Enterprise Methods: The Fallacy of “Motivation”

Motivation

In my “Power of Aiming” post,  I used the terms “aim” and “intention” in a manner that may have seemed interchangeable, but there is an important difference between these concepts.

Aiming is something we do as part of a method. Intention, on the other hand, is what guides our conscious actions even when we do not acknowledge its influence. In other words, we are always acting intentionally, but when we realize the importance of our intentionality, we can harness it by aiming. My “Power of Aiming” post is concerned with transforming intention into aiming, but the astute reader will detect something at the core of the concept that is rather striking. What does the idea of “intentionality” say about the common sense concept of “motivation” that is everywhere in our conversation about human behavior?

The ideas of motivation and motivators have been with us as long as the discipline of psychology. They are derived from observations of animal behavior in which some external stimulus produces a more-or-less predictable response. We then call the external stimulus, a motivator. From this point forward, the psychological theorist builds his house upon the detection and application of motivators that can be used to modify behavior in human animals.

Although it is clear that humans respond to various external stimuli, the variety, complexity, and unpredictability of their actions cannot be explained in terms of the stimulus-response model. For example, we will all agree that when we accidently put our hand on a hot stove burner, we respond with a reflex that pulls our hand away, but people at a fire-walking ceremony intentionally surpress the reflex in order too…. too. Well they have their reasons.

Because of the many problems posed by the idea of external motivators, some psychological theorists proposed that there are “internal” or “intrinsic” motivators and that these are more natural and better for human animals. The classic example of this is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But intrinsic motivation is nothing more putting the stimulus-response model inside rather than outside. I keeps us in the business of imposing ideas about motivators upon human actors.

I have come to the conclusion that the ideas of “motivation” and “motivators”, whether inside or outside the acting human being, are basically nonsense. Human action is not driven by response to motivational stimuli, it is driven by our intentionality as conscious creatures.

As human beings, we develop as creatures who are immersed in a world of symbolic meaning that is woven together by our theories of how the world works. Intentionality refers to the things we “mean” to do. It is rooted in the “meanings” we construct (the knowledge we create) as social creatures. An explanation of how intentionality is acquired in the development of the self is outside the scope of this entry but I do want to suggest the following.

As consciouses beings, we act in the world with intention, although as habitual creatures we do not always stop to examine our intentions. In intention, we make predictions —”if I do this, than that will happen”. Our theory of causation may be useful or it may be nonsense. It does not matter. What does matter is that there is always some intention that guides our action. If we want to bring people together in action — our families, workplaces, schools, and communities —- we will do better to put the idea of “motivators” in the trash can, and substitute the process of creating shared intentionality by which we come together to act powerfully toward shared aims of our own design. If we understand this, useful theory and methods will always follow.

In short, motivational theory deludes us into working ON ourselves and others, while a theory of knowledge creation leads us to work WITH ourselves and others to create a better world.