Structural
As you watch people going about their daily activities, you see that a great deal of what they do is affected by nonhuman factors. Much of what we do is a function of the structural world around us. This isn’t always obvious to the untrained eye. In fact, many of us are fairly insensitive to the effects of our own surroundings, let alone the surroundings of others.
For example, you’re trying to lose weight and don’t realize that the cash or credit cards you’re carrying enable you to set aside the lunch you packed and buy a high-calorie restaurant meal. You’re hungry (personal motive), your friends ask you to lunch (social motive), and the credit card you’re carrying (structural motive) puts you over the top. You also don’t see the distance to the fridge as a factor or the fact that you fill it with unhealthy foods as a force. Of course, all are having an impact.
Human beings don’t intuitively turn to the environment, organizational forces, institutional factors, and other things when they look at what’s causing behavior. We often miss the impact that equipment, materials, work layout, or temperature is having on behavior. We’ve also been known to miss the way goals, roles, rules, information, technology, and other things motivate and enable.
Source 5. Structural Motivation
How do things motivate us? That’s simple enough. Money (and what it can get us) motivates people; that we know. Guess what happens when money is aimed at the wrong targets? For instance, managers are rewarded for keeping costs down, and hourly employees are rewarded for working overtime. They’re constantly arguing with each other. Quality specialists earn bonuses for checking material, and production employees earn bonuses for shipping it. They too seem to have trouble getting along. Maybe a team-building exercise will reduce the tension. Perhaps conflict-resolution training will help. Yeah, right.
When they explore underlying causes, experienced leaders quickly turn to the formal reward system and look at the impact that money, promotions, job assignments, benefits, bonuses, and all the other organizational rewards are having on behavior. It is sheer folly to reward A while hoping for B. Savvy leaders and effective parents get this.
Here’s how this concept applies to a community example. One of the greatest challenges in influencing “at-risk” youth in inner-city areas is that the models of successful careers that they see often involve the sale of illegal drugs. It isn’t just the influence of others that lures them into illicit trade; it’s financial. Until they see clear alternative pathways to financial well-being, thousands of young men and women will be lost to this social cancer.
Frustrated couples are no less strongly affected by this powerful source of influence. The foundations of thousands of marriages continue to erode as one or both spouses give their hearts to careers that promise increased status or rich rewards to those who pay the price.
Source 6. Structural Ability
When it comes to ability, things can often provide either a bridge or a barrier. For example, imagine you’re trying to get the people in marketing to meet more regularly with the people in production. They currently avoid each other because they don’t get along. You’ve aligned their goals and rewards, but marketers still call production folks “thugs” and production specialists call marketers “slicks.” You believe that if you can get them in the same room once in a while, many of their problems will go away. But how? What will it take to get them to meet more often and eventually collaborate?
First you write an inspiring memo. Nothing happens. Then you add “interdepartmental collaboration” to the company’s performance-review form. Nada. Next comes a speech, then veiled threats, and finally you create an award program that honors the “Collaborator of the Month.” You tell the various division heads to nominate an employee for the award, and they argue endlessly about who should win.
Now you decide to do some out-of-the-box thinking, only this time it’s out-of-the-cashbox thinking. The heck with rewards; it’s time to turn to other things. Could you do something to the physical aspects of the organization that would allow people to interact more easily and more often?
Yes, you could. In fact, if you want to get the two groups to meet more often, think proximity. When it comes to the frequency of human interaction, proximity (the distance between people) is the single best predictor. Individuals who are located close to one another bump into each other and talk.
When it comes to work, people who share a break room or resource pool tend to bump into each other as well. Move the marketing offices closer to the work floor, throw in a common area, and the two groups may warm to each other. Proximity or the lack thereof has an invisible but powerful effect on behavior.
The following are a few other structural forces that can affect ability.
Gadgets
Gadgets can have a more profound impact on behavior than most people imagine. For example:
• Cooks and waitresses used to fight tooth and nail over what had been ordered and whose orders got filled first until a researcher invented the metal wheel that controls and organizes orders. With the advent of the wheel, waitresses stopped shouting commands at cooks, and cooks stopped getting angry and purposefully fouling up the orders.
• A mother was constantly punishing her young son for not coming home before dark. The boy didn’t know when the end of “before dark” was, would wait until it was actually dark, and got in trouble — until his neighbor gave him a watch and his mother gave him a specific time to be home.
• A father turned the hot water off at the source so that his wife and daughters wouldn’t take so long in the shower. They resented his actions. One day Mom put an egg timer in the shower, and the problem went away.
• One family determined that its microwave had put distance between the parents and their children. Was this a lame excuse? Not when one realizes that their first microwave eliminated the one time the whole family came together: the evening meal. With their fancy new zapper, the children were able to make what they wanted when they wanted. Without realizing it, the family members lost a key force and began to pull in separate directions. The point is not that gadgets are bad but that they can have a more significant impact on human behavior than people might imagine.
Data
A financial services company couldn’t get people to help cut costs until it published both cost data and financial records. With the same goal in mind, factories now prominently display the cost of each part. In a large intercity hospital, the healthcare professionals regularly chose to use rubber gloves ($30 a pair) instead of less comfortable latex gloves ($3 a pair), even for short procedures. After endless memos encouraging people to save money, administrators posted the cost of the gloves in prominent locations, and glove expenses dropped overnight.
One wise parent tired of the endless requests of his teenage daughter for everything from designer tennis shoes to a luxury sports car. One evening it struck him that an ounce of information might be worth a pound of accountability discussions. He openly shared everything about the family finances. Eventually his daughter — and we’re not making this up — asked if she should get a night job to help out.
Completing the Story
When you encounter people who aren’t living up to a commitment, it’s easy to wonder what were they thinking. Left to our natural proclivities, we tell a simple yet ugly story that casts others as selfish or thoughtless. We mature a little bit every time we expand the story to include a person’s ability. Maybe others don’t know how to do what they’ve promised to do. We also cut off our anger at its source. Not knowing for certain what’s happening, we have to replace anger with curiosity. This puts us in a far better position to discuss an infraction as a scientist, not a vigilante.