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Article 3: The Russian Dolls Strategy For Change
What can Russian dolls possibly have to do with changing the world?
It’s a metaphor that I borrowed from a book called “The Big Leap” by PhD psychologist Gay Hendricks. He used the metaphor of “Russian dolls” to describe the process of digging deeper into oneself, and into the subliminal drivers that guide the real reasons we do things. A bit like the process of asking “Why . . . why . . . why?” To peel away the layers of the onion of our life decisions, or to open up theRussian dolls of our inner selves to find the little one that sits in the very core.
As I was recently finishing up my video course “Save the World with Gamification”, I was having to answer the question of what gamification was quite often. Lots of people haven’t ever heard of the word, or they didn’t really understand what it was. Even the gamification experts (in my opinion) struggle to explain why gamification is useful.
Hendrick’s metaphor for digging deeper into the self, seemed to also fit beautifully for digging into our strategy for how we change the world.
I started to explain gamification as a kind of “motivational wrapping” we can apply to human behavior.
If we want humans to do a thing, (like compost more, drive less, or eat less meat) we can go about the process of trying to motivate people in an infinite number of ways. But they don’t all work. Many of the ways we try and change the world totally fail to motivate people to do the thing we want them to do.
The other reality is that we can try and motivate people to do things in way that totally *effing nails it, and gets lots of people to do thing we want them to.
We don’t need to bash our head against a brick wall. We can design a program that gets people to increase their composting rates by 76%, that gets people to exercise 17% more, that cuts pollution levels by 43%.
It’s actually pretty doable if you utilize the right principles.
Gamification is big piece of the puzzle for supercharging human motivation. In our world of social change, we are motivating people to do more good things, and gamification can help us to help them.
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What can Russian dolls possibly have to do with changing the world?
It’s a metaphor that I borrowed from a book called “The Big Leap” by PhD psychologist Gay Hendricks. He used the metaphor of “Russian dolls” to describe the process of digging deeper into oneself, and into the subliminal drivers that guide the real reasons we do things. A bit like the process of asking “Why . . . why . . . why?” To peel away the layers of the onion of our life decisions, or to open up theRussian dolls of our inner selves to find the little one that sits in the very core.
As I was recently finishing up my video course “Save the World with Gamification”, I was having to answer the question of what gamification was quite often. Lots of people haven’t ever heard of the word, or they didn’t really understand what it was. Even the gamification experts (in my opinion) struggle to explain why gamification is useful.
Hendrick’s metaphor for digging deeper into the self, seemed to also fit beautifully for digging into our strategy for how we change the world.
I started to explain gamification as a kind of “motivational wrapping” we can apply to human behavior.
If we want humans to do a thing, (like compost more, drive less, or eat less meat) we can go about the process of trying to motivate people in an infinite number of ways. But they don’t all work. Many of the ways we try and change the world totally fail to motivate people to do the thing we want them to do.
The other reality is that we can try and motivate people to do things in way that totally *effing nails it, and gets lots of people to do thing we want them to.
We don’t need to bash our head against a brick wall. We can design a program that gets people to increase their composting rates by 76%, that gets people to exercise 17% more, that cuts pollution levels by 43%.
It’s actually pretty doable if you utilize the right principles.
Gamification is big piece of the puzzle for supercharging human motivation. In our world of social change, we are motivating people to do more good things, and gamification can help us to help them.