Why we love revolution over evolution
Yes, your brain is lazy.
That’s the hard science.
And that’s why we’re all secretly hoping for our productivity fairy godmother to wave her magic wand and fix everything. Meanwhile, the humble and overlooked janitor of incremental improvement keeps showing up, quietly making things better one small sweep at a time.
Your team’s “janitor services of incremental perfection” involve fixing tiny bugs, streamlining that annoying approval process, and actually reading meeting notes before the next meeting.
Boring? Absolutely.
Effective? Annoyingly so.
These unglamorous tweaks compound like interest on a savings account nobody wants to check.
But we’re still addicted to the “silver bullet of random reinvention.”
The quick win.
We’d rather try to reorganize the entire department than admit we just need to return emails faster. We’ll try to implement blockchain solutions for problems that require basic communication skills. We’ll try to rebrand our way out of issues that just need good old-fashioned elbow grease and 40% commitment.
The psychology of our preference for magic
Our brains are wired like impatient toddlers in a candy store.
We suffer from what psychologists call “present bias”, we dramatically overvalue immediate rewards while discounting future benefits.
The promise of revolutionary change offers instant gratification for our ego, while incremental improvement requires the psychological equivalent of eating our vegetables.
Then there’s the “planning fallacy,” our delightful tendency to underestimate how long things take and overestimate our ability to execute complex changes. We genuinely believe that this time, the complete system overhaul will go smoothly.
Yeah, right.
And the “sunk cost fallacy” just makes things worse. Once we’ve invested in the big transformation project, we’re psychologically committed to seeing it through, even when the janitor approach would deliver better results faster.
We’d rather fail spectacularly with our revolutionary vision than succeed modestly with steady improvement.
There’s also the “availability heuristic” at play.
We remember the rare stories of overnight success more vividly than the countless examples of gradual progress. Steve Jobs launching the iPhone makes headlines; Toyota’s decades of manufacturing improvements do not.
The cost of chasing unicorns
This psychological bias toward revolution creates real organizational damage.
Companies burn through resources on transformation initiatives that promise everything and deliver confusion.
Teams become change-fatigued, developing immunity to improvement efforts because they’ve seen too many “game-changing” strategies fizzle out.
Meanwhile, competitors practicing incremental improvement quietly eat market share.
Amazon didn’t revolutionize retail overnight; they just obsessively improved logistics, customer experience, and technology infrastructure one small optimization at a time. Their “janitor services” approach built an empire while others chased the next big disruption.
The irony is simple.
While we’re busy hunting unicorns and silver bullets, the janitor quietly builds the stable where real progress lives.
Those small daily improvements don’t make headlines, but they make everything else possible.
Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is sweep the same floor every single day, knowing that consistency creates the foundation for genuine innovation to eventually flourish.
About Me
Director of Data Innovation at IIH Nordic
Board Member at CDOIQ, Community Builder & International Keynote Speaker.I connect people, data, and business outcomes.
With over 20 years of experience, I’m on a mission to make people realize the business and commercial value of data.
On Medium, I write to help others in Data, AI, Digital and Web Analytics navigate their journeys and actually make stuff happen.
