Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap: Designing for Real Behavior Change (with Julie Dirksen)

Why is it so hard to change behavior—even when people already know exactly what to do?

Design your next learning experience so people don’t just understand what to do— they actually do it.

By uncovering the psychology behind the knowing–doing gap, you’ll gain practical tools to move your audience from passive understanding to sustained action.

Our guest, Julie Dirksen, has spent two decades helping organizations design training and products that lead to measurable behavior change. 

WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

Why does information alone rarely shift behavior?

What alternative ingredients turn knowledge into action?

How do motivation, context, and habit interact?

What is the elephant–rider model, and how does it reframe design?

Which practical tactics help learners “walk new paths” instead of retreading old ones? 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Behavior change is not the same as knowledge transfer—information is necessary but never sufficient.

Design for the elephant (emotions and habits) as well as the rider (rational mind).

Reduce friction and increase repetition so the desired action is easier than the default.

Shape context—alter environments so the right choice is the obvious choice.

Layer motivation and support with rewards, social proof, and timely prompts.

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Transcript

Welcome to The Design Psychologist, the show that helps you use psychology to design
better experiences. I'm Thomas Watkins, your guide to becoming a more powerful
psychology -informed designer. Have you ever taught something to someone and watched
them not do it? If you do this professionally, maybe you even created a helpful
tutorial or a training system. Thanks for watching!
to teach a new process. Why is it so hard to change behavior even when a person
knows what to do? Today, I'm very happy to share a conversation I had with Julie
Dirksen, who I'll introduce momentarily. Together, we explore questions like,
why does information by itself so often fail to create real behavior change?
And what's the alternative to giving people information? What role is played by
factors like motivation and context and habit? What is the elephant and the rider
metaphor and why is it so powerful for knowing how to design change?
And how can you design training programs and interfaces that help people walk new
paths instead of just retreading worn ones. By the end of this episode,
you'll see behavior change through a new lens, and you'll gain practical strategies
for designing learning experiences that don't just inform, but transform.
So let's have a listen as I introduce and speak with today's guest. Welcome to The
Design Psychologist. I have a really, really, really cool guest on the show today,
Julie Dirksen. She is a designer of things dealing with how people learn.
And she's internationally known as a writer, a speaker, a workshop facilitator for
professional organizations like the Association for Talent Development and the Learners
Guild and others. She's an award -winning translator of
research into practice and how that can be used to help workplace practitioners,
background and MS in instructional design, and she teaches courses,
university and otherwise in instructional design, project management, instructional
design and cognitive psychology. She's been creating learning experiences for three
decades across a wide variety of organizations, huge corporations, nonprofits, higher
ed, and tech startups. And she is the author of two books that we're going to talk
about today. There's possibly more books. I don't know, Julie, if you've got other
books, but these are the ones that I've got. It's two. Okay. It's a Design for How
People Learn. Wonderful book. A lot of psychology that came out in 2016. And Talk
to the Elephant. Yes, that came out this year in 2024. And I want to add this,
she is a learning designer, a design psychologist who focuses on how can we create
systems and environments that help people learn the right things more effectively.
Julie Dirksen, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you for having me. I love the idea
of the Design Psychologist podcast altogether. It's such a cool thing to talk about.
Yes, and thank you for participating. In fact, you know, so I really like, you
know, on this show that kind of segues into the first point, you know, a lot of
what we talk about here deals with, you know, I'm a UX practitioner, so designing
interfaces. But design psychology is so much more than that. It's anyone who knows
psychology and they're applying it to the world around us. So why don't we talk
about, so why don't we open up with that? What do you, how do you approach this
in terms of there's a heavy presence of psychology clearly in your work and what
you do, how do you think about this stuff? Yeah, well, I love talking to UX people
about it. I've been on a few UX and it's interesting to me because there's sort of
this continuum of places where information can live to help support people doing what
they're doing. And I feel like there's one half of the continuum, which is how do
we embed it? It's the interface or how do we use things like microcopy or how do
we kind of put resources in the right places and things like that to support it.
And that's kind of very much a UX focus. And then there's how do we teach people
how to do the thing and support them in learning, how to act on different things
and that that's sort of the learning design end of the continuum. But we're really
sort of, we're kind of both ends of this thing of where does the information need
to live. In Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things,
he has a chapter called Knowledge in the Head versus Knowledge in the World. And I
think that's the learning designer is knowledge in the head versus UX designer is
knowledge in the world. And that we're speaking the same language, quite a lot,
we just come at it with a slightly different toolkit in terms of we're always
trying to help people do the thing they need to do at the right time. One of the
things that I found out was that there were all these great tools in like
educational psychology about how to build skills or help people remember things. But
then occasionally we would bump into these is where it was a matter of people know
what they're supposed to do, but they still aren't doing it. You know, we all know
we're supposed to wear sunscreen, or we all know that we're supposed to save for
retirement, or we all know that we're supposed to eat more leafy greens or, you
know, whatever the thing is. And yet, you know, also, admittedly,
the behavior doesn't always happen as much as it should. And so the question then
was like, well, what's helpful there in terms of supporting people. And so that led
me down this whole path of behavioral science, which is kind of emerging as its own
distinct domain in the research psychology. And we just got done with the biggest
behavior change experiment in the history of the world. It was all those behaviors
associated with the pandemic.
And it was a remarkable, I mean, we focused a lot on the failures of that, but
actually, if you think about the number of people who'd changed their behavior in a
hurry, like, I don't think we've ever seen anything quite like it. And so looking
at all of that and trying to figure out, you know, bottom line, I'm interested in
learning, but I'm also interested in helping people do things, you know, faster,
easier, more effectively. And so, where can we find things in all the research
psychology to support that has always been a question I've been working with. Yeah,
absolutely. So, in your profession, how explicitly is psychology normally embraced?
So, in the UX world, probably 20 years ago, I would say it was a lot more
explicitly applied psychology when you're talking about HCI and all these other things
Then as things shift and the profession changes a little bit and different sort of,
you know, groups of professionals kind of get involved, these skill sets shift a
little bit and it sometimes gets a lot less explicitly about the psychology at the
core. And I'm curious to, you know, so in your area of work, as you've observed
it, is it explicit about that and has that changed over the over the years and how
do people kind of think of it? - Yeah, when I identify myself professionally, I say
that I'm an instructional designer, which is a domain that actually came out of,
really kind of came into being around like World War II and things like that,
because they drafted all these people or they're, you know, people signed up to
