The most salient motivator
I was asking: How do we create a better solution to spark lasting change - in ourselves, in clients, in workplace culture?
Claude, powered by some of the best thinkers, pointed out a few blind spots in my thinking before offering an answer.
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Who exactly are you trying to help right now?
Because context changes the solution. -
Is it really behavior you need to change or what makes the behavior happen in the first place?
Like incentives. Like what gets praised, rewarded, celebrated. Or, as Matt Wallaert calls them, “pressures.”
That reminded me,
We don’t change behaviors directly. We change what makes those behaviors more desirable, rewarding, and available. And that changes what we do.
Humans are the ultimate adaptation machines. We’re plastic, always reshaping ourselves to maximize the useful things in our environment - we are designed to be shaped by what's around us.
So how about we design for it?
Resistance to change might be simply misaligned incentives
What Claude made me think of:
If you want to change behavior in companies, start here:
Ask, “What makes the current behavior the best option for people? What am I incentivizing the most? Are our intentions for the future and current incentives aligned?”
And it’s tricky to figure out because you need to evaluate both the stated and the invisible incentives.
Example: if you shut down any project that doesn’t bring immediate results, without acknowledging learnings or rewarding long-term progress, rewarding the team who tried, you’re sending a loud signal. You’re saying: short-term KPIs matter more than the long-term view. Bye-bye innovation for the brighter future. We need deliverables now!
We know what humans are motivated by:
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Social status and praise
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Freedom to make choices
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Progress and mastery
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A sense of purpose
So every action we take as leaders needs to intentionally design for those motivators. What we say, who we promote, what we fund, who's in the meetings, what gets our attention.
Salience: the driver of your every action
“Humans and other animals have difficulty paying attention to more than one item simultaneously, so they are faced with the challenge of continuously integrating and prioritizing different bottom-up and top-down influences.”
Another thing that Claude made me think of - Present Bias. It's this feature of our brain to redirect our actions and our energy towards what seems the most important RIGHT NOW.
That’s why Priming matters.
"The key aspect of priming is that it operates below the level of conscious awareness. You might not realize that your thoughts or behaviors are being influenced by something you were previously exposed to."
And that what brings me to this - the most salient motivator at any given moment drives the majority of our actions.
Which means the real work of change is designing the environment - physical spaces, words and communication, norms & defaults, defaults, technology, even who you surround yourself with.
Everything should remind you (and your people) of the things you want to be driven by.
That’s how we change what we do.
And what we do, over time, changes who we become. The culture of us.
My Thesis
The most powerful engine of change is not willpower.
It’s attention. Which we can easily redirect.
We can reshape automatic behaviors, and we can guide thoughtful decision-making - if we continuously bring our focused attention back to the things that drive the future we want.
Our job is simple, but not easy,
To become much better environment designers, fully aligned with the future we’re trying to grow into.
What’s one small environmental cue (that invisible incentive) you could design today to nudge yourself, or your team, toward the change you actually want?
Happy designing!
