There is a famous story about the rats in Hanoi. A new sewer system had been installed, which proved to be a perfect habitat for the small number of rats in Hanoi and as a result, their numbers multiplied.
The governors thought hard about how to bring the numbers down and decided that they would offer payment for every dead rat that the people living in the city could bring in. To their surprise, despite ever-greater numbers of dead rats being brought in, the rat population kept increasing. They realised that their solution, instead of decimating the rat population, had given every citizen an incentive to encourage the rats to breed so they could be caught.
This story says a lot about how the outcome is always baked into the design. We can trace everything back, the way everything turns out, the whole eventual experience, to the way the design is set up.
In the case of Hanoi, the design led to more rats because the whole focus was on more rats.
In our courses, and really, the Life and Death course is the culmination of all our courses to date, we look at the design that is giving rise to the outcome. And particularly in this course, we are looking at the biggest design of all: how life and death are created and the outcome that results from this ultimate design. If the outcome is wanted, awesome. If it's not, what is going on with the design that is creating it?
Once we start really looking at this for ourselves, we start to see where the focus and energy are, where the rewards appear to be, who the players in the design are and what seems to be at stake.
This is where everything starts to shift.
As the design changes, the outcome changes.
Every time.
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