participate in World War II and military and then they went, "Oh shoot, we kind of
need a or kind of structured way of training them to do all of these different
roles in a hurry. You know, again, that was a huge effort, not only to enlist
these people and get them into the right position and things like that, but they
had to train them to do a whole bunch of jobs in a really big hurry. And so
instructional design came out of this desire to have kind of a
structured method for designing learning experiences for people, and that's,
I think, always kind of a push -pull. There's like the theory and the research basis
for things, and then there's kind of formulating a method. So, you know, when we go
back, and I spent about half of my time in graduate school, which is now more than
20 years ago, over in what was then called
Welles, basically.
well. And it was, I think we didn't have as much kind of practices and procedures
as we do now in, you know, in fields like UX. But we,
you know, so we really had to rely on the, you know, on some of the theory and
some of the cognitive science, because I remember when I first started digging around
looking for guidance around interface design, you know, we just didn't have that, we
didn't have that much to lean on there as, you know, Jacob Nielsen's usability
engineering was the first real book I found on it and things like that. In my
field, which is instructional design, we've always had educational psychology as kind
of our foundational discipline that we draw from. So instructional design has focused
a little bit more on methods. and then, you know, we're pulling over from
educational psychology when we're looking for psychology and theory behind it and
those kinds of things. But obviously, the world's changing so fast that we need kind
of all these pieces. You know, the more and more, the more and more we're putting
all of this stuff online and no longer, you know, that they a lot of the research
was based on bringing people into classrooms and, you know, talking to people right
in front of you and all of this kind of stuff. And as we shift mediums and we
shift, you know, we shift all of the things about the technology and things like
that, we're still, we're still figuring out, you know, what actually works, what
doesn't work, all that kind of thing. Yeah. So, you mean getting into the psychology
and kind of touching on your first book of the two that we'll talk about today.
So first of all, I love how these books are written. So for the audience, these
books really practice what they preach because they are about learning and they're
about instruction and getting it to stick, but then that's what the books are doing.
They've got illustrations. It's sophisticated ideas, but boiled down into
straightforward language. Lots of There's lots of sort of models for how to think of
things and the book itself is just very well organized and there's a lot of
psychology in it, which I really love. And so, you know, on the first book,
you know, one of the things you talk about toward the beginning is sort of these
archetypes of learners.
So, so talk about that a little bit and I have some follow up questions
potentially, but talk about some of the whole concept of these archetypes of learners
and so forth. Yeah. Well, one of the things we have found out from the research is
that this idea of learning styles isn't really a very helpful thing when it comes
to design. So when we think about learner archetypes, sometimes we're like, "Well,
I'm a visual learner. I'm not a Tory learner. I'm a kinesthetic learner." You know,
those kinds of things. And it turns out whatever may Whatever may ultimately be
uncovered by the research in those findings, it turns out that that doesn't help us
design very much, because honestly, we're more similar than we are different.
So unless you've actually got some visual impairment, we're all visual learners.
The difference between somebody who's really, really a visual learner and somebody
who's just mostly a is kind of irrelevant when it comes to design practices.
And so the learner archetypes that you're referring to in there I think are the
ones that are like, is this a learner who's like, I just need this one piece of
information that I can act on because I have to solve a problem, right? And then,
you know, like YouTube is full of great video, you know, solve a problem solutions
that are fantastic for that audience, right? Like I can't figure out how change the
setting on my iPhone, I'm going to go poke around in YouTube and sure enough,
there's somebody who, you know, has recorded a 45 second video that says, "Here's
how you find and change the setting on your iPhone." Or I need to figure out, can
I replace the leaking outdoor faucet, you know, where I connect my garden hose all
by myself. Sure enough, there's somebody on YouTube who wants to explain that to me.
So, you know, There's remarkable strategies for, "I just need to solve a problem,"
types of learners. The short video is a fantastic medium for it or a short article,
how this worksites or things like that have great resources on some of that kind of
thing. But then there's other stuff like, "How do I manage conflict in my team?"
Well, a short video might have a few tips on that, but honestly, there's probably a
bunch of messy, complicated things in there. And so maybe a short video is, it can
be a supplementary thing, but it's probably not going to solve the actual problem
for you. And so if I'm somebody who's dealing with a big complicated,
a big complicated problem and I need to really up my skill level to do it,
That's a different set of solutions for it. It might be coaching, it might be
different kinds of things. I think some of the other learners I had like learners
who were like, this is required course and you're forcing me to take it. What kind
of strategies do we have for that person? How do I make this at least somewhat
entertaining and as short and un -painful as possible? If this is genuinely knowledge,
you're just kind of being required to sit through for legal compliance and not
because you really need it. It might be a learner who already knows a lot about
the topic, in which case things, and then they just need these extra little bits
that you can help them with. Well, then it might be about keeping it short, but
really well indexed so they can find the stuff that they
you know, letting them like pick, you know, pick categories, pick their way into,
find their way into particular material. So yeah, depending on what, where your
learners are at and what they need and what kinds of stuff it might be, hey, they
need help kind of understanding why something's important or they might need help
figuring out how to actually do a thing where they might need to see some examples
being modeled for you. And so depending on Where your learner is coming at it, you
know, is this something that they don't know anything about at all? Well, then
they're probably going to need a lot more sort of step -by -step guidance through the
process. But if it's something where they have quite a bit of background knowledge,
but we've got some new information from them, well, that's a really different format
that you're going to want to look at. You're going to want to kind of try not to
make them sit still for every last piece of it, but give them the opportunity to
identify what's useful to them. So There's just a bunch of considerations depending
on what their level of motivation is, what their problem they're trying to solve,
how much do they already know about the topic. All of those kinds of things come
into play when you're thinking about, "How do I want to design this learning
experience?" It seems to me that it's about casting a wide net to make sure that
you're touching all the learning types and there's something there for everyone and
then kind of understanding the classroom and understanding the makeup, you know, that
there's different types of folks because people will struggle for different reasons
and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. And so there's, you know, one of the hardest
problems is when you're an instructor and you've got a class, whether it's a live
classroom or whether it's virtual or anything like that, one of the hardest problems
is when you have really different levels in the room, you know, so that's, and
that's a tough one. I mean, like, even after doing this for decades, that's still a
hard, hard problem for me when I've got a really wide variety. And so, like, the
best strategies that we can usually point to in that case is to try to create some
opportunities for the people who do know this stuff to share. So it might be about,
you know, having small group activities where the people who are more knowledgeable
