The mystery of human potential and transforming change outcomes
From the 1970’s onwards a range of social research emerged that should have revolutionised the accepted wisdom about human motivation, people management, and change. This work challenged the prevailing approach to managing people in organisations and should have led to a revolution of new evidence-based approaches to business management, human resource management, leadership and change that could have improved the effective implementation of strategy and change and unleashed more of the human talent that is largely underutilised in people’s lives at work. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
In fact some of the academics who did this research like Edward Deci were ostracised and even expelled from their academic positions in business schools – a not uncommon outcome for those who challenge the status quo in academia as well as in organisations and society.
An inconvenient truth?
As an example, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s classic research on motivation beginning in the 1980s at the University of Rochester, challenged accepted wisdom in the worlds of academia and business (and it should have shaken up human resources) on the most effective kinds of rewards to shape behaviour and improve performance.
Their work showed that extrinsic rewards such as paying people incentives to improve their performance, in most cases, reduces motivation and productivity. They showed that extrinsic rewards are more likely to produce negative outcomes and encourage dysfunctional behaviour whereas intrinsic rewards (such as experiencing pleasure in the work itself) are far more powerful in producing positive outcomes and behaviour change. Business and human resources however conveniently ignored their findings. It just wasn't "rational".
The work of these researchers including Edward Deci & Richard Ryan, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Carol Dweck resurfaced in the early 2000’s with the emergence of the school of positive psychology. But this again failed to create the revolution that should have occurred to challenge the prevailing approaches to "rational man" and people management in business schools, government and private enterprise.
What motivates people to do stuff?
So what does this evidence suggest? It is most neatly summarised in Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) in which he distils forty years of research on what motivates people into three universal human needs – the need for autonomy, mastery and purpose. Pink (2009, p.145) writes:
“The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-punishment drive, but our third drive – our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose. …The science confirms what we already know in our hearts.”
Pink (2009, p.111) defines what he calls the third drive as:
These needs are at the heart of what it means to be uniquely human and different from all other animals. But whether this aspect of our humanity is satisfied at work depends on the workplace environment. That includes the need for some of our other more basic human social and survival needs to be met so that the environment is safe enough for us to shift our focus to these other higher order needs.
Why change our management practices?
Research suggests these three needs have the potential to turn around much of the underperformance associated with low levels of staff engagement and the high failure rates of strategy and change.
The returns could be substantial. Gallup estimates the low staff engagement in the United States alone is costing business an estimated $300 billion per annum in lost productivity (Pink, 2009 p.111). Add to this the cost of 80% of major strategy and change failing, and the benefits would be huge.
Four ways to unleash human potential and transform business results
So here are four ways human instincts and needs can provide the secret to transforming business outcomes and reversing the poor results from major change programs in organisations.
1. Dealing with basic human instincts first
The first step is to move away from the unhelpful label of “resistance to change” and understand the basic human instincts that your change efforts are likely to stimulate. You can then build in plans to either harness or minimise these normal human reactions. O’Keeffe’s nine basic human instincts we covered in another article on "Denying Human Instincts Undermines Change" is the best place to start. Acknowledging natural human emotions, bringing issues out into the open and talking about fears, providing social support, and ensuring a fair process for change are all important ways to work constructively with these normal human instincts and reduce roadblocks to change.
I have also found that providing opportunities to satisfy people’s higher order needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose can be a critical element in shifting people’s focus away from their fears and giving them hope they can be part of creating something worthwhile.
2. Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives
“The opposite to autonomy is control. …Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.” (Pink p. 110)
Understanding the world through the eyes of those affected and giving them a chance to have input and influence decisions that affect them, is at the heart of people feeling less powerless and afraid during change. This is also the foundation for engagement and provides much better results because the people impacted know the realities of how things work far better than the "experts".
Giving people choice and a voice supports engagement and a sense of a fair process that fosters people’s willing cooperation and creative problem solving that are central to any complex system change being successful.
3. Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that maters
“Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.” (Dweck, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, 2000, p. 41)
People naturally want to learn, solve problems and get better at things they care about and they will do this when they are engaged. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the leading researchers on human potential points out that:
“The best moments [of our lives] usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” (Flow, 1990, p3)
Surprisingly, Csikszentmihalyi found this state, which he called “flow” was more likely to be achieved at work than at leisure because the challenges and difficulty is usually greater at work. (Pink p.129)
As successful strategy development, implementation and organisational change present some of the most complex challenges in organisations, if people are effectively engaged they can produce some of the greatest opportunities for human growth, problem solving and capability development, if we approach the engagement of impacted people in this way.
4. Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
“The most deeply motivated people - not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied – hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.” (Pink p.133)
This explains the power of a compelling vision to motivate and engage people in the shaping and delivery of strategy and change – sometimes to the point that they can achieve almost impossible things. It also explains why I have always found that people at any level in an organisation (from blue collar workers to top executives) are invariably energised and engaged when they are contributing to a larger purpose - like improving the lives of people in their community.
We can see this pride and sense of purpose all around us if we look. Only yesterday I was watching a program on TV where the construction workers building a landmark high rise tower in New York city were proudly describing how they were undertaking the challenging work of constructing an innovative new design in this densely populated city. A young supervisor’s face lit up when he described how he was looking forward to pointing out to his children and grandchildren (many years into the future) how he had been involved in building this land-mark building in his city.
Goals can give meaning to life and, as Pink points out, organisations are likely to be more successful if they focus on purpose maximising rather than profit maximising goals. To be effective, leaders of change need to be facilitators who bring people together, give them hope and purpose that overrides their fears, and create an environment that allows people the opportunity to learn, grow and contribute to creating value that no single individual could create alone. This is a secret to achieving the contribution needed from people to implement successful strategy and change.
So what’s stopping us?
For at least four decades there has been a clear mismatch between what science knows and what business and government does. Much of this research suggests that the motivation and performance associated with autonomy, mastery and purpose is not just a nice-to-have, but is the oxygen for people’s souls and what makes us human and able to achieve amazing performance. So the interesting question is why has it been ignored for so long in most of our organisations?
Maybe some of the human instincts and dynamics we don’t want to own up to explain why we persist in denying the research data and our own intuitive knowledge about the kind of environment we should be creating in our organisations if we were truly serious about organisational performance and change.
We need to challenge many of our dominant beliefs and practices about how we manage people in our society and organisations, our human resource practices, and the workplace environments we create that stifle human happiness, personal fulfilment, and organisational performance that would make our society a better place to live.
Maybe a 20% success rate in strategy and change is the best we can achieve until we can somehow face up to this.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan helps design and implement people-centred strategy, transformation and performance improvement. Her work involves challenging mind-sets, shifting culture, and engaging people to improve service delivery and performance. Her approach taps into the enormous unused potential of people in organisations to deliver exponentially better results with the right leadership, engagement and strategy.
In fact some of the academics who did this research like Edward Deci were ostracised and even expelled from their academic positions in business schools – a not uncommon outcome for those who challenge the status quo in academia as well as in organisations and society.
An inconvenient truth?
As an example, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s classic research on motivation beginning in the 1980s at the University of Rochester, challenged accepted wisdom in the worlds of academia and business (and it should have shaken up human resources) on the most effective kinds of rewards to shape behaviour and improve performance.
Their work showed that extrinsic rewards such as paying people incentives to improve their performance, in most cases, reduces motivation and productivity. They showed that extrinsic rewards are more likely to produce negative outcomes and encourage dysfunctional behaviour whereas intrinsic rewards (such as experiencing pleasure in the work itself) are far more powerful in producing positive outcomes and behaviour change. Business and human resources however conveniently ignored their findings. It just wasn't "rational".
The work of these researchers including Edward Deci & Richard Ryan, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Carol Dweck resurfaced in the early 2000’s with the emergence of the school of positive psychology. But this again failed to create the revolution that should have occurred to challenge the prevailing approaches to "rational man" and people management in business schools, government and private enterprise.
What motivates people to do stuff?
So what does this evidence suggest? It is most neatly summarised in Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) in which he distils forty years of research on what motivates people into three universal human needs – the need for autonomy, mastery and purpose. Pink (2009, p.145) writes:
“The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-punishment drive, but our third drive – our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose. …The science confirms what we already know in our hearts.”
Pink (2009, p.111) defines what he calls the third drive as:
- Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives
- Mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters, and
- Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
These needs are at the heart of what it means to be uniquely human and different from all other animals. But whether this aspect of our humanity is satisfied at work depends on the workplace environment. That includes the need for some of our other more basic human social and survival needs to be met so that the environment is safe enough for us to shift our focus to these other higher order needs.
Why change our management practices?
Research suggests these three needs have the potential to turn around much of the underperformance associated with low levels of staff engagement and the high failure rates of strategy and change.
