The New Age of Motivation

When Dan Pink finished his TED talk on motivation, I felt like I wanted to go out and do something; but then I realized that I had homework, so I stayed inside instead. Mr. Pink opens up his talk with a story about his law school experience, which, because it is humorous, lightens the mood and helps people see where his perspective is coming from. Immediately, you can see the passion he has for what he is doing, and that he wants to spread the word of how businesses are working incorrectly. He starts off by introducing the candle problem, which in short is where a person is put in a room with a candle, a box of tacks, matches, and told to attach the candle to the wall. Most would take the route of attempting to tack or “wax” up the candle, but it soon becomes apparent that they need to see other the ways things can work, ways that are not their intended purpose, and attach the candle by tacking the box up to the wall. The reason this connection takes so long is because the world is stuck in “functional fixedness”, or the thought and mind-set that everything only has one purpose. This same experiment was used to test the effectiveness of reward. One group was told they were being timed to establish an average completion time, the other group was offered a cash reward based on how long it took them. The results were astonishing, and showed just how flawed our system of reward and punishments are. The group with a payment took 3.5 minutes longer than the group without the incentive. This system of “carrots and sticks” is how companies operate, and an experiment just proved that way of business wrong? That’s not how it’s supposed to be! When corporations offer bonuses, they are actually preventing quick work to be done? This method doesn’t match up with science, but it is still used in 21^st century operations, which makes Mr. Pink crazy! However, when the tacks were separated from the box, the group with the incentive “kicked the other group’s butt”.  This is because an incentive narrows the view and concentrates the mind on remedial tasks, and the answer to the problem becomes much more apparent, because it is literally sitting right there! Since businesses are erring in this way, schools must be too, because they created the people that are running the companies. The school system is run by an “if-then” approach. If you get this answer right, then I will give you a good grade. This is the same motivation that has been proved unproductive over and over again! A reward set up this way tapers the student’s creativity and forces them to focus on the bare minimum and the obvious answers. Basically, schools are raising left brained thinkers whose jobs can be automated and outsourced easily and cheaply. What kind of job market are they setting us up for? To further drive this point home, several MIT students were asked to take a series of tasks that tested motor skills, creativity, and concentration, and then were offered 3 levels of reward. As long as the task required a motor skill the rewards worked; the higher the pay, the better the performance. Not surprisingly, however, when the tasks were cognitive, there was a poorer end result. Clearly the school system is making people think a certain way that is not effective in this society. So how does one fix this system? Dan Pink says that it’ll take 3 things: autonomy, or the urge to direct your own life, mastery, the desire to get better at something that matters, and purpose, a yearning to do what we do with something larger than ourselves. In studies, companies that gave their employees free time to do whatever they wanted to do received more creative and ingenious ideas, because all of a sudden its not work any more, its fun. Mr. Pinks example of how an unscheduled company prevails is Microsoft’s encyclopedia, a project with paid professionals that had to stick to a deadline, versus Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that is done for fun, with no one getting paid to do the work. Microsoft had to shut down their project but Wikipedia is still thriving. The difference between these two companies is extreme. Wikipedia works because high performance is achieved with a desire to do things because they matter or are interesting. The people working on Wikipedia do not require any kind of compensation, they do it because they enjoy it, and that is where companies are going wrong. If this mismatch between science and business is fixed, then maybe we can change the world.