In Their Own Words

Your "meaning network" of neurons includes the subjects (like math wizzes) and relationships (like friendships) that are important to you. In this episode, Andrew and David talk about helping folks find the "why?" that intrinsically motivates them to do something. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is tapping into meaning to release intrinsic motivation. David, take it away. 0:00:28.7 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew, and good to be back. 0:00:32.3 AS: Good to see you. 0:00:34.1 DL: So we have been on this journey of five elements of intrinsic motivation and these are the ones that, through my research at least, are the most important elements if you want to see intrinsic motivation emerge. Why are we doing that? Because Dr. Deming was the one that really made it clear that you have to have intrinsic motivation and stop extrinsically motivating people. So that's why we're concentrating on, what are these elements? So the first element was the element of control or autonomy in a situation. The second element was cooperation and we talked about the support network that's necessary and the previous podcast was all about the challenge and today we're talking about the meaning. How did... That meaning is the fifth element to tap into. So in every human brain there is a preponderance of cells in your meaning network. Some of it is... Some of it you're born with, some of it you acquire through life, but it's what... It's the cells that are activated when you get a sense of meaning about, why are we doing something or why are we here, what's happening? 0:02:04.0 DL: And the more we can tap into that network with people and tap into their meaning network, we start to see more intrinsic motivation emerge and therefore more joy in learning and work emerge and therefore a higher level of workmanship that often comes out of that same thing. 0:02:23.3 AS: And when you say meaning network, sometimes when I think of network, I think of a network of people, but you're talking about a neurological network. 0:02:30.5 DL: Yeah, we're talking about the actual neurons in your brain that form the network of meaning behind your life. It's... Sometimes we're just born with a preponderance of cells in certain areas, like I have five children and one of them was just born with the gift of mathematics and that's just the way it was. And another one was just born with his gift of music and another one... On and on. And those are just there at birth. And I don't think we had anything to do with it until we started to uncover that, oh, wow, this meaning... This has a lot of meaning for this individual. In other ways, you can also acquire a meaning network over time. That's for myself and probably for you too, Andrew, that the meaning in network now includes Deming, and the work of Deming, but that had to become an acquired kind of thing. So when people go through that process of learning about it, sometimes they say, my brain hurts because you are readjusting the actual neurons and the network of neurons in your brain that taught you to think about something. 0:03:50.9 DL: So if you had a network of neurons for management and maybe even went to college like I did or university, got a master's degree in management, et cetera, it taught you to think in a certain way. And Deming's work actually, sometimes trashes all of that or sometimes just causes you to have to think in a whole different way. And so then you have to start to readjust your meaning network. So it's been a lifelong interest for me to figure out, well, how do we get more of that to happen? So probably the very first element I want to talk about is relevance. So when you're trying to get somebody to do something, whether it's just work or we're talking about learning in schools, et cetera, is there a relevance? Why are we doing this? Kids don't ask, why is the sky blue or things like that just to make you mad and make your life miserable. They're actually trying to seek meaning in their life and try to understand what's going on. So the tool we often use is five whys. When you're starting to work through something, "Why do we have to do this?" 0:05:13.0 DL: And you have to answer that question and then, "Okay, then why is that so?" And then so on and so forth. And each time you ask, "Why did I say what I did in the previous why and think through stuff?" But that actually gets people to tap into the level of meaning. I never forget I saw five whys one time on, I think it was a group of first graders or something and they'd done this five whys and on why do we have to learn to read? And they'd gone through all these kinds of things, but I'll never forget that the fifth why was we have to learn to read because if we don't, we'll be homeless and die. [laughter] So there's... 0:05:57.9 AS: Right to the point. 0:05:58.5 DL: As a group of kids. Yeah, that's pretty important, right? And so tapping into that is really important. And so when you get that kind of relevance, you also get a joy that happens in learning because you're happy about it because it's relevant to you and it's meaningful. They have the age old question, why do we why do have to learn math and people often talk about that, that, I'll probably never use this again in my whole life. 0:06:28.6 DL: And well, if you are not helping students understand the meaning behind that or tap into their own meaning network about why math is important, it's going to constantly be a struggle or other areas that sometimes we think of as boring like accounting or things like that. Certain people just look at those numbers and love working with numbers and they get a joy in that and they have relevance within that. So relevance is really important and that gets you a level of joy of learning. 0:07:03.6 AS: Right. Can we just go back one step and just describe what you mean by meaning? 0:07:11.9 DL: Well, there's a group of cells in everybody's brains, neurons called the meaning network. And these are the connections that you've made over time. And just like what is describing before that either you were born with or you've acquired over time, but it's a meaning network. And so two people can sit and listen to the same podcast or broadcast, et cetera. And one of them just thinks it's totally boring, boring and worthless. And the other one is just totally engrossed in it. And it all has to do with your meaning network and your brain and whether or not that podcast is tapping into your meaning network or challenging your meaning network. 0:07:54.2 AS: And in a classroom, what would be the opposite of tapping into the meaning network? 0:08:01.9 DL: Somebody says, "Well, why do we have to learn this?" And the teacher says, "Because I said so." 0:08:07.1 AS: Okay. It's clear. 0:08:09.7 DL: Yeah. That's not good learning. It's not gonna motivate somebody to want to learn something. It's just gonna motivate them just to avoid punishment or seek some cheap reward. And that's often why we resort to those extrinsic kinds of motivations because we don't wanna tap into the meaning network. It takes a lot more time to go in depth and to get people to really... To get a deep understanding of it. I think about my journey, understanding Deming and maybe yours is the same way. It didn't happen overnight. It took actually several years and I'm still on that journey after 40 years of really trying to understand what he was talking about and why it was important and how it applies in my life, et cetera. So that's tapping into that meaning network. 0:09:01.6 AS: And you said something that sometimes people don't want to tap into their meaning network. Maybe that's an interesting thing to understand. Why is it at times, maybe each of us don't want to tap into it? Or there's some people that may say, I never want to tap into that. 0:09:16.2 DL: Well, we get caught up into just running things, and making stuff happen without wanting to think about, why are we doing this? And when you do that, then you end up just resorting to getting people to do stuff. And if you don't do this, I'm just going to make your life so difficult you wish you would have, which is not good management. 0:09:41.2 AS: So for the listeners and the viewers out there if you find yourself just running in circles, doing a bunch of stuff and realizing that there's no meaning to it, maybe that's the time to stop and listen and let's continue on about bringing this... You talked about relevance, continue on... 0:09:58.0 DL: Yeah. So another way you could tap into the meaning network is just to concentrate on the quality of the work. And that leads us to a pride of workmanship. And when you're concentrating on the quality of it, instead of just production or just getting through it, you get a whole different level of thinking about something and you tap into a level of relevance that is not normally there. 0:10:32.1 DL: So like in school, if I give them this... If I gave an assignment and we were just talking about math and they say, "Well, you have to do these 30 problems." Well, if we talk about how to do that in a quality way, we start to tap into a pride of workmanship with that. So what would that mean to do this in a quality way? Well, the numbers have to be lined up and sometimes kids will say things, well, it should be neat. Well, we might have to define, what does neat mean? What would it look like if it was neat? But you're tapping into a level of relevance and understanding that's deeper than just do this to get through it. So we can go on to the next chapter which really means there's not much meaning to that, right? It's more of a survival, just get through it and get onto the next thing. 0:11:19.4 AS: And I'm thinking about in the corporate sphere, Deming talked about quality in the eyes of the customer and develop... The process, improving the quality of work and then seeing the customer being satisfied or achieving their goals through it just like with a student to see them achieve their goals... There is true joy in and meaning to what you're doing. 0:11:46.3 DL: Yeah. Well, just before we came on, you were showing me some feedback that you had from your students, which are ultimately your customer in your college class, et cetera. And you were really excited about the feedback. Well, it had a lot of meaning to you about the quality of what they were trying... That they got out of that experience, et cetera, and how they were relating it back to you. And it made you feel very proud of the work that you'd done with them. 0:12:12.1 AS: Well, it's raised the question, why the hell would we not be having meaning in everything that we're doing? 0:12:22.6 DL: Yeah, that's a good question. Why do people do that? Well, a lot of times they just do it just to get through it. Like I said, not enough time and I don't have time to concentrate on meaning. And well, if you don't concentrate on that, then you're going to get whatever it is you get, right? You're going to just get poor quality work and they're going to have to figure out how to motivate people. And these people aren't motivated. But Deming also talked a lot about constancy of purpose, right? And that's tapping into the meaning network. So when you're developing a constancy of purpose, whether that's with a corporation, a classroom, a whole school, a school district, whatever it is, why do we exist? Why are we here? And you're really making that explicit and getting people to align what they do every day to the constancy of purpose. Well, in schools you end up with getting a lifelong learning going then because you have a deeper purpose for going to school other than just to get a grade or just to get through it. 0:13:27.7 DL: I remember asking a group of fourth graders one time I said, "Why do you go to fourth grade?" And one of the kids said, "So we can go on to fifth grade." [laughter] Well, if that's the surface level that you're concentrating on, that's actually the kind of workmanship you're going to get in pride that you're gonna get in the people going through it because they know that you don't care either. Right? Just a step going to the next thing. 0:14:00.4 AS: And when Dr. Deming talked about cleaning a table and he gave the example that you really can't have someone properly clean a table unless they know what the table is going to be used for, is that part of the meaning of understanding the final... 0:14:12.1 DL: Yeah, that's tapping into the meaning network? What are you going to use this table for? Are you going to operate on it? Oh, well, it's certainly not clean enough for that right now. It's going to eat off of it. That's a whole different purpose that you're using for that. So yeah, that's a really good example about tapping into people's meaning network about things and then you get a higher level of quality and commitment out of people when you're actually just creating the environment for that. The other thing is vision. The more you concentrate on the vision of where you're going, what's happening and it ties into constancy of purpose about why do we exist and what we're doing too. But when you have vision, you're tapping into people's prefrontal lobe in their minds about looking towards the future. What are we trying to accomplish? Where are we going with this? And we may not be there today, but this is where we're headed and this is what we're tapping into. So there's a number of ways that come out of a lot of different research about what, makes a good vision. Number one, it's usually always leader initiated. So it doesn't necessarily mean that the person with the formal position is initiating it, but you can be a leader and not necessarily have a formal position. You just, you're seen as somebody who's very knowledgeable about a situation and therefore you start to become a leader within that. 0:15:49.1 AS: And that the good vision is leader initiated concept is contrary to some people that think about, "Oh, well I want empowerment. I want my employees involved and all of that." And when I heard Dr. Deming talk about that this is the responsibility of the leaders, I realized that, yeah, my leaders in my company, were just dumping it down on me. "Well, you tell us?" 0:16:14.8 DL: Yeah. And that's really an escape mechanism because then if it doesn't work, it's your fault instead of our fault. Whereas, where if it's leader initiated and we work together to constantly revise and revisit the vision and it's sort of a living document is what I call it, that it's constantly, it's not the thing where you go in a room and you come up with a vision statement and then you put it under glass on the hallway and then you don't visit it again until you get a new leader again. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about something that's lived on a daily basis about the vision of what it is we're trying to accomplish. And in that, it's also has to be shared and supported, right? And one of the ways you get it shared and supported is involving people in the making of a vision rather than having a board meeting and coming up with a vision and then trying to disseminate that to everybody. 0:17:12.4 AS: Right. 0:17:15.3 DL: It has to be comprehensive and detailed, a vision. So it has to have enough detail so that everybody in the organization or everybody in a classroom can see how their part relates to that vision of what it is we're trying to accomplish. And finally, it has to be positive and inspiring that I really want to do this. I really... 'Cause it's just... It's really inspiring. It's not simple, but when John F. Kennedy said, "We're gonna put a man on the moon by 1969, by the end of the decade," well, that was very positive, inspiring. Did anybody know how to do that? No, not really. And we were really behind in making that happen, but it was leader initiated. He initiated that and this is what we're going to have. And it became shared and supportive and it became very comprehensive and detailed about how we're going to make it happen. And sure enough, the country made it happen. So that's a good example of what vision can do for you. 0:18:20.5 AS: So there's relevance, there's vision... 0:18:22.7 DL: Yeah. Relevance and then the quality of what it is you do and then purpose and vision. And the last element that I'd like to share is a way that you can tap into the meaning network is to leave a legacy. Where the work means more than just the immediate result or you're trying to improve society or you're thinking about passing the torch to the next generation. This leaving of this legacy, I think is really important. When I started to tap into this was the high school where I first started and was working with Deming, some interesting things happened. The English teacher tapped into this and she would take kids over to the pioneer home where it had all the elderly people there that were in the state of Alaska at the time of statehood. And so every year she'd take kids over and they would meet with these elderly people and the people would tell stories about all the way back to 1900 and 1920 and what life was like in Alaska. And then it was their job to write up these stories. They put all these stories into a book and then bind the book for that year. So that's an example, leaving a legacy. That's much different than... Because those kids could look back at that legacy for the rest of their lives. 0:20:01.7 DL: That "I was a part of that." I helped document something that was going on or the science class had a project where every year they would take one square kilometer of the ocean floor and then kids would work to get scuba diving skills. And at the end of each year, then they would go down and they would clean up that one section of the ocean floor. And then other kids would be on the surface and, take the junk to the dump and everything and pass it on. But that's leaving a legacy that "we did this and cleaned this up" and that's passing it on to the next generation. So if you think about... It can be so simple as a fourth grade class passing on a legacy to a third grade class that's coming up and meeting with them and talking about what you do in fourth grade and being excited about that and having a vision about how great it's gonna be to be in fourth grade and what you're going to do. So I'll never forget my oldest son when he was going into first grade and we were talking all summer long about, I may have shared this story, I don't know, but we were talking all summer long that, oh, first grade is going to be so great, you're going to learn to read and you're going to be so excited, et cetera. 0:21:24.4 DL: And so we picked him up after the first day of school thinking he's gonna be all excited about stuff. He said, "How was first grade?" And he burst into tears. And we said, "What's going on is... Did you get in trouble or something or something happened at school or whatever?" And he just shook his head and he said, "I didn't learn to read." But the vision and the meaning network was incredibly strong with him going into first grade. It's just that we had neglected to explain it's going to take more than one day to reach that vision of that. But obviously in our family, reading was very important and it was very stressed. And he could see his siblings reading and all those things are part of tapping into that meaning network. 