When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you’ll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won’t be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work. As Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher put it as far back as 1790, “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections.”

When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.

We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.

We’re self preserving. Most of us would never intentionally push someone else down to get where we want to go. The key word here is “intentionally,” because intention involves thought. When we’re triggered and not thinking, our desire to protect ourselves first takes over. When layoffs loom at a company, otherwise decent people will quickly throw each other under the bus to keep a job. Sure, they wouldn’t consciously want to hurt their colleagues, but if it comes down to “them versus me,” they will ensure they come out on top. That’s biology.

I asked, “If you could pick one trait that would predict how someone would turn out, what would it be?”

“That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”

The most valuable people, he continued, weren’t the ones with the best initial ideas, but the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds. They were focused on outcome over ego. By contrast, he said, the people most likely to fail were those obsessed with minute details that supported their point of view.

It’s easy to underestimate the role ease plays in decision-making. Since behaviour follows the path of least resistance, a surprisingly successful approach is to add friction where you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.