Five tablespoons of melted butter is not a helpful instruction.
Because butter doesn’t come melted, it comes in grams.
Instead, I need to know to melt 100 grams of butter.
You see this kind of thing all the time in business.
Someone with deep knowledge gives an instruction, but skips a crucial step, because for them, the hard part is already done. They want to cut to the solution.
But they’ve forgotten to look at the task from the user’s point of view.
And when you're trying to change behaviour, that perspective matters.
If you want someone to do something differently – follow a new process, adopt a tool, approach a task in a new way – you have to meet them where they are. Not where you are.
It’s not enough to say, “just use the new system,” or “collaborate more.” That’s the melted butter version.
You have to go back a step and ask: What does this look like for them?
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