How a well-meant ritual taught me that the system influences how people behave, and that the why has to travel with the what.

The meeting

Thirty minutes before the meeting, a colleague took me aside.

This was 1998, maybe 1999, a year or two into my career. The project on the table was a big one for us: tens of thousands of pounds, maybe a hundred at the outside, serious money for that company. The colleague wasn’t my boss, and they didn’t hold the client relationship either. That was rather the point. They wanted it, because they felt insecure in their role.

I didn’t feel insecure, because I held the value in the room. I was the one person there who actually understood how any of it worked. Half an understanding, in truth, that early in a career, nothing like the understanding I have now. But the half I had was innate: user experience. A fine art degree turns out to be impeccable grounding for UX, or at least it was then. Graphic design was the study of how people read images. Fine art was the study of how to write them, and how to tell stories through them.

So when they asked my opinion on the project, I gave it gladly. I liked this person. I rated them. I talked through my thinking properly, the way you do for someone you respect.

Half an hour later we sat down in the meeting and I listened to my own thinking presented back to the room, point by point, as theirs.

Not a summary. Not “building on a conversation we had”. Verbatim, and word perfect.

I remember the physical sensation of it more than the words. That slow, cold recalibration where you understand your relationship with someone was never what you thought it was. I had valued them and their abilities. The meeting told me everything I needed to know in return: they didn’t value me. They valued what they could extract from me.

For a long time I filed that away as a story about one person’s character. It took me decades to understand what that meeting had actually done to me, and longer still to see that it was a story about something else entirely.

The pattern

Here’s the thing. Before I founded my first studio in 2003, I worked for three different companies, and they could hardly have been less alike. One was a five-person outfit. One was a boutique agency employing no more than forty staff. One was a global music brand with well over a hundred. Different sectors, different people, different management, no overlap between them at all. And all three had exactly the same culture in one specific respect: credit was not given for contribution, and certain individuals habitually took credit for other people’s work. Often mine.

The meeting was only the sharpest instance of it. Across those three companies I watched the same shape play out over and over: someone does the quiet work for weeks, and someone else collects for it in an afternoon, simply by being the one talking when the decision-makers were in the room.

One person doing that is a character flaw. The same behaviour, recurring across three unrelated organisations, is not a coincidence of hiring. It’s a structural outcome.

In all three companies, credit flowed to whoever spoke in the room, not whoever did the thinking. There was no mechanism for attribution, no habit of asking where an idea came from, no cost attached to claiming one. So theft was free. And behaviour that is free and pays will always find someone willing to do it.

That’s the claim at the heart of this piece, so let me state it plainly. Behaviour in organisations, good and bad, is mostly an emergent property of the operating model, not of the individuals within it. Credit theft is a systems failure wearing an individual’s face. The colleague in that meeting was just the person the system happened to reward that week.

This is also why most culture initiatives fail. Values posters, pizza Fridays, away days, campaigns to “be more collaborative”. They aim directly at behaviour and morale, which means they treat symptoms. The system underneath goes on paying for exactly the conduct it always paid for, and the posters watch it happen.

The response

In 2003 I founded my first studio. I’d love to tell you its founding principles were the product of rigorous analysis. They weren’t. They were an emotional reaction. Four or five years of that treatment since graduating had left me so frustrated that I knew whatever I built was going to be different. I couldn’t have told you what different meant. I just did what felt right.

What felt right was looking after people. Not as some charitable gesture. I’d simply worked out that to get the best out of people, you treat them like the best. It’s the old adage: treat people like adults and they behave like adults. Same mechanism.

So credit where due became a founding principle. Not a value on a wall. A rule I’ve held sacrosanct through everything since, including my consulting work, where the incentive runs the other way. Consultants are paid to be the smartest voice in the room. I still stop and credit people, explicitly and in front of others, when they produce ideas I couldn’t have. Twenty-three years on, it has never once cost me anything worth having.

Inside the studio, my practice was organic rather than formal. When I hit a blocking point in my own work, I’d get up and wander the floor. Ask people what they were working on. Look at things properly. And when the work was good, I’d say so, there and then, in the moment, in front of whoever happened to be nearby.