0:22:19.6 AS: The legacy is a fascinating one. And I think it's a challenge for anybody listening or viewing, what legacy are you leaving? A lot of times we just get so busy in what we're doing and we forget about that. I'll tell the quick story of when I had to go through a few different rehabs when I was a young guy because of addiction to drugs and alcohol. And the third rehab that I went into was a long-term treatment center. They only had 12 beds there and one bed opened up. It was in Northeastern Ohio. And so I went into that treatment center and when I arrived, I arrived for the graduation ceremony of the outgoing student and they had a toolbox which was an open box with a handle on it. And he stood up in front of everybody and, said he was graduating and all the things that he gained from this. And then he emptied out his toolbox and he handed it to me and he said, here's your empty toolbox. Good luck at filling it with the symbols of the intangible tools and physical tools that you develop over the next seven months. And then when I graduated, I took my tools out of the box and I gave that empty box to the next person. And yeah, it's just like... 0:23:33.8 DL: Great example. 0:23:35.1 AS: It's connection with the future. 0:23:39.4 DL: And obviously that tapped into your meaning network because you remembered it. 0:23:45.6 AS: Here we are 40 years later. 0:23:46.0 DL: They want to know what kind of experiences tap into the meaning network? Well, it's usually the ones that you remember, right? Because the other experiences, your brain just quickly gets rid of the connections because it has no meaning. 0:24:01.7 AS: So I want to wrap up and also review the five points or the five elements that you've brought up. Maybe you can just run through them briefly if we're at the end of talking about meaning. 0:24:16.6 DL: Yeah. So these aren't the only factors for intrinsic motivation, but the ones that have never failed me over the last 40 years, whether I'm working with US military or colleges and universities or a kindergarten class or a corporation, I always go back to these five and usually you'll find some fault there that people don't feel like they're supported or there isn't a high level of cooperation or they don't feel like they have the autonomy to be able to make decisions in an organization or there's a lack of challenge, that work is not challenging, or there's a lack of meaning that the organization or whether that's a classroom, a school, a company or whatever is not really tapping into that meaning network and really emphasizing purpose and vision and what it is we're trying to accomplish here and how are we leaving a legacy and passing that on. So it's the interaction of those five factors. That's the key. 0:25:27.1 AS: Right. So maybe I'll summarize... I'm gonna attempt to summarize what I think was a pretty substantial discussion today. The first thing that I got from it was why are we even talking about intrinsic motivation? As you said, Dr. Deming said, stop doing all this extrinsic motivation and start focusing on intrinsic motivation. And basically, we talked about this final point meaning, which triggers the meaning network, which is the thing that we tap into. You talked about relevance and if something is relevant to a person, then it brings more meaning. And that means, think about asking, we talked about the five whys and understanding that and just running things and running activities and doing lots of stuff without meaning becomes, well, meaningless. We also... 0:26:29.2 DL: Right. [chuckle]. 0:26:30.3 AS: Yeah. We talked about quality and the focus on quality and seeing the outcome too of that great focus on quality and the joy in work that that brings. We talked about purpose and vision about constancy of purpose and that brings meaning as opposed to constantly shifting directions. And you said that vision basically about where we're going taps into people's minds about looking forward and starting to think about that. 0:26:57.4 AS: And you mentioned a few things that I thought were really good about what makes good vision and good vision is leader initiated, it's shared and supported, it's comprehensive and detailed and it's positive and inspiring. And I think that last part really is a part that gets me excited when I look at the things that I'm involved with. And then finally, you talked about leaving a legacy and I think that just speaks for itself. Anything you would add to that summary? 0:27:24.4 DL: No, that's a really good summary. So I will pretty much guarantee people that if you're struggling with the level of quality you're trying to achieve or your people don't seem like they're motivated, you might want to take a look at these five areas of intrinsic motivation and see what you need to change in the organization to see intrinsic motivation emerge because it's always there. It's built innately within us. And if we're not intrinsically motivated, you don't learn to eat, you don't learn to talk, you don't learn to survive in the world before you ever get to work or school. So it's there in individuals, you just have to find ways of managing to uncover it. 0:28:11.1 AS: I don't know about you and I don't know about the listeners and the viewers out there, but I can tell you just this discussion was inspiring in itself. So David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming and it really applies in what we're talking about today. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Cooperation is built into the human condition - we don't survive without it. In this episode, Andrew and David talk about the connection in our brains between intrinsic motivation and cooperation - and how you can use that to help cultivate intrinsic motivation in an extrinsic world (and even make your organization more competitive!) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, how to apply the neuroscience of cooperation. David, take it away. 0:00:31.3 David Langford: That sounds ominous to me. So... 0:00:35.1 AS: Impressive. 0:00:35.9 DL: Yeah, we're not gonna do brain surgery, but we'll get pretty close to that today, so... [laughter] 0:00:40.4 AS: This is brain science. 0:00:42.5 DL: Yes. So we're continuing this five-part series on intrinsic motivation. So Dr. Deming was adamant that intrinsic motivation was key, and that we're all just born with intrinsic motivation, and it's our systems and the people that we encounter over time that sort of drum it out of us. So how do you get it back, especially from people that have been beaten down from both the school systems and the businesses that they've been, et cetera? And Dr. Deming said, we have a right to joy in work and learning. And if that's true, we have to try to create these environments to make great joy in the work environment. And why do you do that? Well, when you do that, you're gonna get better productivity. You're gonna get more output. 0:01:38.5 DL: People are gonna be happy, or they're gonna stay longer. They're not gonna be looking for other jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So it all makes perfect sense to me that you wanna concentrate on creating intrinsically motivating systems even though you might be in an extrinsic world all the way around you. So in the first session, we talked about control or autonomy or ownership as being key for intrinsic motivation. And there's five key factors that we're going through. And what I wanna impress upon people is that this is a system of intrinsic motivation. So it's all of these factors together. Yes, you can just do one factor and get a result. For instance, you can just apply more cooperation and you'll see a higher level of intrinsic motivation. But if you really wanna see people rise to the true heights of what they're capable of or what their potential is, you have to think about all five of these factors. 0:02:40.5 DL: So that's why we're taking time to go through all these. Today we're talking about cooperation. And that's much different than setting up a competitive environment where people are competing for isolated resources or they're competing for a medal, a gold star, et cetera, et cetera. But cooperation is built into the human condition, thousands of years ago when we first started creating villages and people working together, and people had to cooperate to make armies, people had to cooperate to build houses. There's a myth about how the west was won in the United States, that it was the rugged individual, but yeah, there was some of that. But largely it was wagon trains of cooperative people coming west. And if they didn't cooperate and worked together, they didn't survive, the people that were the rugged individuals often perished either from native American attacks or just the environment itself. So cooperation, to me, is built into the human condition. 0:03:53.0 AS: And before you continue that, let me just ask you about competition versus cooperation. Is competition also built-in, or is cooperation more built in? I mean, that point you just made about how for survival, humans need to depend on each other to some extent as a society, but do humans need to compete with each other? 0:04:20.1 DL: Well, the great irony is, the better you cooperate, the better you compete. [laughter] 0:04:27.7 DL: So if you're at a corporation, for instance, or even a school, and the higher the level of cooperation that you foster and create, you actually do become competitive because you actually become better than other people in your field, et cetera. 0:04:43.2 AS: And how... I love that statement, the better you cooperate, the better you compete. How is that rooted in facts? Is that rooted in... It intuitively makes sense to me that a team or a group that really cooperates well together can achieve amazing things, but is it scientifically correct to say that? 0:05:13.6 DL: Well, can we point to... We could point to obviously numbers of examples of either schools or businesses, et cetera, that have high degrees of cooperation involved. You can get... You can seize part of the market in a competitive thinking or a competitive environment or pitting people against each other to achieve inside of an organization, but to me every example I ever looked at, it doesn't last. Pretty soon, what Deming said is, the only people you're left with are the people who can't get a job someplace else. [laughter] 0:06:01.2 DL: Because they're not happy. It's not fun. You don't feel supported, so... 0:06:06.7 AS: And that brings us back to intrinsic in the idea that it's inherent in us to want to be in a cooperative environment. Like we want to stay in a cooperative environment. 0:06:19.2 DL: Well, it's more than that. When you think about the neuroscience involved, that when you're in a cooperative environment, whether that's a small team or a company or whatever it might be, there's an endorphin released in your brain that actually makes you feel good. It's a really good feeling. The opposite happens. There's two different types of stress levels, and that's a positive sort of stress level. It can still be very stressful work, hard work, et cetera, but when you're working together to make that happen there's a positive stress hormone that's released in your brain. The opposite is true in competitive environments. So the only person that really actually gets that same kind of endorphin is the winner in a competitive environment. Everybody else becomes a demotivator. 0:07:14.9 AS: So it's kind of the endorphin distribution is what it is about. David, I have a situation at my home where I have caregivers helping me take care of my mom. And one of the caregivers left almost eight years as a nurse at a hospital, because she said, "You really couldn't give good care because of all the... Not only the competition amongst people, but also all the things that just took all of the joy out of it." But also the point where you need to push the patient to do what they need to do is the point that everybody would give up. And now when she's working here with my mom and she's made tremendous progress with my mom, it's like we're high fiving and talking about how we're cooperating. I'm looking at kind of bigger picture stuff she's implementing, and mom is getting the benefit. And when you talked about endorphin and the neuroscience of it, I really kind of just felt that, and for the listeners and for the viewers, think about that time that you've cooperated and been successful and it's worked, or even when you failed, but you are in it together. Like that is the endorphin released. 0:08:18.2 DL: Well actually, I think you should have her compete against other caregivers. [laughter] 0:08:24.1 DL: And then to find out who is the best caregiver in... We laugh about that. 0:08:30.4 AS: Now for our trusted listeners out there, they know that you're kidding, right? 0:08:33.3 DL: Yeah. So yeah, we laugh about that here, but people are actually caught in those environments, and those things are being pushed on them and pressured and et cetera. And just like what you just described, your mom's caregiver finally just said, "Look, I'm outta here. I do not want this stressful environment. It's not fun anymore, actually." But I was also thinking about a presentation of a group of second graders, and they were talking about Deming principles that were in their classroom and all the kinds of things that they were doing. And somebody in the audience asked them a question and they said, "Well, how does it make you feel to work like this cooperatively and in a classroom like this, et cetera?" And this little boy without even hesitating said, "I really like the dolphins." He meant endorphins. [laughter] 0:09:36.7 AS: Fire up those dolphins. 0:09:38.8 DL: Yeah. But it was very clear that the teacher had been having discussions with them about that, about how do we feel about this when we cooperate and we sort of work together? So there's... I kind of break it down and there's two different kinds of cooperation we often see, we see natural and we see forced cooperation. So forced cooperation is like, "You, you, and you, get over there and start cooperating, and then we're gonna see who's the top cooperating group in the room," and things like that. That's sort of like competitive cooperation. Whereas natural cooperation is when you basically just set up the environment and encourage people to support and help each other, they will naturally seek out other people to work together. 0:10:33.5 DL: Now, you may... In education, you may have an objective that you want people to learn to work together with people that they wouldn't normally work together. Okay, well, that's a different aim that you're trying to accomplish. And to do that, I would probably do something like just total random selection, just throw everybody's name in a hat and draw out four names and this is your team. Because then everybody knows how team members were chosen to be in that. But where we get into trouble is when teachers think, "I have all the control and I have all the autonomy, and I'm... This is my role, and so I'm gonna pick people. I'm gonna pick this person to work with that person and this person." And students of all ages, even all the way down to kindergarten, preschool, know they're being manipulated [chuckle] when they do that because they can tell that I've obviously been put with this person because I'm supposed to be helping them or something. 0:11:38.7 DL: And so that's not a good way to operate. Pretty soon you'll just have people who hate being in teams, hate working with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Also, you won't see a level of cooperation emerge if you've got a heavy duty grading system going on, ranking system in a corporation, et cetera. Because the bottom line is we're all trying to survive in this world, and if the only way I can survive is to not work well with others, [chuckle] I will do that. So, a friend of mine was getting his MBA in Australia, and he was telling me that they would automatically get together and sort of form study teams with people that they already knew or they knew well, et cetera. But then they'd be in classes and the professor would assign certain books to read or something. 0:12:40.1 DL: And so some of the teams would send out part of their team over to the library to check out all the books so that none of the other team members in the class could have access to the books, or they would have to drive great distances to go to a different library to get the book. And we tend to point at individuals and wanna blame the individual, like, "Oh, well, look what defective people they are." No, they're in a defective system that's forcing them to sacrifice their integrity to get an artificial scarcity of top marks in that class. And so when you see that kind of stuff going on, we always wanna blame the individual because that takes the pressure off of the system or the managers managing a system, whether that's a classroom, a school, a company, or whatever it might be. You can just say, "Oh, well, just look at these defective people and the behavior that they're having." Well, 98% of the behavior is coming from the system itself. Don't like the behavior, then change the system and you'll see a different behavior emerge, or like what we've been taught to do in schools. We leave the system alone and then come up with all kinds of management systems to manage the behavior it's producing, so isolation and putting kids outside in the classroom and depriving of recess and... 0:14:11.0 AS: It's a good point because I think that there's a lot of people in education and also in management that feel like, "Oh, it's an endless cycle of trying to close loopholes that people are breaking through, they're breaking our system, and it's just endless." And you see very intricate systems, well, we've got a way to deal with that. We've got a way to deal with that. They're gonna be punished on this, they're gonna be rewarded on that. And you realize that actually they're causing all of this, and then they're trying to fix it by tampering with all of these things out there. So when you set up a cooperative environment, it's like you start to... You go back to the source and stop the cause of a lot of the issues that you're dealing with. 0:15:01.5 DL: Yeah. I'll never forget, one of my children was going to high school and she was in an honors chemistry class. Okay? So this is supposed to be the best of the best kids in the school. It was a very big school. They're all in this chemistry class. Well, almost all these kids had a perfect 4.0 grade average at that time in that class. And they all knew that something's gotta give because we're not all gonna be valedictorians even though we would all be qualified for it. So my daughter came home the first day of the class and she said, "Dad, I think I'm really gonna like this chemistry class and the chemistry teacher and everything." And he said, "We're all top students. We all work together, we all wanna have great results in chemistry, everything." And she said, "I think he might be really interested in some of your methods and concepts and et cetera." So great. Second day of school, she came home, she said, "Dad, I think I'm gonna drop chemistry." [laughter] 0:16:08.1 DL: I said, "What happened in two days?" And she said, "Well, he spent the entire class explaining how he grades on a curve." And I'll never forget her face. She looked at me and she said, "Do they just think we're complete idiots?" She said, "We've all had advanced math courses. We can't all get A's if you're grading on a curve." The process. So anyway, third day she comes back, she says, "Well, I think I'm gonna be one of the top people and I'll probably get an A anyway because... So I'm gonna stay in the class." So I didn't hear much about the class until the end of the first semester. And she comes home the last week of the first semester, and she said, "Dad, you'll never guess what happened." And I said, "What?" And she said, "Well, a lot of the kids in the class that were on the borderline between grade levels, like from a C to a B or from a B to a... " Especially a B to an A, well, not only had they kept track of their own performance, but they'd kept track of other kids' performance also in the classroom. 