Back in 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced his famous ‘hierarchy of needs’ with a simple but powerful insight about human behaviour. He identified two fundamental types of needs:
Deficiency needs – the essentials we require to avoid insufficiency or discomfort, like food, shelter, and safety. When these aren’t met, they dominate our attention.
Growth needs – our desire for personal development, contentment, and realising our potential. These only emerge once our deficiency needs are satisfied.
At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy sits self-actualisation – the drive to express our creativity or fulfil our potential.
Rethinking the Pyramid for Shipping
Individual motivation, it turns out, may not be very different from collective industry motivation.
At Strider Carbon, we wanted to explore this idea further, and we created our own version of shipping’s hierarchy of needs for the energy transition. But here’s where we break from tradition: it’s not the rigid pyramid with clear stages that we usually see in textbooks. We believe that reality is more nuanced. Our model uses overlapping waves instead of stacked levels to illustrate that companies don’t move through energy transition needs in a clear-cut, linear fashion. They often address multiple areas simultaneously. And we see accelerated progress when these efforts overlap and reinforce each other.
