Holacracy. MOOCs. Food labels.
Holacracy isn’t working. MOOCs have low completion rates, and an estimated 90% drop-out rate. Food labels to help consumers make informed choices show mixed effectiveness and decidedly no downward impact on public health concerns re obesity.
Other than not working as well as optimistically assumed in their wake, they have one more thing in common.
Their design assumes that people have self-motivation in heaps, and when faced with choices, they draw upon that self-motivation to make the best decisions for themselves.
From organisations, to education, to nutrition and health, the assumption of the “highly motivated and self-interested individual” does not stack up.
The reality is different from the design assumptions made.
As Buffer found out from its year-long no-managers experiment, people were expected to direct and motivate themselves, the lack of managers soon became overwhelming, and an implicit hierarchy emerged nonetheless.
Similarly MOOCs assume that a highly motivated and self-driven student is the only kind around. A self-motivated student will benefit from auto-didactic methods disproportionately more than a peer who isn’t so driven. As a teacher, I can attest to these phenomena too: students have variable levels of motivation, cognition and learning capacity; they may or may not understand the sequentiality of learning certain modules i.e. prior art in a field, which, of course, is more essential in some fields than in others; they may not understand some content and that can be demotivating in itself; they may not have the time or dedication to complete assigned readings; and last but not the least, they will always have have questions and if not, a facilitator teacher can make them question their tightly-held beliefs in a setting that makes them think.
In other words, willpower depletion, by the many demands made on us by life, is a real phenomenon.
The design problem that technology entrepreneurs keep dreaming of does not have to bring about “disruption”. It is more complicated than that.
The design problem is to keep people with varying motivations involved, and progressing.
If at all we achieve step change or “disruption”, the design challenge is to do so the existing tools of facilitation and enabling, along with new tools of technology and emergent social contexts, to address the same problems of variable motivation, cognition, and commitment to learning.
A designer assuming a bottomless pit of self-motivation in its audience sooner than later discovers the ordinariness of the human condition.