0:17:24.0 DL: Were able to single out several individuals in the classroom that no matter what they got on the final, they were still gonna get a B or a C or a D. They could not even take the final and it wasn't gonna change their status or their grade or whatever. But if they could get enough of these kids to do poorly on the final, it would bump some of these other kids up into the top grade level to get an A. And they actually paid kids in the class, [laughter] I can't remember, it was like $20 or something to do poorly on the final. 0:18:03.8 AS: Oh my gosh. 0:18:05.2 DL: So anyway, the principal finds out, the teacher finds out and there's this whole Spanish inquisition, and they're bringing kids in and interrogating them and everything. I couldn't resist it, I had to go in and talk to the principal and I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Oh, we're gonna have to kick these kids outta class 'cause they obviously cheated." And I said, "They didn't cheat. They played your game better than you." 0:18:28.5 AS: [laughter] That really pissed him off. 0:18:30.4 DL: Yeah. These kids ought to be getting awards of student of the year. This was amazing, amazing thing that they figured out and doesn't feel good because they turned the game back on you and found a way where we could cooperate at a high degree to get greater rewards. 0:18:49.0 AS: And the man behind the curtain has been revealed. 0:18:51.4 DL: Yeah. So, he didn't like that at all. That teacher didn't like that. 0:18:56.8 AS: Sure. 0:18:57.9 DL: And... Oh yeah. So it was later on that year that I had to go in to talk to the principal about something else. And he said to me, jokingly, I think he said, "I know I'm having a bad day when your car is in the parking lot." [laughter] 0:19:12.9 AS: Langford! Now let me ask you, in wrapping this up, I just wanna think about the educator out there who likes what they've heard, but they are operating in somewhat of a competitive environment. What would be kind of step number 1, 2, 3 that they could do to begin to bring a more cooperative environment into their classroom? 0:19:35.1 DL: Well, you have to start looking at what are the barriers to cooperation that are going on in your classroom? Are they outside barriers, outside forces? You may have awards and all kinds of things that are going on, but you don't have to emphasize those. [chuckle] You don't have to daily say, "Well, if you don't get your work done, you're not gonna win the award." And constantly go over that kind of stuff. Instead identify that learning is the aim or the goal, and we're all here to get high levels of learning. I think also there's this misnomer about teams and teamwork. And we think that just because we put people in a team that that's teamwork or cooperation. And that's not really true either. Unless you're actually teaching and training people how to work in a team cooperatively would help set people up. I know many, many students that just almost refuse to be in teams, even at the university level because they say, "I end up doing all the work and then I got these three slackers that'll just go along and we all get the same grade." 0:20:44.1 AS: Right. 0:20:44.1 DL: That's another just convoluted process. On the other hand, if you want people to work well together, then start thinking about, how do you set up an environment so people will naturally work well together? So I created a tool in my tool time book called Code of Cooperation. And it's pretty simple. You just start off asking everybody, what leads to a high degree of cooperation? What would it be like in this class? And you just list those things off but that sort of becomes the code of how you operate. And that's a different message right at the very beginning of the class that, here's our code of cooperation and we can talk about it when we sort of start to fall down and not cooperate. 0:21:40.3 AS: Okay, great. So maybe I'll summarize some of the things that we talked about. The first thing that I was thinking about when you... I love the statement, intrinsic motivation is beaten out of us, basically. It's like we set up systems that destroy that for most and that people have a right to joy in learning. And ultimately when that happens, there's better output. Now, we had talked about control, autonomy, ownership previously, and these are kind of foundational things that begin to lead into cooperation. And then you talked about the different factors and understanding that really there's a system of intrinsic motivation, and you wanna try to apply all the different parts of that system. And so the thing that I thought was interesting was the idea of cooperation is different from setting up a system of competition, like competition for resources as an example. 0:22:42.0 AS: Now you said something that I thought was interesting also, which is the better you cooperate, the better you compete. And I was thinking about in one of my courses, I don't have them do group work, I have them do group support on their individual work. And the end result of that is they really become very close to each other. And so I was thinking that cooperation leads... Competition leads to a lifetime of enemies and cooperation leads to a lifetime of friends. And that partially tells you why the endorphin release is such a major thing. And then you talked about forced versus natural and you wanna set up that natural environment and oftentimes we blame the participants in the system rather than blaming the system. And as you've described the idea of students are really good at gaming the system. 0:23:39.3 AS: And finally, I asked you for some implementation ideas, and you talked about, first for those educators out there, look for barriers that are outside the things that are putting competitive pressures on the students and deemphasize those in your classroom. Those are fine. Let them do that outside, whatever, but try to deemphasize that. The other thing is to understand that teamwork is a cop out for teachers oftentimes because it just ends up work going on to individuals. So don't necessarily think that, "Hey, we're gonna set up teams that's gonna lead to cooperation." And number three was, how do you set an environment for cooperation? Ask this question to the students, discuss it, and when you do, you're gonna come up with a more cooperative environment. Anything you would add to that? 0:24:27.5 DL: Just lastly in Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, understanding variation is really critical. And if you are setting up a system where you have an artificial scarcity of top marks or top grades, you will not see people cooperate to a very high degree and really they can't. So you always have to be cognizant of the System of Profound Knowledge when you look at these things 'cause it's telling you what to stop doing, [chuckle] and what to start doing. 0:25:01.4 AS: And for educators and managers out there, it's hard to break free from those systems. But if you first just become aware that that bell curve is forcing the grading on that curve or we get rid of... We give bonuses to our 'A' employees and we kick out our 'C' employees, like these types of structures that are built into systems is what Dr. Deming taught about, that you don't have to become aware of these things and the influences, you may not be able to change them right away. So, great point. 0:25:34.2 DL: Well, you're always gonna have the bell curve no matter what system you set up or whatever, but the real aim is to move the whole bell curve up. So now I have only a finite number of people doing top level work or 'A' work or the best type work. I'm actually moving the whole system up so I have a greater and greater number of people all reaching that level. 0:25:58.0 AS: Yeah. So it's like the application of the bell curve, it's a tool to understand what's going on, but it's not a tool that works for rewarding and punishing, which seems like that's what we see when we see a bell curve oftentimes. 0:26:12.7 DL: That sounds like a whole 'nother podcast right there, so... 0:26:15.5 AS: Boom, we're gonna be rolling into the next one on that, I think. All right. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners out there, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and it's particularly pertinent to our discussion today, People are entitled to joy in work.

How do you tap into intrinsic motivation when the assignments (or jobs) are boring or feel irrelevant? Andrew and David talk about the role of challenge in intrinsic motivation, including why being challenged is key to innovation and improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I will be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is the role of challenge in intrinsic motivation. David, take it away. 0:00:30.6 David P. Langford: Hello, Andrew. Good to be back. 0:00:33.2 AS: Good to see you. 0:00:33.3 DL: So how challenging is challenge, that's really what we're after about here today. So this is part four in a five-part podcast series we've been doing on intrinsic motivation, and so when I first encountered the concept of intrinsic motivation and it's actually when I was getting my undergraduate degree and I was so intrigued about it, but even like today, there was no training in it, there was no real... There was just, "Here it is, and yeah, intrinsic motivation is really good, so good luck with that." And all the training was around extrinsic motivation, how to motivate people, and it's the same today. I get calls and I get emails and stuff, and people always wanna know, can't we use bonuses and can't we use this and... You can use those kinds of things. I always think of the phrases that Dr. Deming had, he said, "The destruction has to start somewhere." [laughter] 0:01:40.2 DL: And people would ask him about those kinds of things like, yeah, you could do that, but... You're on the road to destruction. So I've been trying to explain the five researched key elements of intrinsic motivation that Deming talked about, and how do you actually change the system, whether that's a business or a school or a classroom, or whatever it might be. So you have people becoming more intrinsically motivated, so we've gone through a couple. So we talked about control or autonomy in the situation, we talked a lot about, in podcast number two, about cooperation, and then podcast number three is support, and now we're gonna talk about the role of challenge in intrinsic motivation. So, it's not so easy as just to like flip a switch and say, "Okay, now we're gonna intrinsically motivate people." It is a complex thinking that has to take place in management to create an environment where people can be intrinsically motivated, right? 0:02:51.2 AS: Yeah. 0:02:51.9 DL: And usually, if you find people looking like they're not motivated, Deming talked about probably 94% to 98% of the reason they're not motivated to come to work, is the work itself, the job. So when we start to talk about challenge, you wanna think about the job itself, is the job that say you're having a student do... If I tell people, "Memorize these 10 spelling words for Friday," well, yeah, for some students, that could be really challenging, for others, it's just sheer boredom of, "Why are we doing this? Where did this come from? There's no real challenge to it." So, you can take just about anything that you have that you want people to do... 0:03:39.6 DL: And in fact, Deming was actually a master of this, he went into some of the most mundane manufacturing places in the world where people are just sitting all day long and doing the same darn thing all over and over, thousands of times, and then leaving and then, how do you motivate those people? Well, let's just pay them more, let's do this or that or the other thing. And it didn't work. And the Hawthorne Studies showed that, oh yeah, you could turn the lights off and productivity goes up, or you could turn the lights on, productivity... Or you have music, or you can do all these kinds of things, but what they discovered was that it was the fact that management actually cared. [chuckle] That made the difference, and they were actually doing and trying to do something to improve the working environment is what was really discovered through that. But, Deming was the master of going in and teaching people to use their brains and to begin to improve their own situation. And that's a challenge. I'm sitting here doing this all day long, the same tedious task all day long, but all of a sudden somebody gives me the keys to improve this situation, make a change here, do something... 0:04:57.2 DL: And that's where PDSA came from, or originally PDCA was Dr. Shewhart. But Plan-Do-Study-Act, make a plan, do it, study it and act on it, did it work? It could be just that simple of a process. Now if we get together with a few other people and we study the process of what's happening, and we're given the authority or the control or autonomy, like we talked about earlier, to actually make a change, ah, well, that's pretty challenging. That's pretty interesting. And in my work with education, over and over and over when I go in and start working with people and teaching them this same kind of concept, I hear all the time administrators saying that, "We got dead wood on our staff," or, "We've got people that just don't care," or... Well, it's probably because you taught them to do that, or somebody previously taught them to do that because that's not normal if people are acting like that, etcetera, and yes, they have to make money, and yes, they have to live, and so they'll just learn to quit work, but keep the job. [chuckle] And I'll show up every day and do what I'm supposed to do, but it doesn't mean I'm gonna put in any extra effort in or any thinking or anything else, so... 0:06:21.0 AS: I can imagine a listener or a viewer listening to this and thinking to themselves, "Yeah, let's do a challenge. Let's do a competition." [laughter] 0:06:29.1 AS: Not realizing that when you're talking about challenge, and when talking about intrinsic motivation, it's not about a challenge to compete for a spelling contest or something, it's a different type of challenge, so tell us more about what kind of challenges people respond to. 0:06:46.7 DL: Yeah, so some of the ways that you can get challenge into a mundane task or a situation is you wanna think about excitement, how can I bring a level of excitement into this situation? And well, how do you get excitement going? Well, you have to think about the level of difficulty. And so, in neuroscience, there's actually sort of a learning zone. So, too much challenge, I'm gonna be overwhelmed, I'll be frustrated, I'll get the deer in the headlights look, I just can't do anything. Too little challenge, I got boredom going on. So there's a learning zone where the challenge has to be just right, and the problem, especially with teachers, is teachers are always trying to assess that with the students that they're working with, right? They're trying to set the level of challenge, but what I learned over the last 40 years is, the only person that can really know what is challenging is the individual himself, even like kindergarten, first grade, second grade students know if something is challenging or not, and when you set up a situation where they can sort of choose the level of challenge involved with that, you get a level of excitement that you didn't get before because the level of difficulty is there. 0:08:20.2 DL: So, I think we talked a little bit in one of the previous podcasts about gaming and video games, and so many education institutes, institutions, they wanna ban gaming and they wanna ban all those kind of stuff, but why are those things so addicting? Why are kids spending so much time on that? Because they're setting the level of challenge. They're setting the level of excitement that they can handle, and if they go up too many levels too fast, this game becomes so overwhelming and so difficult that they just can't cope with it, and so will end up just quitting or backing down a level or two until they sort of master that and move forward. So, being cognizant of that level of difficulty and getting the individual to understand how to set that level of difficulty is where it's really at. I remember the story of, I think it's Secretary of State with, I think it was Nixon administration or something... Anyway, there were some... 0:09:26.4 AS: Kissinger. 0:09:30.0 DL: Yes, Kissinger. You got it. Yes. See, there's a level of challenge for you and you win. [laughter] But, Kissinger wanted some kind of a plan or a military plan or something from one of the generals about something that they were doing or whatever, and gave him a timeline, and so the general came back with a plan, and Kissinger listened patiently to the plan and said, "General, is that the best you can do?" General thought for a while and said, "Well, actually, no. Given the time and resources we had, etcetera, we thought, well, this is the best we can do." "Well, why don't you go back and re-look at it and do it again, and see if that's the best you can do." Well, the general came back two or three more times and each time Kissinger said, "General, is that really the best you can do?" And finally the general said, "By golly, we worked on this, and I believe this is the best we could do at this point in time." Kissinger said, "Okay, that's all I wanted." [laughter] 0:10:29.8 AS: I'll read it. 0:10:30.0 DL: That's right. He just really wanted to know. So even in schools, kids learn to play the game of learning really quick. How do you get through school? By giving a teacher what they want. You don't get through school if you're super innovative... Well, you'll get through school, but you're not gonna probably get the As and master stuff if you're actually being innovative all the time and thinking outside of the box, and I think it was even Einstein got a D in physics or math or something because he kept challenging... 