The Science of Norm Design

(Illustration by Bryce Wymer) 

It’s late. It’s loud. The room smells like spilled beer and the cigarettes that aren’t technically allowed inside anymore. The band is three songs into its set, and the trumpet player does something that prompts a stranger to grab your arm. You don’t know this person, but you both heard something amazing.

This is why you and 10 million others come to New Orleans each year. The city knows it and the musicians know it. But the musicians also know that music doesn’t pay the rent. When we at UX for Good began studying the problem in 2012, the average working musician was married, with two kids, had no health insurance, and made $24,000 per year.

The Grammy Foundation, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, and a whole ecosystem of well-intentioned organizations had tried to fix what they saw as the problem: musicians struggling because they lacked business skills. These well-intended groups built a support system to fill that void: Financial-literacy workshops. Business training. Career-management tools. Reasonable, respectful work, designed by smart people who cared. None of it helped.

But after days—and some very late nights—interviewing musicians, record-label executives, bar owners, city officials, nonprofit leaders, and tourists, we discovered that the business-skills diagnosis wasn’t wrong, exactly; it was irrelevant.

Working musicians in New Orleans were intentionally opting out of the conventional life that most of us live, in which business skills make sense. Many of them quit school early to pursue their craft. They sleep until afternoon, jam with their friends, and then play until early morning. They stay loose about where they live and work. This is how serious musicians in New Orleans live and have lived forever. No amount of financial-literacy training was going to make a dent in deep-rooted cultural norms.

We looked elsewhere for answers. The most obvious economic lever was right there in the club: the tourists who come to New Orleans specifically for the music and spend—and tip—freely on everything around it. If 10 million music tourists give a single $5 tip during their average five-day visit, we could boost the earnings of professional musicians in New Orleans by more than $10,000 per year. If tourists gave two $5 tips, we could nearly double the musicians’ annual incomes.

Easy, right? But everyone told us that tipping was off the table, that the musicians wouldn’t go for it. Nearly all professional musicians in New Orleans start out as buskers playing on the street for loose change. Becoming a professional means graduating to playing in clubs and signing with record labels, and officially putting behind you tip jars, open guitar cases, and not-so-subtle appeals to strangers. For these musicians, asking for tips, even tips that could double their annual income, felt like going backward in the social hierarchy.

One approach—a variation on the “business skills” solution—would have been to try to change how musicians think about their professional norms. But when we delved further, we found that the resistance isn’t really about tipping, per se. It’s about asking for tips. And when we understood that the real norm was not “no tipping” but “no asking,” something shifted. If the musicians were opposed to sending the social signal that asking for money sends, the design question changed: Who gets tips without having to ask for them?

The answer, found in the same venues where the musicians were playing? Waitstaff.

In the United States, a tipping norm already exists: a line on the bill—or a button on the screen—along with a social expectation that customers add 15 to 25 percent. That means nobody ever has to ask. The expectation is built into the transaction. Our design solution was straightforward: Add a second line to the bill to “tip the band” and lobby city leaders to make it a standard practice across the sector.

We hadn’t done user research or tried to optimize an experience. We had identified an invisible social rule that every previous intervention had either missed or accepted as fixed. And then we designed a mechanism that worked with the culture, instead of against it.

That’s norm design.

Solutions Must Change the Frame

Wherever people are trying to change something that doesn’t want to be changed, we see the same pattern: smart people, reasonable interventions … and no change. Harvard Business Review has repeatedly reported that something like 70 percent of all organizational-change efforts fail. This is a remarkable number,¹ but we’ve been failing like this for as long as we’ve been measuring, and we keep treating each failure as its own isolated event—wrong strategy, wrong leader, bad timing—rather than asking if something systematic is going on.

Something is. And once you see what norms are holding your problem in place, you notice something uncomfortable: Nearly every solution anyone has ever tried follows the same unwritten rules as the problem itself. It makes solutions feel reasonable when that’s exactly why they don’t work. Seeing the norms is what enables you to imagine solutions that are genuinely different and not just different-sounding versions of what everyone else has already tried.

In New Orleans, every foundation that tried to help musicians found itself stymied by the same unwritten rule as the musicians themselves were: that real musicians don’t engage with the business world. The foundations weren’t naive, and they’d spent time with the problem. But because they’d made the same assumption everyone else had (without knowing they’d made it), business-skills training felt like the obvious answer. The norm was sufficiently ubiquitous in the music community that nobody could see it.

It makes sense that norms are unspoken. Our ancestors lived in small groups for roughly 100,000 years before the emergence of spoken language. Norms held these groups together.

