“Don't convince people. Don't try. Just offer the thing, offer the better way of doing something, offer the better design, offer the better practice. And if they don't want to do it, they probably have a good reason. And trying to trick them into doing it is not worth your time.”
Finding Our Way · User Experience · October 2026
Asked how to deal with organizations that resist change, Jones gives the rule he has kept for years. Instead of persuading, he puts his time into the teams that want to move, then lets their results do the convincing.
Transcript
…have a skills framework for the way that we help people up-level, but it's not there to prevent you from up-leveling. We want you to use it. We want you to go like level up, become better. Those are the things that we know are powerful and we just kind of neglect them. Sorry, that was a bummer.
…calcified. And I guess I wonder about how you manage that tension between wanting to create the correct amount of safety without encouraging this kind of rigidity structurally that prevents an organization from evolving and adapting and the ways it sounds like you were able to build in at August.
…it is. And the leaders around them that perpetuate that. Like that's, it's ugly. Organization design is often dealing with the basest human desires and some of the things that we don't like to express about the way that work works or doesn't work for people. And when it works, though, it's by creating a movement toward positivity. I had this rule for, I still have this rule. I maintain this. Don't convince people. Don't try. Just offer the thing, offer the better way of doing something, offer the better design, offer the better practice. And if they don't want to do it, they probably have a good reason. And trying to trick them into doing it is not worth your time. Instead, what's better, a better plan, is to go find teams that really want to get something done, lavish your time and attention and tooling on them, and then show the organization what they're able to do. Wow, this team over here was able to re-architect our back end. It would normally take a year. It took us 11 weeks. Fantastic. How'd they do that? Oh, well, they used AI in a different way.…
Earlier, Peter touched on your book, Hidden Patterns. And this is a little bit of an unusual kind of a book. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about what inspired it and some of the ideas behind it.
Sure. So it started in 2013. An obsession with trying to break down problems of business strategy or corporate strategy or digital strategy or whatever it might be into recomposable parts. So, trying to understand the problem more accurately and then trying to resolve portions of the problem by…
Whiteboards everywhere. Very Christopher Alexander.
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