Whether you are managing a project, directing a play, or coaching a little league team, the outcome you are seeking is an audience coordinated to one or more behaviors. Behavior is influenced (and ultimately decided), by a series of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivators are internal, and may provide personal satisfaction including wellness, curiosity satisfaction, or deliberately challenging oneself. There are also negative intrinsic motivators, such as fear. Studies have shown that aligning behaviors to intrinsic motivators produces relatively high levels of creative output and happiness. It is where innovation is found. It is where a personal sense of true accomplishment comes from. Intrinsic motivators are the strongest motivators, and if an audience is perfectly aligned with intrinsic motivators, coordination would theoretically “just happen”.
However, when multiple people are working together, exclusively focusing on intrinsic motivators requires a high degree of self-coordination. The simple, unavoidable, biological fact is that human beings are limited in our scale to self-coordinate. We are complicated creatures. We are monkeys who left the garden and went to the Moon. Any given person has any given number of intrinsic motivators at play at any given time. Finding a partner can be difficult. Finding a person who aligns with your values and non-values is a non-trivial task at best. Try to do this with a team of five, and it gets more complicated very quickly. Not only are people's values invariably different, but the weight they assign those values will also be different. Try to do this at even a small event scale like a community play or large gathering at the city park, or with a small startup, and you quickly find out how complicated large-scale can be. This becomes extraordinarily difficult when you have scaled up to large festivals and enterprise-level companies involving hundreds to thousands of staff.
So if intrinsic motivators can't scale, then we need to look to extrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivators are forces external to the person or persons being motivated. Like intrinsic motivators, they can be positive and negative. Positive extrinsic motivators, or "carrots", may include money, fame, and adulation. In our current Digital Society, likes and “subscribes” are extrinsic motivators, even when not directly tied to money. They can also be negative, used as consequences or penalties for action or inaction. In an ideal scenario, intrinsic motivators are perfectly aligned with extrinsic motivators. The extrinsic motivator of money or financial compensation provided aligns well with an intrinsic motivator for wealth. When you don't have good alignment between your intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, and the behavior in question isn't already well aligned with intrinsic motivators, then you need to look to negative motivators, or "sticks".
In an age of Wellness, well-being, and work/life balance (which I wholeheartedly welcome and embrace) it is in fashion to say that the notion of carrots and sticks is outdated; that intrinsic motivators should be the sole motivator for productivity. I have not found this to be the case., Despite people's best intentions and planning, endeavors do not succeed at scale without clearly defining the reasons to do something, and an understanding of the consequences of not doing it (or doing it outside of expectations). This happens in groups from entry-level to enterprise business, and back around again to volunteers sharing a common value and vision. The carrots and sticks. The carrots must be well understood, achievable, and ideally provide and guide the person doing it to a path of greater effectiveness in the group. Implicitly incentivizing growth. The sticks - while ideally used seldom, if ever - must be equally well understood and achievable in the sense that they are willing to be followed through, and must include real and tangible penalties. In my experience, this is necessary even when everyone wants to accomplish the same thing, just because coordinating people at scale is hard. They don’t have to be draconian, but they may have to be sufficient to overcome misalignment or strength of positive or intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivators are the ideal motivators. Studies have even shown that over application of extrinsic motivators can actually devalue intrinsic motivators and decrease overall self-satisfaction. But in nearly any endeavor at scale, there is a quantity of work that does not immediately align to intrinsic value. This often occurs in the later stages of a project as the hard problem is solved and worked through, and what remains is repeating working patterns and polishing edges. This sort of work, while ultimately valuable or even critical to the overall effort, can be perceived by the audience being asked to perform the behavior as low effort or (at least for them) low value. It is especially important in these scenarios to understand what your carrots and sticks are – especially your carrots, and especially in ways that you can align them to your audiences intrinsic motivators.
You also need to define your sticks. If the notion of carrots and sticks is considered outdated, that sentiment is squarely pointed at sticks. I have heard it said (and in a perfect world I would agree) that sticks aren't necessary. That people should do things because of the personal value or the shared accomplishment. And I agree wholeheartedly that those things should be true. But time and time again I have been a part of, stories from, or witnessed organizations fail to scale, then endeavors failed to succeed even remotely, because of a lack of defined or usable sticks. More concerningly, the monkeys who went to the moon will eventually start using sticks whether they are defined or not. And when a stick is invented out of anger, it is far more disruptive to coordination and intrinsic motivators than when it is planned and well-defined.
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, really understanding your audiences' motivations, both intrinsic and extrinsic, is critical to understanding why a group will or won't perform the behaviors you're looking for. And while you should always do your best to assemble a team whose intrinsic values are well aligned with the outcomes you are looking for, you should likewise be prepared with clear carrots (incentives) and sticks (consequences) as expectations you all can share in the Endeavor. And, if after an accounting of your carrots and sticks, you are left in the unenviable position of having a behavior that no one wants to do and there is no clear reason to do it, and no penalty for not doing it, you should not invest any additional time in convincing people to do it. Define your carrots and sticks, or reframe the behavior in a way that better aligns to your audience's intrinsic values.
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