Another example of practice that engages people and builds their understanding in ways that most directly mirror real work came from Performance Plus, a company that used drama as a training tool, and according to its web page, has a client list ranging from Citibank to Condé Nast to Cornell University (Steed, 2005).Though we are now drifting away from the essential structure of a Choose Your Own Adventure text, this example holds true to some of the principles underlying such a structure: the audience selects a path, applies learning to make choices, and ultimately is asked to invest deeply in an experience that, quite possibly, could change them.

Writing in Journal of Business Strategy, Robert Steed, cofounder of Performance Plus and formerly a lawyer and HR professional, sounds a lot like a teacher composing a lesson plan. The theater‐based training that his company offers attempts to “affect the learning of program participants.” He knows his training works if “the minds of participants in a program are opened to new ways of thinking, whether they can experience their reality in a new way, whether they can incorporate both head and heart, both mind and feelings, in resolving issues” (Steed, 2005, p. 52). In a way, then, he wants to equip them to become aware of the choices that are present in even the smallest of interactions; he wants to open the very possibility of what is sometimes called polarity thinking – that an either/or dilemma can often most authentically be solved by converting it to a both/and.

Any teacher would be satisfied – thrilled even – with that outcome, one where his or her students emerged from a lesson with a more complex, more complete view of reality. The path there, for Steed, begins with dramatic reenactment wherein members of his company perform in front of a team for which they are consulting. In their performance, they each take on the role of an actual person in the audience. This move allows the audience members – that is, clients – to see themselves as if in a mirror.

But – and this is the critical step – the next phase asks the audience members to look through the mirror as if it suddenly became a window. They literally interact with the performers, who remain in character. The audience, or trainees, in other words, enter the adventure, ask questions, and exercise agency and choice as they drill down into the meaning of their own actions and behaviors. According to Steed, again sounding like a masterful teacher, “the interactive process enables the program to belong to the participants, not the leader or even the company, and the learning becomes much more meaningful and memorable” (2005, p. 50).They learn for the same reason Steve learned when he stumbled upon a Choose Your Own Adventure text – because the experience was personal, relevant, and drew him into a deep level of engagement. He had to offer some of himself, as do Steed's clients, for the spell to stick, spread, and ultimately become something that he owned permanently.

• If you're interested in taking a deeper dive into the research underpinning the power of choice and intrinsic motivation, keep reading …
• Or if you just want to hear about how Steve did on the debacle of an assignment that followed his reading of the CYOA book – yes, that story is not over – turn to page 150

Deepen Their Experience

The varieties of practice referenced thus far in this section all seek to tap into a critical part of each practitioner: their intrinsic motivation, which is a key driver of outstanding performance in places as diverse as the kindergarten classroom, the church, and the operating room.

In his oft‐cited book, Why We Do What We Do, Edward L. Deci shares a quotation that helps us understand this elusive and powerful part of our nature. Robert Henri, a person Deci considers “perhaps the greatest American art teacher of the twentieth century,” described making art in this way:

The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture – however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a by‐product and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign of what has passed. The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a high state of functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. (Deci, 1996, p. 21)

Henri's proposition really is unique, an unreasonable articulation of deep reason: paintings are precious, but painting, the activity itself, is the true painter's raison d'être. The point is the path itself and how it is travelled. The point is attaining a flow state wherein the participant is able to concentrate fully and offer to the task his or her peak skills and understandings. When that state is attained, we've heard, time melts and master players see in slow motion, block out the noise of the crowd, and exist at the highest echelons of their crafts.

Deci cites the passage in the middle of a chapter called “I'm Only in It for the Money.” You can probably guess that the title is deeply ironic. It's a setup. Being in something only for the money, only for the reward, according to Deci, is a sure way to thwart high performance and shatter internal motivation, the fragility of which he calls at another point “quite haunting” (1996, p. 21).

Many students experience a golden age of learning in the time before they receive their first grade in a new class. Once they receive a grade from a teacher, though, usually within the first two weeks of a class, everything changes. They receive stray signals that curiosity and passion might not lead to what a teacher is actually counting. The attributes that we desperately need to build up in each generation of learners might not, in other words, be connected, in the minds of those learners, to their grades.

When internal motivation is lost or abandoned, according to Deci, it takes other things with it. It takes, too, our “vitality” and our “excitement” for certain tasks. We have seen this again and again in schools. It would take an enormously centered and self‐confident young person to choose delight in that case instead of the external reward of a grade. A grade, after all, supposedly ensures success at the next level, and the level after that. It ensures admission and pads resumes. And, from a teacher's perspective, grades are also used as tools to assert control.

Which means we have reached an important foothold.

Many adults look back on their educational pasts with at least some degree of scorn for the ways in which they were graded and sorted. The ones who earned very high grades and seemingly benefited from the system will sometimes say that they “knew how to play the game” or just “grinded it out.” They rarely say, grades were good because they allowed me to pursue my interests, enhance my strengths, and generally become a creative and autonomous person. The ones who earned low grades, too, rarely cite grades themselves as a motivator. If anything, low grades work to cut off learning that is only flowing at a trickle with which to begin.