0:11:01.4 AS: Messing around. 0:11:03.0 DL: Yeah, he kept challenging the teacher's theories all the time. Well, that's not the way to get through school. You wanna give people the answers they expect, right? 0:11:15.8 AS: Yeah. I have a... 0:11:17.5 DL: That's the level of challenge that we're talking about. 0:11:20.3 AS: Right. I have an experience when I was 18, and I went to work in this factory, and it was a plastic molding factory back when plastic molding was done in America, and it was a very mundane job, and I would go crazy all day long waiting for the break and it would just drive me nuts. And I would be thinking about stuff all the time, and the way the company did it is they gave us three months, and at the end of three months, they'd tell us whether they're gonna keep us or not, and I started the job with a couple of other guys, some of them didn't survive, but this one guy did survive, and it was the night before we had the decision date, and I said... I asked him... We were talking about it and he asked me, "What do you think?" I said, "Man, I hope they don't offer me a job 'cause this is just gonna kill me, this is just... There is no challenge in this job." And I was like... 0:12:13.2 DL: I don't care how much they pay me. 0:12:14.5 AS: Yeah, exactly. Which I felt like must be the same answer that he was gonna give, but he gave a very different answer. He said, "Oh, I hope I get this job." And I was like, "Why?" And he said, "Because I just... I like it, I know exactly what to do. I don't have to bring the job home, I'm not facing all this stress and I can deal with that." And that was a wake-up call when I later became a supervisor at Pepsi, I was able to understand that different people have different objectives from work and different things they want from it, and some people want a big challenge and some people don't necessarily. So my question to you is, how do you handle different people that have different willingness or desire to take on challenge? 0:12:57.7 DL: Yeah, and Deming talked about that a lot in his seminars too, and one of the responses I often remember was, he said, "Sometimes people are just not in the right job." So, maybe there's another job within the company that would be much more challenging for them, but... 'Cause everybody has their own expertise that they bring to a situation, whether that's in a classroom or a job or management or whatever it might be, people have this level of expertise and maybe you're not just... You're just not being challenged to use your level of thinking and background and expertise in a new way. 0:13:40.2 AS: But in this case, that guy may not... I don't know if that would have changed anything 'cause what he was looking for from the job was not necessarily challenge. He wasn't a bad employee. In fact, he got the job in the next day, and... 0:13:54.3 DL: Well, there's two different kinds of stresses, right? There's eustress and there's distress, right? So eustress is when you are challenged by the job, and you're like, "Oh, yeah. This is great. This job's really challenging. I gotta figure this stuff out and I gotta work through this," or distress like, "These people are trying to kill me," or, "This is a... This is no fun for me. I don't like this at all. It's not something I wanna be doing," right? So a manager has to be acutely aware of who they're working with. And part of that happens in the hiring process, are you asking the right questions? And we have the phrase, "Do you have the right people on the bus?" Well, do you actually know what the bus is? What do you really want them to be doing? 0:14:46.3 AS: In fact, the person that was in trouble in that case was me. They probably... Yeah... If I had an education and I had more understanding of the world, I could have said, "Hey, could I try something else?" But I didn't have that understanding. One of the things I was thinking about that you said earlier that made me think about this situation was also that there's one thing that that other guy would respond to. And that is identifying errors or mistakes or problems because everybody is frustrated by that and because they gotta repeat their work and they just don't like that. So you could, I guess, argue that in fact, continuous improvement is something that people will be... Feel the excitement of that challenge about. 0:15:34.9 DL: Yeah, and I've encountered that with educators as well. I've had teachers just come up and tell me flat out, "I don't wanna have to think. Just tell me what to do, and I'll go do it." The problem with that is all of a sudden you're faced with, say 30 students, coming from random variation in the system coming in, and all of a sudden you're challenged with dealing with a level that you've never had to deal with before, right? And if you haven't learned to think and change and adapt and understand that situation, you're just gonna blame the individuals. "We just need some new kids here," right? Well, that's like you get that... You're in a band and you get feedback from the audience that, "Well, what you're doing really sucks," and you're thinking, "Whoa! I just need a different audience." [laughter] 0:16:37.6 AS: That's why I go to talk to my mom, 'cause she always applauds. [laughter] 0:16:41.8 DL: Yeah. There you go. So another way we can get challenged is through just novelty. So too much sameness does the opposite of challenge and it puts people into boredom and stuff. I always tell people, "If you don't believe me, just go to a local church and watch what happens after about 20 minutes of one method, one person talking, everybody just sitting there listening. And then you start to see a whole audience of people nodding their heads in agreement. But really, they're just trying to keep their heads up, their eyes open," right? And this is the same thing in a classroom. Past 10 minutes, if you're doing the same lecture format, the same thing all the time, there's no novelty there. There's nothing to look forward to. There's no challenge, or... 0:17:31.5 DL: I remember I was in a Master's Degree statistics class and it was a 3-hour class, two times a week at night, and the first class was just all lecture. This guy lectured on statistics and so everybody got it. And I remember it was not a very big class, only about 12 students, but the next class, there were only half as many there and when he got ready to start the class, these people would all get their tape recorders out and just punch all these tape recorders because students all realized that there's no point in me sitting here if that's all we're gonna do is just sit and listen for three hours, right? And the professor didn't care either. He didn't care if you're there or not. So that's kinda the opposite of challenge. 0:18:22.6 AS: When I see those heads nodding in my classroom, I always basically say, "Everybody come up to the board. I'm gonna show you something," and then I just do the next lecture with everybody standing." [chuckle] 0:18:35.1 DL: Yeah, so that's really good. So how do you get novelty? You can get novelty through music, adding color, and what you just described, adding movement. Change the situation and then watch how the behavior changes instead of leaving the situation alone and expecting a different behavior, which is, insanity kind of a thing. So you're exactly right. As soon as you see that, you should be changing the situation immediately. Do something different. 0:19:02.5 AS: I've been teaching an ethics class, and that's kind of known for being really sleepy. So what I do is I created a... This is gonna sound kind of funny, a cheat sheet for my ethics class. But basically I teach a little bit and then I tell the students, "Okay, write this down on your cheat sheet." So they have to do a physical activity and then after that we go back to a little bit of a lecture. And then I say, "Okay, now take a quiz question." Then they do that and then we look at the scores and see what they understood, and what they didn't, and basically by doing this type of thing, I'm trying to bring variety, novelty is the word you use. And yeah, and if I didn't do that in that topic, it's gonna be all sleepy, sleepyheads. 0:19:48.4 DL: Yeah, sometimes people interpret that as "Oh, alright, we're going to do an ice breaker." No, that's not novelty. Just a lot of people just look at that and just say, "Oh, just skip the icebreaker," right? 0:20:02.1 AS: Yeah. 0:20:02.2 DL: You have to bring novelty to the learning situation. So I remember when I was in college, I had a class called the Assassination of American Presidents. Fantastic class, but I remember one time we were talking about eyewitness accounts in murder cases and assassinations like that. And while the professor starts to talk about this and he's going through his points and stuff, probably he could never do it today, but these two people burst into the room with masks over their heads, demanded something from the professor, and actually got one of the students and pulled them out of the classroom with them, etcetera. And then while everybody's sitting there in panic, the professor says, "Okay, I want you to take out a piece of paper, write down everything that you saw." 0:20:53.9 DL: 80% of the students in that class swore up and down that these two masked individuals had guns and were holding people hostage. And then they had... He had the mask, people come back in. None of us got it right, because the adrenaline was there and there's novelty and all this kind of stuff, but it turns out these two guys had bananas in their hands, but we were all sure that they were guns and... But that's the problem with that, but that was so novel that every time you went to class, there was something, and then by the third class, you're kind of wary that there's some trick... Is there some trick to this or not? 0:21:39.5 DL: But still, you're paying attention, because there's something going on there. By the way, to get it challenging is to make sure it's compelling. And Deming talked a lot about the purpose of an organization and the aim, etcetera. But is the work more compelling than just the work itself? You think about... Like building the space shuttle is a good example. Well, I'm not just putting in rivets in the side of this space shuttle. I'm actually creating something that's a national heritage and we're doing something that's never been done before and... The work is compelling in that sense. Also, think about... I think Deming talked one time about most of the work in manufacturing during World War II was being done by women, as men were in the army for the most part, and they worked in teams, they communicated, they had fun in their work, but the work was also compelling. You knew you're actually building that airplane for your uncle in the South Pacific. And if you had errors in it or problems that that plane wasn't gonna fly right, you could be... Your family member could be in trouble. So, sometimes that has to be explicit that you have to understand how to make work compelling. 0:23:11.6 AS: Yeah. And I'm gonna wrap it up and then I want to also hear kind of a final word from you about a challenge to the listeners and the viewers to think about how to make things compelling. But let me go through a couple of things that we learned from this discussion. Of course, we're at part four of five part of intrinsic motivation. And right now, we're talking about the idea of challenge. And what was interesting that you said from the beginning was that, we don't get any training on intrinsic motivation, we get all this training on extrinsic motivation. Okay, here's how you do this and here's how you do the scores and here's how you do the competition. And what you also said is that it takes some complex thinking to think about creating an environment of challenge. And you also mentioned that too much challenge for some people could be overwhelming and too little would be boredom and so you've got to try to judge that for the students and people involved. 0:24:13.9 AS: And then you talked about also different types of stress and how are people responding to that stress? And I think that... When I think about that, I think about a lot of managers just wanna deliver stress. You didn't hit your numbers or whatever. And then just to wrap it up, you talked about the idea of how novelty in making things not the same all the time, whether it's music, color, emotion, whatever that is, can bring some excitement and some challenge. And then I think you wrapped it up with what really brings the most powerful challenge is to understand the aim or the purpose of what you're doing. And that purpose basically is what can raise your level of challenge. So if there's anything to add, please add it, and otherwise, let's give everybody a little challenge to bring challenge into their classroom, starting from after listening to this podcast. 0:25:14.5 DL: Yeah, I'd say just the last thing I would add to that is that, you can always get a level of challenge by having creativity involved in the process. So we're studying the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics, and so the creativity is you're to go home and apply the Pythagorean theorem in some way and come back and present it to the rest of the class. Well, that's a much different challenge than do Problems A through Z, and just come back with the answers. But thinking about introducing a level of creativity into the work is very challenging, so... 0:25:55.2 AS: So what would be a challenge for the listeners that they could bring into their own life, their own classroom, their own workplace? 0:26:05.9 DL: Yeah. It really doesn't matter what workplace we're talking about. Once you understand that these are the factors that create intrinsic motivation, you can start looking at your environment and say, "Okay, how could I make this more challenging? Could I add a level of excitement to this that was probably never even there before, a level of novelty? Or could I make this work compelling or add creativity?" I grew up on a farm in Colorado, and I used to sometimes hate that, I'd have to go out with my father to build a fence or something. And one of the first things he would say is, "Okay, so what are we trying to do here?" "Just tell me what to do." Well, what are we trying to do here, and go through this, and then why do we need to build the fence in this way?" And I'd go, "Well, 'cause its stock gets out and... " "What happens if stock gets out?" And he was doing with five whys stuff just intuitively, but after a few years, he could just say, "Hey, go out and build this fence 'cause you know how to do it," and the challenge was much greater of figuring it out on my own and having to work that through. So even something so simple as that can have a level of challenge to it. So think about how you can make just about anything you do, challenging. 0:27:28.0 AS: Great challenge for all of us. What is the purpose of what we're doing and let's bring that out. Well David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for your discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, and listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David discuss one aspect of cultivating intrinsic motivation: the role of support. Cooperation and collaboration don't just happen, and leaving a group of people - particularly kids - to just do as they please isn't cultivating motivation. So how do you support intrinsic motivation? 0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is The Role of Support in Intrinsic Motivation. David, take it away. 0:00:29.5 David Langford: Thank you. So we're working through five factors that lead to high levels of intrinsic motivation. And we started off with control, autonomy, ownership, however you want to think about that, but that's number one. And then we had a discussion around that you have to develop levels of cooperation. And today I want to talk about the idea of support. So I'll never forget a kindergarten class, so students was giving a presentation to the State Board of Education and they were telling the state board about all the ownership they had in class and how they cooperated and how they did all these things on their own and they just knew what to do and had high degrees of ownership. And one of the board members said, "Well, if you're doing all these things, what's your teacher doing?" And without hesitating, I'll never forget this little boy grabs a microphone and he says, "The teacher is not in the closet, you know." 0:01:39.7 AS: My gosh, insightful. 0:01:42.1 DL: Oh yeah, the room was, there was probably 300 people in the room, at this state board meeting, and you could, the whispers were just, "What did he say? What is he talking about?" See, he knew intuitively that he was being allowed to do these things and supported to do these things and to work together and have a real community in the classroom. And that just didn't happen by itself. 0:02:12.4 AS: That's interesting because in that case, you sometimes would think, oh, the teacher's just, you know, letting the class go free or something like that. But it takes a lot of work. I mean, just as you talked, I was thinking about how confrontational America is in the world. You know, here I am in Asia and most people outside of the world do not think that America is a cooperative partner. In fact, people around the world oftentimes say, you know, they don't know whether it's better to be an enemy or a friend of America. And there's that just competitive. There's just not that cooperative. How do we work this out? How do we work together to get a better result for all of us? So continue on. Tell us more about support. 0:02:57.6 DL: Yeah. So if you if you want to see more intrinsic motivation emerge, you need to take a look at what you are doing. And you know, when you point a finger there, what is it that saying, there's three fingers pointing back at you? So yeah, what am I doing and how am I managing in such a way to not have a high degree of cooperation or a high degree of performance in a group? And so there are some very key factors that I've learned over the last 40 years that will either hinder or help intrinsic motivation to come out. And the first one I want to talk about, how do you support people is the area of feedback. So feedback versus evaluation. 