Don’t Accept the Defaults

When you install a new app, you get default settings for how it operates—what you see, how you’re notified, when it interrupts you. Most people assume the designers set those defaults to give the best possible experience. You’d be wrong.

As I wrote a while back for The Control Scale blog in a post aptly called Don’t Accept the Defaults:

Defaults aren’t neutral. They’re invisible levers, quietly pulling you in someone else’s direction. They hum in the background like an operating system you didn’t install but are forced to live with. And unless you stop to reset them, they’ll run your life—and your business—on autopilot.

The danger of defaults is not that they’re wrong, but that they’re invisible. They run in the background, shaping choices you didn’t know you were making.

A Nobel Nudge

Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in behavioral economics, made this point famous in his book Nudge. He showed how defaults quietly shape behavior: people rarely change them, so whoever sets the defaults ends up steering the outcome. Auto-enrolling employees in retirement plans leads to dramatically higher savings rates. Switching organ donation from opt-in to opt-out increases participation almost overnight.

The lesson? Defaults are never neutral. They’re levers of influence—nudges—that serve someone’s goals. The only question is whether they serve yours.

AI is making this even trickier. By design, GenAI gives you the default answer—the most probable next word, the statistically likely summary. It feels authoritative because it’s fluent, but it’s just the average of what’s already out there. Don’t confuse probability with clarity. If you don’t question the AI defaults, you’ll end up sounding like everyone else.

From apps to business defaults

We accept the defaults in various forms and functions:

• Metrics: “Fastest,” “cheapest,” “best.” Superlatives are the marketing default. But as I wrote in People Like Bad Pizza, what matters is not the absolute but the context—how your customer measures success. If you accept the default metric, you end up chasing a scoreboard that doesn’t win you the game.

• Collaboration: Email became the default communication tool because, for a while, it was the only option. It was never designed for real-time teamwork, yet we still treat it as the backbone of collaboration. The result? Overloaded inboxes, fractured projects, and teams that confuse activity for alignment. (Another The Control Scale blog post, We Don’t Know How To Do Group Projects, goes deeper on this.)

• Product Categories: Accepting defaults here isn’t always bad—it’s one strategy. When I started at Freshworks, our playbook was to find established categories like customer service or IT service management and build competitive products. Those weren’t winner-take-all markets, so there was room to compete—especially moving down market. Improvements in functionality, user experience, and pricing helped us carve out share.

Another way to play is to innovate the category. That’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, you set yourself apart with clear differentiation. On the other, you pay the price of education. Customers are used to the old defaults. They have to learn to accept your new defaults before they’ll buy in.

Even careers come with defaults. Get a job. Climb the ladder. Move from manager to director to VP. But what if the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall? One of the most pivotal roles of my career started with no default at all—no template, no job description. It was disorienting, but it forced me to define success on my own terms. That role helped me create an entirely new function that took a company from scrappy startup to IPO.

I’ve also seen the reverse. I've sat in on startup pitches where a founder pitched with the “standard” deck investors have seen a hundred times before. They lost me before the 4th slide. Not because the idea was bad—but because the defaults made it look like everything else.

A quick rule of thumb:

• Accept defaults when they reduce friction and don’t compromise clarity. (Example: entering an established category where customers already know how to buy.)

• Challenge defaults when they distort success metrics or hide your differentiation. (Example: rewriting the rules of your category—or inventing a new one.)

Leaders know which defaults to keep and which to reset.

Berkson's Bits

Show up for people. That's it. We all do that, we change the world for the better.

What I'm (re-) Reading...

As I was writing this issue and included the reference to Richard Thaler's work in behavioral economics I was inspired to re-read his book Nudge. Would love to know what you think.

Defaults are silent saboteurs. They save you time in the short run but cost you clarity in the long run. They make you feel like you’re moving forward while quietly keeping you inside the box someone else built.

So next time you find yourself on autopilot, ask:

• Who set this default?

• What outcome does it serve?

• Does that outcome align with mine?

You don’t need to reinvent every wheel. But you do need to choose which ones are worth spinning.

Because here’s the bottom line: founders, creators, and change-makers don’t just live with defaults. They define them for everyone else.

What defaults are you living with? What defaults are you creating in your work life or personal life?

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan