Reward the right behavior (with science)
A zoologist and a game designer enter a workshop session
In today's post I'll talk about how you can use Science and the misunderstood bastard child of Gamification to get people to participate productively in your workshops1.
It's not what it seems to be.
Why people are naughty
Group workshops are a very social context, filled with people that work in slightly different ways. This makes them challenging to plan and run.
Some participants can tend towards cooperation (and maybe suffer from lack of conviction) and others can be very proactive (and perhaps struggle with working in a group).
Human variation is endless, as is its impact on a group:
When a participant talks non-stop due to their gregarious nature,
they disrupt the group.When a client can't wait to correct you to prove how smart they are,
they affect how much others trust you.When a timid group member avoids joining the discussion,
the group loses valuable insight.
Getting the behavior you want
It is tempting to correct difficult participants. To make them know that what they are doing is not approved.
Professional animal trainers know this works only up to a point and never for long.
Contemporary training methods start with Operant Conditioning2. And they tend to reward good behavior rather than punish bad behavior.
We can do the same with people.
When dealing with poor conduct it's almost always better to reward the good rather than punish the bad.
You can do this with just how you interact with the group (e.g. “I loved how Marisa complemented Doug, instead of correcting him”) or you can get the entire group to do this together:
Badges are not what they seem
To reward what you want to see in a group, you can give out badges to participants that demonstrated productive behaviour.
When you add badges to a workshop, you give the participants the power to vote on who gets which badge (at the end, or during a break). Instantly people have an incentive to connect with others and be nice even when you're not looking.
However, the power of badges is not the reward itself.
Its power is the focusing effect it generates.
On the surface, badges (like medals) are about explicit recognition. They tell the world you're good at a desirable thing. Getting a badge makes you feel seen and it also attracts more attention from others.
A badge tells you what is valued in a setting.
What do you value in a Workshop Session?
Many ways of winning
A single type of badge or award, that only one person can get, is not ideal.
It creates a single winner and makes losers of everyone else.
The competitive participants will strive for the badge but others might feel demotivated to try.
The trick is to have multiple badges, that motivate various styles of participation:
The best listener
The more open to new ideas
The more proactive
The cross-pollinator
The most imaginative
The kindest
etc
Who would you like to give a badge to?
You can decide the badge AND the person who gets it. Just write it on the comments below.
I need to thank Said Saddouk for putting badges in my radar.
His posts on LinkedIn are brilliant.
As opposed with Classical Conditioning. Classical conditioning is Pavlov making a dog salivate at a sound of a bell (based on a reflex). Operant Conditioning is a lab mouse learning that pressing a red button (but not a yellow one) results in a tasty food pellet. The first is involuntary, the second is voluntary. Link to a very simple (and funny) explanation of the difference.