0:03:53.9 DL: So you know, we always think that our job is to evaluate people, evaluate performance, evaluate a paper that you write and then give it back to you, put a grade on it, etcetera. People don't respect evaluation very well. There are just so many opinions in it, etcetera. Performance evaluations, Deming talked vociferously about getting rid of performance evaluations, but they do respect feedback. So when I'm in a classroom and I have an assignment, let's say it's a paper to write and you hand it in, yeah, I could go through it, put red marks all over it and then hand it back to you with a B minus on it and you'll probably just throw it in the trash can on the way out the door and that's the end of it. 0:04:50.6 DL: But if we've gone over what a quality standard is for that paper and what it should look like to meet that standard and now you hand that in and I start to give you feedback on it. I sit down with you and I say, "You know, this paragraph doesn't quite make sense. I think you really should rework these sentences and go over this and your punctuation is not quite right here and if you make these changes, I think you're going to be very close to being there, to meeting that standard, right?" Well, that's much different because I have a way to get out of my hole, right? But if I just have a B minus on it or C plus or whatever, there's no way for me to get out of that hole or to fix it. So it also brings into the whole grading thing. That's partly why Deming was so adamant about getting rid of grading in both corporations and schools, etcetera. Because it just limits the masses of people trying to achieve a high level of quality in anything they do. So moving to a feedback system is extremely important to get support for intrinsic motivation. 0:06:08.4 AS: And what do you say about the teachers and administrators and people who say, "Yeah, but feedback takes a lot more time." 0:06:19.2 DL: Exactly. So we have to think about things like that. If I'm having to spend way too much time giving feedback to people, it's probably because the upstream process wasn't very good. And I needed to go back and look at that and see, wow, if I want to have fewer and fewer students needing feedback to get it to a high quality standard, I might want to look first at the process I'm using to... The explanation of the assignment or how we went over it or examples that I show people up-front or whatever it might be. But that process is producing the end result. If I don't like the result, don't blame the people. They're just part of the system. 0:07:00.4 AS: It's interesting because I have a course that I've been teaching for a long time. And I have a lot of students going through it on a regular basis. And I can see the weaknesses when the reports are submitted. And then I go back and think, Okay, how do we resolve this? For instance, I want them to write in a very clear format. I want three bullets. I want some supporting arguments. So when I started teaching that, what I did is I made an Excel file that had a limit. You could only type in a certain amount of characters. And I said, "Okay, your first assignment is to operate within this limit." And then what I did, David, was I created a macro that would take a picture of that in that student's Excel file. And I said, "Submit your picture to the group. And then let's discuss those." 0:07:52.0 AS: And once I then have them present, five or 10 of them, randomly call on students to present your ideas, very quickly, all students can start to see, "Oh, crap, I see the weakness here. I wasn't that clear on this." And they started looking not only at common principles, but they also see their weaknesses. And then that then goes back into my lecture as I revise it for the next group to say, "Okay, how do I make sure that they don't make those mistakes the next time?" And that's one of the things about the manufacturing process that made Deming such a, it's so, it's sometimes simple to apply in a consistent process that's just cranking away. How do we think about how we apply that in a classroom that we do once a year or once every semester or once every term? 0:08:37.6 DL: Well, one of the previous podcasts, we talked about the Bell curve or the histogram responses of somebody. So your job as a, especially in education, is to not flatten the curve so that you have greater distances from top performers to low performers, but to actually sort of tighten the curve up so it's very tight. So what used to be top performance is actually being achieved by some of your lowest level students, and the top students are actually doing things that are just unbelievable because the whole curve is much, much tighter between the haves and the have-nots, so to speak. 0:09:29.4 AS: And are we also trying to shift that, once we've tightened it, then we have the ability to start to shift it to say, "Okay, what next level of output could we get with students," or something like that? 0:09:40.7 DL: Yeah, my job is to see that the average performance goes up, overall. And the only way to get a higher average is for everybody to achieve, you know, moving that up. So there's some other key factors that are critical for supporting intrinsic motivation. So the next one is what I call fail forward. So you're going to have to put people in a fail forward loop. So either you just didn't do the assignment at all, in which you're going to have to fail forward a lot, right? Because you didn't, you have to produce something or you produced something, but it didn't, it doesn't yet meet the standard for high quality work. Well, I'm going to give you time to get it to that standard because that's my job. My job is to see that you learn this material. My job is not to come up with sophisticated rating and ranking methods and spend all my time tracking that and figuring it through. That's not the job of teaching and learning. 0:10:48.7 AS: Can you explain fail forward a little bit more? It's not something I've heard before. 0:10:54.2 DL: Well, I have five children and they all learned to walk, whether my wife and I helped them or not. But it was always great fun for us when they got ready to walk and we knew they were standing up. And so I'd stand them up and my wife would maybe get 10 feet away. And then she'd say, "Come on, come on, you can do it." They don't really know what they're supposed to do or what's going on. But they're glad that we're both there supporting them learning to walk. But invariably, our kids would take about three little steps and then they'd fall back on their little bums. And, you know, and so what did we do intuitively as parents? 0:11:37.7 AS: Go pick them up. What did you... 0:11:39.1 DL: That's right. 0:11:40.5 AS: Yeah. 0:11:41.1 DL: Or we would applause or say, good job or right. But this doesn't happen in schools. You know, my wife and I were both teachers, so we gave our children D's and F's on walking the first time around as motivation so that they'd learn to walk. 0:11:58.1 AS: You go in the corner. 0:12:00.3 DL: Yeah. So, yeah. So when we look at some basic things like that, we realize as part of the human condition, somebody that was actually grading the performance of a toddler walking like that, we would probably report them to social services or something that this is so dangerous. But why would we want to do that to them when they are in first grade trying to learn math or they're trying to write an English paper at the high school level. Right? You would want to have the same philosophy that, hey, you made an attempt. Your attempt wasn't quite reaching the standard yet, but you'll get there. You'll get there. And I'm here to support you. And my job is here that you, as long as you keep making these attempts, you're going to keep failing forward until you get there. 0:12:47.2 AS: Right. 0:12:49.2 DL: And then it's pretty amazing when you understand the neuroscience behind all this, right? Because we talked earlier about the control issue, about time, but everybody's going to learn at different rates of speed and different time. And the more I understand that variability built into the time factor, I can manage a system so that more and more and more people are all achieving very high levels of performance. And that's my real job. 0:13:20.8 DL: So another area that I want to talk about under the area of support, how to use support in an environment of intrinsic motivation is sharing. I just over the years just found that sharing is so intrinsic to people. So that's whether I have students just pair up, "Hey, pair up with the student next to you and share, you know, what did you do and how did you do it and what did you learn from that experience, etcetera." Or all the way to I have exemplary performance in my classroom by five students, and I'm going to give them a chance to share what it is they accomplished. Now, that's vastly different than me saying, I've got these five students and they're all going to get an award for being most improved students in the class or something like that. Everybody else in the class has no idea how those people got there. So they intuitively will make up their own stories. Oh, well, you know, the teacher just likes her or he's a brown noser or he's this or that. Right? That's where all of these terms come from. 0:14:34.1 AS: Right. 0:14:34.5 DL: Because they have no idea how they actually accomplished this great thing that they did because that wasn't shared properly. 0:14:43.3 AS: Right. 0:14:44.8 DL: And sharing is also a way that you can honor people that have made breakthroughs. It doesn't always have to be your top performers. Right. It could be somebody that really worked hard on something and had a big breakthrough. Is it as good as the top performer in the classroom? No, because I understand variation in the classroom. But... 0:15:05.5 AS: And you just said that somebody that went... What I was thinking about is they had a, somebody had a major breakthrough. But actually, if somebody follows the process of failing forward and they don't have a massive breakthrough, they're still going through the right process. And I was recently interviewing a lady named Annie Duke, who talked about, who talks all about, you know, that the process is more important than the outcome in decision making. You may have had a good outcome only because of luck but if you're improving your process of the way you're doing it, your probability of a better outcome over time is great. So even if somebody, you know, having someone share their experience of failing forward and keep falling down and, you know, how does it feel and what is it that's motivating you to keep getting up and, you know, yeah, because I want to do this or that. I want to, you know. So that's what I was thinking about when you were talking about that. 0:16:04.5 DL: Yeah, even inside of a grading system, when I started learning about Deming I couldn't just stop grading students. But I could apply these methods and this thinking to have more and more and more of the students all do A work. Right. So instead of like 5% of the students getting A's, could I get it to 20% of the students doing that level of work? And now can I get it to 50% of the students getting that work? And just like what you're talking about, it all has to do with the process of, you know, what are we doing and how do we do explanations? Or maybe I shouldn't even be doing an explanation. It's just getting in the way of people. And using that data to try to understand is my process producing the result I want. So in a classroom as a teacher, I have a process. I always taught my students you have processes, too. Right? So if your processes are not getting you to the level, you may be want to start talking to some of your colleagues and saying, hey, what are you doing or how are you going about that or how did you make that breakthrough? Because they may have insights that you've never thought about before. 0:17:16.5 AS: So if we look at these five key factors for a system of intrinsic motivation, control, cooperation, support, challenge and meaning, right now, we're talking about support. And would it be about also you're creating a supportive environment, encouraging people to support each other and giving them feedback? And that's part of being in a supportive environment. 0:17:40.6 DL: Absolutely. Yeah. 0:17:42.1 AS: So let me... 0:17:42.7 DL: That's why I keep saying it's a system of intrinsic motivation. These are interrelated factors. And the more you think about each one of them and how it relates to the others, you become sort of a guru in the classroom that no matter who comes into your classroom over time, you will start to see them more intrinsically motivated when you change that situation. And so lastly, I would want to say that this takes a role change, takes a role change, whether you're a teacher, administrator, a parent, a student. It's going to take a role change to think about working well with other people and cooperating. Right. And sharing what I have. See, I can't, what we talked about earlier is I can't really share my great process if it's going to be a detriment to me. Right. If there's going to be... 0:18:48.3 AS: My grade is going to go down on a curve, if it's graded on a curve, I have this amazing way of really thinking about this particular topic. So I think I'll just keep it to myself. 0:18:58.3 DL: Yeah. So, and we see this in really, you know, big systems. I won't mention the name of the university, but I was working at a university and they caught 200 students cheating on electrical engineering exams. Well, in the investigation, not only were they cheating, this cheating cycle had been going on for 12 years. The students were passing down the answers to this professor's tests for 12 years from generation to generation. They were actually being intrinsically motivated to share, you know, to the next generation about what was going on. But what did they want to do? Well, they wanted to expel the 200 students that were caught cheating and all this. But without understanding, you created a system forcing people to sacrifice their integrity to get an artificial result, because all the classes were being graded on curves. And so... You're not going to get the grade you want unless you cheat. And so the system is forcing people to do these defective behaviors. 0:20:12.5 AS: And, David, I have the most horrible response to that by the teachers or the administrators that you're telling. And they say, yeah, but we're preparing them for work. 0:20:23.0 DL: I don't want those people working for me. 0:20:24.2 AS: Yeah. 0:20:25.5 DL: Right? 0:20:28.2 AS: Yeah. But it's... 0:20:29.7 DL: We're preparing them to sacrifice their integrity when they come to work. Yeah, that's really what we want. 0:20:35.2 AS: Disaster. And it is. There's so much of that in the workforce. And so I think what you're talking about is so critical related to education, because if we can get these seeds planted right, I mean, we already know that people are, and you've talked about it, that people are intrinsically motivated naturally, people are naturally wanting to cooperate. And if we can continue that cooperation and intrinsic motivation, at least they know in school, like this is the best way to get the best out of people instead of whipping them like a horse, you know, as an example. So maybe I'll wrap up. Yep. Go ahead. 0:21:11.0 DL: Well, it's funny that you mentioned horses because I actually raise horses. But I, one of the things when people come to visit our horses and stuff, I have to explain to them that, you know, we don't use whips and we don't use carrots and we don't give them treats because you start to give a horse a treat for whatever. Pretty soon they're biting somebody and they're trying to dig in your pockets. And again, defective behavior that I'm encouraging or I created. And even the horses have an innate sense of wanting to work and do a good job. And when they see that you're really supporting them, that's our topic today, supporting them in doing that job, they can achieve amazing things, that even works with animals, so. 0:22:02.5 AS: Yeah, that's a great point. I know for anybody that's watched anything like The Dog Whisperer or The Horse Whisperer and all that, it's all about, you know, if you ever watch that show, The Dog Whisperer with Cesar, Cesar Millan, you know... 0:22:17.5 DL: Millan. 0:22:17.8 AS: Yeah. What you realize is it's all about untangling the mess that the adults or the people cause with these dogs. And it becomes so clear. 0:22:31.3 DL: He even says, you know, I don't have bad dogs, we have bad people, so. 0:22:35.8 AS: Yeah, yeah. And that's a lot of what we're talking about in the whole education space is how do we, you know, instead of focusing on the kids, focus on how we improve the system, because ultimately that's our responsibility. And if I just would share one last thing, it is that I remember going to my first Deming seminar, it was in 1990 and I was about, I don't know, a 24 year old guy, and I was working for Pepsi, and I saw a lot of the stuff that Deming was talking about. But, man, when he turned and went after some of the leading managers in that room and I wasn't one, I mean, I was a supervisor on the factory floor, and I heard that, I was like, whoa, that was a wake up call to me to say, take responsibility. You know, it is our responsibility to set this system so that there is an intrinsic motivation. So that just brought me back to that moment. 0:23:28.2 DL: Yeah. Any of us that ever saw Deming have great stories, but your story made me think about I was at a conference with him one time and an Admiral got up and asked a question and Deming said, "We already covered that this morning. Where were you, in the parking lot?" [laughter] 0:23:49.2 DL: That was the Deming wit. 0:23:51.9 AS: Yes, it could be biting, biting. Well, let me summarize some of this now. Again, we've been talking about the five key factors for the system of intrinsic motivation. And today we talked about support. And one of the questions you kicked it off with is like, what am I doing to impede cooperation? You know, how do you start to ask that question? You also talked about the value of feedback instead of evaluation and the idea that people respect feedback. And also you talked a lot about how we can think about like, what's the quality standard and how do we give feedback? Is our quality standard clear and how do we give feedback, but also adjust ourselves and our system of teaching to improve that? And also, I like the discussion that we had about the Bell curve because it is something that it's abused. 