What’s Neuroplasticity?

Remember the old adage that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?  Well that may be true for dogs but guess what?  It is not true for us humans.  Recent research has found that we can indeed learn new ways to do things and that what once thought to be “hard wired” is not really true.  Our human brains allow us to continue to process new information in new ways and some portions of our brains actually compensate for other areas.  What researchers have found is that our brains are actually more elastic (hence the neuro-plasticity) and we can change how we do things.  Dr. Bruce Lipton has studied both quantum physics and cell biology and his research shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead, DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts (The Biology of Belief, Hay House, May, 2005).

So what does this mean and how does this apply to incentives and motivation?  What this means to us is that if we can break the paradigms that hold us back, we can change.  The conventional thinking was that you couldn’t change because “it’s just the way you are.”  But the science doesn’t support that.  Incentives could be used to reward people for stepping outside of their comfort zone and try something new.  The new behavior is learned from the positive thoughts emanating from outside of our cells.  It is also important not to create a program that could have negative consequences because the same learned behavior is possible only this time, in a negative way.  It’s why some programs that are ill conceived, result in a far worse effect than if the program had not been run at all.

Performance improvement programs are becoming more scientific and require more attention to the science, not just giving some people some prizes.  The more we learn about human behavior, the more important these programs will become.

I Don’t Need Incentives

Many companies think that incentives are “double dipping.”  I’m running some spiff program or worse, a full-year incentive program to pay employees (either operations or salespeople) to do the job I hired them to do.  I don’t need an incentive program to motivate someone to do what their salary or hourly wage already should motivate them.  Wrong.  Human psychology is a little more complex than that.  Remember the old Hawthorne studies that we all heard about in Business School.  They turned the lights up and productivity went up.  They turned the lights down and productivity went up.  What they deduced was that any attention paid to the employees had a positive effect.

We come a little farther since those studies and the negative incentive (Do this or you’re fired) to realize that “the stick” is not as powerful in the long run as “the carrot.”  It’s not about just rewarding someone for doing their job either.  Incentives are grounded in human psychology.  They target the audience that can have a positive impact on the business issue; engage them; communicate the objectives; track their performance toward stated goals; reward them for attainment and analyze the effectiveness. 

There are lots of programs that don’t work.  Many times, a company will create their own rules for an incentive, think they have all the bases covered, run the program and then find out the ROI was negative.  That may be enough for them never to run another program.  Too bad.  They can learn a lot from incentive professionals that have designed hundreds if not thousands of programs and know where there are pitfalls.