In Brief
- Clear, well-constructed goals: they automatically stimulate the brain to set in motion to achieve them, making them essential for progress.
- Intrinsic motivation: critical to success, it is achieved by aligning goals with what really matters to people.
- Enhancement of executive functions: improving attention, memory, control and planning helps manage complex and challenging tasks.
- Transition to high-value activities: requires acquiring skills and strengthening motivation, creating an ideal mix for success.
- Overcoming ingrained habits: it takes positive experience and personal alignment to introduce new effective behaviors.
- Translating strategy into concrete actions: tools such as Now&Next make it easy to define measurable behaviors for each team.
- The feeling of progress: it is addictive and motivates teams to do their best, making work more meaningful and productive.
200 newsletters ago I began the research for what would later become MAKE PROGRESS. I realized that the business growth mechanisms in the market have one flaw: they do not consider the energy of people in organizations.
I wondered if it would be possible to create a growth management operating system that, instead of exploiting people, would give them back that energizing feeling of progress to keep them motivated, happy and productive, without having to constantly rebalance work and private life because of the feeling that one steals space from the other.
In the next few newsletters I have decided to share the science within the method-I will show you why MAKE PROGRESS with OKRs works and how to help yourself and your team achieve great things.
By the end of this series you will discover what happens to your brain when you work on strategy, when you decide on goals and targets, how to do this to scientifically have a better chance that they will be achieved, how to create the behavioral change your team needs to keep results consistent and execute a strategy that is truly humanly sustainable.
It will be a fascinating journey that will take you inside more advanced goal-driven growth management system built to connect strategy and execution with precision.
The problem with performance management
The reason many change management initiatives fail is that they are designed to boost employee performance by trying to make processes and relationships more efficient from an opportunity cost perspective.
The consultants suggest reorganizing the company so that there is less waste, fewer mistakes and, frankly, less fun as well.
You end up adding a new level of control made up of manager-baby sitters who accompany their colleagues in new rituals and new bureaucracy that produce a sweet and intoxicating feeling of control.
If you have had experience with the introduction of agile or management control methodologies you will have realized that the people happiest with the change are those at the top who are not measured, while others just feel more pressure on results and less enthusiasm.
This makes logical sense only if we consider people as machines that produce their output in a reliable and predictable way, but obviously this cannot be so. Organizations are made up of people, and it would be best to take into account the now extensive research on neuroscience applied to goal management and behavioral change.
But we are here to change things!
The psychology of goals
Our brain is built around the concept of a goal so much so that the moment we have one, clear and well-constructed, we automatically set out to reach and exceed it!
But first we need to agree on the definition of goal.
Formally, a goal is a desired outcome that is not automatically realized and requires intervention. (Kruglanski et al., 2002).
According to this definition, cooking lunch or going out to dinner can be considered a goal. But these things, precisely because our brains already work that way, are not considered goals in the meaning we give them here.
Professor Elliot T. Berkman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon has a better definition: goals are usually things we desire but have difficulty achieving, even though we know they are achievable.
To achieve these goals, we cannot simply wait for things to go our way or continue to do our activities in the same way as always. There is a need to do something new or different than in the past. This requires:
- Skills: know the steps to be taken and have the necessary skills.
- Motivation: the desire and importance attached to the outcome.
That’s why it’s hard to achieve goals: because to do so, you have to change! And change is hard!
Drivers of change
We can draw a diagram by plotting skills and motivation on Cartesian axes and find that there are 4 areas in which our goals fall and consequently the actions we need to take to achieve them.
(counterclockwise)
- Complex repetitive tasks (high skills, low motivation) such as completing a detailed report. Here habits reside, often triggered by external factors and low motivation, here there is commitment even in the absence of a goal (Wood & Neal, 2007).
- Simple repetitive tasks (low skills, low motivation) like doing data entry. Here are all the things we do without thinking.
- New but simple activities (low skill, high motivation) such as learning how to use a new business software. In this quadrant there might be activities that are not necessarily enjoyable but need to be done, such as learning new business software because it was decided so.
- New and complex activities (high skill, high motivation): like working launching a new product. Here are the goals that everyone cares most about, and that’s why they give their best!
But moving from quadrant to quadrant requires commitment.
In order to move from low-value goals and thus activities to high-value ones, it is necessary to acquire skills. It is a long process because you often have to study a lot, put in a lot of effort and challenge yourself.
Once a person has acquired the necessary skills, motivation becomes the key to tackling more complex tasks. But motivation cannot be learned, rather it must arise from within because one deems that goal important for oneself.
This is where management efficiency collides with psychology.
Increasing skills
When deciding to increase skills, it is critical to understand that you are working on four advanced cognitive skills.
The first is attention, which is the ability to maintain focus on important things. The second is working memory, which enables us to manage and update information. The third is control of distractions and external impulses, which allows us to build an ideal environment in which to function at our best. Finally, the fourth is planning, which is the ability to organize and prepare complex actions and coordinate future activities.
These skills enable the achievement of goals, both new and challenging, by moving from the bottom to the top of the behavior graph.
These skills are also called executive functions and their execution requires considerable effort, concentration and exertion. They are conscious functions which means that it is really the person who chooses to activate them.
