SCARF method : Collaborating with influence
It’s the idea that the human brain has been organized to minimise threat and maximise reward.
What Is The SCARF Model?
The SCARF Model is a five-component framework that helps explain human behavior as driven by social concerns.
It summarises two key themes emerging from the vast and diverse field of social neuroscience.
Firstly, human motivation is largely driven by our desire to maximize rewards and minimize threats.
Secondly, the brain considers our social needs to be as important as our basic needs for food and water.
The model identifies five social drivers of human behavior. The first initial of each category makes up the S, C, A, R, and F of the SCARF model.
Status The perception of being considered better or worse than others
Certainty The ability to predict future events
Autonomy The level of control we feel able to exert over our own lives
Relatedness The sense of feeling safe with others
Fairness The sense that we are being treated fairly concerning others
The SCARF Model allows us to classify and understand the social triggers that drive our behavior. In the workplace, this model then allows us to design the right interactions that would maximize rewards and minimize threats for employees and teams.
The Foundational Thread of The SCARF Model
There is a driving principle behind the SCARF model which knits the whole framework together.
It’s the idea that the human brain has been organized to minimize threats and maximize rewards.
Threat: Threat is a shorthand way of describing things that make you feel a wide range of negative emotions. It includes everything from fear and sadness to anxiety and depression.
Reward: Reward is the flipside of a threat. It is a shorthand way of describing things that make you feel good emotions like happiness, through to creativity, curiosity, hope, and love.
Put even simpler still, threats are the things you want to run away from and rewards are the things you want to run towards.
This idea is intuitive and easy to understand, but the ramifications are huge.
It means that throughout your life, you will have consistently made decisions that minimize any danger to you and maximize any good.
Threat State vs Reward State
Millions of years of evolution have trained our brains to behave very differently when responding to a threat vs responding to a reward.
Imagine for a moment that you are an early human 200,000 years ago living on a desert plain. Your brain would respond very differently to the threat of being chased by a tiger compared with the potential reward of fruit high in a tree. In the first situation, all you need to do is run or climb. In the second some creativity and intelligent thinking might be needed.
Accordingly, here are some of the biggest differences between the threat state and the reward state:
Responding To Threats
Blood is redirected from the brain to the muscles
Less creativity
Fewer insights
Fewer ideas for new things to do
Focus on the here and now
Responding To Rewards
Increased blood flow to the brain
More creativity
Problem solving and insights
Fresh ideas for things to do
An ability to focus on bigger things
How to Apply the SCARF Model
It is important as a manager to be mindful of what might be beneficial or problematic for your team members. The human brain according to David Rock is wired to minimize danger and maximize reward. Being in the state of maximizing reward can help people perform better, whereas being in the state of minimizing danger can lead to a demotivated workforce. Understanding this is key to influencing others, including people at the workplace. In the case of a manager, it can be a vital method for ensuring that the team is able to perform well and remain motivated. This is where the SCARF model comes into play.
Status The sense of status can be important for people in terms of maximizing reward or minimizing danger. When one’s status is threatened, this can lead to a state of minimizing threats. However, feeling that your status is not threatened and is rather elevated can help maximize reward.
Minimize Threats: If one is given feedback from a manager or asked to correct something, the individual can feel threatened. This might make the individual in question feel stupid, incompetent, and fear that it might affect his/her job. This state of anxiety or insecurity can lead to the individual arguing with the manager, instead of correcting the mistake. In such a case replacing feedback with self-assessment for correcting one’s self can help improve the status of the individual, making him/her have an elevated sense of status instead of a feeling of their status being reduced. Similarly, if an employee corrects the manager, the manager, in this case, might act the same way due to a feeling of his/her status being threatened.
Maximize Reward: The solution to the conundrum can be to periodically praise employees and encourage them to engage in self-assessment to correct mistakes, such as against a set checklist. Giving more responsibility with appreciation can help ensure that the individual does not feel threatened. Similarly, when dealing with a manager, it might be best to not directly correct the manager but rather suggest a review or ask if you can review something to make sure nothing is missed out. As a manager, you can also look at our list of employee engagement strategies to get ideas regarding maximizing rewards for your employees.
Certainty Uncertainty can trigger a threat response in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This area of the human brain has implications regarding complex cognitive behavior.
Minimize Threats: The prefrontal cortex differentiates conflicting thoughts, determines good and bad options, consequences, establishes possible outcomes, etc. However, uncertainty and a sense of threat can affect the prefrontal cortex, leading to lack of focus, depression, and the inability to moderate social behavior. Since the brain tries to create some sort of certainty to keep us going, its inability to do so can trigger a threat response which can affect one’s behavior and ability to work. This is why certainty is important for individuals to minimize the sense of threat. The threat of being fired from a job, appearing incompetent, or being insulted are all examples of how individuals can feel a sense of threat at the workplace.
