I used to have quite an explosive temper. When things didn't go the way I wanted, I could get ridiculously worked up about them. I've become much better at managing that. Except for one thing. Cleaning up everyone else's mess. Especially when nobody seems to notice. It drives me crazy. Perhaps you recognise the feeling. You put effort into something, you do what needs to be done, and nobody even notices you've done it. The work is invisible. Until, of course, you stop doing it (hello, mountain of dirty laundry!).
I've been thinking about why that bothers me so much. And it turns out that feeling seen for the work we do matters more than we might think. Not just for our mood, but for our motivation and performance.
Which brings me to a rather extraordinary story from a railway platform in Tokyo. And a lesson in Behavioural Design that no amount of bonuses, supervision or performance checks could teach. A bullet train stops there for twelve minutes. Five of those are for passengers getting off and on. That leaves seven minutes for a crew of about twenty-two people to clean sixteen carriages. A thousand seats turned around. Tables, floors, windows, toilets, bins. Today tourists film it. In 2005 the company that does it, Tessei, was in trouble. The work was seen as dirty and hard. People left. Trains ran late.
Management did what managers almost always do. More training. More supervision. More checks. And everything got worse. Morale dropped further. Delays went up. So did accidents and complaints.
Then a new manager, Teruo Yabe, did something that at first seems to have nothing to do with performance. He changed what kind of company Tessei was. Not a cleaning company. A service company whose workplace happens to be a platform, in full view of thousands of people. The cleaners got uniforms made to be seen, not to disappear. Crews line up and bow to the train before and after. And ideas from staff were actually carried out: the nursery area at Tokyo Station started as a cleaner’s suggestion.
Nobody in that company became more diligent. The work stopped being something to get through unseen.
This is Behavioural Design at work: you do not push people to try harder, you change what the work means and who gets to see it. Researchers call it job crafting. Even in jobs with very little freedom, people who can reshape what their work is about find it far more meaningful. Yabe did not wait for that to happen. He designed the conditions for it.
Sometimes the problem isn't that people don't care enough about their work. It's that we've designed workplaces that give them too few reasons to feel that their work matters.
So how do you put this to work, well beyond train platforms? Three practical moves:
Check whether your first response made it worse. Tessei’s first answer was more supervision, and the numbers moved the wrong way. If you are monitoring more and getting less, stop adding checks and look at what the work feels like from the inside.
Change who sees the work. Visibility was the cheapest thing Yabe did and probably the most powerful. Which roles in your organisation are hidden by design? What would change if the people they serve could see them?
Make one suggestion count. Idea boxes fail when nothing visible ever comes out of them. One idea that is carried out, and publicly traced back to the person who had it, does more than a year of asking for input.
As for me, I'm not planning to introduce uniforms or a ceremonial bow before cleaning up the kitchen (no dear husband, this is NOT an option). But a little recognition now and then might just keep my explosive side from making a comeback.
0,5 Minute on, Influence
The illusion of explanatory depth: why you understand less than you think
Speaking of what goes on behind the scenes: in 2002, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil asked people how well they understood everyday things. A zip. A flush toilet. A helicopter. Most people rated themselves quite high. Then they had to write down, step by step, how one of them actually works.
Their confidence collapsed. After trying to explain it, people knew a lot less than they had believed one minute earlier.
We mistake being familiar with something for understanding it. The illusion holds right up to the moment we have to explain it.
You can use this. Before you sign off on a process, a product decision or a strategy, ask someone to explain how it works from start to finish, out loud, without slides. Not to test them. The gaps show up for the person explaining first, and that is the cheapest moment to fix them.
Knowing what something is called is the most convincing form of not understanding it.
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
/
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
Sourcese:
Yabe, T. TESSEI: the seven-minute miracle. An account of the transformation of JR East Tessei.
Wrzesniewski, A. and Dutton, J.E. (2001). Crafting a job: revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201.
Rozenblit, L. and Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521-562.
Loved the newsletter this week? Forward it to a friend or colleague. Got this email from a friend? Subscribe at https://www.suebehaviouraldesign.com/en/newsletter/