You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. This proverb has always puzzled me. People say it as a lament, as if it’s frustrating that you can’t make a horse drink water.

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I’ve been invited to be a guest presenter at this year’s Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference (AYE). I’m honored to join the AYE hosts and the other guest presenters, all of whom I’ve known and admired for years.

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I’d like your help to help guide my energy as I write during October. I’m more motivated when I know I’m writing about something that real people care about. So I’d like to know What questions do you have about resistance?

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Read my latest article “Rewriting the Story of Resistance” on the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference web site.

Also check out the articles by the other presenters, and the AYE wiki that hosts an ongoing conversation for AYE enthusiasts.

Motivation consists of three elements:

• Expectations about ability
• Expectations about results
• Preferences

When we’re deciding whether to do an action, we evaluate all three of these elements, often intuitively or unconsciously. The end result—our motivation for or against the action—comes from a combination of these elements. I will do anything if:

• I believe I am able
• I believe I have a reasonably clear idea of what the results will be
• On balance, I want the results I expect.

Each factors is important. If I am certain that I will not be able to do a given action, I will be less likely to try, even though I would enjoy succeeding. If I have no idea what might happen, I will be less likely to try, even if I believe I am able. If I don’t want the results I expect, I will be less likely to do the action, even if I believe I am able. Motivation combines these factors in a manner akin to multiplication:

Motivation = Ability × Results × Preferences

Don’t take this “equation” seriously as being mathematically precise. I use it only as a handy summary of my Motivation Model. Each factor (confidence in ability, certainty about what will happen, strength of preference) can be high or low. If any factor is near zero, motivation will be low. And preferences have not only magnitude but also valence (or sign)—we may be attracted to a given result (positive valence) or averse to it (negative valence).

This model may seem at first blush to oversimplify the complex concept of motivation. In describing the model, I’m not ignoring that complexity so much as summarizing it. To explore the hidden richness of the model, pick one of the factors and expand it. What factors influence a person’s expectations about whether they are able to do a given action? What factors influence a person’s cause-and-effect expectations about the results of a given action? What factors affect a person’s preferences? (For my partial answer to the question about preferences, see my article “The Structure of Values.”)

I’ve found this model very helpful in a number of ways. The most important is that it helps me to explore my own motivation. If I find myself avoiding some task that I wish I would do, I can quickly check which element is missing. Am I able to do the task? What would happen if I tried? Which of those results do I want? Which do I not want? My answers usually give me a hint about how I can motivate myself. Sometimes my answers tell me that I really don’t want to do the task after all. In those cases, I stop trying to motivate myself (which is a perfectly fine result).

I also use this Motivation Model as I try to understand other people’s reasons for their actions (or inactions). The model is one of the foundations of my work on resistance. For details, see my article “Resistance as a Resource,” especially the section called “The First Factor: Expectations”. (If I were writing the article today, I would call that section “The First Factor: Motivation.”)

I developed this Motivation Model about 10 years ago, as I began to study resistence in earnest. Not long after I first formulated the model, I discovered that many other people had already described very similar models. You can read about some of those models in Edward Lawler’s book Motivation in Work Organizations.

Here’s a new game I’ve invented, called
The Resistance as a Resource Game.

Objective. To create, learn, remember, and express ideas about how to respond to resistance.

Where to Play. The game can be played anywhere that ideas can be posted, such as mailing lists, electronic forums, and conference rooms with walls, white boards, or flip charts.

Players. Any number of players can play.

Turns. It is always your turn.

Moves. There are four kinds of moves:

1. Change.
   Post an example of change that you are promoting.
2. “Resistance.” Choose one of the posted examples of change, and post an example of a statement that expresses “resistance” to that change.
3. Reason. Choose one of the posted examples of “resistance,” and post an example of a reason that an intelligent, competent, sincere person of good will might say such a thing. My article “Resistance as a Resource” might give you ideas for this move.
4. Response. Choose one of the posted reasons, and post an idea about how to respond effectively to someone who has that reason for making that statement.