can help the people who are still learning at it so that gives both of them
something to do that's interesting as opposed to making these poor people who already
know quite a lot about the topic just sit there and listen to you, tell them stuff
they already know. Nobody enjoys that. That is not fun for anyone.
- And so there's another thing I like how you talk about it near that section about
identifying gaps. So for any of us who have taught or we've all been taught before,
It's largely about identifying the gaps, like where is someone right now and where
do they need to be? And then sort of, so that's what the educator is doing and
finding them. And then there's this idea that you quoted from Stuart Brand in 1994
about pace layering. Oh, yeah. That was really interesting. So talk about some of
that a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Well, so some things change faster than others, some
things like that. So the gaps that I usually work with are like, is it just a
knowledge gap? I mean, if they, if they don't know the thing right now, but if you
can just give them the information, will they be able to successfully execute? And
sometimes that happens. Sometimes it really is genuinely an information gap, right?
How do I, you know, how do I do this one task? Or how do I do this? You know,
what little piece of information is going to make me go, Oh, okay. And again,
that's frequently the case when you say have people who already have a good basis
in the topic already and they just need an extra piece of information and they'll
know what to do with it and they'll be able to run with it. But most gaps are
usually a little bit more complicated than that. You know, sometimes we're dealing
with something procedural. I need you to follow these steps. We know exactly what
good performance looks like. I just need you to do it. And so maybe that's just
about, you know, giving you kind of good clear aids to do it, You know,
and then you can start asking some questions like how frequently does somebody need
to do this, right? So if they're gonna do it every day, I just need you to get
up to speed But then you're gonna practice it quite often And so now we just need
to make sure that you have some way to self -correct if you're not doing it exactly
right, you know That kind of thing But if you're only doing it like once or twice
a year, but it's a procedure and we've got steps Then it's gonna be all about like
what support material is my putting in place because I'm not gonna expect you to
remember this six months from now, but when you get to it, I need you to know
where to look and what resources you can use to kind of guide yourself through it
while you're doing it. So there's certain questions about that,
right? How complicated is it? How important is it that people be able to do it
without errors? Are people gonna be able to reference resources while they're doing
it? You know, all of those kinds of things. So there's like a bunch of stuff about
filing my taxes that I don't need to store in my head because it's only going to
happen once a year. But when I do get to that point, I'm going to have to remind
myself, okay, what am I supposed to do with these expenses or something like that?
So I need to make sure I know how to find good resources for it quickly.
If it's a skills -based gap, and I define that as something where you really think
people need to practice in order to be good at it. So that could be anything that
could be hitting a tennis ball, or it could be talking to a customer, or it could
be giving feedback to an employee, or it could be driving a car.
I mean, there's all sorts of stuff, right? And the psychomotor things where you're
actually physically manipulating something, and it's kind of a visible behavior we're
already pretty good at, we know that you need to practice, we know need to, you
know, do this. So like, if you're learning to drive a car, there's guidance around
how much you should practice. There's tests to make sure that you can do it. But
you take something like being a good manager, which is arguably even more complicated
than driving a car. Most people, when I ask that question, most people are like,
yeah, manager is more complicated. But like, nobody gets 40 hours of practice being
a manager before they get kind of turned loose at least on their staff. They
usually just get promoted and maybe go to a seminar for two days and then they're
off kind of practicing all sorts of stuff on their staff and maybe it's working,
maybe it's not working. When we look at those kinds of skills, the big question to
ask about when we're creating learning materials for it is how is somebody going to
practice? How are they going to get feedback? How much practice do they need? You
know, I have clients where they were like, "Oh, we want an hour -long webinar on
this." And so that people know how to budget for this type of project.
And I'm like, "Okay, great. How long did it take you to learn how to budget for
that kind of project?" And they're like, "Oh, God, it was like six months before I
felt confident doing it." And I'm like, "Okay, so let's maybe talk about why an
hour -long webinar is probably not going to be enough to do something that it took
you six months to learn. And maybe we can make a plan that kind of encompasses
that a little bit better. Yeah, excellent. And so it sounds like a lot of what you
are touching on there was the designing for different types of outcomes.
So we already know that if you want to get good at something sort of like with
your hands, I mean, you said you practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
then it becomes automatic, right, over time. And so one of the sections,
there was a series of sections in your book, you talk about design for knowledge,
design for skills, design for motivation, design for habits,
which I previously would have thought it would be heavily over the same thing as
not for skills, but maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit different there. Maybe
you could clarify and then design for environment, design for evaluation. - Yeah,
absolutely. So the first three that I mentioned are knowledge, procedures,
skills, but then we get into things like motivation, which is again, that sort of,
they know what to do, but they still aren't doing it. So like, they know how to
do it, they could do it if they really wanted to, but for some reason it seems
like they don't really want to. You know, they know how to, they know when and
where they should wear their safety glasses and yet it's still not happening, right?
And then we have to kind of dig in and do that user analysis and try to
understand, oh, actually, these particular glasses kind of fog up a little bit and
it's actually making them harder for them to do their task. Okay, now we understand
a little bit more about why they're not using them. Or, you know, like most of
them have never had the experience of an accident with that, you know, it's related
to their eyes. So maybe we need to do a little bit more kind of motivation
persuasion and show them some, you know, some really like not great outcomes that
have happened when people have forgotten to wear safety glasses, those kinds of
things. Habits are an interesting one, right? Because we can know how to do a
thing, like skills and habits have some overlap unquestionably. But like, I talk
about flossing sometimes, you know, you can know you should floss, you can know how
to floss, it's not that hard, right? You can even want to floss and yet it's still
not quite a habit, right? Like it's still not even correct the code of how do I
remember to do this every day. And so we can have all the other gaps met or
satisfied and still miss out on the habit piece. And then it becomes a matter of
kind of like supporting it. And there's some strategies you can use implementation
intentions as a favorite, which is the researchers, Richard Golitzer, Richard
Goldwitzer who looks at kind of creating a plan. So while I'm waiting for my coffee
to brew in the morning, I'm gonna floss my teeth and I'll keep a cup full of
those little flossing things right by the coffee materials. So I can support it both
in terms of having an intention creating kind of a space for it, chaining it to an
existing reliable behavior. And then also kind of adapting my environment to support
it better, which goes to the environment piece. I think UX people really understand
the environment gaps, how wet and how can we adapt to their environment or what can
we put into your environment that makes the behavior more likely.
But yeah, so those are the main ones I deal with is knowledge, procedures, skills,
motivation, you know, like they know, but they're not, they're not doing it. Habits,
