Change has a cost for individuals and communities

TLDR: Almost all economic increases come from change and so profit maximalism demands a world where everything changes, all of the time. But change has a cost for individuals and communities; be cautious, in yourself and your designs.

Recently, I was introduced to the Benedictine ‘Vow of Stability’: a promise that, upon entering a monastic community, you will remain a part of it for life. Philosophically, it is rooted in a belief that instead of seeking out an environment of perfection, you have an ethical responsibility to improve where you are. And practically, it was historically good to have monks that weren’t monastery hopping, trying to find greener grass.

My introduction to the VOS was secular; it came from someone who agreed early on in their marriage to pursue stability as a family wherever they could. They recognized that voluntary changes often created additional stress and even as changes could create a step up in circumstance, there was a hidden cost of turbulence.

As they told me about the choices they made, it struck me just how much of modern capitalism requires paying a change fee in order to advance.

The easiest example is their home, which has quadrupled in value over the 20 years they’ve been in it. They have often contemplated selling in order to harvest that value but that would require destabilizing their family. So instead they bought an empty lot nearby, with the goal of eventually building a home they can comfortably retire in while remaining part of the community.

Slightly more nuanced is education. Their school district has consistently been in the bottom 25% of their already less-than-stellar state. But rather than move, they have sought out enrichment activities for their kids and volunteered to make things better.

I’m not suggesting that their VOS-inspired choices are right. I’ve moved for job opportunities, to give my son an education that fits him, and to be in places that support my individual and family happiness. And I’m content with the choices I’ve made.


But I was in NYC last week and it was just so easy to get business done, because my network there is expansive. When we moved to San Diego, I essentially hit the reset button, both personally and professionally, as did the rest of the family. As individuals, it is worth considering whether all change is worth it.

Perhaps more importantly, when we design interventions, we must be on guard against demanding too many change fees from those we intend to benefit. Turbulence upsets not just the individual balance but also the group; when my son changes schools, it is not only he who loses friends – each of his friends also loses him. What can feel small rapidly becomes larger.

VOS behaviors are all around. When a stock that pays a dividend rather than trying to constantly escalate in price. When a factory stays rather than offshoring. Many changes are choices and we could all stand to choose a little more carefully.

Credentialism isn’t just inequitable, it is an opportunity

TLDR: Learning is not a smooth curve; we frequently grow in spurts and jumps. But those rarely align with external validation like graduation or licensing. Credentialism isn’t just inequitable, it is a business and cultural liability. And there is a market opportunity in refusing to accept the bias.

Recently, there has been a trend in mental health to switch to associates: psychologists who have not yet been fully licensed and cannot practice on their own, without supervision. This is driven largely by cost, as associates are 20-40% cheaper than their fully licensed peers, largely because they cannot create their own practices and must sacrifice some money to a mediating entity.

The requirements for an associate to become fully licensed vary by state but generally include an exam, some number of supervised hours practiced across various populations, and an annoying amount of paperwork that gets returned to you if you misspell something. Bureaucracy gonna bureauc.

Obviously, experience matters. In study after study, we can prove that people do actually get better at things over time; some version of “practice makes perfect” arose in pretty much every language for a reason. 

But that improvement is lumpy. When we look at learning, people tend to proceed in epochs, with long periods of level performance between jumps in ability. And those jumps are hard to pin down; if you do a cohort analysis, when people make a leap up is largely unpredictable. People who are learning and working together don’t necessarily hit milestones at the same time.

And so it isn’t necessarily true that you’re a better therapist today than you were yesterday and it certainly isn’t true that you’re a better therapist the day after the state declares you fully licensed than you were the day before. No one magically produces better work simply because they walked across a stage and got handed a degree.

And yet the day after graduation, your chances of getting a job go up dramatically. Credentialism, or the tendency to rely on formal qualifications over demonstrated ability, is rampant in hiring simply because across a large number of applicants, it is very difficult to find a better proxy.

The problem, of course, is that not everyone has equal access to credentials. Licensing fees can run into the thousands of dollars in some professions, let alone the time investment of a bewildering number of forms. Credentialism tends to amplify sexism, racism, and classism, because the systems that bestow credentials are themselves sexist, racist, and classist.

It is easy to look at associates as inferior and lambast the companies that are increasingly relying on them. Because hiring isn’t the only place credentialism occurs; consumers can just as easily interpret a credential as a valid signal of quality, without actually determining whether there is a real difference.

But ultimately, that drives up market pricing. Consumers who put false faith in credentials end up spending more, without any additional return. And because consumers are buying based on the credential, people are forced to get credentials to increase their wages; the tail is wagging the dog.

As employers, we have structural tools at our disposal: temp-to-hire as a method of determining actual ability, removing degree requirements, etc. And as consumers, we can use reviews as an alternative to credentials. But all of these are choices: ultimately, it is on us to give people the chance to demonstrate their ability to perform beyond their credentials.


