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
P.S. That is my public (i.e., non-academic) blog at Psychology
Today.
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