The rat is not self-actualizing

On motivations, wins, and other cheese

If you follow this newsletter, chances are that you’ve probably been part of an exercise where you examine the interests of various stakeholders. Or if you haven’t done that, you’ve broken up groups of people in different ways: audiences, voting blocs, demographics, seating arrangements. There are endless ways we group people to understand them.

We need these systems of classification to make sense of the problems we face every day. Yet they can also obscure realities about how various groups actually behave. We can even forget essential facts about these groups until we see them again through new eyes.

This was made clear to me in a recent discussion I facilitated among people trying to solve problems in very different fields. One participant shared her frustrations with leaders within a relatively bureaucratic institution. As experts in other problems considered her situation, someone said, “In my experience, people like that need to know what the next win looks like.”

This one comment unlocked insights into actors in several of the different problems under consideration. We are accustomed to looking at various groups’ motivations as if they were deep passions of the soul. But for some people in some roles, it’s really more like a rat looking for the cheese at the end of the maze. They aren’t aspiring for greater and greater proximity to the cheese — it’s all or nothing. If they don’t see how they will win their particular rat race, they won’t take interest in what you are doing.

Of course, that’s all of us in certain contexts. As much as we admire people who strive in any given situation, there’s nothing quite so disappointing as not quite getting the promotion or not having quite enough money for that dream purchase. Someone who congratulates you on coming so close is someone without empathy for the damn rat race you’re in. So we should have empathy for our own stakeholders whose problems are structured in this way, even if we aren’t motivated by the particular cheese they’re chasing.

I’m currently looking to develop more experiences like this where people can share problems across siloes and develop usable insights together. If you’d like to know more, drop me a line.