Rewind

This post is the sequel to last week’s newsletter about habituation - our tendency to adapt to the status quo, which can cause us to overlook problems in our lives, at work or in society. We looked at how ‘dishabituation entrepreneurs’ - a term coined by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein in their new book Look Again - are the exception to this rule. They question the way things have always been done, often bringing about change in their organisations or industries. If you missed last week’s edition, check it out here.

This week, I’ll be exploring what makes dishabituation entrepreneurs different from everyone else and what we can learn from them. Before we continue, take a look at the picture below. What do you notice? Make a mental note as we’ll come back to it. 

Hidden opportunities

Dishabituation is a recurring theme throughout Season 1 of Made For Us (though I don’t think anyone actually uses that word). I often ask my guests about the status quo before they came up with their big idea. Why was the industry the way it was? How come no one else had solved that problem before? Often, it’s because my guests were in a unique position to see something that others couldn’t. For Cliff Weitzman, it was that technology could be used to unlock the potential of people with learning difficulties. After being diagnosed with dyslexia, he built an app that would read to him and that was the start of Speechify, which now has tens of millions of users. 

But the technology wasn’t new. Text-to-speech had been around for decades and pre-dates the internet. But while most companies saw it as an accessibility tool and didn’t prioritise it, Cliff saw it as “something that's completely revolutionary and as a better way for intaking information.” He also realised that advancements in deep learning would allow him to create a text-to-speech app that was superior to what already existed. 

Here’s another insight:

The habituation spectrum

In Look Again, the authors offer a theory about how dishabituation entrepreneurs are made: “We do not have a full answer to that question but we think that part of it lies in their likely exposure, at some stage, to something dishabituating - something that made existing practices no longer seem natural and inevitable, and that delivered a kind of jolt or surprise.”

For social movements to take off, society needs such rebels, Sharot and Sunstein write. They invite readers to imagine people on a spectrum from least habituated (the “zeros”) - to fully habituated (the “infinites”). While nothing will move the infinites to action, ones could be inspired to act if the zeros go first, then the twos and the threes will follow and so on until there’s a societal shift. 

Often, it only takes one “zero” to spark change.

If we go back to the photo above, what did you observe? It’s a Red Cross poster that appeared around various pools in the U.S. about ten years ago. Most people thought nothing of it, but one woman, Margaret Sawyer, was bothered by what she saw - the “Not Cool” label was mostly given to kids of colour. After she posted a photo of the poster on Twitter, the Red Cross apologised and asked all its partners to remove the poster.

As the Red Cross said in its apology, it had not intended to cause offence. But Sharot and Sunstein point out that thousands of people would have seen the poster without noticing anything unusual - not just Red Cross employees but the pool workers who displayed it and those who swam at the pools. Margaret Sawyer ended up being the “zero” who opened people’s eyes.

Takeaways

The good news is that there are things we can all do to slow habituation, boost innovative thinking and notice problems worth solving. Here are a few ideas from the podcast and from Look Again:

Individuals: Increase physical activity, develop close friendships with people from other groups, combine knowledge from different fields, move to a new country, help others walk in your shoes

Organisations: Change employees’ physical surroundings, encourage learning in new domains, create diverse teams with different kinds of expertise, make disability and accessibility training mandatory

Resources

Read:

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein

Watch:

TED talk: The first secret of design is…noticing - Tony Fadell

Listen:

Made For Us: Cliff Weitzman on building the ‘voice of the internet’

Made For Us: ‘No going back’: lessons from P&G’s product inclusion journey, with Sam Latif

Transcripts for all episodes available here.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and if you know someone who’d enjoy this post, please forward it, or share the signup link below.