Unit 3: Insights and the Current Behavioral Balance
Lesson 1: Changing behavior through pressures
We’ve talked about how to define the world we want. But in order to get there, we need to understand the world that we have in two really important ways.
1. Why would anyone want to live in this other world? Why is it attractive? Why does it have energy? Why does it pull people towards it? We call these promoting pressures.
2. Given that it’s an attractive world, given that people want to live there, given that it’s a thing that they want…why aren’t they already living there? There must be something pushing back. We call these inhibiting pressures.
To make a behavior more or less likely you change pressures around the behavior.
For example, if you want to make a behavior more likely, you strengthen promoting pressures and weaken inhibiting pressures. If we want to make a behavior less likely, we weaken promoting pressures and strengthen inhibiting pressures.
Activity:
Somebody calls one of your teammates “lazy” because they didn’t finish their tasks, implying that they are insufficiently motivated and suggesting that we should threaten to fire them so they’ll be more motivated.
What might be some inhibiting pressures affecting your teammate’s behavior, making them appear lazy?