I never wrote this down. It never occurred to me that there was anything to write down. It was responsive, it was distributed across the whole team, and it was tied to the moment of the work itself.

Hold on to those three qualities: responsive, distributed, tied to the moment. They matter later.

Looking back, I can dress all this up as systems thinking. Ideas surface where attribution is safe. In my old jobs, telling a colleague your best thinking half an hour before a meeting was a donation. In my studio it was an investment that reliably paid out to the person who made it. Change what the behaviour pays, and the behaviour changes. But none of that was in my head at the time. I was running on instinct, doing the opposite of what had hurt, and the instinct happened to be right.

The wild sighting

Years on, the same mechanism turned up somewhere I wasn’t looking for it: the supermarket queue.

I’m a customer of Aldi, Lidl and Home Bargains, and I should be honest about why. It isn’t ideology, and it’s only partly price. It’s my ADHD. The discounters don’t stock the vast array the mainstream supermarkets do, and for my brain that limited range is a feature. Walk me into a big supermarket and I’m overwhelmed within minutes by an aisle offering forty variants of the same product.

The butter is where it tips into farce. I live in Canterbury, a stone’s throw from France, and I know perfectly well that butter is better and cheaper over there. So I end up locked in front of a chiller, staring at a five pound pack, thinking: really? When I could hop across the Channel and get the same or better for a euro? A supermarket designed entirely around choice has produced a customer who cannot choose. Note the shape of that, because it’s the shape of this whole piece. The system was producing my conduct too.

Anyway. Over time, as a customer, I noticed something I couldn’t unsee. The staff in Britain’s discount retailers seem consistently happier than the staff in mainstream supermarkets. Same towns, same labour pool, the same fundamental job of scanning and stacking. Visibly different humans.

The lazy explanation would be a morale programme, some head-office culture initiative that actually landed. It isn’t that. It’s the operating model:

• Pay. Aldi and Lidl consistently top the sector on hourly rates, often a pound or more above the big four. Being paid noticeably better than your mates doing the same job elsewhere does a lot for morale before anyone’s engineered anything.
• Variety. Staff rotate across tills, stacking, warehouse and bakery rather than being siloed into one repetitive task for years.
• Lean teams. Fewer people, all visibly needed. Feeling essential beats feeling surplus, and the big supermarkets carry a lot of people in ambiguous roles.
• A simpler operation. Fewer promotions, fewer planograms, less head-office churn landing on the shop floor every week.

My favourite illustration is the tills. If you’ve ever wondered why an Aldi checkout scans so much faster than a Tesco one, the answer isn’t superior IT. Aldi and Lidl are roughly ninety per cent own-label, which means they control the packaging artwork, and they mandate multiple oversized barcodes wrapped around every product. Sometimes a barcode covers an entire face of the pack. The till reads the item whichever way it’s thrown across the scanner. Tesco sells branded goods carrying one small barcode wherever the manufacturer chose to put it. Add sit-down tills, long conveyors, no bagging at the till and scan-rate targets, and the discounters get roughly double the throughput.

Here’s the structural point, and it’s the same point as the credit theft. Tesco is not making a rookie error it has somehow failed to notice for decades. Tesco structurally cannot copy this, because Tesco cannot dictate packaging to Coca-Cola. One upstream decision, going own-label, cascades all the way down into price, speed and, I’d argue, morale. Nobody at Aldi set out to make checkout staff feel competent. The system produces it anyway.

And lean doesn’t mean cheap everywhere, which is the detail people miss. On a recent Home Bargains visit I picked up one of their anniversary carrier bags. Genuinely beautiful. Minimal branding, printed with real metallic gold, actual gold rather than yellow, which means at least a five or six colour process. Not a cheap bag to produce, from one of the cheapest retailers in Britain. Lean means cheap where customers don’t feel it and generous where they do. The big four often manage the reverse: expensive head-office atriums and tatty stores.

I’ll concede the honest caveat. Better pay and a better package pull in more applicants, which raises the hiring bar, so the discounters get different people as well as differently-behaving people. The system attracts as well as shapes. The claim is “mostly the system”, not “entirely the system”.

