People Don’t Behave in a Vacuum

For a long time, much of my work focused explicitly on inclusion. I researched it, wrote about it, worked with organisations trying to improve it and spent countless hours listening to people describe what helped them feel that they belonged somewhere, and what made them feel as though they didn’t.

Over time, though, I became increasingly interested in something broader.

I started noticing how often we try to explain what happens in organisations by looking almost exclusively at the people inside them. If someone doesn’t speak up, we wonder whether they lack confidence. If someone isn’t performing, we question their capability or motivation. If a team isn’t collaborating, we look at personalities. If people resist a new way of working, we decide they are resistant to change.

Sometimes those explanations will be right. Human beings bring their own histories, personalities, capabilities, preferences and behaviour into every environment they enter.

But they bring them into an environment.

And I think we underestimate how much that environment shapes what happens next.

The same person can behave very differently in different environments

Most of us have probably experienced this without necessarily thinking about it in behavioural terms.

We can be confident in one room and hesitant in another. We can contribute freely in one team and barely speak in another. We can be willing to challenge an idea with one leader and decide it would be much wiser to keep our thoughts to ourselves with someone else.

We haven’t necessarily become a different person between those situations.

Something around us has changed.

Perhaps in one environment we have learned that disagreement is genuinely welcomed, while in another we have watched somebody be embarrassed or dismissed for getting something wrong. Perhaps we know that one leader will listen before responding, while another has a habit of becoming defensive. Perhaps everybody else in the room appears to agree, and we are trying to work out whether saying what we actually think is worth the social risk of being the only person who doesn’t.

When we look only at the individual, we can miss all of that.

We might decide that somebody needs more confidence when their behaviour is actually a perfectly sensible response to what they have learned about the environment around them.

This is one of the things inclusion taught me

When I was developing my work around the 8-Inclusion Needs, I became increasingly interested in what people actually needed to experience in order to participate fully.

That distinction mattered to me because inclusion can become quite abstract. Organisations can say they value inclusion, leaders can genuinely believe they are inclusive and teams can contain people with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences. None of those things necessarily tell us what it feels like to be a particular person trying to participate in that environment.

So I wanted to understand the conditions.

Do people have access to what they need in order to participate? Are they accepted without having to hide important parts of themselves? Do they have opportunities to contribute and develop? Are they able to express what they think? Do they feel heard when they do? Can they influence things that affect them? Are differences in circumstances recognised rather than everybody simply being treated as though they need exactly the same thing?

Those questions began as part of my inclusion work, but I eventually realised I was looking at something much broader.

I was looking at the relationship between people and the systems around them.

We often try to change the person before examining the environment

I see this in organisations all the time.

A team has a problem with accountability, so we talk to people about taking greater ownership. Employees aren’t speaking up, so we run psychological safety training. Leaders aren’t collaborating effectively, so we put them through a leadership program. People aren’t using a new process properly, so we retrain them.

Any of those interventions might be useful. There are absolutely times when somebody needs new knowledge, different skills or support to change their behaviour.

But before I reach that conclusion, I want to understand what the environment is currently teaching them.

If we tell people to take ownership but require three levels of approval before they can make a decision, what have we actually taught them about ownership?

If we tell employees to speak up but they have watched difficult messages get punished, ignored or quietly held against the person who raised them, what have they learned about speaking up?

If we tell leaders to collaborate but measure their success almost entirely through the performance of their own function, why are we surprised when functional priorities win?

If we tell people to follow a process but allow senior leaders to bypass it whenever it becomes inconvenient, which behaviour have we demonstrated actually matters?

This is where I think we can become unfairly frustrated with people. We focus on what they are doing without becoming equally curious about what might make that behaviour completely rational in the environment we have created.

Systems communicate, even when nobody intends them to

One of the reasons I find organisational systems so interesting is that they are constantly communicating information about what really matters.

Policies communicate. Processes communicate. Who gets promoted communicates. What gets rewarded communicates. What leaders pay attention to communicates. What happens when somebody makes a mistake communicates. So does what happens when somebody challenges an idea, asks for help, admits they don’t know something or raises a problem nobody particularly wants to hear about.

Most of that communication is not happening through the formal messages an organisation carefully writes.

People learn how an organisation works by experiencing it.

They notice that the policy says one thing but their manager expects another. They notice that everybody talks about wellbeing but the person who works until midnight is praised for their commitment. They notice that collaboration is one of the company values but the senior leadership team competes for resources and information. They notice that people are encouraged to challenge the status quo until the status quo belongs to somebody powerful.

Over time, those observations shape behaviour.

And from a behavioural perspective, that makes complete sense. People adapt to environments. We learn what produces a reward, what creates friction, what carries risk and what other people around us appear to be doing. Eventually some of those responses become so familiar that we stop consciously deciding to make them.

They simply become how things are done here.

Culture becomes much more tangible when we look at behaviour

Culture is another word I think we sometimes make more mysterious than it needs to be.

We talk about changing culture as though it exists somewhere above the organisation, floating around independently of all the ordinary things people do every day.

I find it more useful to bring it back down to behaviour.

What happens in meetings here? Who gets listened to? What happens when someone disagrees with the most senior person in the room? Who is expected to adapt to whom? What happens when a deadline and a stated organisational value come into conflict? Which problems get solved immediately, and which ones somehow remain unresolved for years?

If we observed those things for long enough, I suspect we would learn far more about an organisation’s culture than we would from reading its values on the wall.

The same is true outside organisations. Families have systems. Relationships have systems. Communities have systems. There are expectations, roles, patterns, consequences and ways of behaving that become normal because they have been repeated often enough.

That doesn’t mean individuals have no agency within them. It means their agency is being exercised within a context.

And context matters.

This has changed the questions I ask

Earlier in my career, I think I was more inclined to ask why a person was behaving in a particular way.

I still ask that question, but I rarely stop there now.

I want to know what is happening around them. What behaviour is being rewarded? What creates friction? What are other people doing? What happens immediately before the behaviour we are concerned about and what happens afterwards? What does the person believe will happen if they behave differently?

Sometimes we will still discover that the individual needs to change. Understanding context doesn’t mean removing personal responsibility, and I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend that every behaviour is simply the inevitable product of a system.

But it does give us a better chance of understanding what we are actually trying to change.

Because if ten different people enter the same environment and eventually begin behaving in remarkably similar ways, I become very interested in the environment.

If good people repeatedly make decisions that produce poor outcomes, I want to understand the conditions in which those decisions make sense.

And if we keep replacing people without changing those conditions, I’m not particularly surprised when the same problems eventually return.

I think this is where much of my work has arrived

When I look back across the different parts of my career now, the thread feels much clearer to me than it perhaps did while I was living it.

My work in inclusion taught me to pay attention to what people need from the environments around them. Behavioural science gave me ways of understanding how those environments influence what people actually do. Organisational transformation has shown me what happens when systems, processes, technology and leadership behaviour either support the change we are trying to create or quietly work against it.

Even the questions I am increasingly interested in at an individual and relationship level come back to something similar. We are always interacting with environments, relationships and systems that shape what feels possible, safe, difficult, rewarding or familiar.

That doesn’t mean we are powerless within them.

It means that if we genuinely want to understand behaviour, looking only at the person will rarely give us the whole answer.

So when I see behaviour that doesn’t make sense, I try not to begin with, What is wrong with this person?

I’m much more interested in asking: What might make this behaviour make sense here?

Because people don’t behave in a vacuum.

And sometimes the most powerful way to change what people do is to become much more curious about the world we have created around them.