Integral Motivation Theory
Incentives can start effort, but they rarely sustain it. What sustains it is harder to see, because the story we have been given about motivation leaves it out.
A way of seeing what moves people beneath rewards and pressure, and of designing work, teams and campaigns that people want to give themselves to.
Anyone who leads or works alongside people
The VMP triad, the rule book
Before asking what this discipline adds, it helps to see what has been taken away.
So organisations design incentives, targets and campaigns, and are surprised when effort fades as soon as the pressure lifts.
A culture that treats value as preference has no language for this, so it cannot see it, design for it or protect it.
The pull of worth beyond the self. Once you can see it, you can stop designing against it.
Because the most common ways of motivating people work against the thing that sustains them.
A way to see motivation at its deepest, as a response to something real, and a practical language for working with it rather than around it.
It gives you questions to ask of your team, your strategy or your campaign, and a way to notice when you are relying on pressure where worth would do more. Test it against your own experience.
Intrinsic motivation explains effort through the self: its needs for autonomy, competence and connection. IMT asks what the self is responding to. Where the first stops at the person, the second follows the pull outward.
Everything on this page in 24 pages to study at your own pace, with the worksheet and three questions to try with your team.
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Practise with your own work in the Introduction to IMT course, sessions 3 & 4
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