. In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer recounts the story of a man whose brain injury caused his amygdala to stop functioning. As a result, he was utterly incapable of making even the simplest decisions in life. Without an emotional brain to push him toward a decision, his rational brain simply went into analysis paralysis.

Our brains are extremely powerful, but they’ve got a lot going on. As a result, they basically compartmentalize processing power and take shortcuts when encountering situations that seem similar to past situations they’ve encountered. While this compartmentalization is generally very efficient, it has its drawbacks.