MOVE: July 18, 2014

Motivation and the Thin Red Line

Spoiler Summary: Are you playing with a full deck?  How about a stacked deck? Think your choices are entirely yours in the moment you make them? Are you programmed to change course when you see red?  Well.....

Motivation is a tricky thing.  Why do we choose to do what we do and avoid the "other choice"?  Why do we skip the things we know we "should do" in favor of something less important? It's a critical question for everyone. Whether you deal (or even dabble) on the professional front in areas related to human behavior such as safety, well-being, prevention, performance, etc or whether you see it up close and personal as a parent, colleague or friend - we are all impacted by motivation and the choices it influences.

Workplace Health & Safety may be one of the more obvious domains impacted by choice.  If given two choices and we were to choose the "right one" more often or at least the "better one" most of the time, we'd clearly shift the odds toward the long-term outcome we want - staying healthy and safe every single day.  Although incredibly logical (and demonstrated many times over) it seems the science of influence and choice is a bit more nuanced than that.....and therefore a whole lot more sloppy to handle in the real-world.

One critical concept that (unfortunately) muddies the water, is that we are not wiping the slate clean each day - so every time we're faced with a choice we've made before, we are making a slightly more biased choice now.  Sort of like slowly stacking the deck before we "pick a card", the outcome of our choices becomes more predictable and reliable the more times we face the situation. The more reps, the more bias. Said another way: unless it is a truly brand-new experience, each choice is influenced by the outcome of the last choice we made in a similar situation.  We are learning machines - hard wired to get more efficient (and therefore expend less energy) based on past success or failure. The more we learn, the faster and more accurately we can predict the outcome of our choice all with less effort. In situations where we've figured out the formula and it's still working this is an enormous asset, one which appears to have helped us survive.  However in situations where the landscape has changed so significantly that the current formula no longer works (i.e. current health crisis among other "grand challenges" society faces), this same mechanism makes it very difficult for us to truly change.  Despite knowing that a new choice is needed to get a new outcome, we are still strongly drawn to the previous choice.   

The pull is so strong in fact that researchers working in the world of "Big Data" have been able to predict the choices (i.e. behaviors) of entire populations with mind-blowing accuracy. For example, researchers from MIT were able to predict whether a person would exercise (closely tied to the habits and influence of friends it turns out) as well as how sociable they would be on any given day (closely tied to their sleep the night before).....but that's not all. In another study they were able to show that the ease of connecting with others - literally how many barriers (physical, social, etc) we face in our effort to connect and communicate with colleagues - strongly predicts performance.  So imagine if these researchers wanted to know who the next "all-star" (in whatever group and realm) was going to be? If they knew who got bad-sleep AND who had a sedentary social-circle they could likely do so....not every time, but more often than not.  

Could you and I use the same information to predict (at the personal level) whether we were on track to meet our goals if we had similar information? It's an intriguing question.......but we can't say for sure....yet. However YOU can play along in helping us learn more. Next time you see one of the members of the Pro-Activity team, be sure to ask them if they are "tracking" and if so, be sure to get a glimpse of their wrist.....check the sensor they're wearing and see if it's clear or if it's showing the "red-line of shame" (indicating they've been sedentary for an hour or more)......ask them if in addition to hitting the six-hour minimum, if their sleep has been restful lately.  They'll probably hate me for suggesting this....and more than likely I'll be the one caught with the red line of shame for doing so (we can get into the psychology of "red" another time).....whether we like it or not, at the personal and population level, the data is the data.....and it shows that motivation does not simply come down to choice....it's a social game, so figuring out how to get around the barriers and actively join in is the new formula for success.  Health, Safety, Prevention and Well-being are just too important to all of us for any one of us to have the deck stacked against us.

Have a great weekend,

Mike E.