Why You Can’t Motivate People, Springboards, and Biases

We would like to think we’re pretty rational thinkers. As leaders and growth chasers, we’ll evaluate our options, think critically about predicting what actions we should take to control our destiny and respond versus react.

Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman, who passed away in 2024, would argue that we’re far less rational than we’d like to think we are. He and Amos Tversky wrote about this concept in Thinking, Fast and Slow which suggests that humans have two systems of thinking – fast thinking and slow thinking. While most of the time we think we’re engaged in slow thinking, much of our experience is actually in fast thinking – gut feelings, intuition and the subconscious seeking of patterns. Kahneman and Tversky popularized several human biases (see list below**) – and Kahneman specifically highlights a fascinating concept regarding motivation in one of my favorite podcast series The Knowledge Project. This concept on motivation is what we'll be breaking down this week.

Here’s the thing – you think you can change people. We all do. From the clients we work with, to the family members we disagree with, to that service representative you wished would have been nicer, we think we have more control over people’s motivations than we actually do. The TLDR on Kahneman’s conversation suggests that motivation exists on two poles – either push people or remove constraints, the latter of which is something I’d challenge us all to do a bit more of in our daily/weekly work with others.

Pushing people is something you already do. Push people to go to the gym, push people to not yell, push people to move faster in line, push people to get their work done on time, push kids to do their homework, push family to respect your boundaries, push your spouse to…well, let’s not touch that last one, but I’m sure there’s some pushing happening there.

Stop pushing. Rather, ask:

This week, take some accountability on the situation you’re in with the person you’re trying to push and think about constraints instead.

• Pushing people to go to the gym? ​
  ​Ask yourself why they might not be going already and figure out what you can do to ease the constraints that make going for them difficult.
• Pushing people to stop yelling? ​
  ​Ask yourself why they might be yelling in the first place, consider what it is that YOU ARE doing to cause them to yell, and remove the constraints that might be contributing to it occurring.
• Pushing kids to do their homework? ​
  ​Ask yourself what is causing them to not do it, and remove those constraints.

Kahneman expands on this notion by conjuring up an image of a board suspended by two springs on either side (Figure 1).

If you were to “push” the board down, you are in effect adding tension to a spring. By adding tension, you’re disrupting the equilibrium as one spring gets more compressed than the other (Figure 2).

Conversely, if you remove the restraining force on either side, then there’s less tension on both springs and greater equilibrium in the system overall (Figure 3).

In essence, the lesson is this: you can certainly still get gains by pushing – but beware – you’re creating more tension in the overall system that makes it difficult to sustain. By thinking about critically removing tension and eliminating the restraining forces, you’re creating more equilibrium in the system, and thus more sustainability.

Pushing people will work, but not forever, and not in way that is sustainable.

Better to think about creating the conditions for motivation to occur, than trying to force it. Afterall, human psychology is far more complex than we give it credit sometimes.

Thanks for reading as always.

Time to win the week 🏆

See you next week :)

– J

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