Whatever you think of the term ‘snowflake’ in its popular modern usage, most people would probably agree that each person on the planet is, at least in the literal sense, unique. That is, there are no two people who have had identical life experiences, think 100% alike, and have the exact same combination of characteristics, likes, dislikes, fears, biases, values, ambitions, and thoughts.

This is one of the reasons Attuned exists: because people are different, and a cookie-cutter approach to management generally leads to a less than optimum work experience for both sides, from performance and productivity to longevity and meaningfulness.

But while the idea that people are different is central to our platform, we never fully appreciated quite how different they could be—until now.

Ready to Score

If you’ve ever taken the Attuned Motivator Assessment (and if you haven’t, you can take a quick 5 minute product tour to see how it works), you’ll know that the report you receive at the end gives you a score out of 100 for each of the 11 Intrinsic Motivators. The scores are determined by how you answer the questions in the assessment, and the higher the score, the more important that Motivator is to you.

Here’s mine by way of example:

Given the variables, it probably goes without saying that it’s highly improbable for two people to score the exact same for all 11 Motivators. Indeed, for as long as anyone on Team Attuned can remember, we’ve been telling people—both internally and externally—that the total number of possible different combinations of motivators is a whopping 1.7 million. That means that when someone takes our Intrinsic Motivator test, the likelihood is that only around 4,600 other people on the entire planet have the exact same motivational profile as them—or so we thought.

But it turns out we were wrong. In fact, we weren’t even close.

What started as a deceptively simple question at a team meeting—“So how do we know there are 1.7 million combinations?”—set the ball rolling on a tortuous mathematical odyssey that turned our previously accepted wisdom on its head and expanded our conception of the uniqueness of each Motivator Report to mind-boggling proportions.

Number Crunching

As the most mathematically minded member of our team, Head of Product Mattias Hallberg took it upon himself to answer what we assumed would be a fairly straightforward calculation, but which turned out to be anything but.

Starting with the premise that you can have six different answers for each of the 55 sets of questions in the motivation assessment, Mattias reasoned that the answer was roughly 6^55—which meant that there were more than 6.28E+42 different combinations in theory (that’s 628 followed by 40 zeros!), but there would be many different ways a person could reach the same score, so the real number would be smaller.

When Mattias mentioned on Slack that he would “start an R&D project to uncover the exact number” followed by a winking emoji, most of the team assumed that he was joking. As it turned out, he wasn’t, and we had merely glimpsed the tip of a numerical iceberg so big it could have sunk the Titanic.

Ex-Machina

A few weeks later, when asked if he’d thought any more about it, Mattias replied that, “There was a need to write code to generate all possible combinations, but the full code is very involved and will require longer time to run than the age of the universe.”

Gulp.

Undeterred, Mattias soldiered on, running simulations that generated all the possible combinations of Motivators for different responses across six different experiments. After several weeks, he was finally able to extrapolate a result that, while still approximate, is an accurate representation of the true number of possible combinations: 7,449,231,808,646,470, or a shade under 7.5 quadrillion. That’s 7.5 million billion, or 7,500 trillion.

If you’re having trouble picturing the size of this number, then let me put it in context: 7.5 quadrillion seconds is approximately 237.5 million years; 7.5 quadrillion kilometres is around 792 light years, or 188 times as far as Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system; 7.5 quadrillion US dollars is about 37,500 times Jeff Bezos’ net worth; and 7.5 quadrillion people is close to one million times the population of the Earth.

To put it another way, 7.5 quadrillion different combinations means the chances of two people on the planet having the exact same Motivator Report is around one in a million.

Shortening the Odds

But while this exercise highlighted just how varied any given person’s responses could possibly be, in reality, thankfully, no one has to ponder such inconceivable numbers of possible outcomes. Attuned makes it easy to see at-a-glance which motivators are most important to each person, and to use that information to manage them in a way that makes them feel valued and understood. This in turn has a significant impact on engagement, performance, retention, and overall job satisfaction.

After all, don’t we all want to feel like we’re one in a quadrillion?

Want to learn about the motivational trends reshaping the workplace?
Download The State of Motivation Report 2024. It’s free!