Why are we obsessed with tools?

When developing collaborative decision-making and governance, we often get distracted with shiny tools, rather than developing culture and practices first.

Prompted by the topic of Week 2 of the Practical Self Management Intensive, “Deciding how to decide”, I would like to share a pattern that I have observed time and time again when it comes to collaborative decision-making and adopting new practices as work: too often, we start with the tool rather than the practice. Over the years, my colleagues and I have frequently received requests from organizations looking to change how they work that start with “Could you help us use tool xyz?”.

And just last week, it happened again, with my Practical Self Management cohort. We were asked to run a decision-making experiment in small groups, and all groups ended up running experiments with the collaborative decision-making tool Loomio. Loomio is a great tool and there is nothing wrong with running an experiment that includes it — but it shouldn’t be the starting point. But all to often, for instance as what happened in my cohort group, the first thing we defined was “let’s try Loomio!”, rather than “Let’s try this new practice.”

And from there, it’s a slippery slope. Before you know it, you are obsessing about the intricacies of how it works, understanding product features and getting to grips as a group with the mechanics of the tool. By then….wait what??… you have completely forgotten about the original purpose of what you were looking to do. And you start seeing things from the perspective of the tool, and think things such as “how can I use xyz tool for this?”, when maybe, this is not the right tool, or you don’t need a tool at all.

What I find fascinating about this dynamic, is that even though I have been very aware of this magnetic effect that (even just the idea of ) tools seem to have on us humans, I myself fall into this behavior all the time and regularly observe it with my peers. What is it about tools that has this effect on us? Is it the illusion of a simple fix for the problem we are trying to solve? Is it the distraction from what is complex or hard?

Let’s not let ourselves get distracted with features and functionalities.
Let’s focus on building cultural foundations by facing the important (and difficult) questions.

Whatever the reason may be, this is why it’s so important to keep repeating to others and ourselves that tools are but a means to an end. To work, they need to follow a lived practice, not the other way around. Sometimes the use of a tool may run parallel to practices being developed and spread throughout a group, but tools alone will not create practices. Practices are the result of a group development process, and they are a key manifestation of group culture. The upside of introducing a tool to support an already established practice, is that adoption will be much easier. Contrary to what it may seem, the hard part of introducing a new tools in groups is not the tool, it’s the new behaviors and practices you need to create around it.

This blog post is part of the weekly reflections from Practical Self Management Intensive. If you liked it, please clap!

To learn more about my work, check out http://greaterthan.works