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Attention Required! | Cloudflare
When we seek to intervene in any system created by someone, it’s not enough to view their decisions and choices simply as the consequences of first-order thinking because we can inadvertently create serious problems. Before changing anything, we should wonder whether they were using second-order thinking. Their reasons for making certain choices mi... See more
Second-order thinking • Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
The problem is that with all that knowledge, it is easy to get overconfident and to rush, simply listing the pressures and putting an intervention against each of them. Down that path lies madness. It is entirely possible for a single pressure to give rise to many interventions and equally possible for one intervention to satisfy many pressures.
Matt Wallaert • Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change
Kaustubh Sule added
.modelthinking
Like all examples, Bear is imperfect (don’t tell his mother I said that). I talked about his individual behavior, and yet usually behavior change isn’t about a specific person but rather about changing the likelihood of a behavior across a much larger group: team, organization, city, nation—as we said in the behavioral statement, a population. And
... See moreMatt Wallaert • Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change
Kaustubh Sule added
.implementation .psychology
Some of these conclusions are useful in the micro, in the moment — but we are learning that measuring and treating discrete phenomena in isolation leads to misunderstanding, mis-treatment, and unintended consequences that can sometimes be severe.
Medium • The Ecosystem Hypothesis
Keely Adler added
Remember, the goal is behavior change, not knowledge—we don’t have to know precisely which part of an intervention drives the behavior, so long as the overall intervention is scalable and results in worthwhile behavior change.
Matt Wallaert • Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change
Kaustubh Sule added
.implementation
having selected what interventions we intend to pilot, we need to stop and do an ethical check based on two factors: what behavior we are changing and how we are changing behavior. And these ethical problems are mapped to the two fundamental behavioral gaps: the intention-action gap and the intention-goal gap.
Matt Wallaert • Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change
Kaustubh Sule added
.psychology .implementation
Very often, the second level of effects is not considered until it’s too late. This concept is often referred to as the “Law of Unintended Consequences” for this very reason.
Rhiannon Beaubien • The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts
