Make the right thing the easy thing

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A group of community health workers were waiting for us—five of them when they'd started, ninety by the time I walked in. They were chanting their demands, pay and protection and recognition, and they didn't drop their voices for the guests. I'd flown in to talk strategy. They were already living it.

Over the last month I've described three problems:
• Translation tax —people back whoever's fastest to understand.
• Decision gravity —people pick whichever's the low-effort path.
• Default drift —people slide back to whatever they did before.

Watching those ninety women, I understood they're not three problems. They're one, wearing different clothes at different sizes.

Those women had made themselves impossible to overlook, which is how you get in the room. They orchestrated their meetings so demands turned into decisions, which is how you run the room. And the standard they were after was written plainly enough that a minister could adopt it and an accountant could cost it, which is how they have exemplified change what happens after you leave.

Every one of those moves is the same move: find the right thing, and make it the easy thing to do.

Their standard is now policy in 56 countries. It was won, at every level, by people who lowered the cost of yes until yes was the obvious answer.

The only real work—in your career, in your next meeting, the the part of the world you want to change—is making sure the right thing and the easy thing are the same thing.

Change the world the same way you run a room: make the right things easy.

Try this

Are you struggling to get into the room, to move the room, or to make the change last once you've left it?

Then ask the only question that's ever mattered: what's the right thing, and why is it currently the hard one to do? Change that, and you can stop pushing. You were never meant to move it by force.

🌿 The easy thing always wins. Make it the right one.