Conventional design practice gets you a long way. You study the people you’re designing for. You map their experience. You identify the pain points. You design a solution that addresses them. Behavioral science has made this work more rigorous and more effective, replacing intuition with empirically tested insights about how individuals make decisions. But while this is legitimate, important work that often produces real results, conventional design and behavioral science both take the social environment as a given. They examine the individuals inside a system without interrogating the system itself. They ask, “How do we get people to make better choices?” rather than “Are we even looking at the right problem?”

In New Orleans, the best behavioral design in the world would have produced a better financial-literacy workshop. It never would have produced a second line on the bill. Norm design adds the missing layer. Before designing any intervention, it asks how the social environment actually works: What unwritten rules hold group behavior in place, which of those rules are blocking change, and which are already pushing in the direction you want to go?

Every social environment runs on unwritten rules. The organization you work in, the community you live in, and the field you’ve spent your career in, all of it is governed by rules that nobody wrote down and nobody voted on. But even though they’re invisible to the people inside the environment, they establish what’s normal. Then they fade into the background. You stop seeing them. You just live inside them. In practice, they’re also invisible to outsiders, to the designers, consultants, funders, and policy makers who come in from outside to change things. Not because those people aren’t perceptive but because they aren’t looking.

In this sense, norm design doesn’t replace the research and design methods that social changemakers already use. It adds another lens into the operating system, to see which solutions will get traction and which the environment will quietly reject before they ever have a chance to work. An intervention that doesn’t account for norms is in trouble before it launches.

Unspoken and Invisible (But Everybody Feels It)

Remember the first time you brought a special someone home to meet your family? Before you walked into the house or the restaurant or the wedding reception, you turned to your boyfriend or girlfriend and said, “Look, my family is a little weird.” Then you urged your special someone not to mention something or advised them to do something oddly specific.

When I asked my adult daughter what she told her boyfriends before she brought them home for the first time, she said she advised them to be talkative. If they weren’t, she said, her parents would conclude that they were boring, wouldn’t like them, and would nag her until, ultimately, she didn’t like them either.

I’m not crazy about how this story makes me look, but there you go: You see something new when you look at your family through somebody else’s eyes. Those unintuitive rules—don’t mention something, or do something oddly specific—are the kind of social norms you spend most of your life not noticing but adhering to. They aren’t enforced by anything explicit, just social approval or disapproval, belonging or not belonging. My family never held a meeting to decide that quiet boyfriends were suspect. The rule just existed, passed along through years of dinners and holidays and raised eyebrows, until it was simply how things worked.

While these norms are invisible, invisible is not casual. You don’t notice the unwritten rules of your organization until you accidentally break one, or until a new employee asks a question that makes the room go quiet. You don’t notice the conventions of your industry until a competitor challenges them and the market goes nuts. The violation is what makes the norm visible. Until then, it’s just how things are.

It makes sense that norms are unspoken. After all, our ancestors lived in small groups for roughly 100,000 years before the emergence of spoken language. Norms reinforced through facial expressions and other social cues held those groups together, kept people safe, and ensured everyone got fed. We know this thanks to brain-imaging research: Even today, the threat of social exclusion activates the same neural pathways as physical harm or starvation.² For much of human history, being cast out of the group wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was a death sentence.

Even today, when laws and written policies conflict with norms, norms win. When the posted speed limit is 65 but every driver around you—in front, behind, on either side—is doing 80, how fast are you driving?

Change is hard because when an intervention asks people to behave differently, it asks them to risk being kicked out of the group. The environment pushes back, not because people are naturally resistant to change but because we’re human.

Good practitioners have always sensed norms, even lacking a word for it. The slight tension when someone says the wrong thing. The way a junior person glances at a senior person before answering a question. The unspoken understanding of who gets to speak and who has to wait. Norm design makes that instinct systematic: a set of specific things to look for, specific questions to ask, and a way to turn what you find into a design advantage.

Building a New Emotional Architecture

If you’ve been to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC—or the Holocaust museum in Los Angeles; Houston; New York; St. Louis; or Skokie, Illinois­—the experience across them is largely the same. You go in knowing it will be hard. You move through the exhibits slowly, because there’s no other way to move through them. You read things you can’t unread. You see things you can’t unsee. And at some point, the weight of it all becomes physical, like something in your chest.

Eventually, within hours or maybe days, the feeling lifts. Life comes back, and you return to whatever you were doing and thinking before.