which they can even, people be motivated about it and something can still not be a
habit, although sometimes motivation is part of that. And nothing's ever won. You
know, it's always kind of a mix of these. And then environment, can I make the
thing easier or put something into the environment to support the behavior, which is
easier than trying to, it's easier to change the environment than to change the
person sometimes. Yeah. And so with that, you know, kind of example you gave where
an organization comes to you and they say, "Hey, we need to teach people to do
that." Is that the kind of the trigger scenario that happens? Is that the world
we're dealing with where a large organization and it seemed that seemed to be where
the second book leaned to talk to the elephant, with this organizational, how do you
get it to work? You know, the first one's talking a lot more about the psychology,
but a lot of the practice too. But the second one really dives in into how do you
make this thing happen? And so is it starting up with sort of an organization
saying, hey, you're talking about a little bit too, where, hey, this big accident
happened, or we're in the news because something bad happened. And so they need to
fix something, and they say, okay, process change, or we need training, and they
kind of want to throw money at training. So So what was like, how in the real
world that comes together? - Yeah, well, anytime some organizations screws up really
badly, the CEO will always say, we're gonna do training, right?
Like that almost always shows up, right? You know, when Starbucks did not,
let's say, handle certain situations well,
from a DEI perspective, they shut down the entire organization and everybody went to
a day of training. Well, like what's happening in that day of training, right? And
hopefully it was useful. I don't I don't know what actually Starbucks did on that
day. But but I mean, whenever something real bad happens in any organization, part
of the apologies, we're going to do training to prevent this from happening again.
And, you know, how often was the problem caused by a lack of knowledge.
Sometimes, you know, sometimes legitimately that might be the case. But, you know,
I think in a lot of cases, people know, and, you know, there's still a bunch of
complicated reasons why certain things happen that we would like them not to happen
in the future. And until you
whether it's root cause or whether it's what in the system is propagating this
particular you know, set of behaviors or not propagating a particular important set
of behaviors or things like that. So for example, I use hand washing quite a bit
because it's such an example that everybody understands and everybody went through
their own hand washing journey again recently in the pandemic and things like that.
And we know that healthcare has has never been kind of 100 % compliant to their
reliance. Food service and health care are the big domains where they've worked
really, really hard on hand washing. But there's a bunch of reasons why it's not--
and hand washing is a tough problem. There was one study that found that if nurses
wash their hands for the duration, the amount and duration that is acquired by the
guidelines, they would spend almost an 8th of their day washing their hands, which
is a lot, right? And, you know, there there's always challenges around, hey,
you know, this patient is in distress, what do I do first? You know, yeah, I mean,
theoretically I should wash my hands. But in reality, if I just washed them, you
know, two minutes ago, and this patient is in distress, I'm probably going to help
the patient and not, you know, stop and be like, just hang on while you're having
your crisis while I wash my hands again. You know, those kinds of things, those are
the difficult decisions that a lot of healthcare practitioners are being asked to
make all the time. And, you know, they're doing, they're doing a lot to make that
happen. But we look at this and we ask ourselves, you know, what's the, what's it
root cause behind some of this stuff? Is it an awareness? Well, you know, for some
of the staff in the hospital, it might be, right?
Or is it that they know, but it's, again, not a habit in the right way? Is it
that the environment could be changed to better support it?
Handwashing compliance in the U .S. The biggest jump in handwashing compliance in
healthcare settings was the introduction of the alcohol -based hand rubs that allowed
people to much more quickly, um, you know, meet these hand washing, uh,
requirements, uh, by using the, the rubs instead of, you know, instead of the 20
seconds, 20 seconds doesn't sound like it should be that long, but you, you stack a
lot of those on top of each other and it really adds up. Um, and so having a
faster method, you know, that they added into the environment for hand washing
ultimately made a bigger difference than, you know, a lot of like training about how
important know us. And then it's really directed at workers primarily this training.
It's more so than executives usually, or is it a mix? A lot of the projects that
I work on are directed at line workers or things like that.
Projects that are big enough to sort of bring me in on are usually large audiences,
right? And so, you know, quite a lot of money gets spent on leadership training,
you know, in different executive training. One of the things is what people need
really changes quite a lot, the more they kind of move along and expertise
continuum. So when somebody's just starting out, you can have a fairly uniform
experience. So if you're doing first day UX boot camp or, you know,
like in your UX class and college or whatever it is, like you could all have kind
of the same thing for the first week or something, that's probably fine because
nobody knows.
was first a thing, like people really had very specific needs. And so a class that
was 100 % the basics of it wasn't necessarily gonna support the people who were kind
of at the top level of experience. They needed a lot more kind of variability. So
it might be like we're gonna do a working group and kind of figure it out and
take a look at each other's work or something like that, because everybody's got a
little bit of a different set of problems, depending on what kind of, you know,
situation that they were dealing with. So the more expert people are, the more they
need to be able to adapt the learning experience to match up their circumstances,
which means that we don't tend to have as kind of regular a curriculum at at the
top level of fields, we tend to be more like, we're going to have conference and
you can go to a bunch of different sessions or we're gonna have meetups and we're
gonna talk about our problems and kind of share our expertise and critique each
other or things like that because there's more variability at that level as opposed
to at the beginning level where it can be really pretty uniform. So let's talk
about this elephant analogy here. So since getting this book I have been told that
the elephant analogy is out there and it gets used. I think I think I can probably
comes from you that talked to the elephant part of it. But I love this analogy
because I'm very into the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind.
I wrote my master's thesis on touches on that issue with different kinds of memory
and different scenarios. And so I love it. I love thinking about it. And this
analogy just encapsulates it. And then once I heard, okay, that's why it's talked to
the elephant. So, so get into that a little bit. Yeah, yeah. When you title books,
there's always this dilemma. Do you go with a title that people are going to really
remember? You know, and I think talk to the elephant versus a title kind of
explains more of what it is. So we did it in the subtitle, but you know, I don't
know if I've come to a firm conclusion on that. But the elephant metaphor is
actually the origin of that is Jonathan Haidt. He's a psychologist. He's doing a lot
on like cell phone usage in school age kids right now. So he, he kind of moves
around in terms of where his, where his area of focus is. But this was a book he
wrote in, I want to say the early 2000s called the happiness hypothesis, but
happiness hypothesis. But he was doing this thing about your brain being like an
elephant and a rider. And so the elephant is kind of all of the stuff that deals
with physicality and perception and emotion. So it's a visceral experience of the
world. It's, you know, like, if you go down by your spinal cord, you've got things
like automatic stuff like breathing and heart rate and reflexes, then you get like
vision and hearing in the back and on the sides, you get fine motor control across
