Receptacle or Receptor?

What a Podcast Guest Said About Customers, and Why It Applies to Everyone an Organization Touches

Issue 283, September 24, 2026

Somewhere in the middle of my conversation with David Edward for this season of The Human Factor Podcast, he said something I told him on the spot I would steal. He was describing a manufacturing client whose leadership had spent years perfecting the production side of the business, making it faster, cheaper and more measurable, while quietly starving the creative side, because production could be counted and creativity was a black box. When the conversation turned to growth, the efficiency story played out. The business couldn’t grow on decreasing costs. There had to be somewhere for the product to go. And David put the question he likes to put to clients: do you see your customers as receptacles for your product, something you churn out and hand to them, or are they receptors, willing acceptors and adapters of what you make, your services, your solutions and your ideas?

For his client, growth came from treating customers as receptors, and doing that meant rebalancing the whole organization: the efficiency of production against the effectiveness of problem solving. I said I would write about it, but I am taking a different and broader viewpoint as I mulled over how this applies to organizational management, change and transformation. David, again, was talking about customers. The idea to me applies to everyone else an organization touches. Employees, members, boards, shareholders, donors and partners. The people inside a change initiative or a full-on transformation and the people being impacted by it. To me, the difference between a receptacle and a receptor describes, in two words, the thing that most organizational change gets wrong about human beings, and the thing that a great many AI programs are getting wrong right now.

Let me start by describing what I mean.

A Bucket and a Lock

A receptacle is a container. It has no shape of its own that matters, only a capacity. You direct something into it, you fill it, and the transaction is complete when it is full. A receptacle doesn’t choose what it receives and doesn’t do anything with it. It waits. The relationship runs one way, from the filler to the filled, and everything of value is understood to come from the pouring end.

A receptor is a different kind of thing altogether, and the word comes from biology for a reason. A receptor is a structure with a shape, and it responds only to what fits that shape. It is meant to do one thing and was designed for it. It has a purpose it was built for and a direction it acts in. When the right signal arrives, a receptor doesn’t simply hold it. It does something, it triggers a response, it changes what happens next. The relationship runs both ways. The signal has to fit the receptor for anything to happen, which means the receptor, not the sender, decides whether the connection is made.

Now put those two pictures next to each other and think about how an organization treats the people it depends on. A receptacle has to be directed and filled to make a connection. A receptor has autonomy, a purpose and a direction of its own, and it connects when what you offer fits what it’s for. One of those is a description of a warehouse. The other, in many ways, is a description of a person.

Almost every organization I have worked with over the years would say, sincerely and with a lot of confidence, that it treats its customers, its members and its people as receptors. Almost every one of them has its systems, its budgets and its measures built for a culture filled with receptacles. That gap is what I want to explore in this issue, because I think it is an interesting way to look at why the human factor remains such a challenge in organizational management.

Nobody Invented This Last Week

The receptacle idea, I learned, has a long history of being described and applied.

In 1968, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire described what he called the banking concept of education. Teaching, he wrote, turns students into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely the teacher fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is, and the more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. That sums up, uncomfortably well, how much of society has understood educating its young.

Freire was writing about schools and about power, but anyone who has sat through a corporate change communication, a slide deck of talking points delivered to a room that wasn’t asked anything, has been in that classroom. The content was poured. The receptacles were filled. The scope of action allowed to those in the room extended only as far as receiving, filing and storing.

Business got to the customer version of this a generation later. In 2004, C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy argued in Strategy and Leadership that the meaning of value was shifting from a product-centered, firm-centered view to one in which the customer helps create it.

The traditional view had the organization deciding what value was, producing it, and delivering it to a passive recipient at the end of the line. That is a receptacle. Their alternative, which they called co-creation, treated the customer as a participant with judgment, preferences and the ability to shape the thing being made. That is a receptor. Put this in today’s terms of customer experience, where the stated intent is to change the organizational system to be more responsive to customers and to bring them into it. The approach is rational and offers a way to create a better, or at least a different, structure. But very few organizations have actually made the shift. Much gets communicated, and in reality the structure keeps its systems oriented toward what was. So the relationship remains, in many regards, one way.