Maximize Reward: Managers should try to create a sense of certainty for their subordinates. Ambiguity is bad, even at the workplace. Even if an employee’s job is under threat, such as due to losses incurred by the company, giving more information can help push the employee towards that reward state. This removes uncertainty and makes the individual better understand ground realities and look for other opportunities to estimate the time left until the next paycheck. Similarly, unnecessarily creating a sense of insecurity to make an employee work harder will have negative consequences and lead to a state of minimizing threats. Many organizations tend to lose good employees because they never get a sense of job security despite working hard amidst a culture of bullying, toxic leadership, and uncertainty.
Autonomy A sense of choice can be the difference between feeling a sense of threat or reward. Autonomy is therefore important to have at the workplace.
Minimize Threats: If an employee feels they have no choice, it can trigger a sense of threat due to a lack of control. The more control, the better the employee might feel. Micromanagement and taking away a sense of autonomy can be detrimental to good employee performance.
Maximize Reward: Making employees feel that they have a sense of choice, even when they don’t, can help them feel a sense of reward. If an employee has no choice regarding which task to perform among two different tasks, he/she can still feel a sense of autonomy if there is no micromanagement and the individual is given the freedom to perform the designated task freely.
Relatedness New situations and meeting new people can trigger a feeling of being threatened, as meeting someone you have not bonded with can create a sense of threat as there is no sense of relatedness. The same has implications for working at the workplace.
Minimize Threats: Teams that aren’t bonded at the workplace can feel a sense of threat. It’s like meeting someone new at a party. You don’t know the person and can feel threatened. However, a handshake or a cordial conversation can help create a sense of bonding. Teams that are disconnected or not bonded can result in a sense of threat among individuals, affecting workplace efficiency.
Maximize Reward: Even multicultural teams working virtually can have a sense of bonding to work together. You have to enable them to find common ground and work towards a goal as a manager. In this case, they can have a sense of relatedness through regular virtual sessions, where they share thoughts and ideas freely.
When we connect with people our brain produces a hormone called oxytocin. This is also called the love hormone and is associated with bonding. Making a team work towards a common goal can be rewarding, be it in the form of a feeling of job security, executing a project successfully, recognition by a boss, or just the sense of getting things done with your coworkers with whom you might have developed a bond of friendship.
Fairness Many people face unfair treatment at the workplace. This can trigger a negative response which can have far-reaching implications.
Minimize Threats: Fairness does not always have to be an unfair treatment to trigger a threat response. The mere feeling of being unfairly treated can do this. New managers can tend to be biased towards their favorite subordinates or might treat subordinates differently based on not only their performance but also their ethnic, religious, and cultural associations. If an employee feels that he/she has been treated unfairly, it can trigger a threat response, leading to a negative opinion about the manager and vice versa.
Maximize Reward: To maximize reward, managers need to be considerate regarding how they not only treat subordinates but how they manage them. Embarrassing an employee in from of another can trigger a threat response, whereas having a polite discussion on an issue separately might not trigger such a response. Clarifying goals, expectations, and hierarchy among team members can be a good way to avoid a negative response and to maximize reward.
Other implications of the SCARF Model
The SCARF model can have implications far beyond a corporate environment and can be applied in everyday life, across different professions and for self-improvement.
SCARF Model and Self-Management The SCARF model helps people not only minimize threats but also to ensure that they are able to maximize rewards. SCARF can help people assess the specific types of experiences to maximize reward and reduce threats. You can better understand the reasons for not being able to think clearly or your erratic social behavior, depression, etc. This can help you make a self-assessment for improving your shortcomings.
SCARF Model in Education and Training Having clarity regarding what brings you down and what makes you tick can also be effectively used for educating and training others. It’s not just about presenting a SCARF model PowerPoint presentation to explain the concept during a training session but to explain the implications from personal experience to make others understand what areas to work on for self-assessment. Successful educators and trainers know how to make people tick, form teams, and get the best out of people.
Key Takeaways
On product, we rarely work in isolation. There are as many sources of social interaction and emotional triggers as people in the proverbial room (which includes those we connect with digitally via email, video, and social media). This means we must:
Remember SCARF.
Learn to spot when avoidance emotions and behaviors are triggered (in you and others!)
Develop the skills to contain them and to evoke an approach response instead
It will stop you from adding to the volatility uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of VUCA environments. It will bring down stress levels, reduce distractions and allow you to focus on what really matters - achieving your product goals.