Use the lazy option for success

I will show you how to achieve successes through playing off the inherent nature of people to be lazy. There is a tendency for people – no matter how intelligent and engaged they are – to take the easiest option, and there are ways that you can use this to achieve your aims and find the lazy way to success.

“the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters,” – Terry Pratchett, ‘Maskerade’ (1995)

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7426886-the-iq-of-a-mob-is-the-iq-of-its

The more people there are in a group, the lower their intelligence becomes. Groups become like flocks of sheep, following each other without thought.

Surveys and questionnaires

Many people know that you can ‘guide’ people towards conclusions with questionnaires and surveys, by wording questions and changing the question order to encourage people to choose the option that is easiest for them, but at the same time meets the agenda of the survey writer. However, there are other ways to direct people towards your aims by leveraging their lazyness.

Questions can be worded to ensure that “always, sometimes, never” options will drive people away from the definitive edges and towards the middle. Repeatedly asking similar ‘decoy’ questions in different ways will end up making people less likely to read every following question in full, allowing the important questions to be ‘missed’ by the lazy respondant.

Presentation engagement

In a presentation, particularly with people who do not know each other, when the crowd is asked to do an activity (such as raising a hand), they will be less likely to do so. So, a question such as “raise your hand if you agree” may get fewer people participating when they are in a group of strangers. So, you can use this to your advantage – knowing that people are unlikely to contribute, you can simply re-word the question; “stand up if you disagree”.

This can be further pushed, even in situations where people already know each other, to ask “will everyone who disagrees with this action, please raise your hand and explain an alternative solution”.

The audience will much prefer to just sit there and not be engaged – but they will go as far as releasing a murmur of support or agreement. This can be done to build engagement, as a person who has already made a noise is more likely to escalate and progress their involvement.

Unwilling to speak up

A problem often encountered in IT, and in transitions to Cloud services is when no-one will accept ownership or responsibility for a system that could be decommissioned. Managers will prefer to say that a system needs to be maintained, upgraded or migrated than to spend the effort to find out if the old system is useful or delivering value. It will make more work for other people, but that manager is taking the lazy option.

There are ways to leverage this – stating “I will switch this off, because no-one is using it. If you need to keep it, just let me know how you plan on supporting it” – this is also known as the scream test. The manager will often take the lazy option for them, which saves work for the IT team.

Science: Lazy people are likely to be smarter, more successful, and better employees.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/the-science-backed-reason-lazy-people-are-smarter-more-successful-and-better-employees.html

Counteractions

How often have you been in a situation where a manager keeps knocking back ideas or recommendations? Eventually, people stop making recommendations, because it is not worth the effort, just to get it rejected. The manager may just not want to put the effort to investigate the idea – instead, you can use this laziness to word the recommendation so that it is easier for the manager to approve the new idea than to continue to do it the way it has always been done.