Acronym

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath is a great book chock full of aha moments and tangible take-aways (and the simulated duct tape cover is brilliant). Rather than rehashing their SUCCESs model or discussing the book more generally, I'd like to highlight the concept of Maslow's Basement that is introduced in the book.

Most are familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, where people tend to focus on satisfying baser needs (like food, shelter, etc) before moving on to fulfilling higher order needs (like love, self-esteem, respect, etc). The Heaths lump/label those initial lower-oder needs into the "basement", and suggest that our ideas/communications/products/etc are overly focused on this basement - to our detriment, of course.

They point to research that uncovers a paradox in human reasoning: we generally refer to a high-order need as the motivation for doing something (eg, sense of achievement), while we assume that a lower-order need (eg, money) is what motivates someone else to do the same thing. Think of all the possible areas this thinking can permeate the association world!

I see this kind of thinking first hand within my board. Of course, they are all part of the association because it is the "right thing to do", while everyone else really just wants free stuff and discounts and access to new job opportunities. The board's motivation is purely altruistic/intangible while the motivation of the membership at large is purely tangible - and much of the board's thinking is spent on how we can just provide more and more tangible value to members.

Given this common logic, is it any surprise that most association leaders seemed stunned by the Decision to Join research showing a slightly higher weighting towards intangible "good for the order" benefits over more tangible personal benefits?

No doubt, folks like tangible stuff, but let's not assume that everyone is stuck in Maslow's Basement. What would happen to our products/services, and our associations more generally, if we realized that members were motivated by the same things we were?

PS: While we're on psychology, the Heaths reference the "availability bias" (aka availability heuristic) as a cognitive bias in guessing probability. This concept states that we estimate what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples (and often overrides the credibility of statistics). I see this one all the time in how one special case example (eg, a member complains about something truly exceptional at the annual conference) ratholes the entire org as they view the one vivid example as the rule as opposed to the exception.