Have you ever seen those dirt pathways that cut across the grass in cities, ignoring the pristine and carefully designed paths? Urban planners call these unintended, user-created shortcuts “desire paths” – routes people walk instinctively rather than following the prescribed walkways. Sometimes organisations can be like those urban planners. They build beautiful knowledge databases that sit empty or are unused, while information and knowledge flows through emails, Slack channels and Teams chats.
How can we avoid the waste of time and budget caused by our failure to follow the desire paths? How can we adopt the desire paths when it is safe to do so and get our users on their way efficiently and effectively?
The answer may lie with nudge theory, which can help us to remove friction from natural behaviours, and balance supporting the pathways that our users want us to build, with protections and nudging them towards the destination we need them to reach.
Understanding Nudge Theory
Nudge theory came into prominence in the 2000s and aimed to harness widely occurring biases and heuristics to design a “choice architecture” to guide people towards better decisions, without actually restricting their freedom to choose otherwise. Research has shown that people tend to stick with pre-selected options; choose the path of least resistance and the prominent, attention-grabbing option; and conform to social norms.
Classic examples include opt-out organ donation systems and cafeteria food placement. In knowledge management contexts, this might look like pre-populating a “lessons learned” template that auto-generates at project closeout, rather than asking practitioners to remember to complete one.
Paving the Desire Path
Desire paths reveal the authentic need of our users, rather than their assumed needs. In KM terms this means understanding the actual knowledge flow in our organisation, even where it travels by unofficial channels. Once this desire path is known, we can either support our users’ needs in the way that they naturally work, or, if there are governance, safety or other concerns, we can nudge their behaviours down a different path.
I recommend that you start with defaults that match the worn ground.
Can you enhance existing Teams chats, rather than create a new wiki? Can you offer prompts to share learnings at project milestones?
Offer opt outs, rather than opt ins (perhaps to populate your KM database). Pre-populate templates in the platform your users usually use, rather than require them to download them. If you are trying to change ingrained behaviours, offer your preferred alternative alongside the traditional option. For all preferred options, avoid requiring the practitioner to navigate to a new, separate tool and instead pre-configure or use one-click activation for your preferred tools.
Another valuable nudge is peer modelling in your messaging. When people are referred to templates or click on them, offer supporting information such as “18 partners have used this precedent” or “most referenced documents are …”.
Recognise an existing desire path and make it easier, safer or more official.
When to Redirect
Sometimes, however, a shortcut is dangerous. Knowledge managers understand issues such as information security, compliance and quality control, that individual practitioners might not appreciate. A team sharing client specific data via personal messaging might seem efficient, but violates confidentiality obligations.
In these situations, a gentle redirect is necessary. Some knowledge genuinely needs structure and governance guardrails for risk management reasons. In these situations, be transparent about the reasons behind the formal pathway. However, always ask yourself whether you are genuinely redirecting users to a paved path for safety reasons, or whether it is for your convenience.
Where to start
Improving adoption rates for your knowledge projects directly impacts organisational profitability and financial sustainability, reducing duplicated effort, avoiding losses due to firefighting, and accelerating decision-making, so why don’t you spend a little time this week observing your users. Where does knowledge actually flow in your organisation? Look for the worn ground (the person everyone asks first, the excel spreadsheet that stays updated, the email patterns) and pick one desire path to improve.
The best knowledge systems are invisible to users. They don’t change their direction, they make the journey smoother. Stop building monuments to how you think knowledge should flow. Start paving the paths your people have already chosen.
I’d love to hear how you get on. Let me know what desire paths you were surprised to find and how you will be supporting them in the future.
This post was first published in Information Professional.
