Intrinsic Motivation in Education (and Life!) - A Conversation with Sharath Jeevan

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The idea is that if you achieve that state of flow, you will develop those transferable skills around curiosity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, et cetera, that will help you do whatever else you want to do in life.

Hello, welcome back to the podcast This Week with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week's conversation with Sharath Jeevan was absolutely fascinating and perfectly timed in line with the launch of his new book, Intrinsic. Sharath is one of the world's leading experts on reigniting our inner drive or intrinsic motivation. He founded and led STIR Education, arguably the world's largest intrinsic motivation initiative. Durr has reignited the motivation of 200,000 teachers, 35,000 schools, and 7 million children in emerging countries. Sharath is currently the Executive Chairman of Intrinsic Labs, which supports organizations all around the world to solve deep motivational challenges, from governments to leading UK universities and high-profile corporations. He was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2014 and was recognized as one of the UK's 10 leading social entrepreneurs in 2019. Sharath's work has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, The Hindustan Times, and the Times of India. Sharath's first book, Intrinsic, is out now and is a book which takes readers on a journey around the world to find practical and inspirational answers to solving our motivational crisis. Intrinsic has received glowing testimonials from global leaders in many sectors and best-selling authors. Do connect with Sharath on LinkedIn or on Twitter, and you can find the links to his new book and to Intrinsic Labs in the show notes.

Thank you for joining me. It's a huge pleasure and a big moment to be joining me this week, particularly with the launch of your new book. And I'm happy to be able to talk through some of those ideas around intrinsic motivation with you, Gerald.

Such a pleasure and honor. As I said, such a timely day as well, just the day before the official launch of the book. And yeah, very excited to dive in into some of the fascinating questions that you had around the book as well.

Fantastic.

Good.

Well, perhaps we, we start with one of the things I liked about the book is there's a lot of personal, uh, reflection in it from your own experience, obviously with STIR Education and, and throughout your career related to intrinsic motivation and what you've learned. So personal narratives, but also really practical suggestions. It seems like you've done the, the hard graft of synthesizing the research as well. So that felt very present in the book, but not overwhelming. It's a highly personal and practical book first, but clearly there's a strong research base underneath it. So perhaps perhaps if we could dig there first, just in relation to what we mean by intrinsic motivation. And obviously, as we'll get into the conversation, why that's so important in so many areas of our lives and particularly now. But the first question was, obviously, often it's pitted against extrinsic motivation and there's the either-or questioning, but I really liked what you did to kind of acknowledge that, but kind of move past it by this idea of hygiene factors. Related to understanding intrinsic motivation. So perhaps if we could start there, just talking through a bit of that, that would be really interesting.

Thanks, Tim. I'm very glad you like the balance in the book. It took a lot of, uh, yeah, I'm not sure if there was many drafts to try and get that balance working. I had a lot of others helping me along the way with my publisher. But yeah, I think that the core insight, I think, to really underpin what you said is what deeply motivates us is not the opposite of what demotivates us. Let me just repeat that. So what deeply motivates us is not the opposite of what demotivates us. And exactly as you said, that it all links this idea of hygiene factors. So we know, you know, if you can't put bread on the table, if you can't make a living wage, if you're worried about your survival, as many of us have had to do through pandemic, or family survival, clearly these kind of more extrinsic factors matter a lot. And it does matter a lot about how much money you bring in, All of these things as well. But what we learn is that there are sharply diminishing returns to extrinsic factors. These are, you know, extrinsic basically means external. So things like money, status, incentives, rewards, carrots and sticks, all those kinds of things, which I would argue we've driven a lot of our lives around of the last 20, 30 years. They really start to weaken over time. And the core is not to keep doing what you're doing, hoping that'll keep motivating you. You know, I know bankers I've talked to who had a £20 million bonus, and the look on their face, they don't look happy at all. I said, what's going on? They said, well, the guy next door, my next trading desk, got £25 million on, you know, through the water cooler chat, and I've got to work harder next year. So there's no end to that once you start chasing those things. So the idea of hygiene factors is that these things are important to reduce demotivation. Let's acknowledge that but try to see it as something— it's almost a necessary evil. You've got to have that. But once you achieve those goals, you've got to go to more internal drivers that are more internal or intrinsic to you. That's kind of the other core insight. So it's not to say these things are not important, but, but it's just that as we get more of them, and many of us are lucky, at least in the West, to have more of those kind of core creature comforts and basics, the role of intrinsic motivation becomes so much more important.

