Influencing decisions is difficult at the best of times because so many factors are part of how and why people make decisions. When people don’t even realise they are making a decision it seems that much harder to influence them.

One way decisions can become invisible is through institutional isomorphism, where isomorphic means the same or a similar shape, structure or relational properties. In this scenario organisations of a similar type, and the people working within them, adopt the same kind of approaches to each other. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983 identified that this might be because people are forced to adopt an approach by coercive means through law or mandates from Head Office; it can also arise because people copy successful peers or where professional standards shape ways of working across a sector.

In the coercive scenario people might feel like they are consciously making decisions – where their own sense of what the ‘right’ thing to do bangs up against what they are being told to do. Equally though, where there’s a mandate it can feel like there isn’t any decision to make in practice, that’s just how things are or have to be. For the other scenarios, it might be less clear that a decision is getting made though, that sense of professionalism unintentionally or unconsciously leading people to repeat approaches or ways of working. Hard to know where they come from and harder to unpick.

Another way it can be hard to see that a decision is getting made is where there is path dependence – when the weight of historical precedents make a choice seem inevitable, or a different choice unknowable or impossible. QWERTY keyboards are seen to be the archetype of path dependence leading to lock-in, the example comes from W. Brian Arthur’s 1994 piece. For many people, if they need to get a keyboard they would just find when searching that they are being offered a QWERTY keyboard and most of us wouldn’t think to look for another one. Yet there are other options out there but a series of circumstances have led to QWERTY domination. It’s not impossible to unpick but the number of steps needed to do so feels prohibitively high and most people aren’t motivated to look for other options when the current one seems to work well.

And with all of the talk of behaviour change in relation to climate related actions, those examples show how much can be missed when trying to jump to change territory. There’s often an assumption that the behaviour, decision or rationale is clear to people and so it’s just a case of helping people realign their behaviour into another ‘better’ pathway. If that isn’t the case though, it’s hard to unpick something people don’t realise is tangled up.

These theories that make visible the invisible decisions can help us have some empathy when trying to understand where others might be starting from. Recognising that for many people, choices now considered to be environmentally unfriendly – such as getting a new boiler – don’t feel like decisions is a helpful way to ground yourself in the reality of people you’re trying to persuade. Starting from that point might then provide a better basis on which to sell or persuade.