How to Know What You Know: Ask for More, Not Less

This post is a slight rewrite of a post I published at the beginning of 2020. The wisdom of this principle may be even more important now as we continue to recover from the effects of the worldwide pandemic on our institutions and volunteer-driven settings.

Particularly in community volunteer settings such as churches and schools, it is common to basically beg for involvement. The general tone of the request is apologetic and pleading. “We just need…”  “If you could only sign up for…”  “All we are asking is…”  After a lifetime of studying and living this dynamic, I am finally surrendered to counterintuitive reality: if you want somebody to do something and to really enjoy it, ask for more, not less. Make it harder, not easier, for them to participate. 

As a leader of a small non profit spiritual center, I definitely witnessed this phenomenon close at hand in at least two significant ways:

1) In annual reflection and check-in meetings, the volunteers who were the happiest with the center were ALWAYS those who were most involved. The ones who were on the margins had the most complaints. Although I didn’t scientifically assess it, it seemed that their happiness was caused by the higher participation, not that they chose to participate more because they were happy (and vice versa–the people who had been neutral before drifting into low participation seemed to find themselves less and less happy with the community as their participation decreased).

2) A second example of this revealed itself when we hired someone to coach us on how to set up intimate care circles in the community. To get admitted into a circle, he recommended that you had to 

• sign up to try one out

• fill out an application

• be interviewed 

• make the following commitments

  • to go to every meeting

  • for a full year

  • to follow all the other guidelines in the meeting

  • and if and when you leave, to go through a process for leaving

Even though we had compensated the consultant abundantly (by our standards) for teaching us how to do this, some of us balked at all these barriers to entry.

“We don’t want to scare people away;”

“that is too hard;”

and “that’s not how a caring and loving community behaves”

reflected the essence of the concerns. But because we paid him well, we chose to take his advice (another example perhaps of this principle in action). When we did, the result was astounding. With all these steep barriers to admission, we had more sign-ups and applications than we could let in. It was by far the most successful recruitment effort we had while I was there. 

At many of the centers or churches I work with now, the community norm is you take whatever you can get as far as childcare. You assume that people are too busy to do it weekly. You ask if they can maybe do it one Sunday a month. When they do volunteer, you require very little of them in terms of training or prep. All you want is a live, preferably vetted, adult in the room with them. Very few people volunteer. This reinforces the idea that people don’t have time. You ratchet down expectations even further.  Rinse. Repeat.   

Years before this happened, I had been a Kindergarten teacher at an Episcopal Church in Washington, DC where being a Sunday school teacher was a huge commitment. To do this vital job, you gave up all opportunity to be in a Sunday service live. You worked as a team with the same one or two other teachers. The three of you had to meet weekly to plan lessons and monthly with your supervising teacher. The supervising teachers met periodically with the program leader. This kind of structure is very common in large, successful churches, and there’s a reason for that. We all three found it to be a wonderful experience.  We loved our meetings and planning. We loved being with the kids. It’s cliché, but we all felt we received far more than we gave.  It was an absolutely delightful time. 

This has been SO hard for me to accept despite mountains of evidence that it works. In college, I studied and even wrote my undergraduate thesis on the psychology of cognitive dissonance. The theory, studied and proven in various ways, is that when people are asked to make a significant commitment of some kind, whether it is paying a lot of money for something, going through a rigorous application process, or simply donating a great deal of their time and energy, they HAVE to rationalize why they are doing what they are doing. If we don’t rationalize (or “reduce dissonance”), we may find ourselves believing we have wasted a great deal of money and time, which is profoundly uncomfortable.