0:24:43.5 AS: It's abused all the time around the world. But you talked about the job is not to flatten the curve, but to tighten it. We're not trying to get these extremely bad and extremely good outcomes. We're trying to get a more narrow and then to try to shift that curve. And that means that the average is going up. You also talked and you gave the example of a baby learning how to walk and failing forward. And part of support is creating a supportive environment where people are. Finally, the last part is we talked about was the idea of sharing, and sharing... Getting people to share their experience. Instead of awarding or rewarding them, having them share their experiences, not only of the people that have hit a particular milestone or whatever, but also the people that haven't done that. And then the last thing I think is really the big challenge for all the listeners and viewers out there, which is this - to be supportive takes a role change. It's about working well with others and helping other people to see how to share and work together. Anything you would add to that? 0:25:51.9 DL: Yeah, I'd say ultimately, we want people to take risks because if they're not taking risks, we're not going to have breakthroughs. We're not going to have new levels of learning in schools. And in order to take those risks, they have to feel like they're supported, whether it worked out well or it didn't work out well. If it didn't work out well, what did you learn from that? And it may be what you learned was, I'm never going to do that again. Okay, well, you learn something from that, right? But if they're in that highly supportive environment, you'll see their intrinsic motivation for learning and work come out at a level that you never thought possible before. I can guarantee it. 0:26:32.3 AS: Wonderful. Well, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion, David. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your Deming journey. Listeners can learn more about David at Langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming: "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this second episode of the Motivation series, Andrew and David P. Langford discuss how power dynamics impact motivation and why autonomy is a big factor in motivation.  TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, Who Controls Motivation? David, take it away. 0:00:29.4 David P. Langford: Thanks, Andrew. So we're starting this five podcast series. In the last podcast, we talked a lot about the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Here in this five-podcast series, we're gonna discuss how do you actually create intrinsic motivation environments so that people want to do [chuckle] the work or the learning or whatever it is you might be getting them to do [chuckle] or task them to do. Right? So the first element, and I've been researching this for now over 40 years, and I've never found anything that contradicts what I'm gonna share with the listeners over these five podcasts. And these are five elements of intrinsic motivation that I guarantee you, if you start applying these, you will see either your students, your own children, employees, yourself, [chuckle] you will see people more motivated to do the work that they're doing, if you think about these five factors that we're gonna be going over. 0:01:48.8 DL: So the first factor that I wanna talk about today is the element of control or autonomy in situation. So when I have control over a situation, I have autonomy, I'm self-motivating. I'm doing things in that environment by myself. So we have a lot of buzzwords in management words like empowerment. And well, even a word like empowerment means I have all the power, and so I'm gonna give you some of it. [laughter] I'm gonna empower you to... But you can only do this a little bit, I don't want you to do a lot of stuff. I just want you to do... Be empowered to just do this thing, kind of a thing, and that's also an element of control, so. 0:02:38.6 DL: But control is... Our economy is built into the human condition, and when we tap into that in managing people in either in a classroom or a workforce or a whole group of teachers, whoever it might be, yes, the more I set up an environment where I'm allowing people to take control or have autonomy over what they're doing, the more I will see them be motivated. The more I take that away, and I start controlling everything and running stuff, I start to be really motivated, [chuckle] and I see this a lot with teachers. They're really motivated by controlling everything, controlling all those kids, controlling the process, controlling having... And they have total autonomy in the classroom to do whatever they wanna do basically, and so they're really motivated by that. Well, when they start giving up that control or that autonomy to children, a lot of times, they become de-motivated. 0:03:43.5 DL: [chuckle] I'll never forget this story. I was working with a university,in California, and I had one of the teachers, one of the professors, that really wanted to learn about this and how to run a classroom, so we talked a lot about... I've worked with him individually and talked about, "How do you set up your classroom so that when the students come to your classroom, basically they start to have autonomy and control over the process and what's happening?" Well, one day I get a phone call, and I answered the phone, and this guy is whispering to me. He said, "I think I need some quality therapy." And I said, [chuckle] "Why? What, what's going on?" And he said, "Well, I had a flat tire on the way to school. And so the university has a policy if the professor doesn't show up in the first 10 minutes, everybody can leave. So I was 30 minutes late, and I was just sure I was gonna walk into the room and everybody's gonna be gone." But he said, "I walked into the room and nobody even knew that I was missing.They were all working in teams and working on their projects and discussing stuff and doing what is they're doing?" He said, "I need some therapy." [chuckle] Because for him, that was de-motivating that they didn't need him. Right? So it's a very powerful, powerful concept once you start to get it, but you also have to understand that you, as the manager, of that situation are part of the equation, that as well, right? So you almost have to start the... Your motivation by seeing other people taking on the control of the situation and having autonomy to do what it is that they need to do. I was in a kindergarten classroom in North Carolina years ago, and the teacher had been through my training and stuff, and she invited me to come to her classroom. 0:05:34.6 DL: And so I went there early in the morning and just watched, and those little kids came in and they just knew what to do. And they all went to their tables and they got their stuff out. They were talking with each other and interrelating. And it was probably at least 40 minutes before the teacher intervened in some way. It's the kinda thing where I have to interrupt your learning to [chuckle] motivate you or tell you something. But those little kids had... Five and six-year-olds just had total control of that first 40 minutes. And were happy about it. And yeah, there was a child or two that weren't quite doing what it is they were supposed to do, and what'd the teacher do? She goes over and sits down beside them and starts working with them and explaining stuff and, "Oh, I see you might be having a little trouble with this and... " Right? 0:06:36.4 AS: Maybe just had a bad family day. 0:06:39.0 DL: Yeah. Now, that's totally different than, "Everybody get in here, sit down, be quiet, don't talk to each other, don't touch him. I'm gonna control this situation, and I'm gonna tell you what to do and... Okay, this is what I want you to do, and you go do it, and once you've done that, come back and sit down again." Well, that's the old teacher mentality [chuckle] that I have to control the situation, and there are times where you need to exert that kind of control. If there's a fire in the building, you might have to control the situation, but sometimes teachers will bring that up to me and I'll say, "Look, what if there's a fire in the building and you were incapacitated or taken out by the fire? Would all your students know what to do? [chuckle] Or maybe you were out of the classroom when that erupted, that... Would they all know what they're supposed to do, regardless of whether you were there or not?" 0:07:40.1 AS: Right. 0:07:41.6 DL: Or are they just gonna burn up, because they're waiting for somebody to tell them what to do? So, that's the element of control. So, how do you get that? One of the ways to get that is to give people more knowledge of the situation. Just the example that I just gave you. When those students have the knowledge of what to do if there's something that goes on or something happens, and they have the autonomy to do it, and so maybe you actually practice that. Well, I'm giving you knowledge of what to do in that kind of situation. And when people become more and more knowledgeable about what's going on, they feel like they have much more control over their situation, what's happening. That makes sense? 0:08:36.9 AS: Yeah, and I think what I'm thinking about then is talking with kids like, what's the objective? If there's a fire, get out of the building. And, we have... That's our objective. How do we do that? Well, we try to stay in line because we hold hands, and that helps us keep, but... 0:08:52.8 DL: And we don't wanna run over each other, and... Right? 0:08:55.1 AS: It reminds me of this story of when Dr. Deming talked about cleaning a table. And he was saying something like, "How could a worker really know how to clean a table if you don't tell them what the table is gonna be used for?" 0:09:13.0 DL: That's right. So that's knowledge, right? Are we gonna operate on this table? We're just gonna eat lunch on it? Oh, well, just... Those are two different types of cleaning, aren't they? [chuckle] And so, how can I do a good job if I don't know? I don't have knowledge of that situation or... And, you see this in little children. They're asking why. You're telling them to do this and they say, "Well, why?" Well, because... 0:09:43.4 AS: 'Cause I said so. 0:09:45.1 DL: 'Cause I said so, right? Well, and if you don't do it, I'm just gonna make your life so difficult that you wish you would have. 0:09:52.0 AS: Right. 0:09:52.6 DL: That's not good management, that's just manipulation of somebody. And yeah, you can get the result. But in the end, somebody's not gonna wanna... They're not gonna wanna do what you want them to do on their own. I remember a teacher came up to me one time, said that in the 1960s, he was working in an auto factory in California, and his job was to put these types of rivets in some part of the automobile. But he noticed that the machine that he was using to put the rivets in, would strip the rivets out every once in a while, and he got really tired of having to re-work this situation. Not rivets, they were screws, I think it was. 0:10:45.1 AS: Right. 0:10:45.5 DL: So he actually built his own little tool so that it would only go in at the proper depth and every screw was going in perfectly, and he was very proud of it. So proud of it that when his supervisor came by, he showed him, he said, "Look, look what I built, I built this, and you may wanna think about doing this for everybody," and well, his supervisor just lit into him and told him, "Your job is not to think. Your job is to put these screws in and you go back to doing what you were told to do in the first place." And I asked him, I said, "Well, so what did you do?" He said, "When the supervisor was around, I used the tool that did a bad job, and every time he would leave, I would get my tool out and do it properly." So he was still in that environment, intrinsically motivated to do a good job, but because the supervisor wanted that autonomy or control of that situation, and it's the "not invented here syndrome" that... 0:11:49.1 AS: Yeah. 0:11:49.3 DL: "I didn't invent it, I didn't tell you to do that, so therefore, it can't be a good idea," kind of a thing. 0:11:56.7 AS: And I'm thinking about... There's some teachers out there that are... Have a really hard time. "If I give up control, this classroom is gonna go chaos." They are making themselves really important in that, and let's say... Let's put those people aside for just a minute and let's just take the people that are kind of in the middle, they're open to that and all that. And I just wanna tell a quick story in my life. I remember, my father never... My father didn't tell me his personal problems. He talked to my mom about that, and occasionally, I knew a little bit of what was going on. But I remember, when I turned about, I don't know, 25, and I really had become a much more mature guy, and my dad started telling me some of the things he was dealing with, some of the ways he felt about things, and it's like the whole thing flipped. I just really saw a different side, a human side. 0:12:49.1 DL: They're human. [chuckle] 0:12:50.9 AS: Yeah. And I saw a different side of him, but also I've wanted to be a different participant in that. I wanted to be a participant and someone that could listen and understand where my dad was coming from. And I think about classroom, then I'm thinking about what you're talking about, a classroom. So for a teacher who's kind of open to try some new things, part of what you... Maybe what you're saying is, flip the script a little bit and talk about why are we here, what are we trying to do? What am I trying to do. What's my job? What's... 0:13:17.8 DL: Yeah. When I see intrinsic motivation emerge, it's there, right? It's there. All you have to do is manage the situation differently, and you'll start to see it emerge and come out. So you can take something so simple like the start of a classroom. Well, I could just have all the children come in and talk and goof around and everything else, until I stand up and tell them what to do. That's a way to control the situation or like I was saying, I could start to give them the knowledge of what to do. So let's talk about... Let's do a flowchart. Let's do a flowchart about what to do when you come in the door. Where do you go? What do you do? How do you get things set up? Well, I've now just transferred a level of control to them or a situation like, somebody doesn't know what to do next. 0:14:24.3 DL: So we talk as a class and maybe we come up with a flowchart that's what to do. What to do when you don't know what to do. So we're now giving them knowledge about that situation and being able to take action. So then if I have a child that says, "Well, I don't know what to do." "Oh, have you looked at the flowchart?" Let's talk about that. Remember we talked about, okay, the first thing you wanna do is do this and then do that and maybe talk to somebody else and see if they know what to do. But there's a process of what to do when you don't know what to do. Now, that's different than me saying, "Well, if you don't know what to do, come up and ask me." 'Cause it's putting me... 0:15:11.2 AS: And then I'll tell you. 0:15:12.1 DL: Yeah. It's putting me in total control of that situation and that's very motivating for me. But it's very demotivating for the individual because they can't take control because they don't know what to do next. 0:15:24.1 AS: Yeah. 0:15:25.3 DL: So change the situation, watch how behavior changes versus what we've been taught to do, especially in schools, is leave the situation alone and then manage the behavior that it's producing. See? 0:15:40.2 AS: So we're back to the system 0:15:42.2 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So, couple of other factors, before getting control of the situation. The more you have people self-evaluate their own progress, you'll start to see intrinsic motivation emerge. So as long as I'm evaluating you, write this paper, hand it in. I'll grade it. I'll go over it, I'll find the mistakes, and then I'll put a grade on it and I'll hand it back to you, well, that gives me as a teacher total control of that situation. I reverse that, and I set up processes for you to self-evaluate your own work, so when you think you're finished with this, here are the steps that you wanna go through, so check to see if it's this or nowadays, have you run it through Grammarly, online? But I'm putting you in a position where you have autonomy to self-evaluate your own work. And then if you think it's finished and you've finished your self-evaluation, you might wanna share it with somebody else. I'm gonna look at it, see if you can get some feedback from them. See feedback is very motivating, but evaluation is not. 0:17:00.7 DL: I can give you some feedback on the job that you're doing and support you and how you can do a better job. That's much different than me saying, "You're doing a lousy job, Andrew." Or, "I'm gonna put B on this paper." No matter how hard you worked, you're gonna get a B. So the example you gave in the last Podcast about only 10 students are gonna get A's. Well, that's an artificial scarcity of top performance. And so I'm pretty certain people looked around the room and they said, "I'm not one of those 10 people, I know that." 0:17:37.0 AS: I'm outta here. 0:17:38.4 DL: I'm outta here. 0:17:39.5 AS: And that's not achieving the goal... 0:17:40.9 DL: Right. 0:17:41.5 AS: Or the aim. 0:17:42.3 DL: Or we have other ways that people get control of their situation when they feel out of control. We call it cheating. So when the situation won't allow me actually to achieve what I'm supposed to achieve, maybe I'm a university class and I have to have this grade, have to have this class to get my degree, but the class is so horrible, I'm not learning anything, there's no way I'm gonna pass this test, and so I end up sacrificing my integrity and cheating 'cause it's worth the risk. Because the system is not gonna allow me to learn this material and get to the level I need to get to. So that's when we start to see the effective behavior emerge. It starts really very early in schools. Kids feel like, "I can't get this, I can't understand it, so I'm just gonna have to cheat, copy somebody else's paper, or steal it or something." And we wanna manage that behavior, wow, oh, we caught that, we're gonna... So we come up with sophisticated methods of catching the cheaters. Right? 0:19:00.0 DL: So you see it in the SAT tests and all kinds of things. What? You got to have monitors. It has to be one monitor for every 50 students or because we gotta catch those cheaters. [chuckle] But nobody's looking at the situation or the system and saying, "What's causing people to cheat?" Because they're feeling helpless and hopeless and, "I can't get this. And so, the only way I can get it is to cheat." There's some other ways that we can impart or get people to have more control in situations. So when you think about neuroscience, the human brain taps into mapping and patterns and systems actually. And again, we're back to Deming's work. And Deming tapped into that, actually. So when I put learning into maps or patterns or gestault kinds of things, the human brain actually responds to it better. 