“There are opportunities in meetings to focus more heavilyon mastery, and not in the more anemic, continuing-education way, but giving people concentrated experiences where they’re achieving some form of mastery. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t do via technology. You can watch a lecture via the web, but it’s hard to do a cooking experience via the web, especially if you want to do it with other people.”
quence of what you’ve done, is giving you feedback so you can get better, and one of those forms of feedback is recognition. That’s pretty important. I would have put a sharper underscore beneath the whole
concept of feedback. I don’t think I made the case strongly enough that the workplace is one of the most feedback-deprived regions of American civilization. People want feedback. The mechanisms we have to deliver it are creaky and antiquated. Think about the main mechanism—an annualperformance review. ProblemNo. 1: It’s annual.You’re not going to get good at anything if you get feedback on it once a year. I think here there’s a slight generational difference. If you look
at Millennials, they’ve lived their entire lives in these feedback- rich environments. Think of a 28-year-old, born in 1982. Her whole life, she presses a button and something happens. If it’s a game, she gets a score and moves up a level. She sends a text message and a little sound indicates that it went out. If she wants to know where her friends are, she looks at their status. Her world is so feedback-rich, and she gets into the workplace and it’s feedback-impoverished. It’s a feedback desert. I think that helps explain a little bit the rift between Boomers and Millen- nials—thatBoomers have somehowaccommodated themselves to this very archaic form of feedback, whereas that form of feed- back and that pace of feedback is intolerable toMillennials, and I think rightly so.
What will you be talking about during your General Session presentation for PCMA? I’m going to try to work both sides of the street, and talk about what this basket of ideasmeans for particular organizations rep- resented there, but also try to offer some questions or maybe preliminary thoughts—conversation starters—about, can we use these principles of autonomy, mastery, and purpose in the way that we design meetings themselves? Can we use these principles to elevate meetings, to make them more engaging, to make them more enriching for participants?
What are some of the implications of Motivation 3.0 for meetings? For starters, on autonomy—giving people someamount of abil-
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ity to direct theirownpath through a meeting. And I think that’s happening a lot already, so everybody doesn’t have to march in lockstep, do the exact same thing, the exact same way at the exact same time. The other thing is, I think people are really yearning in many
ways to get better at something, learn something; to master something. There are opportunities in these meetings to focus perhaps a little bit more heavily on mastery, and not in the more anemic, continuing-education way, but giving people these con- centrated experiences where they’re achieving some form of mas- tery. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t do via technology.You can watch a lecture via technology, via the web, but it’s hard to do a cooking experience via the web, especially if you want to do it with other people. And then purpose—a lot of these meetings, particularly
for trade or professional associations, should bring that to the surface a little bit more. Make it a little more salient. Remind people that they are part of a profession, or that this industry that they’re part of is something that’s important. Elevate that kind of context a little bit more. It can really enrich people’s expe- rience in meetings, but also give them a little bit of motivational energy once they leave.
What’s the one takeaway you want your audience to get? On the actualtactical takeaways, what I hope to do is offer three or four on the theory that some things are going to be appealing to some people in some organizations, and other things not. The main conceptual takeaway that I want people to leave with is the need to challenge orthodoxies that we don’t always realize are orthodoxies. There’s this orthodoxy out there that if you want people to perform at a higher level, you reward the behavior you want, you punish the behavior you don’t want. If nothing else, Iwant people to comeaway and say,“You know what? That is not always true. In fact, it’s wrong much of the time.” And if we challenge that orthodoxy, we can begin to look for new ways to work smarter but also just to live a little bit better.
Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene. www.pcma.org