the top of your cortex, you you get gross motor control, more in the back of your
brain. In the middle, you've got like the limbic system, which is all of your
emotional stuff, fight or flight and all of those kinds of things. So you've got a
big, huge part of your brain that's dealing with sensing the physical world,
moving yourself around in the physical world, feeling things, you know, like
perception and feeling and understanding what's going on. And so he kind of calls
that whole part of your brain, the elephants. And then up in front, we have things
like the prefrontal cortex, which activates when you're doing things like executive
control and reasoning and projecting into the future to consider consequences,
right? And so that's this part of your brain that's your talking, thinking, you
know, logical brain. It's kind of like your little Mr. Spock brain, right? And so
the The idea is that both of these entities show up and are participating in
decision -making. Daniel Kahneman's model of system one, system two thinking is kind
of similar. There's a bunch of kind of ones. I happen to like the rider and the
elephant because I think it's really easy for people to wrap their heads around. So
when your alarm goes off in the morning, your logical brain is saying, "I should
get up so that I can do all these things before I have to jump on Zoom this
morning and I will actually have time to deal with some of those emails before I
have to get on my first call and I can have my coffee, can be a little bit
relaxed in my morning. And your elephant's like, it is warm and nice and comfortable
here and I think we should stay longer.
So the big difference between these two entities is kind of a present bias. Your
elephant is like, what is happening to me right now? What is interesting or fun or
comfortable or whatever right now, and your rider's like, "Hey, let me project that
into the future," and, you know, consider the consequences of things down the road.
And so when these two entities are playing in decision -making, sometimes the rider
drags the elephant along. You know, if it's April 14th, you know,
you can probably make your elephant do taxes, even though it's managed to fend you
off for all these days up until now. But if it's one of these things where
intellectually you know you should do it, but your current version is like, "I'm
just going to watch the next episode on Netflix.
I should get up and clean the house versus I can watch the next episode on
Netflix." That's very much a rider versus elephant decision. And sometimes your
elephant just wins. So taking into account both of these entities for your decision
-making is really important. And the thing is not that the elephant's dumb. You know,
sometimes they talk, Kahneman talks about lazy system too. I want to make sure it's
too. But, you know, the lazy system. And I'm like, lazy isn't the right framing.
It's not a bad system. It's efficient. It, you know, saves you energy,
you know, spending energy on the necessary stuff, it leads you towards a lot nice,
fun, comfortable things. But it's not, it can't win all the time. Like the elephant
can't always make the decisions, because then you would never get any of these kinds
of things done. A system one, no, no, no, I want you to continue. I just want to
slide in there. System one, I had to look it up just now to remind myself. System
one, that's the one we evolved to have. So that's the elephant. elephant. In fact,
because it hits you first, and then the second, the more deliberate, yeah. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. No, that's a good point. It's lazy system one. You're right. And that's
why I talk about riders and elephants, because I can't, even after decade and after
15 years of exposure to this stuff, I can remember which one is one and two.
So, you know, rider and elephant, everybody remembers. It's way easier. Yeah, no, so
I love But so we've got the rider on the elephant, the rider sitting on top of
the elephant trying to guide it somewhere. They've got to go somewhere. The rider is
the conscious mind and knows things and maybe has a map and all this stuff. The
elephant kind of wants to do what it wants to do. And you really started to get
into this where it's easy when this is described to think of it as like, well, the
elephant's dumb, it's lazy. And a lot of the effects that we see, like, you know,
I notice this all the time, right, where there'll be some perceptual effect, or you
give the example of the baseball, baseball bat, a problem. And perhaps we get such
on that too, if maybe most people haven't heard it. But you defend the elephant.
And I love he'd have been that poor little elephant because it's not just, it's
not, it's too simple to say like, "Oh, it's just dumb and it's just stupid." It's
there for a reason and maybe it's helpful to know why these things are like that.
Yeah, the baseball bat example is one from Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow,
and he talks about the question. Let's see if I can do it right. You
Um, you've got a ball and a bat and I can't remember, I think the bat is more
expensive like the um Uh, oh shoot. No, I can't do it.
No. Yeah. No, it's the but yeah Yeah, no because and for the audience it's you
have to say it right because you can mess it up if you don't say it right Yes,
so the bat is more expensive. So so you've got a ball and a bet You bought them
both at the store For a dollar and ten cents. Yes. There you go So
Thank you. Yes. Okay. And so yeah, how much is the ball? How much is the ball?
Right. So the bad is one dollar more than the ball. Everybody wants to say, well,
if the, yeah, then everybody wants to say the ball is ten cents if they don't
think about it, right? And the answer is the ball, the bad is a dollar five and
then the ball is five cents and
it's because it's a dollar more. So if the ball is five cents in the bet is a
dollar more, it's a dollar and five cents, because it adds up to a dollar 10
cents. And this is always used as an example of this lazy system one, right, where,
you know, people just give the automatic answer, okay, it's a dollar, if it's a
dollar more than the other one's got to be 10 cents, because we spent a dollar 10.
And this is such an interesting example to me, because there are several things I
think we can learn from this example, but most of them or are not that logical
system is better than the automatic system. And the reason I kind of say that is,
well, this is obviously a fake example because nothing costs $1 .10 anymore in a
store. Even the dollar store, you go in there and stuff is way more than a dollar
in a lot of cases. So there's no buying a ball in a bat that's $1 .10.
you know, kind of an leftover SAT problem or something. So it doesn't actually
matter if I get it right. So that it's written in kind of a weird tricky way to
fool people. And so I think the lesson that we should get from that as designers
is when you write stuff in weird tricky ways, people are probably going to get it
wrong. So like, okay, that's useful information, but doesn't mean that we were wrong
that the elephant was wrong in this scenario. It's clearly kind of a quirky, weird
example. Nobody ever asks questions this way. Nobody ever says, "Well,
you spent $3 on dessert and you spent $37 more on your entrees." How much was your
entrees? People are like, "Nobody ever talks that way." This is an inherently
bizarre, artificial way to this conversation and can you get people to do things
wrong when you have inherently artificial and weird ways to structure the question?
Hey, guess what? Turns out you can. So the lessons I think we should learn from
this is use real examples that actually make sense in people's brains. Don't ask
things in convoluted, tricky sorts of ways.
And don't think that people are wrong because they're leading into efficiencies when
they're trying to answer the question, because this queued them that this isn't
really an important question. It's not real money. It's not something I care about.
I'm going to answer it quickly so that I can keep going on with my day after I'm
done dealing with your goofy logic problem.
And so we didn't queue people correctly about what it is we were trying to do with
this question. And so by queuing people in a kind of slightly deceptive way,
we got them to answer it wrong. But like, what does this tell us as designers? It
tells us that, yeah, you can trick people's brains if you really, you know, do a
bunch of goofy stuff. But that doesn't mean that they were wrong to answer that
question in the most efficient way possible and then move on. In that sense,
their elephant was like, "This isn't important, so I'm not going to stop and figure
