Some of society’s stickiest problems aren’t a failure of intention, importance, or value. They’re the result of a failure to understand human behavior at the last mile—the final stage where desires and plans must turn into action.
No matter who you are, whether you are selling soap or shampoo, whether you are a government looking after the welfare of citizens, or an agency promoting financial well-being and better health, or an institution that is responsible for collecting taxes, you are in the business of changing people’s behavior.
We can pay dearly, in blood, treasure, and well-being, for experiments that aren’t done. In the nearly fifty years that Head Start has been in existence, we have spent $200 billion on it.
The television show Mad Men gets much of its insight from holding up a bygone work era to spotlight just how much societal views have changed in a short time and how unenlightened those notions seem today in retrospect.
Imagine you are a CEO intent on increasing your employees’ creativity so that your company can be more innovative.
How do we become who we are? Traditionally, people’s answers have placed them in one of two camps: nature or nurture. The one says genes determine an individual while the other claims the environment is the linchpin for development.