Virginia Satir once said, “People prefer familiarity to comfort.”

In a recent conversation on the Extreme Programming mailing list, that phrase came up. Alistair Cockburn, an influential change agent in the software development industry, said, “I don’t know about you, but that phrase, besides ringing true, frightens the bejeebers out of me.”

My initial reaction was that it doesn’t frighten me at all. But given how frequently I advocate one change or another, I wasn’t sure why it didn’t frighten me. So I pondered.

I think it doesn’t frighten me because my persuasion style includes ways to make change familiar to people. I never thought about the things I do in those terms until I read Alistair’s message, but as I look at how I encourage change, much of it is about making the unfamiliar familiar.

For example, an HR executive named Susan once sought my help with some resistance she was encountering. I asked her a few simple questions, and that was all she needed from me. Though I wasn’t advocating any particular change in that situation, my questions had the effect of framing Susan’s problem so that it was suddenly very familiar to her. And once the problem became familiar, she knew exactly how to solve it.

Another example: Paul, an executive at a company that builds people’s dream houses, wanted my help with a customer relations problem. As I talked with Paul about the situation, he suddenly realized how he could solve the problem. As I look at that story now, I see that Paul’s epiphany was largely a result of casting his customer relations issue in a familiar light. Once the problem was familiar, he knew what to do.

In those examples, though I wasn’t advocting any particular change, familiarity played a key role in the changes my clients made.

When I’m promoting change, I do a number of things that have the effect of making change familiar. For example, I often work hard to find safe ways for people to try whatever I’m advocating. A small demonstration, maybe, or a “toy” situation to practice on, where failure doesn’t matter. Making it safe for people to try the new idea in a small way invites them to get a teeny tiny bit of experience, from which the new idea becomes a teeny tiny bit more familiar.

Also, I often tell stories, like the ones I linked to above, which can help to make new ideas more familiar.

I suspect that much of my persuasion style is about familiarity, though I never thought about it that way until recently. This gives me an idea for becoming a more effective change artist: What if I attend purposefully to familiarity, and the ways in which familiarity influences the way people respond to change? What new ideas does that give me for how to encourage change, and how to respond to resistance?

Here are some of the ways I may gain value from any given activity:

• I value having or using the product. When I cook a pot of chili, I end up with a pot of chili that I can eat. I like chili.
• I can exchange the product for something I value. When I write software, I end up with a product that I can sell to a customer. I like money.
• I enjoy doing the activity. When I play my dale-o-caster guitar, or watch a movie, or read a book, I simply enjoy the activity itself.
• I value a side effect of the activity. When I rub Lisa’s feet, she is happy and relaxed. I like that.
• I receive rewards for doing the activity. When I present my ideas about leadership and resistance, people tell me how much they appreciate my ideas. I like appreciation.

Any activity that I choose to do is probably providing one or more of these kinds of value. Any activity that other people are doing is probably providing one or more of these kinds of value. If I want to persuade people to change what they’re doing, I will probably need to take those sources of value into account:

• How can I replace the value people gain from what they’re currently doing?
• How can I increase the value people will gain from what I’m asking them to do?

I often see project teams, as they define the requirements for the project, use the words “want” and “need” to sort essential requirements from nonessential. The needs are the essential requirements, critical to project success, and the wants are non-essential. If we find out that we can’t satisfy all of the requirements, we’ll jettison some of the wants and focus on the needs.

This simple distinction between wants and needs has the advantage of allowing speedy triage. We gain that speed by trusting the unexamined and risky assumption that needs are more important than wants.

But hold on… The risky assumption that needs are more important than wants? Needs are more important than wants. Aren’t they?

Sort of. Most of the time. Often enough to lull us into believing that “needs versus wants” is a good way to sort requirements.

