What Drives Me to Work — How to Play
A quick guide for anyone who received the deck without the facilitator present.
What is this?
What Drives Me to Work is a 13-card tool designed to help you recognise what actually drives you at work — not what you think you're supposed to say in an interview, but what genuinely matters to you day to day. It takes about 15 minutes to play, and works best with a few minutes of quiet reflection afterwards.
How to Play
These are the steps for the participant — the person doing the exercise. If you're facilitating this for someone else, walk them through the steps below rather than doing them yourself; your role is to guide the conversation once their line-up is complete, not to build it for them.
- Choose 7 cards. Spread out the full deck and pick the 7 that best represent what you look for in a job or in work in general. There's no wrong combination — pick freely, and don't worry about covering "a bit of everything."
- Rank them. Line up your 7 cards from the one that matters most to you (left) to the one that matters least (right).
Show your satisfaction. For each card, ask yourself: right now, in my current work, is this need met?
- Slide the card up if you're very satisfied
- Leave it in place if you're satisfied
- Slide the card down if you're dissatisfied
- Reflect. Once the line-up is complete, flip the cards over. The short text on the back of each one is where the real conversation starts.
Why two decks — one in black and white, one in colour?
You may have received two different-looking decks, and there's a reason for that.
The black-and-white deck is the one the participant plays with. It's intentionally neutral — no colour, no icon, nothing that hints at which "family" of need a card belongs to. That's on purpose: the moment a card's colour starts influencing the choice, the participant is no longer picking based on what genuinely resonates, but on what looks balanced. Keeping the deck neutral protects the honesty of the selection.
The colour deck is the facilitator's copy. Each card is colour-coded by family, so the facilitator can read the participant's line-up at a glance and guide a richer conversation around it—including how the choices connect to established motivation research and the MotivAtWork model.
Why does the back of the card say something different depending on who's holding it?
Because the participant and the facilitator need different things from the same card.
The participant's card back is written for them, in the second person, meant to be read after the exercise — a short reflection on what that need really means, and a question to sit with, not to answer out loud. It's theirs to keep.
The facilitator's card back is written for the person running the session — it explains where that need sits in the broader MotivAtWork framework, and offers debrief angles and questions to help guide the conversation. It's a working tool, not something participants are meant to read.
Same card, same moment in the game — two very different purposes on either side.
Want to go further?
This page covers the mechanics — enough to run the exercise with friends or colleagues and get real value out of it. But the deck is really a doorway into something bigger: the MotivAtWork systemic motivation model, which explains why these particular 13 needs exist, how they interact, and how to read what someone's choices reveal about what really moves them at work.
If you'd like to facilitate this exercise properly for a team, or simply understand your own results in more depth, the MotivAtWork certification training is where that happens — it's where the card game actually earns its name.