The situation
Anyone who works in a logistics centre does more than pick orders. Between jobs there is restocking to do, order to keep, a new colleague to train, and it is precisely this work around the work that often decides whether a shift runs smoothly or backs up. This overall performance was the subject when the company approached us.
What made the enquiry interesting was less the problem than the form it arrived in: not as a question but as an order. We need something for motivation, they said, people should have more fun at work so that they stay longer, performance rises and employee lifetime value grows. The desired product already had a name, namely gamification. That is not a quirk of this client but the normal case, because organisations rarely order diagnoses, they order solutions they have seen elsewhere. It is for precisely this moment that we run a preliminary check before any project begins: it establishes whether a problem actually sits where the client suspects it does. Internally we call it the gatekeeper, because it decides what has to pass through the gate and what gets to go home.
What the gatekeeper found
When people do not act, there are three possible causes: they cannot do it, the environment does not allow it, or the drive is missing. The check asks exactly these three questions, and here it quickly became clear that a substantial part of the problem had nothing to do with wanting. Employees often simply did not know when there was an opportunity to step in: where restocking was needed at that moment, who required support, what currently had priority.
That is not a motivation gap, it is an environment gap, concretely missing signals and missing feedback. You cannot blame people for not seizing an opportunity that is invisible to them, and you cannot motivate the invisibility away, any more than a better driver compensates for a fogged‑up windscreen.
What the analysis showed
For the share of the problem that genuinely sat with the drive to act, the analysis delivered the second surprise. The Drive Method first assigns a behaviour to the job it is meant to fulfil and then asks which form of motivation that job requires. Picking, restocking, prioritising against clear specifications: these are activities whose quality depends on precision, reliability and speed, and such behaviours run stably where clear expectations, feedback and reward carry them, in the zones that motivation research calls external and introjected regulation.
We sort tools on a map according to which form of motivation carries a behaviour, from pure reward on one side to genuine inner drive on the other. This behaviour sits firmly on the reward side, and that means: good reward systems and good feedback systems, which show why it matters to do this now rather than that, are not the second‑best solution after intrinsic motivation here, they are the right one. A gamification aimed at fun and intrinsic drive would have built past this behaviour, the way a sports car is built past the needs of a haulage firm: not because it is bad, but because it answers a question nobody asked.
The recommendation
The recommendation therefore had two levels. On the environment level: build signals and feedback so that opportunities become visible before they are missed, and so that employees learn, at the moment of decision, why this task counts now. On the behaviour level: a reward architecture that fits the actual form of motivation, instead of a game mechanic that addresses a different one.
The implementation then ran largely with the client itself, which is not a blemish on this case but its point: when the diagnosis is precise, the solution often turns out simpler than the order was.
What it spared the company
There are projects whose value is measured in percentage points, and there are projects whose value consists in another project never being built. This one belongs to the second kind, and this time the difference can be priced: the diagnosis cost the company 8,500 euros, the solution it wanted to buy would have cost 25,000 euros, plus the uncounted hours of rollout, training and patching of a system that could not have solved a visibility problem and would have addressed the wrong form of motivation.
The failure would in the end presumably have been attributed to the employees, because that is how such failures are usually booked. Instead, the diagnosis showed where the right intervention lies and helped the company find the right provider for it, because a no is only worth something if it delivers the route to the right yes along with it.
The cheapest intervention is sometimes the one a good diagnosis prevented.