“Behaviour follows design”

A quote from Karen Van der Aa’s book on generational intelligence.

I learned that generation’s speak of previous generations, the ‘complaints’ of their behaviour are just a representation of the new context these people grew up in.

An entire generation can’t be ‘bad mannered’, the pool of people is too large for all of them to have a bad personality. It’s about understanding, and habit.

Older generations can’t fully understand the new context that younger people grew up in, and vice versa. These contexts form habits, and with every new context, come new habits.

And to make it even more interesting, after 30 our habits become more hard-wired. So what your context gave you early, carries you on in the future. And in that future, more new generations step into the world, with anew, different habits.

It is therefore the challenge of every generation to try and understand the other as much as they can, for the sake of love, for the sake of harmony, for the sake of working together.

What workplaces need is thus a system, a design, that facilitates this understanding, this conversation.

This system becomes a habit. This habit becomes the behaviour the environment needs, be that the workplace or somewhere else.

because…

Behaviour follows design.