And there is an employee version as well. In 2001, Jon Pierce, Tatiana Kostova and Kurt Dirks set out a theory of psychological ownership in organizations, the state in which a person feels that something- a task, a team, a project, a product, is theirs, whether or not they actually own it. They identified three routes that create this feeling of ownership, which no doubt many of you recognize from your own work as leaders and managers. Having control over the thing. Coming to know it deeply. Investing your full self in it. Every one of those is a receptor attribute. Control, knowledge and self-investment are what a person with autonomy, purpose and direction brings to a connection. A receptacle has none of them.

So the concept I am putting forward isn’t new. What David did was put it in plain enough language that a leadership team, a working group or an individual can pick it up and use it, and I am expanding it.

The Tonnage Mentality

David raised another idea in our conversation that belongs beside this one. He called it the tonnage mentality. The organization is designed to make stuff, a widget, a legal brief, a journal issue, a member benefit, and the plan is written around how much stuff can be produced at what cost. Then leadership keeps heaping more tonnage onto people rather than expecting more of them. More of them means more of their judgment, their ideas, their creativity. More tonnage means more output through the same funnel. One treats a person as a receptor. The other treats them as a receptacle.

The tonnage mentality, to me, isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when the easy thing to measure becomes the thing that gets managed, which readers of the last three issues will recognize as the measurement problem again, from another angle. Production can be counted. Creativity can’t, or not easily, so it gets minimized until the growth conversation arrives and someone discovers there is no place for the product to go.

David’s client found, through a talent audit across the whole organization, that the creativity and problem-solving it needed for growth were already inside the building, underused, sitting in people who had been managed as production capacity. The transformation that followed was not a hiring spree. Two senior people were added. Everything else was a shift in conditions. Who had decision-making authority. Whether it was safe to speak, which is the psychological safety Amy Edmondson defined back in 1999 as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and which I come back to often because so much of change depends on it. Whether people were expected to bring something to the table rather than merely absorb something. The talent had been receptors all along. The organization had been treating them as receptacles.

Where the Receptacle Habit Does Its Damage

Here is where this connects to the human factor, and to what I have been writing about for the past year on how organizations handle people during change and, lately, during AI adoption.

Think about how a typical transformation program treats its own workforce. Leadership decides. Communications are drafted. The town hall is scheduled. Training is assigned. Adoption is measured by licenses issued, modules completed and tools logged into. Every one of those can be considered a filling operation. The organization has an amount of change to pour; the people are the containers it is being poured into, and the program is judged a success when the containers are full. It is Freire’s classroom with much better slides.

Now think about what a person experiences on the receiving end of that, particularly a person with twenty years of expertise, judgment and standing. They aren’t being asked what fits. They aren’t being asked what they know, what they would do with the new capacity, where the plan is wrong. They are being filled. And a person who has spent a career as a receptor, with control over their work, intimate knowledge of it, and a great deal of themselves invested in it, doesn’t experience being treated as a receptacle as neutral. They experience it as a message about who they now are. I wrote in August about the identity renegotiation that every AI initiative conducts with its people, whether or not anyone admits it. The receptacle habit is how that negotiation gets conducted with the most collateral damage. Nobody has to say your judgment no longer matters, because pouring change into someone says it for you.

And the response is predictable. Receptors that are treated as receptacles do one of two things. They stop being receptors; they comply, absorb, store and bring nothing, and the organization wonders where the initiative and the energy went. Or they stay receptors and reject what doesn’t fit, which the organization sees as resistance. Both outcomes look like a people problem. Both are really an organizational design problem. The connection was never going to be made, because nobody checked whether the thing being poured fit the shape of the person receiving it.

The same pattern runs outward as well. The member who is treated as a renewal to be secured rather than a professional with a purpose the association could serve. The donor who is treated as a capacity to be filled with appeals rather than a person with a direction of their own. The customer who receives the product and the survey and the loyalty program and is never once asked what they were trying to do. Each is a receptor being handled as a receptacle, and each eventually behaves like one, passively, until they leave.

There is a practical side to this. A receptor connects only when the signal fits its shape, which means the work of connection is mostly the work of learning the shape before you send anything. That is what asking does. Not the survey that arrives after the product, or the pulse check that arrives after the reorganization, but the question asked early enough that the answer can still change what gets built. David’s discussion guide for this episode, Do We See the Same Business, which he offered to our listeners and which is on the episode page, is built around exactly this: asking different kinds of questions inside a leadership meeting so that the room arrives at a shared picture of what is actually going on before anyone starts pouring. We have practiced a version of this with clients for years under a different name, the psychographic layer, learning what a member or customer is trying to do in the moment rather than what benefit we would like to hand them. The more time an organization invests in that layer, the better the connection, and the reason isn’t mysterious or complex. You are finding the shape of the receptor instead of measuring how much the receptacle can hold. We default to the latter time and again, unfortunately, because it feels easier and takes less effort.

