Environment

You're seeing it when an open-plan office creates constant interruptions and then management blames employees for poor focus. The environment produces the distraction; the employees are responding rationally to their surroundings.

You're seeing it when users make errors in a checkout flow that the design team calls "user mistakes." The errors are predictable products of a confusing interface — the environment, not the users, is the problem.

Audit your company's physical and digital environments for the behaviours they produce. Where you see consistent patterns you don't want — low collaboration, slow decisions, poor communication — redesign the environment rather than lecturing the team.

Jobs understood that environment shapes behaviour more than any policy. When designing Apple Park, he insisted on a single massive building with a central atrium to force chance encounters between teams that would otherwise never interact. At Pixar, he placed the only bathrooms near the central atrium for the same reason — engineering serendipitous collisions. Jobs didn't memo people to collaborate more; he designed buildings that made collaboration unavoidable. The same principle governed product design: the iPhone's environment — its interface, defaults, App Store structure — shaped user behaviour more powerfully than any instruction manual. For founders, the lesson is structural: design the environment, and the behaviour follows.