0:20:00.9 DL: So in a classroom, instead of me just verbally talking about stuff all the time, if I take that same information I want people to know and understand, and I put it into some kind of a map or a pattern or a flowchart, I'll see a new level of intrinsic motivation or ownership start to emerge, because I've just changed the situation and tapped into something. So I'm not just dealing with just the auditory learners, I'm really tapping into... I'm giving control of everybody over to learn. I created a tool to do that, actually, to take curriculum and put in into a map or a pattern and then give that to students at the beginning of a learning experience. And all of a sudden, you see ownership, this is all the stuff that you need to know and learn in this two weeks or whatever the time has to be. That's much different than me saying, "Well, read this book. Well, what do I need to know in this book? What's gonna be on the test?" "Well, read it just in case I put something on the test." That's a school game that puts the teacher or the system in control, but it makes the learner feel helpless in that environment. 0:21:21.9 AS: You used a word, ownership. How do we think of ownership versus intrinsic motivation? What does that... What does that mean? 0:21:29.0 DL: Ownership, autonomy, control of the situation, those are all of the same kinds of concepts that you're trying to get people just to have more ownership of their own learning, their own situation. And my job is to manage the whole system, right? So if I've got 30 kids in my class, I want all 30 to be well motivated [chuckle] to learn whatever it is that we're working on and going through. So another level of control is choice. The more choice I give people in a situation, I'll see their intrinsic motivation emerge. And it can be so simple that you can choose to do this, or you can choose to do that. [chuckle] That's an element of choice. 0:22:14.4 AS: Mom, mom, you can either walk after breakfast or twice in the afternoon. [chuckle] 0:22:20.7 DL: Yeah. But that's a level of intrinsic motivation, right? You're giving her the control of that situation. "Well, no, I'd rather do it in the afternoon." Okay. Right? That I'm managing differently by giving people choice, or in a classroom, you have the choice to choose what you wanna write about or how you wanna write it or... And now, for some children that can be overwhelming, right? 0:22:48.3 AS: Yeah. 0:22:48.6 DL: So I can say, "Well, you can choose whatever you wanna do, or I'll choose it for... Or you can have me choose it for you." Right? 0:23:00.5 AS: Right. 0:23:00.6 DL: If you want me just to give you a topic, I'll be glad to do that. Maybe it's you can't really think about what you wanna do, right? 0:23:05.5 AS: Right. That may take some pressure off of them. 0:23:07.7 DL: But still it's your choice, right? 0:23:10.3 AS: Yep. 0:23:10.9 DL: So you start to see rebellion go away when you incorporate levels of choice because I can't really rebel against myself. [chuckle] 0:23:21.6 AS: Right, yep. 0:23:21.9 DL: I chose to do this, but no, I really don't wanna do this. [laughter] But you chose it, right? 0:23:27.9 AS: And that circles back to the title, which was Who Controls Motivation? Maybe I'll just summarize some of the things that I took away. We're talking about five elements of intrinsic motivation and a lot of it has to do with creating the environment so that people wanna learn and they want to get the benefit of that. And the first element is control. And the point is when you give someone... You, if you're holding onto the control, you're not really empowering or you're not really giving autonomy and control. Just give that control to the other people, to the kids, to the other people at the company. They're gonna know what to do with it. And help them and guide them. How do I... What do I do? Give them autonomy. And also you talked about the idea that give people more knowledge. And I think that that's part of what I was telling my story about my father, is like the idea he was giving me more knowledge of what's going on. There's more there than I knew. And the more knowledge that someone has, the more they can really figure out what to do with that. You also said a good one, which was intrinsic motivation, it's there. Just change some things and watch it emerge. 0:24:41.1 DL: That's right. 0:24:42.2 AS: And then you went through a couple of different things that are really helpful for helping people take control, to get that intrinsic motivation. You talked about self-evaluation of your own progress and that helps people. And feedback is motivating, but evaluation is not. So think about constant feedback. "Hey, that was good. Oh, did you see why that happened? Why do you think that happened?" That, and also you said when people lose control, they often cheat to cope. And I liked... One of the things that you said was that the brain taps into maps, patterns, and systems. And I use that a lot when teaching. I need that to see how does this all connect? And then you alluded to the idea of appealing to maybe the left brain and the right brain type of people in the room that maybe some people are seeing things more logically, whereas other people will see things less linearly and that type of stuff. And then final thing that you talked about is choice gives control. Anything you would add to that? 0:25:55.0 DL: Yeah, there's a couple of other factors quickly. One is just-in-time learning, so when I'm getting the knowledge I need just in time. So I'm working on a project or something, and I need to know a level of skill to complete this project, well, when I discover that I need that knowledge, right, that's just-in-time learning. So if you need to know this, come to the back of the room and I'll explain it, but if you don't need to know this right now, then just keep on working and keep doing what you're doing 'cause I don't wanna interrupt you. Well, that's an element of choice. It's also a just-in-time learning. "So when I'm ready, I'm gonna go get that," versus, "I'm gonna teach this now whether you need it or not." Well, that's when you get kids sleeping in class, bored out of their minds, because maybe they don't need that at all. They don't need that explanation. 0:26:54.7 DL: I already know this, right? So I'm just gonna screw around and pass notes or do something else that's more fun than sitting and listening to you. And the last thing for control is time. So the more you have an understanding of how to manage time or teach people to manage their own time, the more, yeah, control that they'll feel like they have over a situation. They'll understand how to work it through. So I often use the example, when you have a two-year-old, right? And you have an appointment that you have to get to, and so you gotta get the two-year-old in the car and get him buckled in the car seat and you gotta go, right? And so you're in a hurry, and so you grab them up and they're yelling and they're fighting you to get in the car seat 'cause they don't wanna go, and... Right? And so, "Well, if you get in your car seat, I'm gonna give you a lolly or a sucker or a piece of candy, or... I'm gonna bribe you to do what it is, what I wanna do. 0:27:54.8 DL: Or I'm just bigger, so I'm just gonna force you into that seat and buckle you in, Right?" Well, that is a way to accomplish the task, or you could do something differently. At breakfast, you're saying, "In about an hour, we're gonna get ready to go, and we're gonna go to the doctor's office, and it's gonna be really interesting for you to see the doctor's office, and we're gonna talk about everything we're gonna do and everything else. So now we're gonna get our coats on and we're gonna walk out, and I'm gonna wait for you to climb up into your car seat, and what do you need to do now? We need to get buckled," right? That's all gonna take a lot more time than me grabbing you and forcefully [chuckle] putting you in that car seat and buckling you. You see, but the urgency of the situation was not that two-year-old's problem. It was yours. Your lack of planning [chuckle] caused the crisis. And if I change any element of that, I see that two-year-old be more intrinsically motivated to do what I want them to do, right? 0:29:05.6 AS: Yeah. 0:29:05.7 DL: 'Cause we're doing something together, and that's the relationship that they're craving more than anything. So I'll leave you with that. 0:29:12.4 AS: So just-in-time learning and teaching people how to manage their own time and it gives them control? 0:29:19.0 DL: That's right. 0:29:19.5 AS: Fantastic. That's a lot of stuff that we covered in that, and personally, I learned a lot. I did like the just-in-time learning 'cause I feel like that's my job. As a financial analyst in the stock market, I come across things I don't really know much about, and I was just looking at, "Well, green energy doesn't seem to work." Germany tried to do it, and they weren't able to replace what they lost in traditional energy. What about nuclear energy? Okay, where does that come from? It comes from uranium. Okay, where is uranium? The country that has 40% of uranium production is Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Republic. And now, all of a sudden, I put together that, wow, Russia and Kazakhstan together all control 50% of the uranium in the world. All of a sudden, you realize that Putin has control of the supply chain for nuclear power. So now, what is this country, Kazakhstan? I remember studying it 'cause I had to, but now I'm interested just-in-time to learn, "Okay, how does this all fit together?" And that to me, I just went through that process for a global investment strategy report, and I was able to tell my clients, "I don't know a lot about Kazakhstan, but here's what I've learned, and I have a feeling this will become a name of a country that we're all gonna know in the next 10 years." 0:30:42.5 DL: Well, you know, Kazakhstan is right next to, "Don't-Understand," so. [laughter] 0:30:50.2 AS: Yes, right? Under... Understand. Yeah, that's right. [laughter] So David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I wanna remind you that listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David introduce the broad topic of "motivation." David describes intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation and how motivation practices are usually manipulation tactics that don't work over the long term.  So what do we do instead? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, The Best Way To Motivate. Take it away, David. 0:00:30.2 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again. 0:00:34.4 AS: Indeed. 0:00:35.6 DL: So, yeah, I wanted to start actually a whole series on motivation and in this podcast, we're gonna talk a little bit about two different types of motivation and how people go about motivating people and things like that. But then, we're gonna start a five podcast series breaking down the five key elements that I found over the last 40 years that really cause motivation to happen. So in this introduction podcast right now, I wanna talk a little bit about motivation. So the topic of that, what's the best way to motivate? You can't. So let's kind of get that out of the way. 0:01:20.7 AS: Don't bury the lead, David. [laughter] 0:01:21.9 DL: Yeah, you can't really motivate somebody. You can't even motivate your dog to do things. You can manipulate your dog to get a result but in the end, your dog or your child or students in classrooms or your employees or whatever, they all have to come to the conclusion that they're motivated to do this job for their... Whatever that might be and that it's their idea. And so it's all about creating an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation environment. And I know this is contrary to all the literature that's out there and everything, and every motivational guru on the planet that's trying to get you to buy something that motivates us. And I was recalling that I was on an airplane one time and I was sitting next to this guy and you strike up a conversation sometimes and he said, "Ah, what do you do?" 0:02:30.4 DL: And so I told him a little bit about what I do and how I help school try to transform and get better results and what they do and everything. "Oh, that's really interesting, tell me more about that." And so we did and we got onto the topic of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. And I just started talking about you can't really motivate people with trinkets and gimmicks and awards and all kinds of things like that. And we got in a big discussion about trophies and sports and all kinds of things like that. [chuckle] And just as we're starting to land the airplane, I said to him, oh, I said, "Well, you know, I never got around to you." I said, "What do you do?" He says, "Well, I have a company that makes trophies." [laughter] And then it was like dead-silence. Oh, we landed the plane and got off the plane. 0:03:26.5 AS: You went your separate ways. 0:03:28.2 DL: Yeah. He did say, oh, I think I understand, but he's gonna keep making his trophies and making money, so... 0:03:39.4 AS: Yeah. 0:03:39.9 DL: And there's a lot of money to be made in it, especially in education, there's just whole catalogs. I get catalogs in the mail even today, about all the awards and trophies and everything and how you can motivate kids to do this and that and it's... Deming was the first one that kind of took a board and slapped it up inside of my head and just said, "Stop it." In fact I remember one of his conferences, somebody asked a question, "Well, Dr. Deming, I'm in a company that's trying to motivate us with a pay and pay for performance and games and gimmicks and sell so much stuff, and you get a free trip to Aruba and what do I do?" And his response was, "Well, you can always stop doing something that's stupid." And that, it was just... He had this knack of these phrases that would just cut through to people. Yeah, you can stop it. You can say, "Okay, I'm not gonna participate in that." I'm not gonna play it. I'm not gonna play that game. And so what do we do instead? 0:05:01.4 AS: And before we even get into that, what does it mean? What does motivate mean? Because you've used the word, manipulate and you've used the word, motivate. Can you define... 0:05:13.3 DL: That's kind of emerged over the last 100 or 150 years or so, as a way to try to get people to do something that basically that you don't think they wanna do. [chuckle] So whether that's kids learning math or it's an employee not getting the productivity that you think that they should get. But basically, I'm the leader, I'm the manager, and I want you to do something that you're currently not doing. And so, I'm gonna do something to you to make you do it. 0:05:55.1 AS: Which sounds like external pressure or external... 0:05:58.7 DL: External pressure. We're gonna motivate you to do stuff. And typically that's what we call extrinsic motivation, I'm gonna do something to you or I'm gonna take something away - that's really popular in schools. "Well, you're gonna have to stay in a recess, you're not gonna have any recess if you don't get that done" or "You don't do what I tell you, you're gonna be sitting in the hall. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take away all of your relationships and isolate you." And, well, that's the same concept we use in prisons, right? We isolate people. We put them in confinement and if you're really bad, then you get into total isolation. Don't even get to talk to any of your other inmates. Well, it's the same depth of motivation that is in schools today all over the world. 0:06:51.6 DL: People are still using those techniques to try to get people to do something that they're either not doing or they want them to do. So, it's really important to figure out what do you do instead? If you're gonna stop doing something stupid, [chuckle] and what are you gonna do instead? And that's where Deming really reinforced intrinsic motivation. That your job is to create a situation where people can be intrinsically motivated, that they actually want to do the job. And that's a whole different way to look at what you do. How do I set up a classroom so that kids can be intrinsically motivated? Now, none of these things are a light switch, where you can just switch it on and switch it off, "I'm going to switch on intrinsic motivation and switch off extrinsic motivation." In fact, with children, if they've been addicted to intrinsic motivation tactics for years, everything from grades, to prizes, to awards, to just little trinkets that they can get, stickers even, all kinds of things, sometimes it takes time to wean them off of that over time, and have it have the less and less meaning. 0:08:32.1 DL: I'll give you an example, the thing about stickers... I'll often get elementary teachers say, "Well, you know what's wrong with that? Somebody does a good job, I'm gonna give them a sticker." Or, When I was a child in piano lessons, I got a gold star if I did a good job in my piano lesson and the teacher would put a star on it, by it and... The problem with those things, it's not that it's evil or anything, it's just that you're taking away the emphasis towards working towards the thing that you want 'em to do and love and understand. So, if the only reason I'm doing this is to try to get a sticker, [chuckle] you've just reduced the thing that I'm doing to the value of a sticker. So there's no real conversation or a relationship going on where you're saying, "Hey, man this... You really did a great job on that. How does that make you feel to be able to understand that or explain something to that degree?" You wanna tap into that inner person about that understanding something is probably the greatest motivation. "I just feel really good about that." That's why you get children that when they finally get it, a hard concept of something and they're like, "Oh! I got it." They're really forward in... 0:10:08.9 AS: They're really enjoying the process, too. 0:10:11.0 DL: Yeah, they're really forward in their emotions and they actually put that out. But employees in business, sometimes when there's a breakthrough like that, it's more internal for them. They're just like, "Oh yeah, okay, I got this. I really worked that through." And if you come in and just reduce it to some type of extrinsic motivator... Even if I just come in and say, "Atta boy, good job, well done, Frank." And then you leave the room, and then Frank is sitting there and thinking, "I put hours and hours into working through this and going through this, and all I got is, "Good job, Frank,' and a pat on the back." 0:10:51.3 AS: "You're gonna get Employee of the Month, Frank." 0:10:55.4 DL: Yeah, so the message is, "Next time, stupid, don't work so hard." You can always stop doing something stupid. And Frank learns just do whatever the boss wants, don't put any extra effort in or go through stuff. All right, but some people will come back and say, "Well, I like to have more money." And that's a motivation. And it's actually not. Yes, we have to have money to survive, but the examples are millions of people that are making tremendous amounts of money, but they're not motivated to do the job. We can look at pro athletes. They make millions of dollars and some of them are still not motivated. [chuckle] 0:11:54.5 AS: Right. Or when the motivation stops, money can't re-ignite it. 0:12:00.7 DL: No. 0:12:00.8 AS: Let me ask you a question about this from let's say a classroom perspective. Let's say I'm a teacher in a classroom, and I'm a piano teacher, as an example, and we've got a group of 20 kids and yeah, there's a few of them that are really into it, and then there's a lot of 'em that just don't wanna do it. David, can I just use the gold stars for those ones just to kind of like, [laughter] a doggy bone, like, "Come on, over to the piano." What do I do? 0:12:27.1 DL: Or what used to be the norm in Catholic schools, "Can't I just whack 'em on the back of their hands with a ruler and get them to shut up or do whatever it is I want them to do?" Yeah... 0:12:42.7 AS: Carrot or stick. 