From The Morgue

A lot of people care about their world. Relatively few do much about it. Small Group Action applies the principles of usability to this, laying out a ‘course of least resistance’ for turning caring into action.
Step one is meeting with friends of yours who also care. This meeting may result in a Small Group.
We’ve already established two qualities of a Small Group:

1. small – three to seven members, ideally four or five
2. short-term – two or three months at most

There are two other qualities that complete the picture:

1. concrete – the group’s goal is to produce one concrete outcome
2. consensual – the group’s goal is not predetermined

A concrete goal is an absolute necessity. Without one, the group won’t achieve anything but talk. It doesn’t need to be a major goal, only a real one.
Consensus is also necessary. Everyone in the group has to buy in, or members won’t have a good experience or won’t contribute.
The purpose of the first meeting is to discuss what concrete things can be done, and to choose a goal that everyone buys in to.
By this point, you have a small group, who have chosen an action with a concrete outcome, and who are driven both by their own caring about the issue and by social pressure from group membership to deliver that outcome.
And with all that in place, you’re away. Go do it.
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That’s it. There’s lots more detail in my head and scribbled in various notes, but the core idea is there: small groups doing short-term concrete actions. I believe this model is one of the most friendly ways we can coax ourselves into action.
Someone who tried out aspects of this approach called it a “three month we care” project. The three month limitation makes SGA feel safe – it’s easy to jump in to a project wholeheartedly, instead of with a sinking feeling that I’m starting something I won’t be able to sustain. And the whole project assumes, rightly, that lots of people out there do give a damn – they just don’t have a friendly way of acting on it.
But – and this is a big but – SGA falls apart unless five people for three months can actually produce something worthwhile. More on this in the next post…

We are busy people, leading busy lives. It’s hard for us to chunk out some time. We are, understandably, wary of making a commitment. But if we actually want to do anything, we have to make a commitment.
First principle we get from this: long-term commitments are scary. Short-term commitments are not (as much). Therefore, our small group must be a short-term commitment (with the option to renew).
There’s more to be said about commitment, though. This gets a bit more jargony and theoretical than previous posts, so feel free to skip down through this stuff.
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I started thinking about the idea of commitment, particularly on the moment when you get committed to something – the moment when you go from “I might actually produce something sometime” to “I’m gonna produce something dammit.” I call that moment – or more precisely, the action that constitutes it – the Action of Commitment.
I think stuff like “I should send a letter to the Minister of Health about this” all the time. Doesn’t count for much – I’m not committed. In fact, I start feeling committed only when I sit down with a bit of paper and write “Dear Minister of Health” at the top.
If the Action of Commitment for writing a letter is starting the letter, then that’s not going to produce too many letters. Way too easy to get distracted and do other stuff. A lot of Actions of Commitment are like that, way down the chain of thought, in the realm of ‘hard stuff’ that we tend to put off until tomorrow.
Right, so let’s think this through in the terms of this SGA thing. How can we change the action of commitment so it’s easier to get people there?
Side trip: Pledgebank
My thinking about applying usability principles to the problem of inaction was influenced by Pledgebank, which I’d discovered over at No Right Turn. On Pledgebank, you make a pledge: “I’ll do such-and-such if X many people say they’ll do it too.” Then people who are keen sign a pledge to that effect. Once your name is on the pledge and enough people are signed up, you get an email saying “go for it!”. That’s all it is – but it works. Once you’ve put your name down, other people are counting on you. Social pressure is brought to bear on you even through the anonymous internet. You don’t want to let these people down, you don’t want to feel like a hypocrite, and so you carry out your pledge.
Pledgebank changes the point of buy-in. Your Action Of Commitment isn’t writing “Dear Minister of Health,” it’s being online, seeing something you agree with, and putting your name on a list. That’s a much easier action, but it is almost as likely to result in the task getting done.
Pledgebank works off many of the same principles I seized on separately. Check out this quote from director Tom Steinberg:

We all know what it is like to feel powerless, that our own actions can’t really change the things that we want to change. PledgeBank is about beating that feeling by connecting you with other people who also want to make a change, but who don’t want the personal risk of being the only person to turn up to a meeting or the only person to donate ten pounds to a cause that actually needed a thousand.

Which brings us back to Small Group Action.
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We need to create a better and easier point of buy-in. Our good intentions come to nothing a lot of the time because it’s hard to get to a point where we feel committed to following through.
The SGA approach says, when you feel like doing something, the first action you should take is this.
meet with a couple of your friends to talk about forming a small group
That’s all. Meeting up with friends is something we do all the time. This technique says, just do that, but agree to actually have a focus.
Easy. And because it’s easy, it’s also powerful, especially combined with all the rest of the SGA approach.
There’s more. Tomorrow.

