Background: This blog originated from an Academy of Finland research project “Self-determined motivation for work and health”, conducted by people in the University of Helsinki Behaviour Change and Wellbeing research group.
Views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect official positions of any institutions involved.
Q & A
Why do we need strategies to manage our motivation and behaviour?
The world has grown more interconnected, leading to increasingly complex operating environments, which increases the demands placed on individuals. Unfortunately, much of the organisation of work is still built on factory era command-and-control optimisation, which by the principles of complexity science, inevitably fails when the environment changes. Even more unfortunately, many workers have internalised the “do as you’re told” mentality, and find themselves struggling when they’re suddenly expected to take initiative (that is, instead of being just called whiny millenials for abhorring repetetive tasks with little knowledge of what they contribute to).
But telling people what to do rarely if ever works, even if one would magically have enough information to know what’s the best course of action for a particular person: They have to figure it out themselves.
we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in the need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb (in: Fooled By Randomness)
What we tried to do, when we created the The compendium of self-enactable techniques to change and self-manage motivation and behaviour (upcoming in Nature Human Behaviour), was to create an integrative index of techniques people can use to initiate and maintain lifestyle changes. These techniques serve as tools for people to experiment in their own work and life contexts, which they are experts in.
The technique listing can be found here, but as it’s quite elaborate, this blog also presents bitesize ways to tinker with it.
What about bullshit* jobs?
In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the anthropologist David Graeber describes types of work that have become prevalent in the contemporary society, but are mostly meaningless and/or harmful in the bigger picture. To manage your own motivation and behaviour does not mean you should figure out tricks to make you love your bullshit job. Instead, you can use self-leadership tools to try make your job less bullshit (for yourself, at least), or build up courage to start doing something more meaningful.
Sometimes, though, people do not see the point of their work, while it actually serves some important societal function: In fact, a person in a particular position might have a completely different view of their work, than another one in the exact same position in the same organisation. In these cases, finding the hidden meaningfulness by changing your viewpoint might be valuable. But only you can decide, whether you’re in a bullshit job or not.
* Note that “bullshit” is a philosophical term, not (just) a swear word.
Related references
Bar-Yam, Y. (2002). Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile. In Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Retrieved from http://www.necsi.edu/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html
Siegenfeld, A. F., & Bar-Yam, Y. (2019). An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and its Applications. ArXiv:1912.05088 [Physics]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1912.05088
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Knittle, K. P., Heino, M. T. J., Marques, M. M., Stenius, M., Beattie, M., Ehbrecht, F., … Hankonen, N. (2019). The compendium of self-enactable techniques to change and self-manage motivation and behaviour (v1.0) [Preprint]. https://psyarxiv.com/h72s3/
Taleb, N. N. (2016). Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile. Random House Trade Paperbacks.