Motivation: A Task-Focused Climate

Learning Objectives:

• Reflect on intrinsic motivation and self versus task focus in an innovation environment

In innovative organizations, culture and motivation are closely related. Culture establishes the rules of engagement—how people interact. Motivation keeps people focused on what is most important to the organization.

In the following video transcript, Frans van Houten explains how Philips balanced short-term innovation cycles with standardization of other components of the business model to maximize available resources and keep everyone focused on the most valuable innovation opportunities.

Innovation is, in the end, a process. And it requires good people with good capabilities, but also an approach on how you do it.

An iPhone has an architecture and has certain building blocks that are distinct. The camera module, the battery management module, the radio, the screen interface. Apple doesn't change everything every year. They may change the camera module while keeping the rest the same. Or they may choose a different color while keeping the rest the same. By doing that, you gain speed.

Whereas historically in medtech, people always designed the product from scratch. And then it would take seven years, and then they were out of breath, and then seven years nothing else would come. But then, your innovation cycle is seven years.

Whereas if you take a platform approach like what I just referred to with an iPhone, if you apply that to health care, and you say, well, maybe my hardware stays the same, but I have software that can be updated every six months. And now I can bring new features in software.

And if that is your design philosophy to innovation, I can actually bring benefit even to customers who bought my product last year. I can now sell them a new software release on an older hardware platform and bring them more benefit. And I could have an innovation cycle that runs every six months.

So, of course, other industries have done this before. But health care was really slow to adopt it. And in this way, you go faster. And also, the design thinking will point you to what's the most important, what creates the most value. Because very often, all the basics and the plumbing of a product actually do not add value.

And when we discovered that we had 600 versions of carts on which we can put a product with wheels, what value does that add? Is that what the customer thinks is important? Or was it actually every business unit thinking that I must have my own cart. I'm not a real person if I don't design my own cart.

Well, just because you can design it, doesn't mean you should design it. So it's very wasteful. And so good design thinking also looks at where do you add value and where not. And if it doesn't add value to differentiate, let's standardize. And the more I can standardize, the more R&D money I have to differentiate on top. Much more exciting.

Intrinsic motivation comes from within: It is our desire to master a problem and achieve personal satisfaction. (The opposite, extrinsic motivation, means working for something external, like a reward, recognition, or avoiding punishment.)  

What word or words would you use to describe an environment where people feel intrinsic motivation to work on innovation projects?

Culture defines the rules of engagement, and there are many ways organizations outline culture, such as defining values and installing processes for debate and critique. However, motivation, and particularly intrinsic motivation, can seem more abstract.

The innovation consultancy Synecticsworld helpfully defines the goal of motivation as shifting employees’ focus from the self to the task. This means changing the environment, when necessary, to a place where mental energy is directed toward collaborative activities and discussions instead of personal performance.

Task-focused climates tend to have the following characteristics:

• Small, collaborative teams
• People with different backgrounds and skills—this reduces cognitive bias and encourages team members to reach out and consult one another
• A combination of short-term and long-term goals

In the case of Philips, Frans van Houten encouraged the standardization of any offerings that didn’t increase value for users. This standardization, combined with shorter and more incremental design cycles, helped define the climate as one where user value (the task) was the crucial performance metric.

It is also important to keep the difference between the operational and innovation worlds in mind when increasing motivation.

Phillips's major shift to providing innovative health care solutions was successful for many reasons, including its mission and value statements that laid the groundwork for the new innovation culture.

Culture plays a big role in sustaining employees' motivation to think creatively, produce insights, and communicate effectively about innovation. Motivation, together with expertise and creative thinking skills, is a key element of Teresa Amabile's componential theory of creativity.

As a manager, you control all these components. You can recruit individuals with expertise, invest in training to build creative thinking skills, and create an environment that motivates people to collaborate and create.

When Teresa Amabile described an environment that motivates, she did not mean simply providing money and other incentives. She meant an environment with freedom, resources, encouragement, and support. These characteristics build intrinsic motivation.

The opposite kind of environment, with too much control, oversight, and criticism, invites repetition, lowers morale, and reduces the likelihood of creativity. Of course, as noted back, the right environment for innovation is not all fun and freedom. There is a productive tension between freedom and accountability on successful innovation teams.

This is a delicate balance. But with too much freedom and too little, motivation and creativity both fall.

Many of the detriments to intrinsic motivation are what HBS Professor of Business Administration Teresa Amabile calls innovation inhibitors, some of which we explored previously:

• Harsh criticism or rejection of risky ideas, particularly those toward the far end of the near-far-sweet model
• Exclusive focus on short-term performance and operations
• Consistent high-pressure and multiple responsibilities at once

Even if you use the FourSight model to acknowledge possible personal differences on your design team and make genuine promises about how you will collaborate, it is difficult to sustain innovation in environments that consistently display these characteristics. Employees’ intrinsic motivation will wear down over time.

While we can learn to empathize with other perspectives, we will usually fall back on familiar cognitive habits, especially when we are under great pressure or feel threatened.

Think of it this way–throughout our evolutionary history, human beings lived in dangerous situations. Research has repeatedly shown that our brains respond to blame and other threats to our professional reputation with a fight or flight response.

This response was a benefit to our ancestors in those dangerous situations of the distant past. But in the professional world today, it leads to panic, defensiveness, and difficulty engaging in problem-solving.

You can avoid this environment and turn creative conflict into something productive by inspiring trust in yourself and others. This means approaching team interactions, including personal conflicts and issues with poor performance, with the same mindset that you would use to approach the clarify phase of design thinking.

The goal is not to tolerate poor performance, but to investigate it collaboratively and with an open mind. These types of discussions build trust and may reveal surprising sources for problems.

The more innovative an idea is, the more trust is required to propose it. People with higher levels of trust feel more motivated to participate.