Sellers, trainers, service professionals, or leaders should take note, though, because it is quite possible that you operate in a world where you, yourself, dole out something akin to grades in a way that shuts down something akin to learning. It is quite possible, in other words, that you are sidestepping your client's, customer's, or team's curiosity or intrinsic motivation. As a result, you are missing the chance to enact meaningful change in their lives and in your business.

We'll give Deci the penultimate word. Meaningful change, according to his research, comes when people “are ready to enact a commitment each moment.”

The last word, then, is this: meaningful change happens for others when a teacher, a leader, a seller, a service professional, or a trainer commits to their true delight. Solving someone's problem does not guarantee meaningful change, nor does handing them a certificate, closing their file, or offering them a bonus. On the contrary, if you want them to keep showing up, if you want them to continue to vote for you or your product, then you have to add value, the kind that elevates or deepens an experience for a participant, to their lives.

Choose the Uncommon Way Forward

In schools, many ambitious assignments (by teachers) and noble efforts (by students) often end with a crass question: What did you get?

Similarly, as adults in a business setting, the question continues with only a slight variation: What did you get paid? Or, what will I get paid? Or, if I do this, what will I get?

We end up forcing ourselves, and people about whom we care, away from and off the path of intrinsic motivation. By asking about the reward, we elevate the reward to prime mover status. By asking too often about the product, we look right past the process. Unknowingly, ironically, we compromise our own potential.

Regardless, if you were to ask Steve what he got on the assessment tied to his Choose Your Own Adventure book – again, that's a common question – he could not tell you. He completed an assignment but never registered the grade that the teacher ultimately levied on that assignment.

When he tells this story, he likes to say: he doesn't remember what he earned as a grade on the assignment, but in some ways, he pulled a life out of the assignment. (Leaders, take note: some assignments can be life changing. Have you designed any lately for your team members?)

Some experiences belie the categories we invent to contain them and slip right past the questions, even well‐intentioned, that may minimize them. By the time he turned in his book report, Steve didn't need a grade. The assignment itself, preceded by the reading experience itself, preceded by the choice‐infused selection process, had given him all that he needed.

Which does not mean the assessment itself was an easy or inconsequential ride. In fact, it was one of the more challenging assignments he has ever had. Importantly, though, he remembers the challenge; he does not remember the grade. Here is what happened.

After reading blissfully and competently for the better part of a week, Steve was struck by a heavy dose of reality when, all of a sudden, his “book report” was due in a mere 15 hours. He wasn't necessarily used to doing well in school, but he certainly wasn't used to doing poorly. He was a good student, good enough to be left alone. But on this night, he faced utter ruin – he didn't even know how to get started. The book report was not an uncommon assignment. In fact, he had completed several in the past and never felt challenged. Usually, he could sit down, write briskly the requisite summary of important events, and move onto something else.

But the problem for Steve was that, at this point, he had read the book multiple times and in multiple ways. He had chosen his own adventure again and again, always choosing a different door, always choosing a different path. There wasn't one story to sum up neatly in a book report. There were at least a dozen zig‐zagging paths zigging and zagging all over each other.

He literally couldn't find the narrative. So, as he was trying to retell the story, he ended up writing a book report about the limits of book reports. He had to explain that there were multiple paths through the book, and ultimately, predictably, the paper turned out to be a little bit of a mess.

But, and this is important, it was one of the best and most memorable assignments he ever completed, because it was deeply personal. He really wanted to explain his reaction to this book to someone who would listen. As he untangled and retangled the book, he learned things about interpretation and analysis that he never would have learned if he were able to simply summarize a story. It took him a step beyond his available skills. He had no literary framework, no toolkit to explain hypertext‐style literature, no sense of the appropriate way to approach meta‐analysis. He found these tools later, in graduate school, and in fact, it's possible that he only found them there because he had activated a need for them much earlier in his schooling.

Now, in his current role, Steve is as likely to pull out one of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy cards to help unstick a problem as he is to reference Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's research on “the progress principle” (2011), one that champions a reverence for the inner work life of employees and the ways in which choice and internal motivation can spark innovation. These sources resonate with Steve, in part, because they trace back to a formative learning experience. Not what he learned, but how. Not the judged output of a process, but the process itself.

So you're facing that class at 8 a.m. Literally if you're a teacher, figuratively if you're in another field. You're facing that cold customer, that eye‐rolling trainee cohort, that frustrated client. You're dealing with the bored or the autopilot, the frustrated or the fearful, the person trying his best to avoid engagement. This is a common dilemma; delight is the uncommon way forward.

We won't love all the assignments that life and work throw at us. We won't all want to convert a book we love into a book report. We won't all want to deal with products that break, with services that fall short, with trainings on underwhelming topics. But when we're in control of these experiences, when we're the ones presenting the offering, we can try to make others feel, at the very least, like Steve, when he was invited into that school library. And at the very most, since this should always, also, be on our minds, we can attempt to change the course of others' futures with the work we put into the world.

The remaining chapters in this section will offer you suggestions – theoretical, strategic, and tactical – for how to move people into a state of delight. If you consider one of delight's most worthwhile outcomes – the generation of a game that people want to keep playing – then you can probably already start to figure out all kinds of reasons why you would want to bake it into your training, your leadership, your service, and your sales actions.