this out. I'm just going to kind of do my off -the -cuff answer." And the elephant
was right in terms of assessing the consequences. Nothing bad happened because they
answered 10 cents. There was no consequence. It was a small enough amount of money
that I felt I'm wrong. It totally doesn't matter, you know, because who Um,
so that's, if somebody was like, figuring out how much they were going to pay for
an option on their car that was going to cost them thousands of dollars, we hope
that they would pay more attention, but could you as a, somebody selling the car
structure, the question in a way that they'll agree to it without necessarily doing
the math, sure you can, right? Are you an ethical, you know, are you an ethical
person if you design that setup that way? That's a different question. But can you,
can you come up with these tricky things? So it's not that I think the, they
shouldn't have done the, they shouldn't have done the experiment or this isn't useful
information. I think it is really interesting. And it's really useful. But I think
coming to the conclusion that people lying on their automatic systems, our lazy is
the wrong conclusion to come to.
Especially as designers. - Yeah, and a lot of it is situations where when you wanna
not have the elephant be in charge, it's a difficult situation. So if you walk into
a casino, you don't want the elephant in charge because the casino's designed to
take advantage of the elephant. Whereas there's other situations where the elephant's
judgment, maybe you're judging the facial expressions of your loved ones as they're
talking to you. And then maybe they're, you're sensing that something's wrong or
something. Maybe the elephant has enough practice and automatic, you know, exposure to
be able to, will you listen to the elephant in that case? Well, the challenge is
we talk about biases a lot. And because of some of the stuff that came out early
in behavioral economics and things like that was very heavily focused on bias, right?
And so there's all these biases, there's availability heuristics, and there's halo
effect, and there's all these kinds of things. And we leaned really heavily into
trying to de -bias people or any of those kinds of things. The thing that was often
missing from those conversations about bias from a design point of view was the fact
that these biases exist because they are functional behaviors most of the time. So
95 % of the time, these behaviors were just fine. Like they're efficient, they get
stuff done, they keep you moving, they, you know, handle the situation. It's all
great, right? And the problem is there was this small percentage where if we weren't
paying attention and being careful, these behaviors would then lead us down real bad
paths, right?
So like I just had some medical stuff and they kept asking me, like, what are you
here for? Can you describe what procedure you're here for? And this was this check
that they had put in because one of the problems was, obviously people got treated
for the wrong thing, right? Like this is fundamentally, you know, or stuff like
that, we know that there are, you know, these terrible stories of people getting the
wrong limb amputated or, you know, things like that. And so the issue isn't that
like, you know, that these automatic behaviors aren't serving us,
they serve us until they don't. And then the real trick is being able to identify,
where do I need to heighten my, "Heighten my vigilance and really double -check, and
how do we build that in so that it doesn't happen?" One of the challenges with
talking while you're driving or something like that is,
if somebody's in the car with you and you're merging into a particularly nasty piece
of traffic, they stop talking while you're merging into this nasty piece of traffic.
Both of you recognize that this is a scenario where you want to heighten your
vigilance, right? If you're just driving down the road and you're going on a
straight line and it's not that crowd, you know, there isn't that much traffic
around you, you can lower your vigilance around driving and be much more automatic
about it and have a full conversation with the person sitting next to you. But then
you're like, oh, at this place where I'm having to like look over my shoulder and
merge in and it's more dangerous. We all need to heighten our vigilance. We
recognize that, but when you're talking to somebody on the phone, they don't know
that that's happening to you. And so they keep telling you about the fight that
they had with their sister -in -law and you're as the driver now having to like do
a cognitively high demanding task of merging into traffic at the same time as you're
listening to your friend have, you know, express how upset they are about this thing
that happened and whatever. And so that was one of the challenges around some of
that kind of stuff was, you know, we had stuff, we had behaviors where we all
recognize we need to heighten their vigilance, but then we put people into situations
where either they don't recognize that they need to heighten their vigilance or, you
know, like increase kind of bring it off of out of automatic control up to more
conscious control. So like looking at what are the circumstances we need to do that
and how do we build safeguards in? Like we build a step in the process where we
ask the patient why they're here and make sure that their answer actually matches up
to what we understand, right? So I can build that into the process so that I can
reduce medical error. But I mean, the number of people who get treated for the
wrong thing when they come to the hospital is actually quite small, but it's real
bad when it happens. And so when do we leverage that? So the trick isn't bias is
bad. The trick is bias is mostly good, except when it's not. And how do we make
sure we catch those? - And then so why do you wanna talk to the elephant? And so,
'cause one of the main things that I get from the book is that
often poorly designed materials are talking to the writer and it's kind of easier to
talk to the writer 'cause you just like make some explicit bullet points and you
say like do this, this, this, and this, but you want to talk to the elephant.
Yeah. Well, I think most of our behaviors that we struggle with as humans.
And if you can find an example for me where this isn't the case, I'd be super
interested to hear it, is are things where your physical environment contradicts your
intellectual knowledge. And what I mean by that is if I know that I should wear
sunscreen intellectually, but it's kind of a cloudy day and it doesn't feel that
bad, like my environment is telling me nothing bad's happening, you know,
because I don't feel like my cheek's getting red, I don't feel it burning, you
know, any of those kinds of things. And by the time that stuff happens, or by the
time you get, you know, skin cancer 20 years down the line because you didn't wear
enough sunscreen. You know, those kinds of things, you know, you've been able to go
a really long way and been just fine until you're not, right? And so most of the
things, most of the behaviors that we struggle with these humans are things where
nothing bad happens immediately if we don't do this behavior, or nothing good happens
immediately if we do do the behavior. It's both rewards and consequences. So, delayed
or absent feedback is honestly either positive feedback in the form of rewards or
negative feedback in the form of consequences is usually an element that I see in
every single behavior that we struggle with as humans. And that's something where
your elephants like, "I understand why you're so worked up about this sunscreen. I
think we're fine," right?
But that those are situations where we've got this tension between these two things.
And so when we're thinking about designing for it, we want to try to figure out
how to make it feel more real and more tangible and more immediate for the elephant
because we're gonna get much better adherence to behavior. When the rider is the
only one motivating the behavior, it works fine until you kind of have a bad day
and then it sort of all falls apart or it works fine until you get tired, or
until you get frustrated, or until you're sleep deprived, or until you're any of
those kinds of things. And so we get much more consistent behavior if both the
rider and the elephant are on board with, "Yes, this is important." And so that's
the big issue is people can force themselves to do things that don't have any kind
of immediate off or consequence, but eventually like that forcing yourself to do
things kind of breaks down. And so if we get the right or if we also get the
elephant on board, if we also talk to the elephant, we get much more consistent
behavior from people. One of the things you do in your book is you distinguish
