creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy, mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04
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creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy, mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04
 
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creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy,
mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04 http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2013/01/creative-solving-of-complex-problems-is.html Wow! Describes my process! Autonomy Mastery Purpose no earnings at all -- so far, age 70... nonduality collaborative lively communion meditative exploration aspartame methanol formaldehyde toxicity McDougall organic low fat, low protein vegan diet deepest space images evidence for ice comet fragment impacts 13 Ka BP monitoring cold fusion research solving all magic squares for any number Rich Murray rmforall.blogspot.com WhileScienceSleeps.com On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Jackie Yeo wrote: Dan Pink: The Puzzle Of Motivation This is not a true link, but if you put the words into YouTube.com as a search, you will find this. It is very exciting to me. Love, Jackie Yeo Sent from my iPod Daniel H. Pink TED talk video 18:37 2009.08.25 http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html English transcript [ Persian available ] about ten million views on all platforms Dan Pink: The Puzzle Of Motivation I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of, something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter) Now, in America law is a professional degree: you get your university degree, then you go on to law school. And when I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to. (Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might have seen this before. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. Karl Duncker created this experiment that is used in a whole variety of experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do? Now many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. Somebody, some people -- and I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or 10 minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem. Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University in the U.S. This shows the power of incentives. Here's what he did. He gathered his participants. And he said, "I'm going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?" To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem." To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator. Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. Three and a half minutes longer. Now this makes no sense right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work. Right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. And what's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over and over again, for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources -- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you what I mean. So Glucksberg did another experiment similar to this where he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Okay? Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it? (Laughter) If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. And so, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is not over here. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility. Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities. Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, are those kinds of problems -- do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work. Now, I mean it makes me crazy. And this is not -- here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let me marshal the evidence here, because I'm not telling you a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. Okay? If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. Then they said, "Okay let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Lets go to Madurai, India and test this." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance. Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No. These are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. And do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience. Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics -- LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what the economists there said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. And the good news about all of this is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses. I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is like -- it's not a tree, it's a television set. Okay? Somebody invented it. And it doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. Let me give you some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. What this means -- you don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, because what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy. Let me give you some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half. (Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." So that engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and wooly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. And then, being Australians, everybody has a beer. They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty. It's not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed. And it's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20 Percent Time -- done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can work, spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News. Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment, the ROWE, created by two American consultants, in place in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional. What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Now some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it. Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model. This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation. Right? This is the Thrilla' in Manila. Alright? Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks. And who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive -- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. And here's the best part. Here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world. I rest my case. (Applause) http://www.ted.com/speakers/daniel_pink.html http://www.danpink.com/ http://www.danpink.com/about ABOUT DANIEL PINK SHORT BIO: Daniel H. Pink is the author of five provocative books about the changing world of work — including the long-running New York Times bestseller, A Whole New Mind, and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Drive. His books have been translated into 33 languages. Dan lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children. LONGER BIO: Daniel H. Pink is the author of several provocative, bestselling books about the changing world of work. His latest is To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which offers a fresh look at the art and science of sales. Using a mix of social science, survey research, and rich stories, the book shows that white-collar workers now spend an enormous portion of their time persuading, influencing, and moving others. Then it reveals the 3 personal qualities and 3 specific skills necessary for doing it better. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink uses 50 years of behavioral science to overturn the conventional wisdom about human motivation and offer a more effective path to high performance. Drive is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly bestseller — as well as a national bestseller in Japan and the United Kingdom. The book is being translated into 32 languages. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future charts the rise of right-brain thinking in modern economies and describes the six abilities individuals and organizations must master in an outsourced, automated age. A Whole New Mind is a long-running New York Times bestseller that has been translated into 24 languages. The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need is the first American business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga and the only graphic novel ever to become a BusinessWeek bestseller. Illustrated by award-winning artist Rob Ten Pas, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko has been translated into 14 languages. Dan’s first book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, was a Washington Post bestseller that Publishers Weekly says “has become a cornerstone of employee-management relations.” His articles on business and technology appear in many publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, and The Sunday Telegraph. (See a sample of articles here) Dan has provided analysis of business trends on CNN, CNBC, ABC, NPR, and other networks in the U.S. and abroad. And he lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on economic transformation and the new workplace. In 2011, Thinkers50 ranked him one of the 50 most influential business thinkers in the world. A free agent himself, Dan held his last real job in the White House, where he served from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He also worked as an aide to U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich and in other positions in politics and government. He received a BA from Northwestern University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. He has also received honorary degrees from the Ringling College of Art and Design (2011) and Westfield State University (2010). Dan lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy, mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04