Labeling requirements simply as wants or needs hides at least as much information as it expresses. Each requirement, whether we call it a need or a want, is a value. Like any value, a requirement gains its importance through a rich web of beliefs and values called a Value Hierarchy. When we quickly label requirements as wants or needs, and quickly sort the requirements under the assumption that needs are obviously more important than wants, we leave unexplored the rich web of beliefs and values that motivates the requirements in the first place. If we act on requirements without testing the underlying beliefs and values, we increase our danger of solving the wrong problem, and of wasting precious time, money, and attention.

What leads us to think of needs as more important than wants? To explain that, I’ll need to describe how I think about wants and needs.

In their noun forms, the words want and value mean the same thing: a condition that we desire. Wants, then, are organized into Value Hierarchies — each want becomes a want precisely because we believe it leads to some other condition that we desire even more. Each want is a means to an end.

I see needs as special kinds of desired conditions — that is, as special kinds of wants. Like other wants, each need is a means to some more important end. What distinguishes needs from other wants is that a need implies necessity, our belief that the means is necessary if we are to achieve the end. If I want to attend a conference in Boston, I need to go to Boston. Given my desire to attend the conference, going to Boston becomes a need.

Not all wants are needs. If I want to go to Boston, I might choose buy an airplane ticket. But I don’t need to buy a plane ticket. I could instead travel to Boston by car or by train. Buying a ticket is a possible means to the end, but not a necessary means. So buying a plane ticket is a want, but not a need.

A need, then, is made up of three elements:

• A deeper value.
• Our belief that satisfying the need will satisfy the deeper value, or contribute to satisfying it.
• Our belief that we can satisfy the deeper value only by satisfying the need.

It’s the third element, the element of necessity, that distinguishes needs from other wants. And it’s that additional element that leads us to consider needs more important than other wants.

So now I’ve shown that needs are more important than wants, right? Well, yes, with important conditions: A need is more important than a want if the value underlying the need is more important than the value underlying the want, and if the beliefs underlying the need are reliable. Those conditions are important. If we lull ourselves into believing that all needs are (obviously) more important than wants, we forget to test the underlying values and beliefs. And sometimes those values and beliefs don’t hold up under scrutiny.

If we’re going to claim that this requirement is more important than that one, we owe it to ourselves to explicitly test the values and beliefs by which we assign the requirements their importance.

What can happen if we choose to leave those beliefs and values tacit? Here’s an example of a time when I focused so much on something I thought I needed that I didn’t bother to ask myself what problem I was solving.

I was writing a conference paper about resistance, and I kept referring to “the person you are asking to change.” I got tired of writing that, and it seemed like an awkward phrase to repeat so often. I tried the word “client,” but that didn’t seem quite right. So I wrote to a group of writer friends, and said, “I need a better word.” They offered lots of ideas, but I wasn’t entirely happy with any of them. (I was happy that nobody suggested the word “target,” a metaphor that I do not want to promote.)

Finally, Jerry Weinberg said, “What’s wrong with ‘person’?”

I tried “person,” and it fit nicely in some places, and awkwardly in others. I was stumped. So I asked myself, “What is wrong with ‘person’? What am I trying to do here? What problem am I trying to solve with a better word?”

As I looked closer at what I was writing, I noticed that the reason I was repeating “the person you are asking to change” so often was that I was trying to avoid the awkward “him or her.” Aha! My real goal was to find words that were both gender-inclusive and graceful. By focusing so intently on my “need” for a better word, I had distracted myself from discovering my real goal, the deeper value. Once I realized that my real goal was to find graceful gender-inclusive terms, I solve the problem easily.

I think you’ll agree that this example is relatively harmless. I wasted a few hours of my time, and perhaps a few hours of my friends’ time. Not a major disaster.

