I believe that self-determination theory (SDT) and focus on strenghts gives us valuable insights into the driving forces of action.
According to SDT three factors need to be in place for a person feel intrinsicallymotivated and thus have the internal power to consistently move forward towards a goal.
- First we need to feel that the actions taken feel autonomous - that they are congruent with who we really are.
- Second we need to feel competent, we need to feel that we can make a difference.
- Third we need relatedness as you point out in the story on “Football Saves a Friendship”.
I would like to elaborate a little on our first need - the need for our actions to feel autonomous.
Inspiring goals can sometimes be hard to get going at, as you also point out, but with actions that are congruent with who we really are it might become more easy to get started.
Because - why is it we are reluctant to move our goal into actions? Many times because we see the necessary actions in the wrong light - we argue to ourselves, that “this is not really me”. Because if it was we probably would have started much earlier.
A growing trend in business and personal development is to focus much more on our strengths - discover them and align them to the goals we are striving for.
But to many people are unaware of their strengths - simply because to little time is spent on discovering them, talking about them and deploying them more focused.
The consequence of this strengths unawareness is that we tend to look at the most obvious actions - the ones prescribed by others. And since these “don’t feel like me” we do nothing.
However if we are much more clear on our strengths we can set out actions that are congruent with these strengths or try to link other needed actions to what we do best.
Christopher Petersen and Martin E.P. Seligmann creators of the the Values In Action (viasurvey.org) strength approach, state that actions aligned with our strengths provide us with:
- A sense of ownership and authenticity (”this is the real me”)
- A feeling of exitement while displaying it, particulary at first
- A rapid learning curve as themes are attatched to the strength and practiced
- Continous learning of new ways to enact the strength
- A sense of yearning to act in accordance with strength
- Invigoration rather than exhaustion when using the strength
- Intrinsic motivation to use the strength
It seems to obvious, but the problem is our focus is often on the negatives.
We tend to study what doesn’t work in order to find out what works. That doesn’t work so lets look at what works 
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Dave Weissburg
November 30, 2009
My colleague pointed us to packaging for Azithromycin.
Check it out at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoobyfoo/sets/72157606520347896/
A few things struck him as interesting about this:
1) Not your typical pill packaging. Text is large, clear, sparse and to the point. Also appealing, in a functional, clean kind of way. The legalise is hidden away at the back.
2) His doctor made a point of saying that 5 days on this dose is ‘the same as a 10 day course’ on other antibiotics. In large clear print it says “Azithromycin keeps on working days 6-10”: This is all motivated by adherence issues, most likely. Was this formulated specifically to address adherence issues with antibiotics?
Did they manage to drive design for adherence all the way back into formulation, and carry that right the way through packaging design? If so, kudos to them. Did they get design help to do this? Frankly, if IDEO had contributed to this packaging concept, we’d be pleased, even if it could be better. Are all antibiotics packaged this way? If not, why?
A second colleague commented-
This is the generic version of Zithromax. The original was an undifferentiated antibiotic from Pfizer, introduced in 1991?. Pfizer pulled a coup (at least 2 years ago) with their adherence packaging (one of the only and best examples of pkg driving adoption by docs) and the generics for Azithromycin (including Sandoz and Greenstone) have followed suit.
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