Easier Is, Well...Easier!

Good Continuous Improvement Coaches, actually good coaches in general, make improvement efforts relatable, meeting people where they are in order to make things as easy to understand as possible.

A good example of the importance of making things easy comes from a recent study involving people’s estimate of difficulty.

A large number of people were divided into two groups and given instructions for a task and asked to estimate how long the task would take someone to complete.

One group was given the task instruction in an easy to read and familiar font, the other group was given a different font that was both unfamiliar and harder to read.

The group with the ’easy’ font estimated the time to complete the task to be on average 8 minutes while the group average with the ‘difficult’ font was more than double at 17 minutes.

The instructions and the tasks were exactly the same for both groups; the only difference being the font. Additional study has validated that people are primed for how they relate to challenges by how ‘hard’ it is initially framed for them. If it is unfamiliar and presented in a difficult way to understand, people will unconsciously assume it is a more challenging task. In this case more than twice as difficult.

In Continuous Improvement we often go into areas and introduce a new way of working. By doing so we are introducing something unfamiliar, which as we learned from the font studies, frames change as more difficult. We need to be conscious of framing, connecting the change as much as possible to familiar things they know or have done, making it as easy to understand as possible.

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