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Don Norman

Articles by Don NormanMIT Technology Review

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Skip to Content Don Norman is a cognitive science professor (UC San Diego, Northwestern) turned executive (Apple vice president) turned designer (IDEO Fellow), and author of 20 books, including Living with Complexity and The Design of Everyday Things. He can be found at jnd.Org.

Excerpted with permission from "The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition" by Don Norman. Available from Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013. UK edition published by MIT Press.

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Busting The Bureaucratic Iron Cage: How To Win Support For Change

Weber On The Bureaucratic Iron Cage. Norman And Brown On Human-Centered Design. Deci And Ryan On Motivation.

Conventional change management theory (described in my first post) ignores a concept that is central to organizational psychology: Employees' performance is influenced by how well the organizational environment satisfies employees' basic psychological needs. This oversight explains why the topic of employee resistance looms large in the conventional theory and practice of change management. In the following I argue that change can become a spontaneously emergent property if we design organizations around human needs.

Creating change in the iron cage is hard.

Painting by George Tooker, Landscape with Figures, 1965-66. Private Collection. Via ArtfixDaily Artwire.

Creating Change In A Bureaucratic Iron Cage Is Hard

In 1922, Max Weber's book Economy and Society was published. It is considered by many the greatest sociological treatise of the 20th century. In it, Weber describes what he considers the pinnacle of efficient organizational design in his time: the rational-legal bureaucracy. And he reflects on the connection between this form of organizational design and human behavior. The bureaucratic organization is characterized by hierarchical structures with formal lines of authority, division of labor, task specialization and routinization, rewards tied to narrowly defined objectives as well as written codification of work rules. Bureaucratic organizational design is optimized for producing standardized, predictable outcomes within narrow limits of variation. It is efficient within an industrialized model of mass production. While appreciating the efficiency of the bureaucratic model, Weber was sensitive to its dark side. He observed that bureaucracies displayed self-reinforcing tendencies, ultimately resulting in a technically ordered and rigid institutional "iron cage", a dehumanized organization that suffocates individual freedom and potential. Creating change in the iron cage is hard.

Design Thinking Makes Change Easier

More recently, design thinking has popularized the notion that empathy for human needs and values is vital to good design. This focus on human needs and values is relevant not only for designing smart-phones, but also organizations. A human-centered approach to design starts out by understanding what human needs are and then designs the product around these needs. It seeks to develop solutions that users find simple and intuitive to use in accomplishing their goals. It optimizes the usability of a product around users, rather than forcing users to accommodate the product. If a product causes frustration, the fault might not lie in the user's lack of sophistication, but in product design that ignores the user's needs. To empathize with those needs, a good designer must be something of a cultural anthropologist, seeking deep immersion in the user experience. (Or the user herself must become a co-designer, a concept that I will address in my next post.)

An example of non-intuitive design is the so-called Norman door. This is a door where the design... [+] tells you to do the opposite of what you are supposed to do.

Photo via Behrnt Aaberg/Aptus

From this point of view, the function of good organizational design is to guide employees effortlessly and intuitively to the desired action. To appreciate good design, it can be helpful to consider its opposite. An example for non-intuitive design is the so-called Norman door. This is a door where the design tells you to do the opposite of what you are supposed to do. The door has a handle that tells you to pull when it opens by pushing. Rather than improving the design of the handle, such design flaws often get superficially fixed by sticking signage with instructions on the door. This type of door takes its name from Don Norman, a celebrated design thinker. In his influential book, The Design of Everyday Things, Norman lays out the basic rules of human centered design. The book Change by Design by Tim Brown discusses how we can apply the principles of design thinking to promote organizational change.

Needs-Based Theories Of Motivation

The idea that employees' motivation to perform an activity is influenced by how well the organization meets employees' needs is firmly established in organizational psychology. Since the 1940s, leading psychologists, most prominently Abraham Maslow, have suggested a close relationship between the fulfillment of basic psychological needs on one side and human motivation and behavior on the other.

The psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have developed what might be the most refined and rigorously tested needs-based motivational theory. The book Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation provides a fascinating description of self-determination theory, as it is known. Deci's and Ryan's research provides evidence that standard motivational approaches relying on reward and punishment often stifle people's intrinsic motivation to engage in an activity. Their research demonstrates that people's intrinsic motivation and performance is strongest within an environment that nourishes their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy relates to a person's desire to be the causal agent of one's own life and to act in harmony with one's integrated self. Competence connotes a person's need to experience mastery in producing desired results. Relatedness refers to the universal desire to interact with, feel connected to, and experience caring for others. Empirical evidence demonstrates that satisfaction of these needs predicts improved intrinsic motivation and performance in areas as diverse as academic achievement, work-related creativity, smoking cessation, or adherence to physical exercise.

Psychological Needs And Change Management

The conventional change management approach frustrates all three of these needs. When managers' tactics to reinforce change behaviors through relentless communication and contingent reinforcement feel coercive to employees, this violates their need for self-determination. Employees' need for competence is undermined when their insights are disregarded. When they fear that the change process puts their employment at risk, employees' need for relatedness is threatened. Self-determination theory helps us understand how standard change management theory thwarts basic psychological needs, thereby undermining intrinsic motivation to support change. Worse yet, people that feel excessively pressured to support a change project may respond by adopting a defiant stance. This effect is known as reactance, and it is most likely to manifest itself in individuals with a strong belief in their capacity to control events in their lives, a concept psychologists call locus of control.  This is the process by which a conventional change management approach alienates an organization's most enterprising change agents.

How, then, can we design a change management process that accounts for the basic human needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness?

We can satisfy the need for autonomy by inviting employees to apply their ingenuity and contribute their ideas to change projects. We can go further by empowering them to self-initiate change projects. Ideation platforms are a great tool for this purpose (that I will describe in more detail in my next blog post). As a result, change is not perceived as something that is imposed from above, but rather as a collective activity that anyone can initiate.

By thus empowering employees to be originators of change ideas, we also validate employees' competence. We can further nurture employee's sense of competence by providing them with easy access to the skills and tools needed to master the challenges that the change process entails.

We can nourish the need for relatedness by cultivating a work environment in which people feel a sense of belonging, care for each other and perceive their relationship with the organization as reasonably stable. The types of behaviors needed to support change processes – taking risks, assuming new responsibilities, letting go of old ones, seeking feedback, asking for help, helping others, sharing information, suggesting improvements, experimenting, talking about errors and failure – will be in greater supply in a climate marked by mutual respect, trust and psychological safety.

A human-centered approach to organizational change sheds a new perspective on employees' resistance to getting with the change program. Instead of dismissing this resistance as stubborn obstinacy, we should stop, reflect, and inquire if it is caused by organizational design that ignores basic human needs. In sum, intrinsically motivated support for organizational change can flourish when employees feel they can provide their support freely without coercion, when they have confidence in their ability to master the challenges the change process entails, and when they don't have to worry that they might become a casualty of change.

Love to hear your thoughts. Please click here to comment on my related LinkedIn post.

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Industrial Design

For some gamers, having a light fast polling mouse is key. [Ali] of [Optimum Tech] loved his 23-gram mouse but disliked the cord. Not seeing any options for a comparable wireless mouse, he decided to make one himself.

Trying to shortcut the process, he started with an existing wireless mouse from Razer weighing in at a hefty 58 grams. The PCB on its own weighed in at 11 grams and after swapping to a smaller battery, [Ali] had a budget of 10 to 15 grams for the shell. Here is where the meat of this project lives. The everyday objects in your life like the poles that hold up traffic signals or the device you're reading this article on are looked at and used without much thought into why they are what they are. The design of everyday things is a surprisingly deep field and designing a curvy mouse is no exception. With a 3d version of the PCB, he went through several iterations of how to lay out the mouse triggers. The scroll wheel was removed as he didn't need it for the game he was playing.

The shell was printed in resin and came out great. [Ali] found himself with an ultralight 4000hz wireless mouse that was thoroughly enjoyable. It's a great example of someone diving in and designing something for their personal use. Whether it's a mouse or a chair, we love anyone taking on a design challenge. Video after the break.

Continue reading "A New Gaming Shell For A Mouse" →

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