Genocide museums like this exist for two purposes. For the families and communities of the victims, they’re places of remembrance, sacred ground. For everyone else, they’re about preventing that atrocity from ever happening again. The museums expose visitors to the horror of what happened, generate empathy, and then leverage that empathy to inspire action.

No institution chose this approach. It’s so universal that it is, in effect, what it means to be a genocide museum. But is the norm correct? Does exposure to horror actually inspire action?

The Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda is the final resting place for more than 250,000 Tutsi killed in the 1994 genocide. Every day, scores of Rwandans visit the mass graves of their loved ones and hundreds of visitors to Rwanda visit the museum.

Visitors emerged heavy, drained, and frequently devastated. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do. But, as we found in our research, it wasn’t turning visitors into people who would act.

In 2014, we traveled there ourselves to meet with survivors, families of victims, perpetrators, museum staff, and government officials, and we watched the norm play out in real time. Visitors moved through the exhibits; descended into the horror; and emerged heavy, drained, and frequently devastated.

It was doing exactly what it was designed to do. But, as we found in our research, it wasn’t turning visitors into people who would act. Yes, nearly everyone left changed in some private way, but the interviews we conducted with visitors on their way out indicated that they weren’t inclined to do anything.

The conventional design response might have been to dial up the visitor experience: better wayfinding, more careful emotional pacing, or more compelling exhibit design. Hit them harder. Make them feel it more. That would have made perfect sense if empathy leads to action. The industry norm says it is.

Unfortunately, science says it isn’t. Social neuroscientist Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute found that empathy and compassion are neurologically distinct. Empathy for suffering—the kind of suffering we experience in a genocide museum—activates the brain’s pain circuits. But prolonged exposure doesn’t deepen concern. Instead, it produces what Singer calls empathic distress fatigue. We burn out, we withdraw, and we disengage.

But compassion, warmth, care, and the motivation to help run along an entirely different neural circuit. They don’t deplete us; they build resilience and the desire to act.

Once we saw the norm as a norm—not as a truth, but as just a convention—we were able to ask the right question: What is the proper mechanism to generate compassion and the desire to act?

When we looked for it, we found our answer at a school in a village outside Kigali. While the story Rwanda tells the world about the 1994 genocide is about horror and suffering, the story Rwandans tell their own children is richer. It includes the people who refused to participate, the neighbors who hid neighbors, and the ones who stood up when standing up was a death sentence. That fuller story doesn’t just activate the pain circuits; it produces compassion and the motivation to act.

We had found a tailwind, in other words: a local storytelling norm that pushed us in the right direction. Our response was the Inzovu Curve, which carries a visitor through pain, reflection, hope, and action. Instead of leaving visitors at the depth of their despair (trusting that empathy will do the rest), the redesigned experience lifts people through reflection and hope into something less like grief than resolve. The Kigali Genocide Memorial was redesigned around the model, which has been piloted at museums in the United States and Europe.

In New Orleans, we worked around a norm. In Kigali, we replaced one with a new emotional architecture for an entire field. That’s norm design too.

Looking for Signals

How do you know when you’re looking at a norm problem? If you fund interventions, lead organizations, or commission change, the cost of misreading a problem is high. You can end up designing solutions for the wrong problem and then wondering why nothing sticks.

(Illustration by Bryce Wymer) 

Four signals in particular are worth watching for.

The problem persists, despite multiple serious attempts to solve it. If smart, well-funded efforts keep failing at the same thing, the problem probably isn’t the people or the solutions. Something in the environment is rejecting both. In New Orleans, the Grammy Foundation tried. The Jazz & Heritage Foundation tried. The environment kept winning.

Everyone converges on the same diagnosis, but nobody questions it. Pay attention to unanimity. When every stakeholder, every funder, and every practitioner independently arrives at the same explanation for why the problem persists, that consensus might be evidence of an assumption so widely shared that it’s become invisible. Because every genocide museum in the world had converged on the same theory of change, the unanimity felt like confirmation, even though it proved scientifically backward.

A visible gap exists between what people say and what they do. Sometimes the budget says one thing, but spending says another. Or the strategic plan points in one direction while decisions go in another. Sometimes stated values are posted on the wall and the actual behavior is something else entirely. That gap is not hypocrisy (or not just hypocrisy). Its unwritten rules are overriding official ones.

An intervention that should have worked. Sometimes an effort at change is quietly neutralized—not overtly rejected or debated and defeated, just absorbed—and the organization or community goes right back to what it was doing before, without anyone being able to articulate why. This is the environment’s immune system at work, norms closing around an intervention and rendering it inert. If you’ve ever funded something that produced a good pilot that somehow never scaled, you may have watched this happen without recognizing it for what it was.

