Think of a project where you felt confident you understood what was driving someone. You had done the diagnosis. You knew the person, the context, the motivational profile. Then something surprised you. Not a failure, necessarily. But just a moment where the behavior didn't match what you expected, and you had to update your mental model. What did that moment teach you about the gap between "knowing what motivates someone" and "designing for how that motivation actually works"? Share what you notice. Curious what comes up for people here.

Yesterday, I shared research about managers piling extra work onto their most intrinsically motivated people, based on the assumption that those people will enjoy it. The technical term the researchers use is "motive oversimplification". Here's what I'm curious about from your own experience: when you design for engagement or motivation in an organization, what's the most common assumption the client or stakeholder brings in that you end up having to challenge? Drop your pick in the poll, or write the assumption you hear most often in the comments. I'm curious whether the motive oversimplification problem is something you run into from the outside (as a designer or consultant) or something you're fighting from the inside.

Hey everyone, during the weekend I came across a research from Northeastern. They tracked how managers actually allocate work and found that 55% of them give more tasks to the people they see as most engaged. Here's the full study if you want to dive deeper: https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/03/18/intrinsic-motivation-at-work-burnout-research/ It's just how it plays out: you see someone who genuinely loves what they're doing, who hasn't complained, who seems energized, and you think, "Okay, they can handle this." The assumption feels reasonable. But here's what I realized while reading it: Engagement and capacity are not the same thing. The person who is most committed to the work is also the person least likely to push back when they're actually hitting a wall. They just keep going. Is this like a system design failure hiding in plain sight? The signal that looks most healthy is the signal that's most dangerous to ignore. Curious if you've seen this play out in your teams or work. How do you actually separate someone who is energized from someone who is about to burn out? Because they can look the same from the outside.

Looking at those four options of the poll that I created yesterday, I now notice they're all about diagnosis. And they matter. But I'm curious about what happens before the drop-off. Because usually the person isn't gone the day they decide to leave. They're already half-gone. The design made it easy to drop off is the one that interests me because it's the only one about what you built. The other three are about them. And yeah, people are busy and unmotivated, and we can't change that immediately. But what if we start by focusing on what we can change in that very moment? We can change the friction. What if the first thing that signals drop-off isn't a reason at all, but a moment where the structure stops pulling them forward? Not because the content is bad. But because nothing is asking them to come back. Which of these resonates most with what you're seeing in your world?