Rollerblades & Lemonade

 

Recently, my five-year-old daughter took up rollerblading course as part of her planned school holiday activities. However, after the first lesson and a few bad falls, she developed some symptoms of basophobia and was quite reluctant to continue with the rest of the lessons. In order to encourage her, I promised to make her lemonade, something she could not resist, as a reward after each of the lessons. As I had expected, she pushed herself to attend the next few lessons for the sake of the lemonade, of course. Something strange happened after that. Once she had mastered the fundamental footwork and managed to balance herself on the wheels, the psychological fear in her subsided and the long repressed interest on the sport bounced back in full zeal, overwhelming the phobia. I no longer needed to coax her to go for lesson anymore. Instead, she was the one that kept asking – “When is my next lesson?”

I was intrigued by my little daughter’s behavior. It reminded me on what we have been doing on change management and implementation. When you want people to adopt and adapt to change, what do you normally do to motivate and convince them? According to Daniel Pink in his book “Drive”, there are three types of motivation that affect our behaviors (watch the interesting video on Drive below). 

It is interesting to see how these motivations worked out in the little endeavor of my daughter mentioned above. She started with a biological desire to try out a new sport which was immediately crushed when the psychological fear of falling developed in her. My attempt of rewarding her with lemonade as an extrinsic motivation worked as expected and corroborated with what Daniel Pink purported that ’carrots and sticks model works well for tasks that require only mechanical skill’. However, once she grasped the basic skills required for the sport, the intrinsic motivation of mastery kicked in and took over. The joy and satisfaction through mastery were so immense that the effect of the lemonade was dwarfed.

What can we learn from this to help us in change management? Clearly, the effect of intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation and we should always work towards the course of intrinsic motivation in order to achieve maximum impact in implementing change. But, this does not make extrinsic motivation irrelevant. When applied properly in the right context and timing, extrinsic motivation does have its values – e.g. the way lemonade was used as a temporary reward to encourage my daughter to continue with the rollerblading lessons. The key here is to know when extrinsic or intrinsic motivation works best for you in a particular situation and devise a way to insinuate them in the change process. Below are a few tips to guide you along the way.