Encouraging the Spark of Innovation in Your Team

What a difference a couple of years make! The last time I wrote on this blog was June 2023. Many things have changed since then, and now the big kid on the block is AI.

The rate at which the new commercially available LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini) have changed how we can complete work tasks is quite mind-boggling. We are all getting used to using our new AI friends to help us summarise content or pull together presentation outlines, and there are now tools to build web-based products in a matter of minutes that you used to need a team of engineers for.

Nobody quite knows what all this will mean for our work, but big changes are inevitably coming. Of course, these tools are fallible (and like some humans, blissfully unaware of their fallibility), but there’s no doubt they make phenomenal assistants when supervised carefully.

The other big potential advantage of AI tools is that they don’t come with the inconvenience of human psychology. They don’t get frustrated if their colleagues are getting more credit than them, they don’t feel the need to be seen and accepted by their boss, and they don’t even need to get paid bonuses or incentives to complete their work. To the corporate machine, this sounds like a dream.

Of course, AI has plenty of limitations (including the lack of self-awareness I mentioned before), but where is the current real limitation in my view? Creative thinking. The type of innovation that creates products that meet needs people didn’t even know they had. Innovation that takes inputs from all walks of life and turns them into a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

If the future is workforces that are supplemented to at least some extent by AI assistants, then unlocking human innovation is where organisations can start to differentiate their products and services.

Plenty has been studied on how to unlock that spark of motivation in an employee base. The dominant theory in this space is self-determination theory, which essentially says people need empowerment at work to feel autonomously motivated.

Self-determination theory has shown that there is a spectrum of different motivation types. More "controlled" motivation comes from external sources, such as financial rewards or social pressure. “Autonomous” motivation comes from within (similarly to intrinsic motivation) and is driven by belief, enjoyment, or a feeling of ownership. Studies have consistently found that autonomous motivation is generally better at predicting a range of organisational outcomes, including engagement, well-being, and a host of positive work behaviours.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

Source: Sarah Marrs / Awardco

You’d be forgiven for thinking that more controlled motivation, coming from external sources, is therefore bad. But that’s actually not the case. A well-researched study found that rather than one being better than the other, controlled and autonomous motivation just play different roles. Broadly speaking, controlled motivation accounts more for the quantity of employees’ output, and autonomous more for the quality. Assuming both quantity and quality are important in the workplace (and in my experience, they are), then both types of motivation are important to cultivate, although you may want to lean on each one at different times depending on the task at hand.

There’s also an important individual element here—different people will have a combination of different motivators at different times. I’ve just recently been conducting research on that topic which I will share in a blog post shortly.

We know that it is impossible for a human to compete with AI when it comes to the amount of work we can complete in a set time. They are faster than us, and unrelenting in their service. However, when it comes to the quality of that work, and the creative thinking we can put into new solutions, products, higher efficiencies, better processes, new sales approaches, that’s where we can and must continue to offer the unique value of a human mind. And cultivating that in our workforces will require a focus on cultivating autonomous motivation, tapping into our humanity, and igniting the spark of motivation and creativity—and there's more to come on that topic!