Zoom and Boom

At my office building, there is a bathroom. Every other week, the toilet gets clogged and the landlord has to call in a plumber. "Someone flushed wet wipes," says the plumber. "You should tell people to not flush anything other than toilet paper."

At first, the landlord put up a sign that said "Please do not flush wet wipes." After every incident, the signs became more aggressive, using terms like "absolutely forbidden" and even "this is disgusting." The landlord even tried to punish tenants by delaying the repair and keeping the toilet closed for days.

Nothing worked. The signs continue to get more aggressive, and the toilet continues to get occasionally clogged.

How do you prevent people from throwing wet wipes into the toilet?

There's one strategy the landlord hasn't tried yet: Put a little bin next to the toilet, so people could have somewhere else to throw their wipes.

I am sorry to start your day with a clogged toilet. But this story captures something important about the landlord mindset: The notion that end-users can and should be told what to do, and that authority is sufficient to change their behaviors.

The same dynamic is playing out on a broader scale. Across the country and the world, landlords and bosses are trying to tell people where and how to work. Five years after the first Covid-19 lockdowns, too many people still aren't listening. And just like the signs in my local bathroom, the calls are only becoming more aggressive. But humans — and even whole teams and organizations — don't like doing what they're told; they like doing what's convenient.

Pre-Covid, people used to complain that "This meeting could have been an email." Now, many of these meetings are an email. Or a group chat, with participants anywhere on earth.

The offices that are doing well are those that appeal to convenience rather than authority: the ones that are close to home or very easy to get to; the ones that offer amenities that save people time or enable them to do something they couldn't have done elsewhere.

Incredibly, even the strictest and most powerful authorities buckle in the face of convenience. Yesterday, The Atlantic published a group chat conversation between Vice President Vance, Defense Secretary Hegseth, and other officials about operational plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen. The chat was conducted on Signal, a consumer app. For some reason, one of the admins invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to join the chat — and Goldberg was able to read all the deliberations preceding the bombardment of Yemen and many operational details about weapons systems and units.

Goldberg's piece is well worth reading in full. Aside from the subject matter (war), the actual chat was similar to the ones you see in every workplace: excessive use of emojis, gratuitous compliments, passive-aggressive disagreements, overly polite rejections of people's suggestions, and the general feeling that too many people were invited to a conversation that could have been much shorter.

Pundits have commented on the merits of using Signal's encryption and on the risks of using personal devices for classified conversations of this kind. The chat also seems to have breached formal orders and legal restrictions.

But what was the alternative? Getting everyone to drive over to a secure location? Using a separate device rather than one's iPhone? Logging in to a poorly designed government app?

Too much of a hassle. Even at war, even in the face of legal consequences, convenience trumps authority.

So, next time you want people to toss their wet wipes or secure their war plans, don’t double down on stricter rules or louder warnings. Just design for how people actually behave — because convenience always wins. Embracing this truth could make America great again. If nothing else, it will ensure my office bathroom continues to function.

Have a great week.

Best,

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