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THE ABC MODEL: BEYOND "ATTITUDE"

The core of our company's motivational system is what we call the "ABC Model" of human behavior.  It consists of three basic elements:  Antecedents, Behavior, and Consequences.  Notice that we define a Behavior as anything that people say or do; that Antecedents precede Behaviors, or get the Behaviors started; and that Consequences are what happen as a result of the Behaviors performed.

In the classic rat experiments of the early behaviorists, this model was very much in evidence.  In one of these experiments, Skinner taught a rat to push a lever by providing it with food every time it did so.  The original Antecedent here may have been the rat's accidental brushing against the lever, or it may have been the rodent's curiosity.  For whatever reason the animal performed the particular Behavior of lever-pushing, though, it was immediately rewarded with food - the Consequence of the Behavior.  Once it was rewarded several times, the rat made the connection between lever-pushing and eating, and continued to perform the Behavior, so it would continue to reap the reward.  It had learned a previously unknown Behavior because that Behavior made a difference in its life.

Similar cause-and-effect experiments were performed with variations many times, not just on rats, but on various higher species, including humans.  The critical variable in all these experiments was the Consequences, and the critical discovery was this:  By controlling the Consequences of a Behavior, you could change the Behavior itself.  This relates to what I have said before:  people don't change their behavior unless it makes a difference to them to do so.  So, if you want a rat to push a lever, make a difference to him by giving him food when he does.  If you want him to stop pushing it, follow the lever-pushing with an electric shock.  It may not be elegant, but it works.

This discovery - that you could alter behavior by altering its apparent effects - not only revolutionized psychiatry in the 1930's; it also has had a profound effect on the way motivation is managed, on the playing field, in the work place, indeed everywhere.  The shocking lesson of Watson's and Skinner's experiments was that, if you wanted to change (improve) a person's performance in a given area, you didn't have to know the "real" or "ultimate" reason behind his current performance:  that is, you didn't have to know why he behaved as he did.  Without knowing anything at all about "unresolved Oedipal conflicts" or a person's love life, you could alter the Behavior simply by modifying the Consequences.

A lot of people didn't want to hear that.  The news angered the psychiatrists, for example, since they were accustomed to charging forty bucks a pop for therapy sessions designed specifically to uncover "why" a given set of Behaviors was performed.  It didn't tickle the humanists either.  They didn't like the idea that humans were merely "talking rats," and they didn't think that psychology should confine itself to mere "manipulation" of its subjects.

We see this resistance to "manipulation" all the time in our seminars.  And we see vestiges of the old-fashioned, "searching for the Soul" approach to psychology, too.  Only the managers we teach don't talk about Mind or the Soul.  They talk about internal make-up or personality.  Usually they call it "attitude."  

In teaching our system of motivation, we usually begin by asking the group members, "What do you think makes your best workers perform as they do?" and, "What makes the worst ones perform badly?"  The answers are always revealing.  Almost without exception, the managers focus not on things that they could do to influence the behavior of their people (that is, on the Consequences they could introduce for good or bad performance), but on the workers' own internal state - the "why" that "makes" them act the way they do.

For example, when asked to define what makes the people on their most productive shift so good, plant managers consistently say things like this:  "They've got the right attitude," "They've got pride in their work," "They care about the company," and "They've just got a lot of initiative."  Asked to identify why the slow shift remains slow, they say:  "That's just a lazy line."  "They don't pay attention to what they're doing," and, "Just a bad attitude all around."

Explaining things by referring to an "attitude" that is impervious to management control is both the most common and the most aggravating "explanation" that managers give for why a certain level of performance is not happening.  It's an easy copout that shifts responsibility off the manager's shoulders and identifies some tenuous but immovable "force" as the reason his people won't perform.  "It's not my fault," the hidden message reads.  "These guys are just bad seeds."  (In other words, they're just "evil" because they won't learn on their own which are the right levers to push.)

Anybody who has ever played on a sports team and has seen the dramatic effect that good coaching can have knows that this is nonsense.  In professional sports especially, most teams today are pretty equally matched:  there's very little difference in the "talent levels" of the players on a first-ranked team and those on a team in the middle.  The difference is in the quality of coaching - which is to say, the quality of "people management."  Invariably in high-level sports, the most successful teams are the ones whose coaches are most skilled in "manipulating" their people toward the kind of Behaviors that win games.  Exactly the same principle applies in business, and in every other situation where learning creatures (like people), not robots, are involved.  So the manager who complains that his people "just won't get cracking" is really saying that he doesn't know how to turn them on.  And - here's a news flash for you - the one who cant' explain why his best people are doing so well is in the same boat, or soon will be.  If the only clue you have to why your people perform is that will-o'-the-wisp, their "attitude," sooner or later that attitude is going to go "bad."  Because it's not something you can control.

Because focusing on internal attitudes always leads to a management dead end, we advise the managers who attend our programs to focus on externals instead.  Forget about your people's "ultimate causes" and "real" mental states, we say.  You can't change those things anyway, no matter how hard you plead or preach.  What you can change is their external behavior.  And you do that by manipulating Consequences.  That's the "ultimate cause" of all good motivation.

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