Episode Details

Cooperation is built into the human condition - we don't survive without it. In this episode, Andrew and David talk about the connection in our brains between intrinsic motivation and cooperation - and how you can use that to help cultivate intrinsic motivation in an extrinsic world (and even make your organization more competitive!)

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, how to apply the neuroscience of cooperation. David, take it away.

0:00:31.3 David Langford: That sounds ominous to me. So...

0:00:35.1 AS: Impressive.

0:00:35.9 DL: Yeah, we're not gonna do brain surgery, but we'll get pretty close to that today, so...

[laughter]

0:00:40.4 AS: This is brain science.

0:00:42.5 DL: Yes. So we're continuing this five-part series on intrinsic motivation. So Dr. Deming was adamant that intrinsic motivation was key, and that we're all just born with intrinsic motivation, and it's our systems and the people that we encounter over time that sort of drum it out of us. So how do you get it back, especially from people that have been beaten down from both the school systems and the businesses that they've been, et cetera? And Dr. Deming said, we have a right to joy in work and learning. And if that's true, we have to try to create these environments to make great joy in the work environment. And why do you do that? Well, when you do that, you're gonna get better productivity. You're gonna get more output.

0:01:38.5 DL: People are gonna be happy, or they're gonna stay longer. They're not gonna be looking for other jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So it all makes perfect sense to me that you wanna concentrate on creating intrinsically motivating systems even though you might be in an extrinsic world all the way around you. So in the first session, we talked about control or autonomy or ownership as being key for intrinsic motivation. And there's five key factors that we're going through. And what I wanna impress upon people is that this is a system of intrinsic motivation. So it's all of these factors together. Yes, you can just do one factor and get a result. For instance, you can just apply more cooperation and you'll see a higher level of intrinsic motivation. But if you really wanna see people rise to the true heights of what they're capable of or what their potential is, you have to think about all five of these factors.

0:02:40.5 DL: So that's why we're taking time to go through all these. Today we're talking about cooperation. And that's much different than setting up a competitive environment where people are competing for isolated resources or they're competing for a medal, a gold star, et cetera, et cetera. But cooperation is built into the human condition, thousands of years ago when we first started creating villages and people working together, and people had to cooperate to make armies, people had to cooperate to build houses. There's a myth about how the west was won in the United States, that it was the rugged individual, but yeah, there was some of that. But largely it was wagon trains of cooperative people coming west. And if they didn't cooperate and worked together, they didn't survive, the people that were the rugged individuals often perished either from native American attacks or just the environment itself. So cooperation, to me, is built into the human condition.

0:03:53.0 AS: And before you continue that, let me just ask you about competition versus cooperation. Is competition also built-in, or is cooperation more built in? I mean, that point you just made about how for survival, humans need to depend on each other to s