between learning design, which is what you do. And at one point,
behavioral design and behavioral strategies at one point in this book, you
distinguished it, and you talked about how it's kind of a rapidly growing field, but
you kind of, you know, you're saying don't expect it to be exactly the same thing,
but do you have anything to say about that and the different professions and the
way it's looked at? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who are working on kind
of the same set of problems, and they come at it with their own kind of toolbox.
So UX designers are I think behavioral designers, you know, fundamentally, like
they're trying to figure out how do I create an interface that's going to support
the behavior, and it might be the behavior of buying a sweater on this website, or
it might be the behavior of, you know, like keeping up to date with,
you know, this information or it might be, you know, there's all sorts of, there's
all sorts of things, right? And, you And part of what they're trying to do is make
it as easy as possible to do the desired behaviors.
We're sort of in a similar boat as learning designers, but we're just, like I said,
coming at it from the other end of the continuum. Behavioral designers are using
both of these skill sets. So one of the case studies in the book,
there's a chapter of case studies towards the end. And one of the case studies is
a design scenario, which is kind of I think coming very much from a UX perspective
about how do they support people who want to quit smoking. And it was the quitting
app that was being done by, oh shoot, I think it was truth .org.
It's the truth organization that had the funding to help support people who want to
quit smoking. And it was very much about, like, what's the user experience,
but also what did people know? How do we educate people about anything from like
the difficulties of quitting to strategies that they can use while they're trying to
quit, but then also creating this, you know, trying to help them identify when are
they going to have the highest rate of success? What are tracking strategies for it?
And so all of these pieces kind of come together. So, you know, behavioral science
as a discipline has been, like I said, coalescing into its own fields,
it came kind of a lot out of behavioral economics, but really there's also been,
you know, kind of parallel fields and things like public health or, you know,
different kinds of policy groups and things like that and psychology. So there's a
bunch of different disciplines that are now kind of calling themselves behavioral
science, But there's also, people also will talk about behavioral science in the
context of mental health behavior, you know, in treatment, and that is actually a
whole different domain. And so it's, they unfortunately use sometimes similar terms,
and so it gets a little confusing. But you see things like the behavioral design
units that came up. The U .S. government had one kind of, it was started under the
Obama administration. The U .S., Australia has behavior works, I think is the name of
theirs,
the UK had behavioral insights, which is looking at taking a lot of this stuff and
applying it to policy interventions and things like that. And so behavioral science
is its own domain. The main professional group in there is something called BESI,
which is B -E -S -C -Y .org. They do a lot of great stuff, and they're looking a lot
at systems design as applied to behavior change challenges.
There's a few different organizations. BehavioralSciences .org is a good newsletter that
focuses a lot on behavioral design. Then there's groups like the University College
London Center for Behavior Change that has built out the predominant model,
and it's the one I talked about in the book, which is the behavior change wheel
and specifically the combi model, which can be used as kind of a foundation for
doing this level of behavior analysis and then identifying different interventions that
can be used in a design to try to help support people with behavior change.
Yeah, so So, you know, you've got the learning side, how can we help people learn
and then the behavior? How do you, especially on the environmental side of things?
And it seems like in a lot of the use cases, it seems like learning would probably
be the most often, the more effective and the sort of better things to do in a
lot of cases if you say, okay, we need to do these changes, but how do we help
people kind of learn like the intrinsic motivation, how do we help them get it?
Yes, you could do Band -Aid solutions outside, but how do we get the root of it
there? - Yeah, absolutely. And to be fair, the instances in the book that I was
using kind of leaned heavily towards things that were gonna be applicable for
learning and development professionals, which is kind of my target, like core market
that I write for, but The learning is one of the tools.
There was a meta -analysis study that came out, and I can find it for you and give
you the reference on it that looked at the efficacy of different types of
interventions, and they found that learning alone often wasn't the most successful
intervention for behavior change. However, we know that sometimes a learning component
is a necessary prerequisite or part of other types of interventions, right? So there
may need to be some education stuff if we're putting together an app for helping
people quit smoking, but we need to, we know that some education is going to be
part of that intervention. So maybe educational loan isn't going to have a big
effect, but we combine it with a variety of other things. And nudges were very big
for a while, and there's nothing wrong with nudges, except that they don't often
stand alone as the only type of intervention that you need, you know, it can be
part of your toolbox that you're applying to a set of, you know, a set of
circumstances or set of tools. But it's, you know, it's not just nudges. It's not
just learning. It's not just, you know, UI design. It's kind of a whole,
you know, you're almost all of these problems are complicated. And so therefore, or
the likelihood that you're gonna find a single solution that's gonna be all you need
is really low. So a more effective intervention is gonna take into account a number
of things from different toolboxes to put together to create the most effective
intervention. - One of the things I really loved in your book, and we don't have
time to discuss it in depth, but I really wanna touch on it. The shelves analogy.
- Yeah, yeah. - Can you give us kinda like a high level of? Yeah, one of the
biggest problems, one of the biggest challenges we're always dealing with is cognitive
load. And so cognitive load theory is this idea that we can hold a certain amount
of material and working memory at any given time. And so like if I say a six
-digit number like 651612, can you say that back to me? Me right now?
Yeah.
I'm sorry, I didn't cue you. I should have told you I was gonna ask you to do
that. But okay, I'll give you a different number. Can you say this one back to me?
Okay. 9 -5 -2 -7 -6 -3. 9 -5 -2 -7 -6 -3. See, perfect, great.
So we know that six digits is something that's usually within the bounds of
somebody's working memory. You can kind of just hold it in your brain buffer kind
of for a long time. But if I do 9 -5 -2 -7 -6 -3 -6 -1 -2 -6 -5 -1. nine,
seven, five, two, some bunch of stuff, and then six, one. - All right. - Which you
just, beautifully demonstrated privacy recency, which is the kind of beginning and
end, and usually the middle gets messy. So 12 digits is not something that you
should be able to remember, unless you're like one of these memory people who's
trained yourself, and there's a whole bunch of methods for that. If If you're
interested, the book "Moonwalking with Einstein" is a great book on how to expand
your capacity. But what it does, and specifically, "Moonwalking with Einstein" talks
about memory palaces, which is I create a whole slew of things, and I just kind of
memorize that, right? Like I just use the old school, I'm just going to memorize.
And it might be like you walking around the rooms of your childhood home, it might
be a memory palace. And then as I tell you this number, you drop a digit by
imagining like seven bananas in the bowl and then, you know, six people standing in
the kitchen and then one person, you know, like asking where the bathroom is,
or you know, something like that. And so I create this really vivid, because it
turns out our visual memories actually have a lot more capacity than, you know, a
memory for a discreet like information, like numbers or something like that. And so
I can visualize a path around my childhood home where I can remember 12 different