Yeah, I guess it's kind of a baseline starting point, but in an educational context, obviously, which this podcast is particularly focused on, the qualification, the end exam, the final grade, it seems often is the motivating or perhaps motivating external factor, extrinsic factor, which as you say, we can't ignore, but it's not sufficient. It has to be acknowledged and used, but it's not sufficient. Then we need to go the next layer. Into the intrinsic.

Yeah, and what I'd say to you is I think in our school system, I think in the UK but also around the world, has been driven almost entirely by extrinsic thinking and very much a kind of carrots and sticks approach. The approach has been very much about accountability is the answer. If you put enough pressure on schools and teachers and head teachers, we'll get great results. Unfortunately, if you look at, you know, most of these comparisons, you haven't become a world-leading country in education, sadly, despite lot of effort in this area. But I think more importantly, what it's created is a culture where increasingly a headteacher thinks, my job is to serve Ofsted or the league table, not to serve the community and the children that I, you know, and people that I really serve in the question of purpose. And I think it can lead to so much gaming now where selection becomes the game. It's about just selecting our intake of kids, not really nurturing them and then realizing their full potential. So I think it's led to all kinds of perverse behaviors through this focus.

And you refer to John Maynard Keynes' quote in the book, which I also like, that we become slaves of some defunct economist. And it is that idea, isn't it, that schools as entities or individuals are kind of self-interested units and they're going to game the system, play the system in whatever way best serves their own individual interest. And clearly that's a a very poor reflection of the fullness of what we can be as human beings, right? And there's a great deal more to us than that, let's say.

I've never yet met a teacher who says, my job is to wreck young people's lives, right? Almost every teacher I know, I'm sure you know Tim Logan, I worked with about 200,000 at STIR. They came into the profession with some kind of intrinsic motivation, some kind of right reason and a real desire to help and serve young people and ignite young minds. What happens though is I think the accountability pressures become so large, they stop seeing that purpose. So I think teaching is an intrinsically purposeful profession. It's all about helping and serving others, but we've sliced and diced the school system and how we organize individual schools and classrooms now in almost every country in a way that detracts from that purpose. So then what does happen is you have that reaction, that kind of gaming you talked about, becomes a natural action. I think we'd all do that if we were in certain shoes.

Yeah.

I mean, I suppose that kind of leads on to the substance of the book in a way. It's almost like the extrinsic factors are easier to deal with and they've got kind of harder edges and they're more, they bite when they don't work and we can clearly see them. We can clearly evidence them. We can hold people accountable to them, but the intrinsic is a much more, I mean, I remember using this actually when I was talking to to John and Girish for, in the STAIR Education Podcast I did, you know, you end up in these slightly fuzzy areas and that's, those are much more difficult to deal with in a way. So, and I, I suppose what you are doing is then really leading into that area of that idea. And, and my question therefore would be, is intrinsic motivation developable intentionally? And then if it is, how, how might we know that it's growing? You give loads of examples in the book, as I said, related to education, but in lots of other areas of parenting and life and citizenship. Perhaps you could give a few different examples of how it might be developable.