And there is plenty to be gained. Besides combating inequity, in a market economy that overvalues credentials, there is a price opportunity in not making the same mistake: you can get more and better, for cheaper, if you’re willing to fight the bias that others are falling victim to. Fighting credentialism is a moral imperative but if you need an economic justification, it is certainly there.

We need to be conscious of both the practices and people that we platform

TLDR: Even if our processes buffer us from academic misconduct, we still need to be conscious of both the practices and people that we platform. Above all else, we must be applied, behavioral, and scientific.

Yesterday on BlueSky, Neil Lewis Jr. pointed out the latest Atlantic article by Daniel Engber on academic misconduct in behavioral science, and one of the themes was compensation and the outsized benefits that come with novel findings: tenure, grants, social status, etc.

My first reaction to the article was dismissal: in my version of applied behavioral science (SIDE), where every intervention gets validated by a pilot and published studies are used only as generative prompts during the Design phase, academic misconduct doesn’t have the same scale of negative impact. If someone made something up, the pilot will show that it doesn’t work and as long as we don’t also falsify the pilot results, all it did was waste time.

But then I started thinking about our role in the attention economy. Most of us still read and debate journal articles. I talk to clients about work that brings academia closer to application, without actually being in those labs and watching that data collection. We’re not just consumers; we also use our expertise to direct attention.

A few months ago, I blocked someone on LinkedIn. We first interacted back when I published the SIDE model; they insisted that Evaluation was unnecessary if an intervention was soundly based in theory. I objected and said the whole point of science was being willing to collect evidence that might disprove a generalized theory.

We sparred a few more times, most recently when they insisted that one cognitive model was more “scientific” than another simply because it was published in an academic journal. After a few rounds of comments, I blocked them and moved on.

But sometimes they pop in my feed because we’re both included on a “who to read in applied behavioral science” list. And I have a visceral reaction every time it happens, because I don’t want what I do to ever be associated with their approach.

Applied behavioral scientists can’t just opt-out of the discourse on academic misconduct, even if our methods shelter us from its ill effects. Because as experts in our field, we still have a role in who we platform. When we say “you should follow X” or “read Y”, we’re socially endorsing it.

So what to do, in a world where you can’t validate everything? For one, use papers and case studies as examples, not rules. And be sure you’re communicating to others that what matters about those examples isn’t the phenomenon but the methodology. Our job as applied behavioral scientists is to do and teach a scientific approach to changing behavior, not to create generalizable descriptions of the world.

Be careful who and what you platform. And if someone says in public that pilots are unnecessary and whatever methodology gets published in a journal is the thing we should do…don’t put them on the same list with me.

A near miss is an almost win and needs an “ante vitam” meeting

TLDR: Narrow misses feel worse than wide ones because it is easier to imagine all the things that might have gone differently. But regret is a red herring; a near miss is an almost win and needs an “ante vitam” meeting.

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Imagine that you’re late for your train in two parallel universes. In one universe, you arrive on the platform just as the train is pulling away. In the other, you missed it by 30 minutes. Which universe would you rather be in?

Most people intuitively understand that missing it by a few seconds will feel worse and they’re right: we feel more regret about narrow misses than wider ones because of counterfactual thinking. It is easy to imagine a dozen “if only” ways you could have saved a few seconds: got out of the car quicker, chose your shirt faster, not had to look for your keys. It is harder to imagine saving 30 minutes.

Anticipating that regret, most of us would say we’d rather have missed it by a mile.

But regret is a red herring; it tends to make us focus on our past instead of our future. And that change in framing makes all the difference. Because in reality, missing something by a few seconds means that next time, you’re very likely to make it. If you are going to be taking this train every day, it is far better to have missed it by an inch than a mile.

Back to the train platforms. Now you’re not alone: you’re traveling with your best friend. 


When you miss by inches, the fingerpointing begins. Because when we feel regret, we often externalize it and begin the blame game; it feels better to grumble about how slow your best friend is than confront the reality that it might have been your fault. 

This happens all the time in workplaces: near misses devolve into analysis paralysis as Product, Design, Marketing, and Tech focus on who to castigate. Blame is easy because any number of decisions by any of the departments would have resulted in a win.

Think about the 2024 presidential election. As Democrats argue about “the reason” for losing, the reality is that with a popular vote margin of only about 1%, most of the cited reasons are valid and a change in any of them could have swung the balance. Racism, sexism, communication, the lack of a primary, whatever…they’re all on the table in the way they wouldn’t be with a 30% deficit.

It is important to teach your team to identify the size of a gap and to change your strategy accordingly. With wide misses, you need a few heavily resourced interventions capable of closing a large gap. But with almost wins, it is more important to spread your resources across a number of smaller bets, since any of them is enough to tip the balance. Making this explicit can help cross-functional teams quickly move away from blame and toward solutions.

The frame change can be as simple as a name change. A post mortem is “after death” and makes sense for wide misses. But for an almost win, consider an ante vitam meeting, because an intervention that almost worked is just “before life”.