Beyond Motivation: A Philosophical Foundation

A motivational talk can fill a room with energy. Then Tuesday comes. The inbox fills up, the feeling fades and people go back to doing what they did before. Motivation changes how people feel for a while. To change how they behave, you need something underneath it: a clear way of thinking about value. That foundation is a branch of philosophy called axiology.

What is axiology?

Axiology is the branch of philosophy that studies value. The word comes from the Greek axios, meaning worthy. It asks what is good, what is worth pursuing and why. I describe it as the study of values, value constructs and value creation.

I should warn you that I am a geek when it comes to philosophy, and axiology is a heady subject. It goes all the way back to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and it comes forward through thinkers like Dr. Robert Hartman. If you suffer from insomnia, pick up Hartman’s The Structure of Value. I promise it will put you to sleep. It is thick, heavy stuff.

My work is applied axiology, which means taking those ideas and making them simple enough to use at work tomorrow morning. Any fool can take something simple and make it complex. Taking something complex and offering it up simply is harder, and far more useful.

Why a philosophy does more than a pep talk

People in business say all the time that they want to “bring additional value to the table.” Unfortunately, not many people or organizations know how to do that. Axiology shows how.

It starts with culture, which I define as the collective expression of the values, beliefs and behaviors that individuals bring to any endeavor. A pep talk aims at behavior, the last item on that list. Axiology starts with the first.

Every organization has a culture. So does every gym, every congregation and every family. You will have a culture by design or a culture by default, and trust me when I tell you that you do not want a culture by default.

Moving from one to the other is a matter of perspective. Perspective is the only thing I know of that can radically transform the results you get without altering a single element of your environment. Engagement is about how people see the world, how they interpret it and how they show up for it.

Three maxims of value creation

Applied axiology comes down to a handful of maxims. Three of them frame everything else, and each one turns into a question you can ask yourself every day.

The maxim of creativity

We are all designed to create value. That is our hard drive. The problem is that our software is broken. We have all been infiltrated by selfishness, by the attitude of what’s in this for me. You can spend your life as a creator of something other people will enjoy, or as a consumer with your head down at the trough, making sure you get more than the person next to you. The question that goes with it: do you create more value than you take?

The maxim of positivity

All the good things you want in life are a byproduct of creating value for others. That holds for happiness, and I believe it holds for business. Most people would say the purpose of business is to make money, and I fundamentally disagree. If you don’t make money you will be out of business, of course. But the purpose of business is to improve the human condition: to meet a need, fill a gap and care for people. People will gladly pay full price for what they believe brings true value to their lives, and they like to do good business with businesses that do good. The question that goes with it: do you leave a positive wake?

The maxim of sustainability

To continuously create value, leverage your passion and your strengths to solve problems. The bigger the problem you solve, the more value you create, and the more invaluable you become. The question that goes with it: do you solve problems, or do you point fingers?

Simple on purpose

If those sound simple, good. Robert Fulghum wrote a book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and he had a point. The most powerful principles are simple ones. You do not need a philosophy degree to use these. You need to ask three questions regularly, of yourself and of everyone around you, and answer them honestly.

What changes is the mindset, from me to we. If all of us keep asking what we can get, we end up at a dead end. When we ask how we can win together, everything changes.

From philosophy to daily practice

The questions fit into an ordinary day like this:

• Before a decision: what choice will create the greatest value?
• After an interaction: what kind of wake did I leave?
• When a challenge appears: what part of this problem can I own?
• At the end of the day: did my presence make the people and situations around me better?

Keep them handy and come back to them often. Their power is in how simple they are, and their impact comes from applying them consistently.

To go further, the Remarkable page lays out the whole model, and Remarkable!, the parable I wrote with David Salyers, tells it as a story.