Yeah, so the evidence is really clear now that this is not something you're just born with or not. I think in education, Tim, we had this revolution around growth mindset some years ago now, and Carol Dweck and her amazing work that showed us that intelligence is malleable, right? It's like a muscle, we can develop it. I think motivation, it's a very similar paradigm. We just need to adopt that paradigm. And the really encouraging thing is it's not about individuals most of the time. It's really about the culture around the individual in an organization or school system setting. So once we take that into account, there's a huge amount of optimism and I hope excitement from, uh, those in education that we can do this. What we need to do though, is to, as you said, find those markers and you're right. It's not sort of as obvious perhaps, but Part of it is really thinking about what the purpose of education is, first of all. What's been really interesting is, I think you'll use that, use the Mark Twain analogy, we've used, you know, metrics like the, you know, the lampposts for the drunk, right? Not for elimination but for support. And so we're often trying to define random metrics, which are easy to measure, without actually asking ourselves, does it mean anything for the young person? Let me give you a couple of real examples I talk about in the book. Everything in modern work is about solving wicked problems, problems that are fuzzy, to use your words, don't have easy solutions, are not easy to do checkbox exercises on. And I do a lot of my work right now consulting to large companies who their managers are tearing their hair out because they're not able to understand this new world. And so what you talk about the school system and management being fuzzy, that's the world we're in. Look at this pandemic the last 18 months. Everything has been fuzzy. There's been no clear right answer. When I talk to the book about this idea of wicked versus kind problems, then the world now— I would argue teaching is an inherently wicked profession. By that I mean you cannot reduce it down to a formula or easy best practices. And I talk about a book about the Gates Foundation spent $250 million trying to decode teaching practices, and you can't, because in front of, you know, every teacher there's a different child, Different contexts, different classroom settings. There are millions of permutations out there. Teaching really is an art. It's not logistics, uh, you know, in that sense. And so if you take that into account, I think if you say, what, what's really the core purpose of education? Um, I think I'd argue if we're talking about the UK, look, the main thing is for our young people to be able to survive in this world of unknowns and have that lifelong love of learning. Everything we should be measuring really in the school system then should be about that ability to learn to learn. Instead, we're fixated by academic subjects, that stuff where we can pick those up as we go now in life. Now, this is my probably 4th or 5th career now. We're all gonna be changing our careers a lot. Yeah. What we need to be able to do is have the diversity to communicate ideas, to influence others, to keep motivated and resilient during tough times, to be intellectually curious, all of these key things. There are increasingly good metrics towards those and things we can measure. But the thing I think would really help us in education is moving away from this comparison culture. No two kids are the same. You can't reduce this all down to paint-by-numbers. What matters, and this is a key thing in Intrinsic, is the idea of mastery, the idea of constant progress towards the best version of yourself you can be. That's deeply motivating, and that's what we need in the world of work today as well.

No, that's brilliant. And what I found really interesting is, and you, as you raise it again, the parallel with what happened with Carol Dweck's work and the growth mindset. I think that's perhaps something we can learn from, cuz there was a really interesting trajectory, let's say, of that idea into education. And I kind of saw it and I was at the beginning of it, you know, super, super excited about this idea. And I've heard other people talk about It has a lot of face validity for teachers. Like it clearly makes sense. Of course we want to encourage, but where it bites is actually what do you then do about that? Like in intervening, in supporting another child to develop in a particular growth mindset, that's where the real work is, but that's where it becomes, it's not an easy thing to do clearly, 'cause we're dealing with, as you say, distinct unique individuals who all have a slightly different relationship to different subjects or different experiences and trying to come up with ways that support their development of, let's say, a growth mindset, or now, you know, intrinsic motivation is a really, it's a really interesting problem. And I think perhaps there's something we can learn from the experience, cuz I think a lot of schools really went for it with a growth mindset and there's posters everywhere and they're trying to imbue it in the culture very intentionally, but actually what seemed to transpire was it didn't make a huge amount of difference ultimately to the, the outcomes which they were measuring, which were the academic progress. I mean, obviously you might argue that that's the wrong thing to be measuring as an outcome of that process, but I think there were— it threw up some interesting pieces of learning, that whole experience, that might be relevant.

Yeah, I have a strong view on this, don't you? I think the ask growth mindset, you know, make us breakfast, mow the lawn, if you do that with, you know, all these randomized controls It was ridiculous what we put that idea through. That wasn't the point. The bigger point of the growth mindset work, in my view, was that it was about really helping teachers see potential in every child. I would just measure— so going back to why the measures are so important, you have that, you know, yes, over time that will lead to always be correlated perhaps academic success, but what matters much more is our teachers changing their mindsets, their own behaviors. But if you take that much more focused measure I think there was a lot of progress in that way of thinking. And I think we can reorientate our approaches towards it. I think what tends to happen is we want everything. This goes back to the whole problem the book is set up to solve. We have this extrinsic culture where it's all about how this thing can be used as a tool to get me something else. It's very much contingent reward mindset, which says, you know, if I do this, I want guarantee this will happen. The whole point of intrinsic motivation is to say, well, what is the purpose of this in the first place? Let's do it because it's an inherently good thing. I would argue that teachers believing that every child has potential, I would find that very hard to argue whether or not it increases attainment rates or not. It just seems a crazy way to— what happens is we have great professors like Carol Black, their ideas get sort of hoisted and taken to these crazy extremes. And I think that's a fable of how we need to be— just have common sense in these discussions, actually.