But notice what this is. It’s my old employers’ story running in reverse. Those three companies got bad behaviour nobody intended, as a by-product of missing structure. The discounters get good behaviour nobody engineered for, as a by-product of an efficient operating model. Same mechanism. Opposite outcomes.

If that were the whole argument, this would be a comfortable piece to write. I spotted a problem, built the fix, and found the proof in a supermarket. The author was right all along.

He wasn’t.

Star of the Week

In 2017 I had to leave my studio for three months. Medical treatment, and it did not pan out the way anyone anticipated. I expected to be back far sooner than I was.

Before I left, I sat down with my head of production. She was genuinely good at her job, one of the few people I’ve employed I’d call truly solid and dependable. Her great strength was turning her role into repeatable structures. She wasn’t improvisational or creative in the moment, and that is fine; teams need people who execute reliable process, and side by side she and I were a good team. I told her something I thought was simple: while I’m away, it’s important to go around the studio each week, establish who has done really good work, and give them credit for it.

You can already see what I couldn’t.

What I had in my head, without ever saying so, was my own habit: the wandering, the asking, the praise landing in the moment, spread across whoever had earned it that day. What I actually said was the instruction. Weekly. Establish who. Give credit. I handed her a mechanism and kept the reasoning without noticing I was keeping it.

True to her formalising nature, she took my organic habit and resolved it into a scheme. It was called Star of the Week. Every Monday morning, she announced to the studio who had done the best work the previous week.

Now, the studio had one particular star performer. Measured across any given week, this person genuinely always had done the best work. So the scheme did exactly what it said, faithfully, every Monday. Which meant that week after week, twenty people sat in a room and heard how one colleague was better than them.

The ritual implemented my mechanism perfectly and inverted its purpose precisely. My practice worked because it was responsive, distributed and tied to the moment of the work. Those three qualities again. Star of the Week was scheduled, centralised and detached from any moment at all. Instead of everyone getting recognised when they earned it, everyone got a recurring public reminder of a fixed hierarchy.

I want to be very careful about where the fault sits here, because it is not with her.

She interpreted the brief correctly as written. The brief was wrong. I handed her the what, give credit weekly, without the why: that credit works when it’s timely, spread across the team, and attached to the work itself. I’d never articulated the why to anyone, including myself. The principle lived in my legs, in the habit of wandering the floor, and I gave her the schedule without the understanding.

And the circumstances were worse than the brief. She was dropped into an impossible situation by forces beyond both of us: serious problems with the holding company, and an absence I expected to be brief stretching to three months, because my treatment went the way it went. I expected the people around her to behave better than they did, and I expected to come back quickly. Neither happened. I did what I could from afar, with severely limited capacity, and it wasn’t enough.

If she ever reads this, I hope she recognises herself, and I hope she reads it the way it’s meant: as an apology, and an absolution. It wasn’t a failure of execution. It was a failure of transmission, and the transmission was my job. What happened to that studio while I was away remains one of the few genuine regrets of my career, and none of it lands on her.

The why travels, or nothing does

So the thesis has two layers, and I had to be wrong to learn the second one.

The first layer: the system influences how people behave. If you want different behaviour in an organisation, don’t campaign for it. Redesign what behaviour pays. My old employers never intended to breed credit thieves; they just made theft free. Aldi never set out to make till staff feel capable; it just built an operation where competence is the natural state. The people are, mostly, the people. The system decides what the people do.

The second layer is harder. Even a correct principle fails in transfer if you hand over the mechanism without the reasoning. Copy Aldi’s till layout without the own-label packaging behind it and you get nothing; the speed lives upstream, in a decision you didn’t copy. Copy a credit ritual without the intent behind it and you get resentment on a Monday morning. Surface imitation of systems fails identically in both directions, whether you’re a supermarket chasing a competitor or a founder delegating a value.

So: redesign what behaviour pays, and when you delegate a principle, encode the reasoning, not just the mechanism.

Because the mechanism without the why is just Star of the Week.