Receptors Are Not a Type of Person

When David and I first talked, I was thinking of receptors and receptacles as types of people. The more I sat with that, the more wrong it felt. Find the receptors, promote them, manage the receptacles. That isn’t what David described and it isn’t what the research supports.

Receptor and receptacle aren’t types of people. They’re conditions the organization creates. The same employee is a receptor in a meeting where her judgment is asked for and a receptacle in the one where it is not. The same customer is a receptor in a relationship where his purpose is understood and a receptacle in one where he is simply a delivery address. David’s client didn’t go out and find receptors. It changed the conditions, authority, psychological safety, expectation, and the people who had been managed as containers turned out to have been receptors the whole time. It’s a view worth considering. It doesn’t ask who your good people are. It asks what your systems are turning your people into because of how you see them.

Which brings me back to change and transformation, and to why I think this distinction belongs in the vocabulary of anyone leading either. Change can be poured. You can fill an organization with a new process, a new system, a new org chart, and if the people hold it and comply, the change has happened, more or less, for as long as anyone is watching. Transformation can’t be poured. It requires people to do something with what they receive, to fit it to their purpose, to act in a direction, to change what happens next. Transformation is a receptor activity by definition. And an organization that has spent a decade optimizing itself to fill receptacles will find, when it reaches for transformation, that it has trained the receptors out of the very people it now critically needs.

The Question Under the Question

So a few things to look at in your own organization.

Look at the last change communication that went out. Was there a question in it, a real one, that the organization intended to act on the answers to? Or was it entirely a deposit that a leader felt needed to be communicated?

Look at how the AI program measures adoption. If every number is a count of what was issued, assigned or completed, the program is measuring how full the receptacles are. Ask what measure would tell you whether anyone did anything with it.

Look at the people who are called resistant. Ask whether they rejected the change, or whether they rejected a change that didn’t fit, that didn’t preserve or create ownership and autonomy, and whether anyone checked the fit before pouring.

And look at the customer or member or donor relationship the organization is proudest of. Ask whether it is proud of what it delivered, or of what the other side went on to do.

David’s phrase was do you see your customers as receptacles or receptors? The harder version of the question is the one an organization has to ask about itself. Are you built to fill, or are you built to fit?

Because the people you depend on, inside and out, already know which one you are, and they have been responding accordingly for some time. You just missed the memo.

Related Reading

The Identity Renegotiation (Issue 276). What AI asks people to give up before it gives anything back. Treating a receptor as a receptacle is how the renegotiation is conducted in silence.

The Same Hole, Dug Faster (Issue 282). Last week, on lateral thinking and why most AI strategies are efficiency strategies. The tonnage mentality is the same hole with a production schedule.

Who Owns That Number? (Issue 280). On measurement that accumulates. Adoption counts are measures of pouring, not of receiving.

The Permission Paradox (Issue 269). Why people hide the very things leadership says it wants. Receptors that are never asked stop offering.

Smart Marketing Is a Mirror, Not a Megaphone. The customer version of this argument, from an earlier season of the newsletter.

On The Human Factor Podcast

Performance Is Lost Before Execution, Season 3 Episode 033. The conversation with David Edward this issue comes from, on what brings out the best in people, how capability becomes performance, and what to do with the capacity AI returns. His discussion guide is on the episode page.

Research Sources

1. Edward, David (2026). The Human Factor Podcast, Season 3, Episode 033: Performance Is Lost Before Execution, recorded September 11, 2026. Direct quotations from the recording transcript.

2. Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, chapter 2. Continuum. First published in Portuguese in 1968. Source of the banking concept and the receptacle passages quoted above.

3. Prahalad, C.K., and Ramaswamy, Venkat (2004). Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. Strategy and Leadership, volume 32, number 3, pages 4 to 9.

4. Pierce, Jon L., Kostova, Tatiana, and Dirks, Kurt T. (2001). Toward a Theory of Psychological Ownership in Organizations. Academy of Management Review, volume 26, number 2, pages 298 to 310. The three routes, control, intimate knowing and self-investment, are drawn from this paper.

5. Edmondson, Amy (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, volume 44, number 2, pages 350 to 383. Source of the definition of psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.