Applying the Neuroscience of Cooperation: Cultivating Intrinsic Motivation Series with David P. Langford (Part 5)

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 some extent as a society, but do humans need to compete with each other?

0:04:20.1 DL: Well, the great irony is, the better you cooperate, the better you compete.

[laughter]

0:04:27.7 DL: So if you're at a corporation, for instance, or even a school, and the higher the level of cooperation that you foster and create, you actually do become competitive because you actually become better than other people in your field, et cetera.

0:04:43.2 AS: And how... I love that statement, the better you cooperate, the better you compete. How is that rooted in facts? Is that rooted in... It intuitively makes sense to me that a team or a group that really cooperates well together can achieve amazing things, but is it scientifically correct to say that?

0:05:13.6 DL: Well, can we point to... We could point to obviously numbers of examples of either schools or businesses, et cetera, that have high degrees of cooperation involved. You can get... You can seize part of the market in a competitive thinking or a competitive environment or pitting people against each other to achieve inside of an organization, but to me every example I ever looked at, it doesn't last. Pretty soon, what Deming said is, the only people you're left with are the people who can't get a job someplace else.

[laughter]

0:06:01.2 DL: Because they're not happy. It's not fun. You don't feel supported, so...

0:06:06.7 AS: And that brings us back to intrinsic in the idea that it's inherent in us to want to be in a cooperative environment. Like we want to stay in a cooperative environment.

0:06:19.2 DL: Well, it's more than that. When you think about the neuroscience involved, that when you're in a cooperative environment, whether that's a small team or a company or whatever it might be, there's an endorphin released in your brain that actually makes you feel good. It's a really good feeling. The opposite happens. There's two different types of stress levels, and that's a positive sort of stress level. It can still be very stressful work, hard work, et cetera, but when you're working together to make that happen there's a positive stress hormone that's released in your brain. The opposite is true in competitive environments. So the only person that really actually gets that same kind of endorphin is the winner in a competitive environment. Everybody else becomes a demotivator.

0:07:14.9 AS: So it's kind of the endorphin distribution is what it is about. David, I have a situation at my home where I have caregivers helping me take care of my mom. And one of the caregivers left almost eight years as a nurse at a hospital, because she said, "You really couldn't give good care because of all the... Not only the competition amongst people, but also all the things that just took all of the joy out of it." But also the point where you need to push the patient to do what they need to do is the point that everybody would give up. And now when she's working here with my mom and she's made tremendous progress with my mom, it's like we're high fiving and talking about how we're cooperating. I'm looking at kind of bigger picture stuff she's implementing, and mom is getting the benefit. And when you talked about endorphin and the neuroscience of it, I really kind of just felt that, and for the listeners and for the viewers, think about that time that you've cooperated and been successful and it's worked, or even when you failed, but you are in it together. Like that is the endorphin released.

0:08:18.2 DL: Well actually, I think you should have her compete against other caregivers.

[laughter]

0:08:24.1 DL: And then to find out who is the best caregiver in... We laugh about that.

0:08:30.4 AS: Now for our trusted listeners out there, they know that you're kidding, right?

0:08:33.3 DL: Yeah. So yeah, we laugh about that here, but people are actually caught in those environments, and those things are being pushed on them and pressured and et cetera. And just like what you just described, your mom's caregiver finally just said, "Look, I'm outta here. I do not want this stressful environment. It's not fun anymore, actually." But I was also thinking about a presentation of a group of second graders, and they were talking about Deming principles that were in their classroom and all the kinds of things that they were doing. And somebody in the audience asked them a question and they said, "Well, how does it make you feel to work like this cooperatively and in a classroom like this, et cetera?" And this little boy without even hesitating said, "I really like the dolphins." He meant endorphins.

[laughter]

0:09:36.7 AS: Fire up those dolphins.

0:09:38.8 DL: Yeah. But it was very clear that the teacher had been having discussions with them about that, about how do we feel about this when we cooperate and we sort of work together? So there's... I kind of break it down and there's two different kinds of cooperation we often see, we see natural and we see forced cooperation. So forced cooperation is like, "You, you, and you, get over there and start cooperating, and then we're gonna see who's the top cooperating group in the room," and things like that. That's sort of like competitive cooperation. Whereas natural cooperation is when you basically just set up the environment and encourage people to support and help each other, they will naturally seek out other people to work together.

0:10:33.5 DL: Now, you may... In education, you may have an objective that you want people to learn to work together with people that they wouldn't normally work together. Okay, well, that's a different aim that you're trying to accomplish. And to do that, I would probably do something like just total random selection, just throw everybody's name in a hat and draw out four names and this is your team. Because then everybody knows how team members were chosen to be in that. But where we