0:12:42.8 DL: You can do those kinds of things, but eventually, you're going to have to tap into an intrinsic motivation. And so your example in a class, if I got a few kids that are really into it, whatever it is we're doing or working on or whatever, and they're really working at it, I'd probably give those children a chance to talk about, "Why are they into that? Why do you like this so much? Or why do you like practicing so much if you're learning an instrument? And how do you go about that? What do you do? And how do you find a place in your house that's quiet and where you can concentrate if you're trying to read or" Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to use the people that are already self-motivated, and to give insights to people that are not self-motivated, to try to understand that it's not just because you're just smart, right? Probably doing a number of things that are making you be successful, and those things could be shared with other people. In the same way with employees, instead of just giving an employee of the month, I'd probably have somebody that's really doing a great job explain, how are they doing that great job? What's the process that they're using? How do they go about it? How do they set up their workspace? Whatever it might be, because I want other employees to go, "Oh, that's what they're doing. I could do that." [chuckle] 0:14:13.1 AS: And is that because you want them to try to explore where is their area that they can bring them so then... Okay, you're not gonna... I got 20 people in this room, and all 20 of them are not gonna be piano lovers and virtuosos. So it's not necessarily the process of getting everybody on that piano all the time, it's the process of who are the people really love it, let them shine, let them share, and let other people say, "Okay, I don't like piano, but I do like working on fixing my neighbor bicycles, and people bring bicycles to me every day, and I fix them, and I just love that feeling," or I don't know. I'm just trying to think about it. How would you describe it? 0:14:54.7 DL: Yeah, that's right, and that goes back to Deming's concept of understanding variation, that you're going to have variable degrees of performance or ability or whatever it might be. And Deming talked about sometimes people are just in the wrong job. [chuckle] And maybe you can move them to another job in the same company that they might like more or they might be well-suited for, or the same thing in a school, right? Like example of what you were talking about, that somebody is much more suited to and enjoy working on motorcycles versus just playing the piano or something. But it doesn't mean that they can't reach a minimum level of skill and understanding about how to play the piano, maybe to the point where they decide, "Okay, I know I don't wanna be doing this." [laughter] 0:15:57.6 AS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0:16:00.7 DL: That's also motivation, right? And what is your motivation? What do you wanna do? 0:16:07.2 AS: Yeah, yeah. 0:16:07.4 DL: And I get... So in my seminars, I get teachers coming up to me all the time, and I always think, "Oh, they're gonna ask a complicated question about, "I've got this kid in my class, and how do I get him motivated and everything." I'd say probably eight or nine times out of 10, they come up and they wanna talk about their child. [laughter] "My son is having a problem in this class. How do I get... " "My daughter can't get along with her teacher. What would we do about that?" Because that's really a very personal thing that's going on within them. But then to get them to see that, "Okay, well, the kinds of things that maybe you're doing in the class is demotivating a large number of students." It's all kinds of things. There's variability in time, for instance, right? So if I give you a... If I give a group of people a complex math problem, there probably is somebody in that room that could solve it in a matter of minutes. 0:17:14.7 AS: Right. 0:17:15.5 DL: But there'd be others of us that might need a lot of help. But we could probably get to a level of... Minimum level of solving it or understanding it given enough time, but the problem is, like in schools, we wanna truncate the time always, right? 0:17:34.1 AS: Right. 0:17:34.6 DL: "Gotta get this done in the next 10 minutes," or, "You gotta get it done by Friday." We don't have this deep understanding of variability and how to manage variation in performance. And so what we do is we make time rigid, but we make learning flexible. So basically, you learn any amount you want as long as you get it done by Friday because we've made the time rigid. 0:18:00.4 AS: Right. 0:18:00.5 DL: And we talked about that earlier, about a deadline and... Right? Well, when you reverse that and you begin to understand how to manage a system and manage the variability of the people in that system. Then everybody starts to be more well-motivated by themselves internally, which means you have to do less and less external motivation. You just have people coming in and doing their job and going to work, same way in the company. Yeah. 0:18:32.0 AS: I feel like even just having a discussion with your students or employees about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is right there something interesting, just to have that discussion. 0:18:48.0 DL: Yeah, I have five children, and we started those discussions, my wife and I started those discussions with them when they're two or three years old. "You're not doing this to get a sucker... If you do this, I'll give you a sucker or a lolly." No, we want you to clean up your room because that's the right thing to do. So maybe I'll come and help you clean up your room and we'll do it together, and that might be a lot more fun then. And then we could talk about how can you keep your room clean so you don't find yourself in this mess, because how do you feel when you have a really messy room? 0:19:32.1 AS: Yep. Yeah, I'm sure that you would have some great tips of, "Okay, here's the way I would do it if I... When I've had this problem," and 'Oh, okay, I didn't even think about that, put all my whites in a pile over there and put all my dark colors... " 0:19:49.1 DL: Exactly. 0:19:50.3 AS: Over there just to have a... Make a game out of it or something like that. 0:19:50.6 DL: Yeah, and that's totally different than me isolating you as punishment and saying your room is dirty, go to your room until that room is cleaned up. 0:20:00.4 AS: Yeah. 0:20:00.6 DL: Right? It's the same thing we talked about earlier. I'm gonna extrinsically motivate you to get that done and work that through versus trying to spend time, and part of it is just kid's probably really happy that you're there. 0:20:16.6 AS: Yeah. 0:20:17.4 DL: Right? I got a relationship now with somebody and let's work on this together and over time... 0:20:23.4 AS: Yeah, I don't want to be in my room alone. 0:20:25.9 DL: Yeah, and this over time, then let's figure out how do we make sure it always stays cleaned up. 0:20:32.1 AS: Yeah. 0:20:33.8 DL: But you have to understand the difference between a clean room and a dirty room, and how that makes you feel. And you'll have kids that will say, I have kids that say, "Well, I like it messy like this." "Really? You couldn't find your book yesterday because it was under a pile of clothes. You have been wearing dirty clothes to school, because... " 0:20:57.9 AS: "Your room's stinky. People can smell... " 0:21:00.4 DL: Yeah. 0:21:00.6 AS: Yeah. 0:21:02.1 DL: Right. And it's not necessarily all just about you, it's how does it affect other people that you're dealing with, right? What do you think other family members are thinking about you when your room is a disaster and you're not taking care of yourself and you don't smell good and... 0:21:22.4 AS: Right. 0:21:23.9 DL: Right. 0:21:26.4 AS: I wanna explain an experience that I had when I was young, and maybe you can help me understand the extrinsic and the intrinsic aspect of it. I went to Kent State when I was kind of first starting out, and I didn't really know what I was gonna study. I thought I was gonna study maybe Psychology, but the first professor I had, I was really not impressed. I felt like he just read this book about Psychology, and so I was searching and I found an Economics 101, Ecom 101, and I went into this classroom and it was huge, it was 200 students in there, hustle bustle. I got in the room, I sat down, the room was divided by a walkway down the middle, so there was 100 students on one side and 100 on the other. The teacher came kinda bounding down the stairs and came in front of all of us on that first day and he said, "There is 200 people in this room, a 100 of you will be gone by the time we get to the end of this term, and there will, out of the 100 that will remain, I will give 10, A's. Let's get started." 0:22:29.6 AS: Now that guy set a fire, it's just... I don't know why, I never had somebody say something like that. And all of a sudden, what I started doing is I sat right in the front row, and I told myself, I'm gonna get an A, I'm gonna survive and I'm gonna get an A. And then I started to study differently, every day after class, I sat down at a cubicle outside the room, and I re-wrote my notes with the book open and I went through it and everything, and then I would ask the teacher questions either at his office or in the room. When I had questions as I was trying to clarify. And he sparked a whole new way of studying for me that really carried me through university, but also sparked a fire of wanting to learn and the challenge of learning. And I think I read, I don't know, 3000 to 5000 books since that day. And he lit a fire in me, and I always tell my students, "I wanna light that fire in you." Now, part of that was extrinsic and then part of it was intrinsic. But can you tell me what happened to me on that day? [laughter] 0:23:35.1 DL: Well, it sounds to me like a professor that doesn't know what his job is, right? 0:23:40.1 AS: Yeah. 0:23:41.6 DL: His job is not just to weed out the bad ones, or weed out the ones that are not motivated to learning Economics, right? 0:23:49.6 AS: Mm-hmm. 0:23:49.6 DL: He's got 200 students in that class. His job is to produce 200 people who love Economics. So Deming talked about that a lot. So you don't know what your job is. That's not motivation, just to weed out all the people that don't adapt to the style that I have in the classroom, right? 0:24:18.9 AS: Right. 0:24:18.9 DL: Yeah, what happened with you... 0:24:20.1 AS: Yeah, me too. I'm sure that didn't motivate majority of people the way it motivated me. 0:24:23.4 DL: Oh yeah. 0:24:24.2 AS: It worked for me. 0:24:25.7 DL: I probably would have gotten up and walked out of that class right there. Because I would have been in the 100 people that aren't gonna be there. Or the old thing, look to the right, look to the left, one of those people won't be here at the end. That's not motivation, that's survival, right? 0:24:43.2 AS: Right. Right. 0:24:44.4 DL: You're just trying to survive that experience. Now, you personally decided the way you're gonna survive it, is you're gonna work hard and you're gonna learn this. But there was probably also a level of intrinsic motivation for Economics that you tapped into, right? 0:25:06.2 AS: Right. 0:25:06.6 DL: You realized, "Hey, look like I like numbers." 0:25:09.1 AS: Mm-hmm, yup. 0:25:10.4 DL: "And I like working with this, and I'm getting it, and I understand it." 0:25:14.7 AS: Yeah. 0:25:15.9 DL: Yeah. And then you did a number of things, you changed where you were sitting, you changed your attitude, you went in and you started working with the professor. 0:25:28.4 AS: Yeah. 0:25:28.6 DL: So even though you're in an environment that was hugely extrinsically motivating... [chuckle] 0:25:39.4 AS: Or demotivating. 0:25:39.6 DL: Yeah, demotivating everybody. 0:25:39.9 AS: Depending on which side of the room you're on. 0:25:41.4 DL: Right, you chose to rise above the situation and do something different, and you tapped into your love of Economics, which carried on far beyond the class, what you learned in that class, right? 0:25:55.1 AS: Right. 0:25:55.4 DL: Because like you said, I read 3000 books since then, well nobody was telling you to do that, right? 0:26:02.9 AS: Yeah. 0:26:03.1 DL: You weren't getting graded for it. I'll tell you that I never read a book for pleasure until I met Deming. You think of that. 0:26:14.1 AS: Wow! 0:26:14.2 DL: My master's degree, years of experience working schools. It was always because I was being told to do it or forced to do it, or for a grade or whatever it might be, but until I tapped into Deming and intrinsic motivation, that was the first time I thought, "I'm just gonna read this book for pleasure." And it was... The same kind of thing was kind of a weird thing that I had to go through because my whole life had been spent on extrinsic motivation. And I guess... And I was one of the ones that excelled in that, right? I got the grades, I got the scholarships, I got the prizes, right? 0:26:55.9 AS: The gold star. 0:26:57.7 DL: Right. And when all that ended, then now what? Well, there was no love of learning there. I had to find a way to find that. And that's what you tapped into. 0:27:08.6 AS: Yep. I feel like, just in wrapping this up, that the story that I remember I've read it, but I also remember Dr. Deming telling it at the seminar when I was there, was the story of the little girl who wanted to make the Halloween outfit to be like an angel, and her and her mom worked together on this outfit for weeks to get ready to go to the Halloween party. And of course, it wasn't beautiful, but it was handcrafted and they had such a great experience. And then they went to this Halloween party, and she was so proud to show it off and all that. And then one of the adults came up with the idea of, "Let's have a competition. Let's give a prize to the person that... " And in the end, of course... 0:27:51.8 DL: "Has the best costume." 0:27:53.5 AS: Yeah, the best costume. And in the end, of course, she didn't win. 0:27:55.5 DL: And we as adults are gonna pick the criteria for the best costume. [chuckle] 0:28:00.9 AS: Exactly. And in the end, she didn't win. She was far down the list. And all of a sudden, she was completely demotivated and realized like they reduced this whole couple of week process down to something just awful. And I always remember that story, and part of what I've always said about Dr. Deming is he's a humanist. He cares about how people feel. 0:28:28.4 DL: Yeah, we're really good at creating situations to kill the joy of learning, [chuckle] so... 0:28:32.8 AS: I did it right there. That was a story. 0:28:35.5 DL: Yeah. 0:28:37.9 AS: Let me review some of the things that you've talked about. First thing is we're gonna be talking about five key elements that cause motivation or talking about motivation. And one of the things that you said right off the bat is you can't. You can't motivate. You can manipulate and do other things. And I think we're gonna learn more about this over time. We talked about intrinsic motivation also being a bit about setting up the right environment for that intrinsic motivation. Talked about extrinsic means - giving away something, giving some incentive, a carrot or a stick, and that you're much better off using intrinsic motivation rather than trying to reward people with a gold star, because when you do that, you just reduce it down to some... Even people who are intrinsically motivated can be suckered in to just going after the gold star and... 0:29:38.6 DL: Or money. [chuckle] 0:29:39.6 AS: Yeah, or money, right? Definitely. And they may even sabotage the business or whatever to get that gold star or that money. And then you talked about the idea of the piano thing of when you've got a few students in the room that are really doing well with them, having them talk about why they're... What happened. What they like about it, what's going on for them, because maybe it's not gonna be that everybody's gonna be a piano star, but if they could learn the process or share the process of the excitement, that may be able to be applied in other areas too, for some people. And then you talked about understanding variation, and part of it is understanding that not everybody's gonna be that star. And I think also the last thing that I think about is that... The thing you said is that people may just be in the wrong job too. Like you can't necessarily get the best out of someone sometimes because they're just in the wrong job, and I think that's kind of a critical one that we oftentimes overlook. Is there anything else that you'd add to that? 0:30:50.9 DL: Well, I was just thinking about special needs kids too. I was talking about teachers coming to me and wanting to talk about their own child. 0:31:00.2 AS: Yep. 0:31:00.3 DL: They say, "Oh my son has ADD or he can't do this, or he can't do that, or he's got this thing in classroom. How do I motivate him to do stuff?" And invariably, I'll say, "Does he ever do anything on his own over a long period of time?" And invariably, they'll say things like, "Oh yeah, he loves to make model airplanes, and he'll go to his room and he'll spend just hours making model airplanes." Well, he doesn't have an ADD problem. He's got, [chuckle] a motivation problem, right? 0:31:32.2 AS: Mm-hmm. 0:31:33.3 DL: He loves doing that, but he doesn't love what's going on at school, so... 0:31:40.2 AS: Turn that. 0:31:40.9 DL: It all depends on the kind of an environment that you're gonna make, but because we have so many kids that are, like your story, are being demotivated by school, right? Well, what do we do? Well, we're gonna classify them, we're gonna call these ADD and we're gonna call these kids this, and we're gonna call this that and then we're gonna medicate this group and not medicate that group, but nobody's ever saying, "How do we change our system so we have less and less and less of this kind of behavior?" 0:32:11.6 AS: Yeah. 0:32:13.6 DL: And that's what we're gonna get to in the next five podcasts. 0:32:17.2 AS: It reminds me of that ACDC song when I was young, "Problem Child." I'm a problem child. I've been labeled. I know exactly what I am. 0:32:25.1 DL: Yeah. 0:32:25.8 AS: Well, David, on behalf of... 0:32:27.5 DL: I'm proud of it. [laughter] 0:32:28.6 AS: Yes, exactly. I've got my spot. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

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