No, that's great. And I mean, actually, I'd like to jump to that question because I wanted to ask you about that specifically, and I'll come back to the the question of talent in a moment, but because what you're talking about there is that kind of transactional approach. If, if we do this, then this will happen, and it runs counter to the whole logic of intrinsic motivation in a way. But that was one of my thoughts, and I wanted to ask you whether perhaps there is a danger of it being used for that, or just for your thoughts on it in general about the idea of developing intrinsic motivation as a more efficient way to gain compliance for the extrinsic outcomes that we're seeking. If you think of as a teacher, you're trying to motivate and encourage these students to be the best versions of themselves they can be, but particularly they're going to be held accountable to the academic outcomes. And so it would be much better for everybody if there's more intrinsic motivation just fueling the system, let's say, if you put it like that.

I think intrinsic was written really very strongly, Tim, to counter that way of thinking, because I think I could see that even in the It's a definition of 10 years ago and Dan Pink wrote a really good book called Drive and so on. But the risk of this stuff is that it starts to become seen as a tool, right? Just, it's another way of achieving the same outcome. One of the things I tried to do with the book as a sort of innovation was to reorder the concepts, the pillars. Now I started with purpose first. So I've used Purpose, Autonomy, Mastery, or PAM, if you want an easy acronym. The reason being, if we don't— are we not clear first of all what the purpose of what we're doing is, it's very hard to know what is this all for? And so the idea has been exciting. What I do in the book is look very closely at what's happening with work nowadays, with talent and success, with relationships, parenting, citizenship, as you mentioned, but first ask that deeper question of what are we doing this for? And trying to draw from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, you name it. If we're really honest about what that purpose is to begin with, then it's a different approach where it really is a different way of thinking and engaging in the world and running our schools and education systems, rather than just some kind of instrumental tool to get the outcome more cheaply, frankly, right?

No, it's a very nice way to frame it, to kind of flip it on its head a little bit and start with the purpose. And that your example of the education system in India in the book was interesting for that, and just reorienting that. But then if we come back to this idea of talent, because that's one of the other things I really enjoyed, was your description of the difference between talent managers and talent nurturers. Particularly, I mean, obviously again for me and this podcast related to education, but I think it applies more broadly in the world of work and elsewhere, but perhaps you could talk about that difference between just kind of managing talent and then nurturing talent and what that really means for the skills and attitudes of somebody who is a teacher or a manager, leader.

Yeah. I would argue that every great teacher and every great school leader, Tim, is a hard talent nurturer. Yeah. And let me take a personal example. I talked about in the book, a teacher called Paul Henderson who taught me. And I think largely because when I got into Cambridge, for example, my undergraduate degree, and it was because I think he saw something in me that no one else saw. He had this abundance mindset talent where he was willing to look beyond the conventional. He also realized that a lot of his job as a teacher was to keep me deeply engaged in his subject, English, but that had a huge spillover into everything else I learned. He saw his job not just about imparting technical knowledge, but but also about making connections. To me, I was, I'd come back to the UK, I grew up in the Middle East, I was struggling with lots of things. He helped English have a real relevance to me in my life more broadly, got me interested in all kinds of new authors, for example. And then he made the step of actually encouraging me to apply for a scholarship to a different school where I went to and still stayed in touch afterwards. And so that idea of nurturing, as you said, it's not trying to manage and select talent and say, I want a cream skin, basically. Which more and more I think schools are under pressure to meet some of these attainment targets. The easiest way to achieve them is just to select kids differently and be more selective, either explicitly or implicitly. But instead of the idea of saying everyone has got talent, what's their unique talent? What are they uniquely placed to do? How do I help them deeply engage in that activity and achieve that, really stretch themselves and achieve that state of flow? And I talked about it also in the book about the first manager, David Newkirk, in the world of strategy consulting. And I'll explain the relevance in a second. But for interviews to hire candidates, he wouldn't ask traditional consulting questions. He wouldn't ask to analyze a business or any of those questions. He'd ask you to talk about an activity you were deeply engaged in. And he'd drill deeper and deeper and deeper. And what he was testing is, Did you really push yourself to the limits in that activity? That could have been the Tiddlywinks or it could have been scuba diving. You didn't care. But the idea is that if you achieve that state of flow, you will develop those transferable skills around curiosity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, et cetera, that will help you do whatever else you want to do in life. And I think that's the core beauty of teaching, I would argue.