None of these signals is definitive on its own. But when two or more of them show up together, you’re almost certainly looking at a norm problem, which means you’re looking at an opportunity that conventional approaches have been systematically missing.

Once you start seeing it this way, you see it everywhere.

Rethinking the Given

The first thing you notice working with NASA is that everybody on the inside feels the way most everybody on the outside feels: that it’s one of the coolest organizations on Earth. The engineers, the administrators, and the support staff light up when talking about what the agency does. So do you. You’re working with people who put human beings on the moon. It’s hard not to feel that.

It makes the next thing you notice—that everybody notices—very strange: For an organization that inspires so much genuine enthusiasm, NASA has surprisingly little pull with Congress. Funding is perpetually uncertain, as NASA’s relationship with its primary funder has been deteriorating for decades, quietly but steadily, administration after administration.

The conventional read is that NASA needs better messaging, better public engagement, and a more compelling case for its value, so every attempt to address the decline has focused on how the agency talks about itself. It’s what any good strategy firm would recommend (and what many did).

The problem was a norm so deeply embedded in the organization’s identity that nobody inside could see it, starting with the most important story NASA tells about itself: the moonshot.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history, a speech that didn’t just rally the nation but established something inside NASA that outlasted the Apollo program by decades. It was a belief that the White House sets the vision for space exploration and carries the burden of making the case to Congress and the American people. NASA’s job is just to execute.

None of this requires starting over. Every interview, site visit, or strategic-planning process you’ve conducted, all of it was already saturated with information about how the social environment works.

Everyone we interviewed—literally everyone—told the moonshot story. It was their superhero origin story, the proof of what’s possible, and the template for how things are supposed to work. And because the moon landing was one of the most consequential events in human history, the norm it created didn’t just persist but calcified.

After Apollo, NASA kept waiting for another moonshot. Through shifting priorities and shrinking budgets, the organization operated as if another presidential speech was coming, another top-down mandate that would restore direction and funding. Ask anyone inside why congressional support was declining, and you’d get some variation of budget pressures, political priorities, or public apathy. Of course, nobody would say, “We’re waiting for a speech that’s never coming.” They couldn’t see it. That’s how norms work.

We asked one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters if there would ever be another moonshot speech. The answer was an unequivocal no. The landscape had fundamentally changed since 1962. Kennedy had been speaking to a single organization with a singular national mission, and now dozens of companies are traveling into space. Moreover, the public no longer rallies around a single national idea the way it did back then. The conditions that produced that speech were historically specific and unrepeatable. The norm had outlived the world that created it.

Our design response was not to wait for the White House to set NASA’s vision. The agency would need to define its own. Instead of waiting for a mandate that wasn’t coming, NASA would need to develop its own bold ambition and enlist its research partners to lobby lawmakers and make it real.

In New Orleans, we worked around a community norm. In Kigali, we replaced an industry norm. At NASA, we found an organizational norm so deeply embedded that nobody had ever thought to question it. That’s also norm design.

The field of norm design is still young. A handful of us have been developing it in the field, testing it against real problems, and refining what works. It also has its first academic home. Annalisa Enrile and a few of her colleagues have been teaching it at the USC School of Social Work, in the nation’s first doctorate in social innovation.

“A definitive aspect of our doctoral program is that we teach students to diagnose norms before designing anything,” Enrile says. “Design is often depicted as intuitive and ambiguous. But by understanding norms, students can put the communities they’re designing with at the center of their work. Once they understand that wicked social problems persist because there are norms that hold them in place, they can see where solutions will have the most impact.”

The science is accelerating too. Sociologists are mapping how norms operate across a wide variety of groups. Neuroscientists are confirming just how powerful these forces are.

However, none of this requires starting over. Every interview you’ve conducted, every site visit you’ve made, every strategic- planning process you’ve sat through, all of it was already saturated with information about how the social environment works. You may have sensed something was off. You just didn’t have a name for it or a way to act on it.

The signals were there: the problems that wouldn’t stay solved, the unanimous diagnoses that nobody questioned, the gaps between what people said and what they did, and the pilots that somehow never scaled.

What’s new is not the signals. What’s new is the ability to read them, to know what you’re looking for, and to design something that works with the grain of the culture. But while we’re all at the beginning of this, the place to start is already here, in the work we’re already doing.

Read more stories by Jeff Leitner.