The Diderot Effect
There is something curious about improvement: it rarely changes only the thing we improve.
Imagine bringing one beautiful new piece of furniture into your home. It fits perfectly. It is better made, more comfortable and perhaps more contemporary than what it replaced.
And then something unexpected happens. The table beside it suddenly looks dated. The carpet no longer seems quite right. The lighting feels wrong. Nothing else in the room has changed. But your perception of it has.
There is a behavioral idea that helps explain this phenomenon: the Diderot Effect.
Its name comes from the 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot and his essay Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown. In it, Diderot reflects on replacing his familiar old robe with a luxurious new one. What might seem like a simple upgrade had an unexpected consequence: the new robe made the possessions around him appear less fitting by comparison. What had once seemed perfectly adequate no longer felt quite right.
Centuries later, the idea feels remarkably familiar.
We experience versions of it everywhere – in what we buy, how we work, the technology we use and the experiences we have.
Once we experience something better, our expectations change.
And that is where the Diderot Effect becomes particularly interesting to me.
Better creates a new reference point
We often assume that we evaluate things independently.
Is this product good? Is this service fast? Is this process simple? Is this technology useful? But “good”, “fast”, “simple” and “useful” are rarely absolute standards.
We compare. And once we experience something significantly better, our point of comparison changes.
The old chair did not become worse when the new table arrived. We simply started looking at it differently.
Technology has accelerated this phenomenon enormously.
Once an application responds instantly, waiting several seconds somewhere else becomes noticeable. Once a process can be completed with two clicks, another requiring five steps begins to feel complicated. Once information becomes available in real time, waiting until tomorrow starts to feel slow.
The technology did more than solve an individual problem.
It reset the expectation.
And that is where the Diderot Effect becomes particularly interesting for business.
Every improvement has a second effect
When businesses innovate, we naturally focus on the first effect:
What became better? The product became faster. The interface became simpler. The process became automated. A new capability became available.
But perhaps leaders should pay just as much attention to the second effect:
What does this improvement make people expect next?
Because customers do not experience individual improvements in isolation.
When one part of an experience becomes remarkably simple, complexity elsewhere suddenly becomes much harder to accept. Instant communication can make a slow response elsewhere more noticeable. A sophisticated new feature can make an outdated part of the same product suddenly stand out.
In other words, improving one part of an experience can unintentionally raise the standard for everything around it.
This is not an argument against progress. It is an argument for understanding its consequences.
The real challenge is coherence
There is a temptation in technology to respond to rising expectations with more.
More features. More automation. More integrations. More channels. More functionality.
But if every improvement leads us to add something else simply because everything must “keep up”, we risk creating a different version of Diderot’s dilemma.
The answer cannot always be more. Sometimes the answer is better integration. Sometimes it is simplification. Sometimes it is removing friction between things that already exist. And sometimes it is recognizing that something works perfectly well and does not need to be reinvented.
This is where I believe the distinction between innovation and accumulation becomes important.
Accumulation asks: What else can we add?
Innovation should ask: What will make the whole experience better?
Those are not necessarily the same question.
Think in ecosystems, not individual products
This is particularly relevant in technology, where almost nothing operates independently anymore.
A platform connects to another platform. One communication channel complements another. Data moves between systems. APIs connect businesses. Automation connects processes that were previously separate.
Every new capability becomes part of a larger environment. And when one part of that environment changes, it can influence how the rest is experienced.
That is why I believe good technology starts with understanding that environment before deciding what should be added to it.
In messaging, where we have spent many years building technology at HORISEN, this becomes very tangible. Businesses do not experience SMS, RCS, APIs, routing, automation or business applications as interesting technologies simply because they exist. What ultimately matters is whether these elements work together in a way that solves a real problem.
Perhaps that is one reason I have always been more interested in building useful systems than chasing individual features. It takes considerably more time and effort, but I have always believed the result is worth it.
Technology should create possibilities, certainly. But those possibilities need coherence.
Progress changes the baseline
Perhaps this is the most important lesson I take from the Diderot Effect.
Improvement changes more than the thing being improved. It changes the baseline.
When we make something faster, people learn that faster is possible. When we make something simpler, unnecessary complexity becomes harder to accept. When we remove friction from one part of an experience, friction elsewhere becomes more visible.
Yesterday’s “good” has not necessarily become objectively worse. But once people have experienced better, good may no longer feel good enough.
For leaders, that creates both an opportunity and a responsibility.
Innovation should therefore not end with the question:
Did we make this better?
We should also ask:
What expectations did we change by making it better?
And perhaps one question more:
Does everything around it still make sense now that we have made that change?
The idea behind the Diderot Effect began with a new robe and a simple observation that remains remarkably relevant centuries later:
Changing one element can change how we perceive everything around it.
For those of us building businesses and technology today, that may be worth remembering every time we decide what to improve next.
Fabrizio Salanitri
Founder & CEO, HORISEN