Not—

and of course academic information that's passed on is important, but That's much less important today. I think it's that key relationship and those transferable skills that the teaching is all about nurturing.

It's fascinating, isn't it? And I think that idea of your first mindset about talent nurturers, that idea of abundance versus scarcity, it's such an interesting kind of underlying profound worldview, if you like, that is. So, I mean, obviously it feeds into the economic kind of paradigms that we work with. You've got to protect what you have because resources are scarce. There's a practical resonance to that, but also we run education like that, don't we? In terms of you've got to be stepping on the fingers of somebody else in order to get, you know, because these top grades are scarce and these top university places are scarce and trying to shift out of that to a different kind of approach. There is space for people to become fully themselves and develop their own unique talents is a totally different way of thinking, but it's trying to square both of them.

Yeah, I sort of confess in the book, I think I was very— my identity early on in my career, my life was very wrapped into the idea of selectivity. You remember that? Yeah, the master of my Cambridge college calling us the intellectual cream of the country as we had our kickoff dinner and so on.. And so I think it was just that side. I think what I'm worried about is we're accelerating more and more in that direction. You know, Scott Galloway, the US sort of business thinker, talks about top universities now, like he calls them Gucci bags or luxury bags. It's become a positional good, a status symbol. We get, you know, we're using education to almost advance the pecking order of others. But what's ironic is that a lot of new economic thinking, Robert Solow and others, for example, have shown that Actually, education is not a, is not a scarce commodity that if I'm educated, you will also benefit because our mutual education makes us all prosperous, uh, more civilized, more flourishing human beings. It's not a zero-sum game. I don't have to gain at the expense of you or anyone else. So it seems interesting that we've taken these mental models on in education.

Very definitely. And I think as a very practical example of that, this idea of even mixed ability groups and actually working with somebody who hasn't quite understood concept and I'm explaining it to them, that's not just me being charitable and supporting somebody who is not quite as strong in this area as me. I'm actually developing my own competence and depth of understanding in that aspect and overlearning and these things. But again, we tend to not value that part of it and not even see the give back that that gives to the person themselves.

Some research from, um, um, actually Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, actually, actually scientifically validated exactly what you said. That actually meant she looked at the role of mentors, and actually the mentors gained as much as the mentees in almost any skill they were mentoring in. Because I think it's that role modeling effect. If you role model something, you're going to see yourself in a different light. You're going to put the bar higher. You're going to be more reflective of what you're actually doing. So exactly, I mean, there's so many ways we can move education away from this zero-sum game mentality. I think that's got to be the order of the day now. Amazing.

That's brilliant. And then if we take perhaps a step back and look at it as a bigger picture, as you go through the different aspects of life from parenting, and as you say, to education, to citizenship, to through work, one of the key points I think you make in the book is that everything related to intrinsic motivation is deeply interconnected and interlinked, and you can't actually pull at one strand because it's going to pull the rest of the nest of interconnections. What does that mean? Therefore for the way we approach whether it's policy or specific work of leading schools, or in terms of identifying and kind of acknowledging that fact that there is this interconnection, but yet we still have to act, right? We still have to do something.