Applying usability principles to the problem of inaction had me thinking in some broad circles before I started getting somewhere with it.
The main issue is where to apply these principles. You can’t just change the entire world to make it more usable. That’s ludicrous. (Well, you can, but such a change would require such a huge amount of effort and rethinking that the project would make itself redundant.)
After turning it over a while, I hit upon what felt like a bolt-from-the-sky revelation. I had been approaching the problem from the wrong end. Instead of starting with the problem and looking for solutions, I would start at the solution and work back to the problem.
Er. That doesn’t really make sense. Bear with me here.
Consider groups. When you get a group of people together, instantly you have a social dynamic. This social dynamic is very powerful. If you’re in a group of strangers, that fact exerts massive influence over your behaviour. If you’re in a group of old friends, or family, then your behaviour is similarly hit. Psychology (particularly, but not exclusively, social psychology) has been delving into this stuff for a very long time. Groups can be very powerful ways to affect behaviour.
So, we have a group as a powerful way to influence behaviour. All right then. The first part of our answer is this: “form a group”.
Note that this is “form a group” not “join a group”. Why? Well, either way you end up with membership in a group. One way, you probably have a high level of investment in the success of the group; the other, you probably have a low level of investment in the success of the group. We’re reverse engineering something to be powerful, so we pick the high investment option, and that means forming a group.
How big is this group, ideally? Well, again, the larger the group, the less investment in its success. In big groups, it’s easy to escape any feeling of responsibility for the group’s wellbeing. Additionally, in big groups you have the burden of management. With more people, it gets harder and harder to manage them – you need to develop systems and methods and everything starts getting very impersonal. Compromise becomes more and more essential, to the extent that everyone in the group is compromising all the time.
(These aren’t linear relationships – they’re complex curves, rising and falling as different effects kick in at different group sizes – but for the sake of this potted summary assume more people = less investment, and more people = more management.)
Big groups have huge positives, too, of course. You can do things with big groups that are beyond the wildest dreams of small groups. Amnesty International, my favourite charity, does amazing things that small groups just can’t possibly equal. But this exercise isn’t interested in that. We’re most interested in influencing member behaviour, and that means small groups.
How small? I think 3-7 is a good number, 4-5 is probably ideal. I’ve kinda plcked these numbers out of the air, but not entirely. One of many observations that plugged into this thinking was how functional groups of that size can be. In that general range you get small sports teams, fitness buddies, dieting support groups, role-playing game groups, road trip groups, book clubs, knitting circles, bands… The evidence is that this size group works. My instinct is that this size is the location of one of the tipping points in the relationship between management input and achievement output – smaller than four means less management but much less achievement, while bigger than seven means more achievement at the cost of significantly more management.
So that’s our first step, then. Form a small group. That’s part of our solution. We need to refine this a bit more, add to it, and then work backwards to find out exactly what the problem is that it answers.
I hope I’m not jargonizing you to death. Trying to explain clearly, but most of this is first draft stuff… anyway, more tomorrow…

Over the last 18 months or so, I’ve been drawing a few disparate threads together and coming to some interesting points of insight.
One of these threads is how our social conscience interacts with our motivation.
Yesterday’s blog post was basically a big encouragement to go see Inconvenient Truth. Countless people have been to see it and been inspired and motivated. And yet I can say with great confidence that only a small percentage will have acted on that inspiration and actually done something concrete in their lives.
The heart is there, the mind is there, but somehow the action never quite materialises. It’s just our nature, part of our fallible existence as human beings. But it’s kind of sad, to think that we just sit back complacent as our world actually, literally, starts to collapse.
(I’m no different, by the way. This isn’t preaching. Much of what follows came from observing the self as much as observing the world.)
Somewhere along the line, I started approaching this behaviour from a usability perspective. I’m hardly a usability expert, but I have a serious interest in it, and I’ve taught myself a thing or two over the years. And the principles are powerful. Essentially, they state that we (human beings) are incredibly responsive to our environment and to situational cues. If you design a better interface, you get better interactions, and everyone leaves happier.
For example, consider a website. If you have to scroll to see something important, that’s not very usable. If there are so many links on the page that it takes forever to find the one you want, that’s not very usable.
Also consider paper forms (man, some of the bank forms I’ve encountered are almost incomprehensible), textbooks (laying out your information for easy indexing and learning), remote controls (what the heck do these buttons do again?)…
So, applying the usability principles, a question emerges. We observe social conscience; we observe lack of action. What is interfering with the expression of the first through the second? And, can elements of the situation be altered to make action more likely?
I think so.
The sekret project is a technique for turning the worthy sentiments of busy people into concrete and worthwhile results. I call it “Small Group Action”.