Our brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, is designed to be stimulated by new challenges and not to perform repetitive actions; it gets bored easily. The anterior cingulate cortex allocates mental resources according to work, deciding to distribute them even at the expense of more stimulating activities.
However, there are limits to executive functions: they are so demanding that one can only focus on a few activities at a time. This involves making choices about what is important and what is not, generating stress. Multitasking does not work for this very reason: our brains can do one thing at a time in the same area; in fact, we can walk and whistle, but not do two mathematical calculations at the same time.
Over time, the prefrontal cortex turns these simple repetitive activities into habits to save energy, thus making them automatic as we become more experienced. This is why an initially complex activity such as driving, over time, becomes natural and we do it without thinking about it.
The practical implications? If we become better only by increasing skills, we create habits and activities will seem easier and easier because the brain is built to conserve energy. We will become better, yes, but we will also become more bored — unless we also increase motivation.
Increasing motivation
To increase motivation, it is crucial to understand self-determination theory, which distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation concerns actions performed to obtain rewards or are externally imposed. Goals in this area are less likely to be achieved because they do not really interest the person who perceives a strong feeling of external control; they are tasks to be done because they are mandatory.
Intrinsic motivation is about what we really care about, activities that we do for the sheer pleasure of doing them, without expecting rewards because they are aligned with our self. This is critical: to set goals with high probability of success and maximize people’s engagement.
We can define motivation as the strength of the desire to achieve an outcome, regardless of the pleasure experienced in doing so. For example, changing a smelly diaper is not pleasant, but it is in line with the parent’s intrinsic motivation.
Thus, there are two forces that govern motivation: want and pleasure.
Wanting is related to the desire to change one’s behavior, such as changing diapers to become a better parent.
Pleasure, on the other hand, is related to the satisfaction of having achieved that desire.
In the balance between want and pleasure, a crucial phenomenon is triggered: a reward system that makes future behavior more likely (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972).
When I understand that I am doing something important related to my intrinsic motivations, I receive a reward in the form of a dopamine rush, a feeling of pleasure that will lead me to have that behavior again.
I will never tire of saying that the feeling of progress is addictive!
To make this happen, it is necessary to align goals with individual identity (more on this in the section Inside MAKE PROGRESS).
When motivation increases, along with the increase in skills, the fourth quadrant in the behavior graph is reached. These are the goals have the greatest chance of being met and exceeded.
Why is it difficult to change?
The first reason is that habits are ingrained in people because old behaviors have frequently been rewarded, while new ones still have not. And it is estimated that it takes 5 new positive experiences to abandon an old habit. Indeed, when it is said that the older we get, the harder it is to change, it is because there is less and less time to relive 5 times the many experiences that have made us who we are.
The second reason is because people assign subjective value to actions based on their own values and past experiences.
Personal identity and subjective value are closely related: in fact, we tend to place more value on that which reinforces a positive self-image (Greenwald, 1980; Pelham & Swann, 1989).
That is why telling strategy through financial numbers is not very useful, since it is of interest to only a few people, but for everyone else those numbers are far removed from one’s daily work and it is very difficult to understand how to influence them. In doing so, financial goals become extrinsic, that is, far removed from one’s own identity and unattainable with one’s own abilities.
Inside MAKE PROGRESS
At MAKE PROGRESS, I and qualified coaches, we help the teams we work with translate strategy into concrete, measurable behaviors so that everyone can “see” their contribution.
When the Strategy reaches a good level of definition we use the Now&Next to design how each team will need to evolve its behavior to most effectively support the strategy.
This, among the proprietary tools in our OKR Toolkit, is among the most important. Compiling it correctly means:
- Get a very precise strategic execution manual that includes behaviors and KPIs, for each team and sub-team;
- obtain, thanks to a numerical indce we call Strategy Gap, the sequence of priorities with which to activate the strategic motion;
- imparting a strong acceleration and increase in the writing accuracy of OKRs;
- Equip themselves with a schema for interpreting future strategic outcomes.
With Now&Next, people can protect and reinforce their identity and suggest ways of execution aligned with it. Goals are not imposed from above, but proposed based on the understanding of strategic direction.
One of the first positive effects we see in the pearls that teams learn to use. They know the word carryover is being replaced by the word supports because that is exactly what happens: people support the strategy with their best work.
Returning to our pattern, as skills increase (from bottom to top), so does motivation (from left to right).
In conclusion (for the time being)
This is only a small part of the science used to build the program MAKE PROGRESS, which is not simply about cost reduction and technical efficiency, but about creating a business operating system that leverages psychology to get the best out of people to create, by-design, that energizing feeling of progress.
If you enjoyed this strategy note, I encourage you to save it and share it with your colleagues or those who might find it useful to better understand the scientific mechanisms of goal setting and the evolution of organizational behavior. These tools are critical to creating a strong, cohesive and motivated team capable of accomplishing great things together.
If you would like to see the tools that make up the method in detail, I invite you to choose a time from my calendar or request a training session for you and your team on the entire toolkit at MAKE PROGRESS.
See you in the next note, where we will continue this fascinating journey into the science inside MAKE PROGRESS.
In the meantime, let me have your feedback, I care.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
