Human Behaviour Abhors a Gradient

Written By Justin Balaski, Founder and Principal at IdeaLeap

Context

I was supporting a government organization through its first Agile development project. It was a large program with around 100 people split evenly between the implementation partner and the client.

Agile was new to the organization, and one problem kept surfacing. While the implementation team lived in Jira, the client team rarely looked at it. It wasn’t that they didn’t care; it was that Jira was unfamiliar, complicated, and just another tool they were expected to learn. The implementation team grew increasingly frustrated because they couldn’t get people to engage with the tool.

I had an idea. One of the walls on the project floor was a huge empty space, about thirty feet long. Armed with sticky notes, painter’s tape, and string, I recreated the entire program increment on the wall. Four sprints. Every user story on a sticky note. Every dependency linked with string.

The next morning, the entire team was standing around the wall. I expected that because, if nothing else, it was impossible to ignore. But what I really hoped for, and what I witnessed happening, was people pointing at stories, asking questions, and talking about priorities. Conversations that had never happened inside Jira were happening naturally in front of the wall.

Overnight, the behaviour of the client-side project team had changed.

The Big Idea

I used to think this story was about visual management — about how making work visible helps teams collaborate. I now realize that the wall wasn’t important because it was visual. It was important because it created a behavioural gradient.

Human behaviour abhors a gradient.

A behavioural gradient is the difference in friction between the current and desired behaviours. It exists whenever one behavioural path requires less effort than another. When a gradient opens up, the human propensity is to close it by shifting behaviour towards the lowest-energy position — in other words, to do what is easiest. I describe this in the following conceptual equation:

ΔBehaviour = Fc − Fd

Where Fc is the friction on the current behaviour and Fd is the friction on the desired behaviour.

• When Fc > Fd, behaviour tends towards the desired behaviour.
• When Fc < Fd, behaviour tends towards the current behaviour.
• When Fc = Fd, change is frozen.

The role of change management isn’t to convince, sell, or persuade people to change through communication and training. It’s to create behavioural gradients. The problem was that Jira carried enormous friction for the client team. It was unfamiliar. They had to remember to log in, navigate the interface, find the right board, and learn a new way of working. The behavioural gradient pointed away from engagement (Fc < Fd).

People naturally gathered around the wall — not because we’d communicated differently, and not because we’d delivered more training, but because the environment had changed. By recreating the sprint board on the wall, I’d created a behavioural gradient.

Up until then, I’d been trained in the traditional change management approaches. Create awareness. Build desire. Communicate the change. Help people understand why it matters. I’d also seen those approaches fail again and again. We were constantly trying to push change onto people. More communication. More information. More reasons why they should change. But people don’t change simply because they have better information.

Friction Mapping

I’ve spent the last few years taking the lessons from this experience (and many more) and turning them into a practice that I call Friction Mapping. The idea is simple. Friction is one of the primary levers we have to shape behaviour, and we need a way to see it so we can identify where friction exists today, understand the behavioural gradient it creates, and deliberately redesign that landscape so the desired behaviour becomes the easiest path to follow.

Friction Mapping has six basic steps:

1. Define outcomes: Describe the current outcomes the system is producing and the desired outcomes you want to see.
2. Define behaviours: List the specific leadership, manager, and frontline behaviours that would move the system from current to desired outcomes.
3. Identify constraints: Surface the factors currently shaping whether the desired behaviours can take hold. Map the system as it is today — no motivation, mindset, or resistance, only things the organization could directly change if it decided to.
4. Map the constraints: Place each constraint on the Friction Map according to how it impacts Fc and Fd.
5. Indicate effort to shift: Colour-code each constraint by the structural, political, cultural, or technical work needed to move it: Low, Medium, High, Fixed (work around it), or Protect (defend it).
6. Adjust the gradient: Choose which constraints to shift and design small, reversible experiments — lower friction on the desired behaviour, raise it on the current behaviours.

The Friction Map below represents the scenario I opened with. A number of constraints were acting on the system, making it difficult to get the desired behaviour from the team. In the starting position, the constraints gather around the top right of the map, in the Steep Gradient area. Here, Fc is low (the current behaviour is easy) and Fd is high (the desired behaviour is hard).

The starting position. Each card is a constraint acting on the system; they cluster in the Steep Gradient zone, where the current behaviour is easy (low Fc) and the desired behaviour is hard (high Fd).

Here is the same map with interventions we could try, to shift each of the constraints. Each blue card is an intervention, and the arrow shows our forecast of what that intervention will do for Fc and Fd. The goal is to shift the behavioural gradient into the Low Gradient area as much as possible, where the current undesired behaviours are hard and the new behaviours are easy. One intervention — the big sprint wall — is forecast to shift directly to Low Gradient, while others lower the gradient in variable ways.

The same map with interventions. Each blue card is an intervention, and the arrows forecast its effect on Fc and Fd — shifting the gradient toward the Low Gradient zone.

Friction Mapping is about creating a behavioural gradient between the behaviours that are dominant today (Fc) and the behaviours you want to see dominant tomorrow (Fd).

The image below shows the same map in Terrain mode, from IdeaLeap’s AI-powered Friction Map. In Terrain mode the map becomes a topographic landscape: friction becomes elevation. Every constraint shapes the ground people would have to climb, and the tightly packed contour lines in the Steep Gradient zone show how steep the climb to the new behaviours currently is.

Terrain mode turns your Friction Map into a topographic representation at the push of a button. Friction becomes elevation, and the tightly packed contour lines show how steep the climb to the new behaviour currently is.

Once an intervention is designed for each constraint, the map redraws the terrain as a forecast. Each constraint shifts toward the lower left as its intervention takes effect, and the landscape changes shape. The contour lines relax and spread apart, and a basin opens up around the desired behaviours, shown by the dashed contours.

A basin is the opposite of a hill: it doesn’t just remove the climb, it pulls behaviour in. When the desired behaviour sits at the bottom of a basin, people no longer need to be pushed toward it. Behaviour flows there naturally, because the old way is hard and the new way is easy.

The forecasted terrain after the interventions. The contour lines relax and a basin opens around the desired behaviour — far more conducive to the behaviours you want.

With Friction Mapping, the goal is to create a behavioural gradient between Fc and Fd that is large enough for behaviour to flow naturally towards Fd — the way water finds the low ground.

A behavioural gradient large enough that behaviour flows naturally toward the desired state — the way water finds the low ground.

Friction Mapping is a practice and a tool that takes some application to get comfortable with. But it is transformative. It forces change agents to think past mindset, beliefs, motivations, and feelings, and to focus on what can actually be controlled: the environment.

Want to go further?

If you want to learn more, here are a few ways to get started:

• Take the Friction Mapping Masterclass
• Join the IdeaLeapers community
• Take the Lean Change Agent training

Justin Balaski
Founder and Principal, IdeaLeap