While rewriting Working with Stories I’ve been making the rounds through some old projects and visiting some of my favorite patterns. One particular pattern has come up in so many projects — ten? fifteen? — that I think it might be of interest to others. It has to do with generations, organizations, and motivation.
This is not a formal meta-analysis. I haven’t actually brought any real data together (and probably won’t, because of client confidentiality and varying data formats). I’m content to observe and comment, and I don’t claim to have proven anything. (And probably lots of other people have already proven all of this.) But I find it an interesting pattern to ponder anyway.
Youth and middle age
What I’ve seen is this. As people begin their careers, or periods of involvement with an organization (as employees, volunteers, even customers), they start out telling fairly uniform stories.
Many of the stories by younger people display an abundance of energy but little power. These stories could display frustration at the situation, but often they don’t because they don’t show a strong
desire, involve big challenges, or demonstrate an obligation to make a difference. Nor do they involve knowledge to carry out complicated plans. These stories are involved and sometimes passionate, but loosely, contingently, experimentally so.
As people enter middle age, their stories tend to show growing power mixed with an increased desire to create change, challenging tasks, a feeling of obligation, and knowledge of how things should be done. You could say that the power evidenced in these stories is just enough to make their tellers want more; so the frustration level rises to a peak just as energy levels start to decline. In contrast to the earlier stories, these are committed, not exploratory; but their commitment is sometimes a seat belt and sometimes a straitjacket.
Engagement and detachment
At this point the dynamic splits and one graph becomes two. At some point in middle age, the stories diverge into two groups. The people don’t split into two groups; but the mixture of tendencies expressed in their stories shifts as people get older. I’ve taken to calling the two sets of stories:
- engaged stories about people (usually their tellers) doing things in the organization
- detached stories about people (usually their tellers) dealing with the things other people do in the organization
For whatever reason — energy, perseverance, connections, skills, personality, attitude, background, luck — some people begin telling more stories that feature an element of power. By power I don’t necessarily mean organizational-chart or powers-that-be power; I mean the confidence that comes from knowing one can achieve one’s goals. That sort of power can come from many places.
In engaged stories desire, knowledge, challenge and obligation all rise together to a peak. At the same time, energy decreases as people age. This creates some degree of persistent frustration — not at being out of power, but at not being able to use the power they have as effectively as they would like to create the change they want to see happen.
Detached stories, on the other hand, show a decrease in power as well as energy. You might think this would increase frustration further, but the reverse happens. These stories are all about pulling away, giving up, learning helplessness, reducing desire and avoiding obligation. Evidence of knowledge continues to grow, but not at the same pace as in the engaged stories, because the stories are largely devoid of challenge. These stories aren’t always negative; sometimes they are just about people showing practical sense in a world they can’t control. But there is definitely less positive energy here than in any of the other story sets.
Opportunities
I’ve noticed some places along the sets of curves where I think organizations might release untapped energy based on these observations. Points one and two are the same in both graphs (because the graphs are the same up to the middle point), and points 3a and 3b refer to only one group of stories.
1. The plums on the cliffs. Young people have lots of energy but don’t know where to put it, so “Youth is wasted on the young.” I find that this proverb makes more sense to me every year. If I could go back in time … But in a way, organizations can go back in time. Reducing the gap between youthful energy and all the other low-in-youth elements in my graphs above could create tangible benefits for organizations. Of course, giving the most inexperienced people with the least interest in becoming involved lots of power would be a mistake. But small changes in this area could result in large gains. I remember being at IBM and interacting with two summers worth of interns. These young people brought fresh eyes to old problems and had amazing amounts of energy, but much of it was dissipated as they scampered around the mossy stones standing nearly motionless in the offices and corridors. I was young enough to feel some of their frustration myself: those boulders just wouldn’t move. Using young interns to “shake things up” is an area where I don’t think many organizations have gone beyond the lip-service level.
A crazy idea for harvesting cliff plums: Mix interns with regular employees, but don’t label them as interns. Give them titles that don’t sound temporary, so people don’t reflexively discard their ideas. Involve them in the actual infrastructure of the organization. Don’t hold special fake-involvement meetings where the interns present their mini-projects and everyone pats them on the head and goes back to “real” work. Don’t quarantine them in young-people’s meetings devoid of anyone over thirty. Instead of giving them tiny or fake projects to work in, give them real power in real projects. But be prepared to intervene swiftly in case of problems. Instead of having them swim in a wading pool, send them out into the ocean — right next to a great big ship loaded with rescue equipment.
