Today’s awesome TED Talk provides a very original evaluation of the science behind motivation. Dan Pink, a career analyst, opens the talk by revealing that traditional ideas behind incentives are often flawed. Traditional incentives are – in his words – ‘extrinsic’: what we would call ‘carrot and stick’ motivation. It is the idea that to motivate somebody, you offer them a reward, typically a financial one; or you threaten them with punishment, perhaps in the form of bonuses not gained. In his comic and charismatic style, Pink goes on to explain why this system of incentives will not always work and – increasingly – are less effective than the ‘intrinsic’ incentives he goes on to explain.
Watch the talk here:
Dan Pink comes to a surprising conclusion. He asserts that, when tasks are routine, with a clear set of rules and a single solution, extrinsic motivators (the carrot and stick method) work perfectly. When a task requires purely mechanical skill, incentives work exactly as you would expect them to.
BUT, when a task requires even a little bit of creativity or cognitive skill, these incentives can be seen not only to be ineffective, but actually detrimental to the task at hand. He gives the example of studies done on the Candle Test (watch the video to see this explained). Pink backs this up further with economic research done by the Federal Government and the London School of Economics. However, he observes, our current business system is built around the carrot-and-stick idea. We imagine rewards and punishments are the secret to improving performance. There is now a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Pink presents a new system of incentives, a whole new approach developed by motivational scientists, designed specifically to improve performance on tasks that require more cognitive ability and, furthermore, to inspire creative solutions.
This new system revolves around three core concepts of ‘intrinsic motivation’: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
“Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters. And purpose is the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”
Pink chooses to focus on autonomy. He gives several examples that testify the effectiveness of autonomy in business. At Google, for instance, engineers are encouraged to allocate 20% of their time to researching anything they like – to entirely direct their own research. Over half of Google’s new products are inspired in this 20% time.
He then gives a very impressive example. In the 1990s two different models for creating Encyclopedias were proposed. Microsoft started Encarta – an encyclopedia written by highly-paid professionals and overseen by managers. A few years later another model was started – a model in which everybody wrote articles without being paid a penny, working because they liked to do it. This was the Wikipedia model. Back then, “not a single sober economist on planet Earth” could have predicted Wikipedia’s triumph.
Although he does not say much on mastery and purpose, the ideas are clear. If you have the opportunity to develop a particular skill in the course of your work, then the innate human desire to get better at that skill (something that matters to you) will serve as an incentive for you to perform better. Equally, if you know that the work you are doing contributes directly to society, that you are having a positive and purposeful effect on the lives of others, you will be naturally incentivised to work harder and perform better.
The implications for managers are profound. If you manage a team engaged in tasks requiring more creativity and cognitive ability, then providing employees with these intrinsic motivators – autonomy, mastery and purpose – is the key to incentivising higher performance.
AWESOME INSPIRATION 