digits. And then if I've already memorized the path around the childhood home, I've
already created in my mind as a place where I drop information, then I can much
more easily drop the information. And what that meant with that visualization of the
path of walking around your childhood home is a shelf that already exists in this
shelf metaphor, right?
- You used to play piano. - You used to play piano, okay. So if we talk about like
different kinds of piano music or something like that, you probably have more shelves
for piano than I have. As somebody who never played the piano, right? I know some
things about playing the piano because I live in the world, but it's a fairly
narrow list. And so piano playing, I'm like, well, there's jazz and there's
classical, and that's probably where my ability to like kind of hold onto that ends,
you know. So I have two shelves. And so if you start telling me about a piece
that you were practicing, assuming you were still playing the piano, but if you
start telling me a bit of piece you're practicing and you know challenges to it, if
you're talking to somebody who also plays the piano, they have a much more diverse
set of shelves and information that could be like, Oh, yeah, that one. It's over
here, it's this composer. So it's going to have these challenges and this issue with
it versus me where I'm like, oh, that sounds like classical, right? I have one
shelf and that's all I can do. And the problem with that is, is if you don't have
shelves to put things on and somebody's handing you a ton of information, right?
Like if so, if I'm learning stuff about, you know, new UX practices, I have these
leftover shelves from graduate school where I used to spend a lot of time learning
about UX. So my shelves are going to be okay, but not great, right?
I'll probably be able to parse what you're saying. But if you use like three words
I don't know in a row, I'm going to be like, don't know what to do with that.
Versus if you're talking to somebody who's a current UX practitioner, they have a
much more diverse and, you know, set of shelves. And the problem is we have this
tendency when we're teaching something to new people is to gather all the stuff off
our shelves and they want to come over here and just hand it to the people who
are new and be like, "Here's all the things I've learned. It's all super useful, I
promise." And the people who are new are like, they don't even have shelves. They
have a little locker with a pile of stuff on the ground and all they can do is
kind of just dump it in there and occasionally weed through hoping they find things.
And so when we're teaching things, the way that we help people build shelves is we
might have them do a project using some of these strategies, and that helps them
construct an experience, set of experiences that helps them build shelves. Or we
might share lots and lots of examples with them of different things so that they
can start to build out their own, like, oh, these kinds of musical pieces versus
these kinds versus these kinds. So there are strategies we can do to help people
build shelves. It might be exposure to a lot of case examples. It might be
storytelling. It might be leveraging something that they already know and showing how
this is related so that they can do that. And so all of these things contribute to
long -term memory and your structure for storing information. And then that comes over
and helps you take this new piece of information. So all the numbers I was having
you recite, so thank you for playing along, but all the numbers I was having you
recite are area codes in the Twin Cities area where I live. So if I told those
same numbers to somebody who also lives in Minneapolis or one of the suburbs or
something like that, they would 100 % know what I was doing and they would be like,
"Okay, you did North Metro, South Metro Minneapolis, St. Paul. And they could tell
me those numbers back a lot more easily. They still might be like, why are you
doing this to me? I don't understand. But they would only have to remember four
chunks of information instead of 12 discrete digits. And so that's what we're talking
about. They already have shelves for those numbers. So it's a lot easier for them
to take in this chunk of information and process it. And so one of the questions
we think about when we're designing learning experiences is what kinds of existing
structures in this analogy shelves do they already have? If they don't have any,
how do I help them build those in a way that's meaningful so that then I can feed
more in? So managing cognitive load is I think one of the central responsibilities
of instructional designers. But I think it also is something that UX people have to
think about, you know, if I'm going to show you, if you're going to do a search,
I was on Amazon today 'cause I was looking for a duffel, like a rolling duffel
bag. And, you know, I searched for rolling duffel bags and of course got a million
things and some of them were actually rolling duffel bags but a lot of them weren't
and I needed a particular size but I didn't have that sort of thing. So now I'm
just parsing through and now I don't remember what was on page one by the time I
get to page four. You know, like there's a lot of instances where effectively using
short -term memory or working memory, really, and how are you helping people build
long -term memory and then use that long -term memory? Those are all kind of central
concerns, I think, as any kind of designer's dealing with any kind of information.
- Awesome, I love it. And my last question for you today is, are you a fan of the
movie "Inside Out"? - Yes, yes, "Inside Out" is great. - I I love it. Don't you?
Yeah. I think they do, and it reminded me of this because the physical analogies
for psychological things kind of just helps it all, helps it all come together. And
I think we're so much smarter about the emotional component.
It kind of used to be sort of like, like I said, you know, it was dumb or it
was lazy or it was kicked to the curb. And it's like, there's a lot of reasons to
believe that how you feel about something acts as one of your gauges for how
important is this and how much attention should I allocate to it. And so if we're
giving you something that's a ton of abstract information and you're just like, "I
don't know how to feel about that," then what your elephant is going, "Oh, so that
means it's not that important and we don't need to care and we don't need to
allocate our attention and we can go check TikTok instead."
Like we know that these things are necessary. And so yeah, Inside Out, I think does
a lovely job of being like, you know, I mean, and now when it's a little bit more
like being happy all the time, you know, like, hey, guess what? All these emotions
exist for a reason and we want to have full expression of them. You know, you
don't want to let one take, you know, go to the controls and do too much. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. But they all, they're all here for purpose. And so if we're just
ignoring them as designers, we're not going to be as effective as if we take these
things into account. Awesome. So everybody check out, I think both of the books
"Design for How People Learn" and "Talk to the Elephant" designed with the subtext
"Design Learning for Behavior Change." Yeah. Julie Dirksen,
thank you so much for being on the show today. Yeah, thank you. It's been a really
fun conversation. So, to wrap things up, this episode wasn't just about learning,
it was about the gap between knowing and doing. Julie Dirksen helped us unpack why
so many training systems and tools and products still fail to create lasting change,
even when they inform folks about what to do. The answer and lies and how we think
about behavior. We shouldn't think about it as a knowledge problem, but as a
psychological system that is made of habits and motivations and context and even
emotional resistance. We learned that information is just one piece of the puzzle,
and if we want people to act differently, we have to design for their elephant,
not just their rider. That means making it easier to follow through, reducing
friction, designing for repetition, shaping the environment and other things.
We also explored how real change happens when you combine clarity with motivation and
provide practical support systems. We saw how learning design isn't just about
delivering content, it's about building systems that guide action.
So as you go and design your next learning experience, whether it's a product, a
process, or some kind of training program, ask yourself, "Am I helping people
understand what to do?" or "Am I helping them become a person who actually does
it?"