2. The swamps of sadness. Vast quantities of frustration and disappointment come spilling out of stories told by people in their middle ages. Many of these people are having their mid-life crises and asking themselves what they will leave behind. Many are having children and wondering what they will leave for them. Many are developing confidence in their own abilities at the same time as they develop an overwhelming disappointment at their ability to get the rest of the world to join their earnest efforts. Here again, it’s possible that relatively small changes to organizational systems might free up energy that is otherwise wasted. Paperwork, wasted meetings, contradictory messages from management, great ideas unheeded, change programs full of pretense and empty of action — all of these things can be improved upon, and sometimes with a far smaller amount of energy than is released as a result.
A crazy idea for draining the swamps of sadness: Tap volunteerism among frustrated do-gooders. Tell people that, say, everyone can leave at three o-clock in the afternoon on Fridays, or they can use that time to work on things they think the organization needs. (3M famously does this, or at least that’s what I’ve heard…) Give people a little freedom and power to do what they think will work. Employees need confidence in the organization as well as in themselves, and it seems to be in the middle ages when this begins to decline.
The hard part of this crazy idea is that to do this, those in charge (those who decide what people will do on Friday afternoons) have to share the organization’s vision and values with those under them. And by share I don’t mean “tell them about it.” I mean let them have some of it. Some people at the top don’t want to share the organization’s vision because they consider it their vision. I’ve seen people in power squirm and argue and stalk out when confronted with the possibility that those they have hired and paid might also have hopes and dreams for the organization. In some places it seems almost taboo to mention it. But a factory worker can be just as proud of the car they helped create as its designer, and rightly so. It takes maturity to share an organization with everybody in it, but it pays off.
3a. The mountain paths of the masters. Another opportunity is in supporting people who have run a good race and can tell stories full of wisdom and understanding, but can no longer produce the volume of output they once did. These are the masters of organizations (and they may not be the CEOs). I picture them walking slowly along well-worn paths with accolades following them catching the nuggets of wisdom they drop; but in fact many such masters walk their mountain paths alone. Finding the organization’s masters and helping them make the most of their remaining energy is another opportunity often lost. People nearing or just after retirement from organizations are usually given far less attention than is productive (or even respectful). Keeping these people in the loop can help organizations avoid costly mistakes nobody else can see coming and discover opportunities nobody else could imagine.
A crazy idea for walking the mountain paths: Don’t make retirement a step change. Make it both a gradual decrease (in time and energy) and a transition to a different sort of contribution. As with interns, don’t sequester retirees; keep them deeply involved. But increasingly tap lower-energy reflection and advice while decreasing expectations of energy-consuming production. It’s true that younger people will work longer hours for less, and it’s true that younger people are more malleable. But the old people know what’s what. It’s like that old story about the plumber who goes into the factory, taps one pipe, walks out, and sends the factory owner a bill for $50,050. When the owner balks, the plumber explains. Tapping the pipe: $50. Knowing which pipe to tap: $50,000. Don’t tire your masters out tapping all the pipes in the factory, but do keep asking them which ones to tap.
3b. The valley of the shadow of giving up. When people tell stories of detachment, they (or those parts of them) represent not only a danger to the organization but an opportunity as well. In many of these stories I find a sense of lingering desire, a dormant hope that the storytellers could once again be useful and take action with confidence. With some help even the most jaded can take on new challenges and provide the benefit of their knowledge.
When people tell these stories they are like the Beatles’ nowhere man, making all his nowhere plans for nobody. The thing is, some of those plans are actually pretty good. Do you remember what Ringo said to the nowhere man in The Yellow Submarine?
Ringo:
Hey, uh, Mr. Boob – you can come with us, if you like.Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD.:
You mean… you’d take a nowhere man?Ringo:
Yeah. Come on, we’ll take you somewhere.
A crazy idea for raising the valley: Take your nowhere people somewhere. Literally. Find the people who could contribute to your organization but don’t. Ask them to come to a special meeting or lunch or retreat. Discover the desires they hide, the challenges they wish they could approach, the knowledge they may not know they have, the power and confidence that would enable them, the barriers that stand in their way. See if you can reduce the gap between their desire and their (real and perceived) power and confidence so that they can have a positive impact on the organization.
So there you go. I find thinking of this set of forces that impact motivations to be helpful in my own efforts to get people to do things (don’t we all). Hopefully some other people will find it useful as well.