I was reminded of the quote that I’ve used for the title of this post at a recent workshop with a public sector body. I was talking about the book ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery‘ which is a wonderful account of the early years of the UK Government Digital Service and how they transformed the delivery of government services to UK citizens. The idea behind ‘make the right path the easy path’ is to design processes and systems that naturally encourage people to follow the optimal route, minimising resistance or friction. It mirrors the idea of ‘desire paths’ in urban planning.
Coincidentally I also saw a comment by Tom Worthington on Johnnie Moore’s thoughtful post questioning what happens to content when everyone is using AI to produce it. Tom talked about ‘desire paths’. These informal paths often form naturally over time as people choose the most direct or convenient route across a space, rather than following the pre-designed, paved, or official walkways. They are, if you like, a physical manifestation of human behaviour and choices, showing how people prefer to move through a landscape. They can reveal insights for designers, urban planners, and architects into how spaces are actually used, and they can prompt changes in infrastructure to align with people’s natural tendencies.
This concept can be useful for service designers looking to reduce complexity for users. By creating pathways that are aligned with users’ natural behaviours and preferences they can support better user outcomes. Johnnie and Tom’s point about AI of-course was that new behaviours can encourage more of the same behaviours if the tools make it easy. Which leads to a valid concern about how easy AI tools make the job of crafting mediocre blog posts. But as Sturgeon’s Law suggests, 90% of everything could well be crap anyway and perhaps that will always be the case, even in the age of AI.
But to add a more positive spin on desire paths, they can also be useful when leading change, and particularly behaviour change. Making new and desirable behaviours an easier option than traditional or legacy habits and responses is a powerful incentive to drive change. In her brilliant Firestarters episode about driving cultural change in large organisations, Tanya Evans (Group Culture and Leadership Director at Lloyds Banking Group) talked about making behaviour change visible, particularly through a ‘catalyst’ population of change agents.
Using this ‘catalyst’ approach is a brilliant way of leading change by showing rather than telling. It can help establish behavioural norms that can make the right thing easier to do. Like most things in life making desirable outcomes the easiest ones to achieve can have lots of upside, but it’s also worth being cognisant of the potential downsides.
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