What motivates people?

What is the driving force behind our behaviour? This is an old question, and here is a new answer to this one: 

There are two different kind of driving forces: 

1. The (lack of) inner ecological balance ("Homöostatisches Gleichgewicht", in german) 
2. A drive without immediate need ("Antrieb auf verselbstständigter Bedarfsgrundlage") 

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Table of contents

1. We have an inner ecological balance. 

E. g. we have a blood sugar level. If this drops below a certain level we feel the urge to raise this level again so that it is "in balance again" (if it drops too low, we loose consciousness, and if it drops even lower, we die). The feeling caused by this is called hunger. We eat something, the blood sugar level raises, and the hunger vanishes. 

There are a lot of other parameters that have to be kept in balance. Most of these don't come to our threshold of consciousness. The urge comes if something gets out of balance and vanishes when the balance is restored again. 

That is simple and can be understood quite easily. But this driving force can't be all. Even primitive animals don't react solely on this. Squirrels will collect food without being hungry, and they will hide the food at some place for the winter. 

That is: 
 

2. We have a drive without immediate need 

There is an inner drive which will activate some of our behaviour without an outer or even an inner need except a "hydraulic" driven need. The hydraulic is an analogy: there is a reservoir which is filled with a constant rate (the driving force). If the pressure gets too high a valve opens and the driving force is activated. The valve can be opened by other avtivities (by need), too. 

For our purpose, we have two driving forces that we (as software developers) have to consider: a functional lust and the need to control the circumstances of our lives. 

I don't have to explain what functional lust means (at least, not to our intended public). People outside of our business often don't know what we mean by this term. They don't understand why we're programming complete operating systems (Linux) just for the fun of it, just because we want something to work perfect, and because we want to know how it works. How often have you written a program that has been written a few dozen times already? No need to have another one - except that you have written it to find out how it works and, may be, to make it just a bit better. That's enough motivation to write a program. It is fun in itself to create something that is working - no need for any other gain. 

But life isn't all fun. 

We have to eat, we have to sleep, we need clothes against cold weather. If we forget this, our inner ecological balance (or lack of it) will remind us. 

So we have to be active before this happens. There is a need to gain control: we want to have something to eat before we get hungry. We need to write down the number of the pizza service before we need to call them... Without this, the circumstances of our life will be in control of us. So we try to prevent this. We have to take precautions so that we can, at any time, restore the inner balance. 

But we don't live alone. We have a social life. We're born as social beings. We can even show that the evolution of mankind wouldn't have happened if we are not social. So we have to reformulate the above: 

We need collective, cooperative control over the circumstances of our lives.

We call that a "productive desire". The desire to create a cooperative control through being productive. 

Money is not the driving force behind all we do. Money is just a device for gaining control.

So we can answer our question:

We are motivated to act if we anticipate that this action will gain us more collective control of over the circumstances or our lives or that this action will act as a precautionary measure to have anything we need to keep our inner ecological balance in good shape.

Of course, you can always force people to do something. Managers (PHB's) think they can. But this will certainly backfire.