Yeah, I think I talked in the book, Tim, about this is real realization. I think I've made many mistakes, of course, as a leader in education, but the biggest one I really regret is, is honestly probably somewhat of arrogance or hubris that I could solve these issues myself, right? And if you think about issues like education inequality, which I focused on for 15 years in the UK originally and then in emerging countries, these are such intractable problems and interlocking problems. We need to solve them upstream in terms of some of, you know, what prevents income inequality to begin with, but also downstream in the sense of what do school systems need to be providing now to help people flourish in one world. I think what that requires is more of a systems thinking approach where we step out of the education comfort zone. I think we've retreated so much. I was certainly guilty of this, honestly, retreating into jargon and technical terms and pedagogy and all this stuff. And I'm not saying these are not important, but we need to have a conversation as education leaders with the wider world, with parents. I think it's really critical because right now it feels like, you know, teachers and school leaders and parents are pulling in exactly opposite directions. They're almost competing for time. I mean, the number of extracurricular activities many kids in, in the UK or US now subjected to, it almost distracts them from school. It almost makes them feel like school is a sideshow. Parents are often undermining teachers by all they're saying, and there isn't a proper conversation, a supportive mechanism between two groups. At the same time, you know, I think, you know, I've been mentoring some young people recently on careers and My God, the sort of quality of information we're providing in career services across the UK, it's so out of date. It's talking about a world that existed 20 years ago. Even I'm not even sure existed then, but if anything, though, it's close to that. It's— we just diverged so far. We're creating a, you know, we've got a Victorian school system in a way that's trying to meet the demands of a modern world. And I think as educators, we need to say, look, we cannot solve it alone. We've got to get out of our comfort zone and have these conversations and build this together. I think companies or employers are so keen to, to solve it because it's one of the biggest challenges they face. Parents are tearing their hair out because they want to do something positive, but they're not quite sure how. And they end up often causing perhaps some damage in the process. So I think if we can be more outwardly facing and work together with these two groups, I think so many great things can happen.

Yeah, very nice. And you certainly did that with STIR. I mean, hearing the great work you did there with the teachers, and then in parallel, simultaneously with the education government officials working in, in the Ministry of Education in the various countries, Uganda, India, etc., in order to do that kind of simultaneous work and systemic connected work. If you support one bit over here, they're going to ultimately face a block over here, but trying to fuel the system on all these different points with intrinsic motivation is Certainly something you were doing there.

Yeah, no, I think we did it well within an education system. I think my big reflection, and I take fully the blame for this, Tim, is that I wish I'd connected dots even further outside of it as well. So I think there's not a lot of it within a system that makes complete sense, but I think even that isn't enough because ultimately the education minister is subject to what the finance minister says or what the prime minister or president is saying about where they want the growth of the country to be. It's got to join up. And right now, you know, our education debate has become so marginalized and not linked to our national purpose with the themes in the book. Where is the country trying to go? What's it trying to do? How do we, how does education help us achieve a workforce and citizenship who will flourish in that, in that way as well? I think we've got to join these dots even better. Yeah.

Interesting. To take it even a level up, and the pandemic has perhaps fueled this, there's an even more interconnected layer on top, isn't there, of people connecting internationally outside of national borders. And then, and obviously they're not working within the national system, but they're somehow connecting, whether it's, for example, in my world of international schooling, and you have an international network that somehow transcends the national policy context. There's an interesting, another layer of interconnection there.

Yeah. And I think one sort of research I've been doing actually, groups like InHive and so on, and I have a number of clients I work with around, you know, bringing motivation thinking to their worlds. One of the things we're learning a lot in is the role of networks and building motivation. Yeah, that's social capital. And so I think the name of the game— we cannot now wait for some minister to save us. I think we've seen that from pandemic clearly. I think what we've got to do is we've got to say we are the educators, but we can't do it alone as well. Let's create these peer networks within education but beyond it and work. And I think working across borders is so powerful. And what that can do, I think, is create very deep social capital where we can learn and be honest with each other, make mistakes and share them, but also create a freshness of thinking and open up some of the silos we've created by being in the education box. So I think it's a really powerful way for us to, to engage. I think we just need to make sure we just don't do it within the same education circles, but do it much more broadly.

Yeah, there is that danger, isn't there, of just the teachers talking to the teachers and whether it's internationally or nationally, but it's not perhaps reaching the parents. And I've had that discussion with many people that there's this whole conversation around what do we want for our young people, for our children that isn't perhaps reaching the parents. And as you said before, it's vital that we do engage the different groups. And then lastly, I'd love to just then ask you, as we obviously, the really important work of synthesizing all of this fantastic stuff that you've done recently into the book, but the book in a way is the starting point perhaps for, for a whole another set of work for you with Intrinsic Labs and then perhaps developing the research base around intrinsic motivation. So yeah, I just wanted to invite you lastly just to talk about what that might be, where that might go in terms of furthering our understanding of this important topic.

