Silly Goose Choices
The graylag goose has an interesting behavioral trait: when it sees its egg sitting outside its nest, it will quickly run to the egg and attempt to roll it back into the nest. This is an automatic process for the goose, and it can be quite persistent about it. Give it a soccer ball and it becomes even more persistent: to the goose, that soccer ball looks like nothing so much as a very big egg, and that egg belongs in the nest. This is known as a fixed-action pattern: when the stimulus is provided, the behavior unrolls automatically. The stronger the stimulus, as with the soccer ball, the stronger the resulting behavior. Of course, that’s a silly goose. What about people?
The other day, my wife and I went to lunch at a local restaurant. On the wall near the “Please wait to be seated” sign this particular restaurant has a wall of really quite excellent photographs. Like most people who come to this restaurant, we stopped to admire them while waiting for someone to seat us. Since it was a quiet day, we had an unobstructed view. After a couple of minutes, a woman came and seated us. An hour later, on our way out, we paused again to look at the pictures. After about two minutes, the same woman came and offered to seat us. Even though she’d walked past us several times while we were eating, indeed, had seated us an hour before, seeing people standing and admiring the photographs was apparently the only stimulus necessary to trigger the seating behavior. Arguably, since we had just eaten, the stimulus was now ever so slightly bigger.
Okay, so this is a mildly amusing story, but does it have any further significance? In fact, yes, it does. Fixed-action patterns like this one play out in businesses all the time. You can identify them in your company with a little effort: they’re the behaviors that come out automatically in response to some predictable trigger. For example, a customer complains; what happens? Or you find a bug in the software; what happens? Sales are not going as well as planned, or perhaps they’re running better; what happens? Every organizational culture develops its fixed-action patterns, although the details will vary from business to business. The key thing about them is that they become so automatic that no one really thinks much about them any more; when the appropriate trigger occurs, people just react.
For example, at one software company, shipping a product triggered a very unfortunate fixed-action pattern. As soon as the product was out the door, everyone would gather together and look at everything they had not accomplished: the features that did not make it in, the bugs that did not get fixed. As each person tried to show how seriously they were taking their product post-mortem, the focus on the negatives only grew. Ironically, it didn’t matter how much customers liked the product: like the woman at the restaurant, the stimulus triggered the behavior. While the restaurant was just funny, and caused no harm, the pattern at the software company led to a steady decline in motivation: it’s hard to be excited about your work when you “just know” that every release will be a disaster.
Fortunately, these fixed-action patterns don’t have to be bad. A conscious effort to build a pattern of celebrating successes and focusing on the positives of a release can build excitement and momentum that will launch a team into their next product. The trick is to pay attention to the patterns you want to have, and then create the new patterns. Don’t worry about getting rid of old ones; if you focus on the new patterns long enough, the old ones will fade away. Unlike with geese, where the fixed-action patterns are genetic, for people the patterns are built into our organizational culture. It may not always be easy, but, unlike the goose, people and organizations can change.
In other words, the patterns you have are the patterns you build. You get a choice, so don’t be a silly goose.