But what if something similar happens on your projects, on your requirements? What if the deeper need behind some “critical” requirement turns out not to be very important after all? What if the requirement will not really satisfy the underlying need? What if there are better ways to satisfy the underlying need? What if you discover these problems only after you spend precious time, money, and attention to implement the requirement?

Don’t let your need to quickly sort requirements distract you from understanding the requirements more fully. Take the time — especially for the requirements that you are sure are “needs” — to test your underlying beliefs and values. What underlying value motivates this requirement? Will implementing this requirement really satisfy the underlying value? What makes us think so? Is this requirement necessary, or might there be simpler, less costly ways to satisfy the underlying need?

Where do values come from? Every value comes from a deeper value. Each value — that is, each condition that we desire — is motivated by our valuing some other condition even more. For example, I want to pick up my telephone because I want to buy a plane ticket to Boston. I want to buy an airplane ticket to Boston because I want to go to Boston. I want to go to Boston because I want to attend First Annual International Symposium on Where Values Come From. I want to attend the symposium because I want to present my ideas about where values come from. I want to present my ideas because… And so on.

Each value links to others, and the links form a Value Chain.
Each link connects a less important value to a more important one. Buying the ticket is more important than picking up the phone. Going to Boston is more important than buying the ticket.

Each value is linked to the next through a cause-and-effect belief, a belief that satisfying this value will partially or wholly satisfy that more important value. I believe that if I pick up the phone, I can buy a ticket, and that if I buy a ticket, I can go to Boston.

Each of our values, then, becomes a value through our belief that it contributes to an even more important value. My desire to buy a ticket comes from my desire to go to Boston combined with my belief that if I buy a ticket I can go. If I didn’t want to go to Boston, or if I didn’t believe that buying a ticket would help me to go to Boston, I wouldn’t want the ticket.

One way to explore a Value Chain is to use the experiments I described in my article about “The Value Question.” Another way is to start with any desire you want to explore, and state it in the form, “I want (this desire) in order to __________.” Then fill in the blank. That tells you the deeper desire that is motivating the first one. Now state that deeper desire in the same form, and fill in the blank. Repeat until…

Hey, wait a minute! If every desire comes from a deeper desire, then a Value Chain goes on forever. Are Value Chains endless? Not quite. As we trace any value through a Value Chain we eventually arrive at a value that we desire in and of itself, and not because it supports a deeper value. Connirae and Tamara Andreas, in their marvelous book
Core Transformation
call these values Core States. Though people use various names for their deepest values, the Andreases have identified five common Core States: Being, Inner Peace, Love, OKness, and Oneness. Every Value Chain leads to a value like one of these Core States. In other words, every value is a value because we believe (in most cases tacitly) that it leads ultimately to a Core State.

I believe each Value Chain continues at least one step beyond a Core State, but in a way that we cannot access consciously. I suspect that there is a single deeper value that motivates all of the Core States: express and sustain the force of life.
And I suspect that the reason that this value is inaccessible to us is that it ultimately serves not us as individuals, but the force of life itself.

We have lots of these Value Chains, because we have many relatively independent values and desires. Right now, I want to post this article on my web site. I also want to read a chapter or two of a book I’ve been reading. I also want to get to sleep within the next few hours. Each of these desires has a Value Chain.

Our many Value Chains interconnect into a web that I call a Value Hierarchy.
Some values lead to more than one deeper value. For example, going to Boston supports my attending the conference, and it also allows me to visit my family and friends in New England. And some values motivate more than one lower-level value. Wanting the attend the conference motivates me to travel to Boston and also to book a hotel room.

Value Chains — values linked through cause-and-effect beliefs to deeper values — are central to my approach to resistance and power. If you want to increase your influence, learn whatever you can about your Value Chains and those of the people around you.

Reference: For more information about Core States, I highly encourage you to read Connirae and Tamara Andreas’s
Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within
. You may notice that I recommend lots of books. If you read only one of the books I recommend, Core Transformation is the one. This book helped me more profoundly than any other to understand people, especially myself.