Thanks, Tim Logan. You said it really well in terms of this is the start of a conversation. I hope people will audience will enjoy Intrinsic and really start to think about their lives in a different way. That's the whole goal of the book. There isn't one easy answer, but I hope there's a set of examples and stories that are inspiring and research and so on that helps people ask the right questions at the right time, I think, as well. So it was a pretty key goal of the book across the key areas of our lives, for sure. But, you know, it's about how we practically apply this to our lives that really matters. I believe I can write a book, but We change lives, right? We all have to do it ourselves. So I hope the book is written in a way that really inspires individuals to act. And I think hopefully it's vivid enough and practical enough to do that. I think at the organizational level though, what I was finding was that there are many more complications there. And so what I do now is I also consult actively to a range of organizations around the world. I've worked with about 15 client partners over the last 10 months or so, ranging from The Economist Group all the way to London School of Economics, to give an example.. And it could be about any aspect where there's— that they're resolving a deep motivational challenge. And what the work there is, is really helping leaders make the right trade-offs. And what I talked about and closed the book with, with some ideas of how do we weave this into our lives and into our organizations. It's not the research base about the, the strength of the concepts of purpose, autonomy, and mastery, that the pillars of intrinsic motivation— that's really rock solid now. There's been 30 years of research and Brilliant academics have already done that. There was no need for me to duplicate that, nor is that my, my strength. But what I felt I could add some value in the world, if you like, is to help leaders apply these principles. So if you do move in an intrinsic direction, let's say you change the exam system, which is a big debate right now in the UK, how do you do that while still not creating a massive pushback or a sense of unfairness or lack of rigor? All of these. So a lot of what I'm trying to do with organizations now is help them think about how do you manage that downside. And take those small steps towards that new direction, doing it safely and building momentum so they keep seeing wins and momentum, and that creates more and more commitment to move in this direction. So it's been fascinating work, and I'm also with the book now I'm talking to about 60 or 70 groups around it, from WHO, for example, to Cambridge, to parent groups, to multi-academy trusts, around what do the ideas mean for them. It's a very broad book. The whole idea is to almost hold the mirror and say, how does this relate to your context? What will you do next to take these ideas forward? So really excited about what's going to come out of the conversation. Fantastic.

That's very interesting because it is often, as you say, we're not short of ideas and in many areas we're not short of research. Um, but what we are sometimes short on is, is authenticity of success in the implementation side. And That's where the motivational element comes in often, isn't it? There's a great excitement about a new change initiative, and then it just either gets a lot of pushback, as you say, or it just— the, the initial buzz of the intrinsic wanes as reality bites and it's more challenging. So there's an interesting implementation piece there which would be fascinating to explore.

I think what's really important is when you drive that change as a leader or support it It's to go in with your eyes open about your— this is the right thing to do for you and the organization. You cannot always control the outcomes. You might try and change the exam system, there may be some unintended consequences. But I think if you're clear about what your intent was, you can manage those things. You can talk about— look at many examples where that's, that's worked. You can just work that out. There will be things you didn't expect. That's the nature of modern life. But you can find ways to mitigate against some of those risks and just be adaptive and flexible through that. But the key thing is resetting that direction and saying, look, we really want— this is my purpose as a school or as a school leader or school system. If that purpose is clear, let's take those steps towards it.

Fascinating. Oh, brilliant. Well, thank you, Gerard. Such important work, I think genuinely, and really interesting to talk to you about it. And it's a great book. I can highly recommend it, but I really wish you the best of luck with facilitating those conversations as they emerge.

I'd love to get in conversation with your listeners as well. And yeah, please look me up on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Intrinsic Labs is my website and there's ways to sign up for newsletters and so on. And Intrinsic's available on Amazon, but also lots of independent booksellers around the UK and around the world as well. But I really hope it starts a conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions to those who have a chance to read.

Brilliant. Thank you, Sharath. Lovely talking to you. Thanks, Tim. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website, intrepidednews.com.