Progressing Just Like The Others

The social animal that we are has benefited from mimicry. Over millennia, groups whose members imitated their peers formed stronger bonds and survived. We are the ones whose parents imitated others, and had kids.

This phenomenon is called mimetic pressure, and it affects how we perceive options when making progress. We end up choosing to progress just like how others chose to progress. We edit our choices to fit the group’s history.

If your preferences tend toward novelty and innovation, you must think this is bad news. Antiquated. Arcane.

But if you want to serve other people, people conditioned for survival by mimetic pressure, you ought to pay a bit more empathy.

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Before a user buys, they might ask people around them, pausing their momentum, just to be sure.

When an executive signs the check, they’ll be thinking about how this will leave a mark on their resume, because that’s how their mentor did it at the previous stint.

To avoid getting conned, buyers will be skeptical of you. Even if your product is a great fit for their problem, they still don’t know you. Charlatans have meant danger for tribes for a long longer than the time it took the internet to create new types of strangers.

The designer who wants to look current will use the design tool that the rest of the industry uses.

“This product is just like the one we used at our last job.”

“We’ve always done it this way.”

What’s old is what’s new.

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People will break from this pattern when there’s an outsized force, internal or external, that ends up creating some brand new momentum.

“Enough is enough.” It might be a slowly repeating anxiety that finally became one too many, or it might be a sudden event. There was a before, and now it’s no longer the same.

And then, they no longer want to progress just like the others do. They’re willing to consider other options. The commodity won’t cut it. What the others do, that’s not quite right anymore.

And then, if you did it right, they might now want to make progress, this time, with you.