The returns could be substantial. Gallup estimates the low staff engagement in the United States alone is costing business an estimated $300 billion per annum in lost productivity (Pink, 2009 p.111). Add to this the cost of 80% of major strategy and change failing, and the benefits would be huge.
Four ways to unleash human potential and transform business results
So here are four ways human instincts and needs can provide the secret to transforming business outcomes and reversing the poor results from major change programs in organisations.
1. Dealing with basic human instincts first
The first step is to move away from the unhelpful label of “resistance to change” and understand the basic human instincts that your change efforts are likely to stimulate. You can then build in plans to either harness or minimise these normal human reactions. O’Keeffe’s nine basic human instincts we covered in another article on "Denying Human Instincts Undermines Change" is the best place to start. Acknowledging natural human emotions, bringing issues out into the open and talking about fears, providing social support, and ensuring a fair process for change are all important ways to work constructively with these normal human instincts and reduce roadblocks to change.
I have also found that providing opportunities to satisfy people’s higher order needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose can be a critical element in shifting people’s focus away from their fears and giving them hope they can be part of creating something worthwhile.
2. Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives
“The opposite to autonomy is control. …Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.” (Pink p. 110)
Understanding the world through the eyes of those affected and giving them a chance to have input and influence decisions that affect them, is at the heart of people feeling less powerless and afraid during change. This is also the foundation for engagement and provides much better results because the people impacted know the realities of how things work far better than the "experts".
Giving people choice and a voice supports engagement and a sense of a fair process that fosters people’s willing cooperation and creative problem solving that are central to any complex system change being successful.
3. Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that maters
“Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.” (Dweck, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, 2000, p. 41)
People naturally want to learn, solve problems and get better at things they care about and they will do this when they are engaged. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the leading researchers on human potential points out that:
“The best moments [of our lives] usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” (Flow, 1990, p3)
Surprisingly, Csikszentmihalyi found this state, which he called “flow” was more likely to be achieved at work than at leisure because the challenges and difficulty is usually greater at work. (Pink p.129)
As successful strategy development, implementation and organisational change present some of the most complex challenges in organisations, if people are effectively engaged they can produce some of the greatest opportunities for human growth, problem solving and capability development, if we approach the engagement of impacted people in this way.
4. Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
“The most deeply motivated people - not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied – hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.” (Pink p.133)
This explains the power of a compelling vision to motivate and engage people in the shaping and delivery of strategy and change – sometimes to the point that they can achieve almost impossible things. It also explains why I have always found that people at any level in an organisation (from blue collar workers to top executives) are invariably energised and engaged when they are contributing to a larger purpose - like improving the lives of people in their community.
We can see this pride and sense of purpose all around us if we look. Only yesterday I was watching a program on TV where the construction workers building a landmark high rise tower in New York city were proudly describing how they were undertaking the challenging work of constructing an innovative new design in this densely populated city. A young supervisor’s face lit up when he described how he was looking forward to pointing out to his children and grandchildren (many years into the future) how he had been involved in building this land-mark building in his city.
Goals can give meaning to life and, as Pink points out, organisations are likely to be more successful if they focus on purpose maximising rather than profit maximising goals. To be effective, leaders of change need to be facilitators who bring people together, give them hope and purpose that overrides their fears, and create an environment that allows people the opportunity to learn, grow and contribute to creating value that no single individual could create alone. This is a secret to achieving the contribution needed from people to implement successful strategy and change.
So what’s stopping us?
For at least four decades there has been a clear mismatch between what science knows and what business and government does. Much of this research suggests that the motivation and performance associated with autonomy, mastery and purpose is not just a nice-to-have, but is the oxygen for people’s souls and what makes us human and able to achieve amazing performance. So the interesting question is why has it been ignored for so long in most of our organisations?
Maybe some of the human instincts and dynamics we don’t want to own up to explain why we persist in denying the research data and our own intuitive knowledge about the kind of environment we should be creating in our organisations if we were truly serious about organisational performance and change.
We need to challenge many of our dominant beliefs and practices about how we manage people in our society and organisations, our human resource practices, and the workplace environments we create that stifle human happiness, personal fulfilment, and organisational performance that would make our society a better place to live.
Maybe a 20% success rate in strategy and change is the best we can achieve until we can somehow face up to this.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan helps design and implement people-centred strategy, transformation and performance improvement. Her work involves challenging mind-sets, shifting culture, and engaging people to improve service delivery and performance. Her approach taps into the enormous unused potential of people in organisations to deliver exponentially better results with the right leadership, engagement and strategy.