Laws of Leadership: Humphrey's Law

Ever watched a Little-League team completely forget how to play baseball after the coach yells at a player?

Humphrey's Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance, deliberate focus disrupts ingrained habits, spiking error rates.

This one is essential for process leaders. People's highest performance physical capabilities occur when they run on autopilot. That's what muscle and movement memories are.

Under muscle memory, people can do things with superhuman accuracy, speed, and repeatability that cannot be achieved in a state of conscious thought.

However, our brains are wired to turn-off this autopilot function when we feel stress (this is what cortisol does, it turns off autopilot to make you perform fresh evaluations). We also have to turn it off when we are disrupted (machine stops every 2 minutes).

In the baseball example, these muscle and movement memories are exactly what you're trying to build with drills. You're repeating a task to build the ability to do it intrinsically, without conscious thought.

The process leader who wants to reduce the human error rate in his facility must protect this "autopilot" function.

Keeping people in their autopilot functions (assuming they are performing well designed processes safely) will yield world class safety, quality, and performance results.

There is no way to hit world-class if your team is fighting through disruptions.

The disruptions you have to face:

Frustration

Fatigue

Rushing

Complacency

Habit Disruption

Cognitive Overload

Environmental Stressors

Uncertainty / Lack of Information

You cannot punish these errors away when they happen, that'll just push good people away and fix nothing.

You have to audit to make sure people are doing their processes correctly before there is a problem. If you do this regularly, they'll do their processes correctly.

Then you can praise them (because you find them doing it right) which will give them a dopamine hit. That will make them like the audit and the job.

Then reduce disruptions. Make the machine, material, process, leadership, etc... reliable and non-disruptive.

Protect the peace of mind that lets these people run like great athletes.

You can create a lot of burnout trying to over-control disrupted habits, it amplifies frustration and errors instead of restoring flow.

Leading change is hard. Understanding Humphry's Law helps us reduce error rates and increase worker quality of life.

Change leadership is a marathon. You can't disrupt habits without spiking errors. Don't be a disruptor to your people.