Fred unlocks his bike and feels tense. He puts on his helmet and turns around to wave at Lauren, who is about to cycle off into the other direction. They've known each other since Monday when they met at their neighbourhood coffee shop and talked about the time it takes to drink two Cappuccini. Yesterday he texted her and asked her out on a walk in the park today. All morning he was excited for his first date in a long while.
As he cycles out of the park, he feels frustrated, embarrassed, and confused. By the time he arrives at home, he knows why. Several values of his felt hard to live by for this hour and a half in the park. He tried to see the world around him anew through the eyes of another, but when he asked Lauren what she noticed in her surroundings, her quick answers sounded like Hallmark postcards, drawn from a stack of prepared replies. When he thought of different ways to walk along the path, as if to surprise the floor, as if feeling the impact of their step all the way to the crowns of their head, she giggled and looked around to see if anyone saw them. He had hoped she might join in and they could connect with their bodies in playful, silly ways. Most importantly, he hadn’t acted from a place of clarity about his own experience. He had noticed that he didn’t feel comfortable and still he went on with whatever they were doing. Because it was easier at the time.
Back in his apartment, clear about the values he didn’t know how to live by, Fred thinks through the past hours. What would he have needed to do differently?
He would have needed to recognize his discomfort at the prospect of going along with what they were doing. He did notice it on two occasions, but thinking back he's pretty sure there were other instances were his hunch didn't ripen into a full-blown thought. Had he noticed, he could have interrupted the flow of conversation to make time to investigate his own experience. He could have specified what he felt, discerned the nuances of his discomfort, and identified what it is that he cared about that he seemed to be about to ignore. After all that he still would have had to imagine at least one way to proceed, modeled what consequences might unfold and how he'd face them, and, finally, decided what to do next — and act on it.
Fred opens a beer. That's a lot of steps to get right. And, now that he thinks about it, some of these actions are not only hard on dates, but they are also hard to get right at dinners with his parents — another context where he struggles to act from a place of clarity about his own experience.
When Fred lives by any of his values, he enacts a sequence of small actions. Some of these actions are necessary — if he cannot take them, he cannot live by his value. And some of those necessary steps are hard. Those necessary and hard micro-actions we call Hard Steps. You know you've found one when you nod your head in reply to all of these questions:
- Is this step necessary for living by the value? If you could never do this, could you still live by the value?
- Is it hard (at least for some people, some of the time)? Do you know what exactly is hard about this?
- Is it specific enough to be clearly easier or harder in different situations? Where is it harder? Where is it easier?
- Is it general enough to apply across cases? Can you do this in a classroom, in a hospital, with a lover, friend, parent?
- Is it an instruction that could be followed? How would I do this? Do I need more detailed instructions? This one's tricky — sometimes you'll have to zoom in quite far to arrive at a level of specificity a clueless player could roll with and succeed. Rule of thumb: be more specific than you think you need to be. About three reformulations more specific than you think you need to be.
You can imagine Hard Steps as the weak links where attempts to live by values break down. Living by a value gets easier when our redesigns support agents in those critical moments when they have a tough time. That is why the HSC practices Spacejam and Redesign both spell-out the Hard Steps of a value to know what to focus on with their redesign.
It's not just helpful for design though. Spelling out the Hard Steps of my own values helps me pinpoint the small specific bits I struggle with. Far-out values seem more attainable when I know why exactly they are hard and what I can practice so as to make them easier to live by. Once I know what Hard Steps keep coming up for me, across values, I can practice those. I can even ask my friends to come up with practice spaces designed for the sole purpose of helping me grapple with specific Hard Steps. That's why I get really, really excited about Hard Steps.