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Rich, That is a nice TED talk. The studies he talks about are cool, and pretty consistent. Alas, it feeds into a false dichotomy between motivation by "internal" vs. "external" factors. I started writing a more elaborate reply... and it quickly became long enough to use as a blog post. If you are interested, you can find it here. Eric P.S. That is my public (i.e., non-academic) blog at Psychology Today. -------- Eric Charles Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State, Altoona From: "Rich Murray" <[hidden email]> To: [hidden email], "Rich Murray" <[hidden email]> Sent: Saturday, January 5, 2013 12:26:35 AM Subject: [FRIAM] creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy, mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04 creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy, mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04 http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2013/01/creative-solving-of-complex-problems-is.html Wow! Describes my process! Autonomy Mastery Purpose no earnings at all -- so far, age 70... nonduality collaborative lively communion meditative exploration aspartame methanol formaldehyde toxicity McDougall organic low fat, low protein vegan diet deepest space images evidence for ice comet fragment impacts 13 Ka BP monitoring cold fusion research solving all magic squares for any number Rich Murray rmforall.blogspot.com WhileScienceSleeps.com On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Jackie Yeo wrote: Dan Pink: The Puzzle Of Motivation This is not a true link, but if you put the words into YouTube.com as a search, you will find this. It is very exciting to me. Love, Jackie Yeo Sent from my iPod Daniel H. Pink TED talk video 18:37 2009.08.25 http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html English transcript [ Persian available ] about ten million views on all platforms Dan Pink: The Puzzle Of Motivation I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of, something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter) Now, in America law is a professional degree: you get your university degree, then you go on to law school. And when I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to. (Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might have seen this before. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. Karl Duncker created this experiment that is used in a whole variety of experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do? Now many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. Somebody, some people -- and I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or 10 minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem. Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University in the U.S. This shows the power of incentives. Here's what he did. He gathered his participants. And he said, "I'm going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?" To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem." To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator. Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. Three and a half minutes longer. Now this makes no sense right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work. Right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. And what's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over and over again, for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources -- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you what I mean. So Glucksberg did another experiment similar to this where he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Okay? Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it? (Laughter) If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. And so, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is not over here. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility. Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities. Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, are those kinds of problems -- do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work. Now, I mean it makes me crazy. And this is not -- here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let me marshal the evidence here, because I'm not telling you a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. Okay? If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. Then they said, "Okay let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Lets go to Madurai, India and test this." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance. Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No. These are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. And do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience. Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics -- LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what the economists there said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. And the good news about all of this is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses. I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is like -- it's not a tree, it's a television set. Okay? Somebody invented it. And it doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. Let me give you some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. What this means -- you don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, because what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy. Let me give you some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half. (Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." So that engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and wooly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. And then, being Australians, everybody has a beer. They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty. It's not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed. And it's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20 Percent Time -- done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can work, spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News. Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment, the ROWE, created by two American consultants, in place in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional. What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Now some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it. Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model. This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation. Right? This is the Thrilla' in Manila. Alright? Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks. And who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive -- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. And here's the best part. Here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world. I rest my case. (Applause) http://www.ted.com/speakers/daniel_pink.html http://www.danpink.com/ http://www.danpink.com/about ABOUT DANIEL PINK SHORT BIO: Daniel H. Pink is the author of five provocative books about the changing world of work — including the long-running New York Times bestseller, A Whole New Mind, and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Drive. His books have been translated into 33 languages. Dan lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children. LONGER BIO: Daniel H. Pink is the author of several provocative, bestselling books about the changing world of work. His latest is To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which offers a fresh look at the art and science of sales. Using a mix of social science, survey research, and rich stories, the book shows that white-collar workers now spend an enormous portion of their time persuading, influencing, and moving others. Then it reveals the 3 personal qualities and 3 specific skills necessary for doing it better. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink uses 50 years of behavioral science to overturn the conventional wisdom about human motivation and offer a more effective path to high performance. Drive is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly bestseller — as well as a national bestseller in Japan and the United Kingdom. The book is being translated into 32 languages. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future charts the rise of right-brain thinking in modern economies and describes the six abilities individuals and organizations must master in an outsourced, automated age. A Whole New Mind is a long-running New York Times bestseller that has been translated into 24 languages. The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need is the first American business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga and the only graphic novel ever to become a BusinessWeek bestseller. Illustrated by award-winning artist Rob Ten Pas, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko has been translated into 14 languages. Dan’s first book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, was a Washington Post bestseller that Publishers Weekly says “has become a cornerstone of employee-management relations.” His articles on business and technology appear in many publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, and The Sunday Telegraph. (See a sample of articles here) Dan has provided analysis of business trends on CNN, CNBC, ABC, NPR, and other networks in the U.S. and abroad. And he lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on economic transformation and the new workplace. In 2011, Thinkers50 ranked him one of the 50 most influential business thinkers in the world. A free agent himself, Dan held his last real job in the White House, where he served from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He also worked as an aide to U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich and in other positions in politics and government. He received a BA from Northwestern University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. He has also received honorary degrees from the Ringling College of Art and Design (2011) and Westfield State University (2010). Dan lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: creative solving of complex problems is motivated via autonomy, mastery, purpose, instead of reward and punishment, Daniel H. Pink 18 minute TED video, seen by 10 million since 2009.08.25: Rich Murray 2013.01.04
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Rich -
I'm with you on wanting to believe that Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are fundamentally more effective motivators than Carrots and Sticks. My own life, careers, etc. also seem to validate this for myself anyway, though I know people who seem to have almost the exact opposite experience? Pink's talk provides some motivating examples and makes a nice distinction between tasks that require direct focus and tasks that provide peripheral awareness. Eric - I appreciate your more thorough analysis of Pink's talk and of this subject on your blog. I appreciate it when people here take the time to elaborate and share their personal and professional experiences and knowledge to this degree. When the popularity of WebLogging (aka Blogging) first emerged, I was critical... after all, didn't we already have mail lists, newsgroups, and the ability to create our own website (with only minimal tech skills really) if we wanted to? But as this new medium has evolved, I finally get it and appreciate how it has empowered a much larger range of people contributing to the commons. I maintain multiple blogs myself, but not really in response/relevance to this venue... but your use of your personal blog to address this issue in more depth inspires me... I agree with your observation about the "false dichotomy", but believe this is a common problem caused or at least aggravated by our analytical, western approach to everything which maybe relates to the dichotomy (false or otherwise) in question. Pink's examples focused on problems that were perhaps better approached with synthetic approaches which might explain why the "intrinsic" motivations were more effective than the "extrinsic" ones as I think you point out in your blog response. I believe (supported mostly by anecdotal understandings of history) that the evolution from a hunter-gatherer society to a agrarian and village society, the opportunity and value of *extrinsic* motivators went up. When we evolved from agrarian and craft and merchant economies to industrial, corporate, and urban, the balance shifted again. Our public schools systems were created to support and to feed this new society/economy and were based to some extent on a "factory" model which has a strong overtone of Carrot/Stick despite plenty of room for Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose. Personal Anecdote Readers - I was lucky enough (don't laugh) to experience some pretty weak public schools. They were so lame that they didn't weild very good carrots nor sticks, which left me room to find my own motivations. The boys were not expected to perform above a minimal level (Cs with an occasional B to balance the occasional D or F) and there was not any obvious reward for learning what school offered up. The work/job opportunities in the area did not require much in the realm of readin', ritin' nor 'rithmatic and certainly had no use for literature, poetry, philosophy, cosmology, linguistics nor quantum mechanics. That left me with a tension between boredom and curiosity that paid off. As long as I was going to have to sit in the classroom 8 hours or so a day and at least go through the motions of memorizing spelling words, learning my times tables and reading lame childrens books, I might as well let the dictionary lead me from the required list of 20 spelling words to dozens more that were more interesting. Once I began to see the patterns in the times tables it set me up to appreciate the patterns in fractions and later in prime numbers and sequences like Fibbonaci. And as long as I was expected to read, why couldn't it be Tom Swift instead of Dick and Jane, Jack London, Edgar Rice Bouroughs, etc. All as a response to boredom. The lack of expectations left me with a great deal of "Autonomy". I also discovered the pleasure of "Mastery" even if it might be via having already internalize the words on the list or double-digit multiplication long before I encountered them in the lesson plan. The curiosity born of boredom stood in for Purpose... but by the time I was in High School, I had been staring at the event horizon many here experienced from their own perspectives. This was called Vietnam and the Draft. My Purpose became transcendence. My peers were polarized between "ho gung ho" and "hell no, I won't go". I was left with not knowing which if either view was honest, so I started seeking my own answers and options. I discovered that the Autonomy I had been gifted by an environment of low-expectations, and the Mastery I'd begun to experience through iterated applications of curiosity, had provided the tools I needed to support my new found Purpose. I wasn't afraid to strike out and try new things and I was confident that I could learn anything I needed to along the way. I raised two daughters who have found their own Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose in a hail of Carrots and Sticks and more often Carrots used as Sticks. They, nor I, am free from the extrinsic motivators. We have mortgages to be paid and we are seduced by good food and drink, opportunities to see the world, and the manufactured desires of a consumer econonomy honed to keep us on the treadmill like the donkey with the carrot on the end of the stick. - Steve
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