When psychologist Daniel Kahneman died last year, the tributes poured in. Most celebrated his Nobel Prize and his ability to show the world what we’d long suspected: we’re not nearly as rational as we think. Not even you.
That may sound like an academic point. It’s not.
It is deeply practical, especially if you’re a school leader or teacher trying to make change stick.
Kahneman’s research revealed that human behaviour is full of shortcuts and blind spots. We don’t calmly weigh up evidence and make logical choices.
We make snap judgments.
We cling to what we already have.
And we build our beliefs on trust in people, not on data.
Kahneman gives us some ideas on how to avoid the pitfalls of our human nature to work better together.
First, delay your intuition. Most of us form an impression in seconds, then spend hours justifying it. Kahneman showed that the best leaders resist that urge. They pause, gather more information, and only then let their intuition guide them.
Second, be aware of your natural bias towards loss aversion. Gains feel nice, but losses feel unbearable. Once a teaching team has something - a favourite classroom, a way of planning, particular storage arrangements - it feels far more painful to lose it than joyful to gain a new one.
Third, rules beat goals when you’re trying to make change happen. Goals can slip. Rules change behaviour. Kahneman set personal rules that helped him say “no” when his instinct was to overcommit. For example: instead of resolving to “exercise more”, commit to “going for a walk every morning after breakfast.” The rule removes wiggle room and reprograms your unconscious default.
Finally, belief follows trust, not facts. I can’t count the number of eyerolls I’ve seen when a conference speaker says “according to research”. We don’t change our minds when presented with evidence. We change them when we trust the person presenting it.
All of this was humming in the background at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland this week. The school has just opened a breathtaking new building, and we were spending time with their teaching team, not just those who will teach in this beautiful space, but the whole staff. We wanted them to see how space is an influential part of pedagogy.
What we discovered together echoed Kahneman’s lessons.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions about what a new space is “for.” But we were able to provide time and thinking tools to pause, to delay natural intuition, and explore many possibilities.
It’s tempting to cling to old habits, to feel something is being taken away when familiar spaces are replaced with totally new ones. That’s loss aversion at work, and it’s powerful. Naming it actually helps us to start seeing new possibilities.
It’s natural to set lofty goals for any new building. But it is rules that make change real: “Every term, try one lesson outside your usual space” is the kind of rule that makes experimentation the default.
And, perhaps most importantly, the success of a space doesn’t come down to its acoustics or furniture alone. It depends on whether teachers trust each other, and their leaders, to try something new.
At Le Rosey, that trust is palpable. That’s what will make their new building more than an architectural jewel. It will make it a catalyst for rethinking learning itself.
So when you think about the people, the place they work and the pedagogy you’re all using, are you designing for rational decision-making or for the real, messy, very human ways people actually think and behave?