

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation [video] - ashishk
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

======
azanar
I think that the disconnect between science and business that he alludes to is
not entirely accidental; it is a form of short-term, selfish risk mitigation.

The benefits of the organizational system Dan Pink lays out include increased
satisfaction, increased autonomy, and increased productivity and increase
responsibility. There are drawbacks though; things such as increased workload
and increased responsibility, and a sense of decreased security.

This last point is extremely problematic. The current primary purpose of this
thing called _a job_ is not to be productive, creative or anything positive. A
job is aligned as an mechanism to avoid a negative; you have a job to protect
the security and comfort of you and your family, and perhaps to protect your
sense of social class. The other purposes are tangential except to where they
help distance you further from the negative.

In the case of attempting to avoid a negative, a road map on where to go comes
in extremely handy. By following the map, you are reasonably well assured not
to fall off any cliffs. This is where incentives and requirements come in for
the business world; they are like a road map on how to keep your job.

However, by following the road map, you also miss the chance to discover parts
of the area few if any other people have explored. Where you miss the lows,
you also miss the highs. But, when you are scared almost motionless of the
cliffs, this would appear a net win. So goes the thinking: new discoveries are
interesting, but cliffs are deadly.

Then someone like Dan Pink comes along and says "you'd be happier and more
productive if you had more autonomy," and you think he is completely insane.
More autonomy means more responsibility, and more responsibility means less to
separate oneself from the short-term negatives. You don't give a damn about
happiness; your focus is entirely on survival. Your intrisic motivation is to
follow the extrinsic motivations, because anything else seems like suicide.

The problem that Dan didn't allude to that I will is that by focussing on
survival, you completely screw both. Where people assume this sort of
extrinsic motivation, and the lower productivity that comes with it, a
feedback loop kicks in. Lower productivity begets lower revenue begets lower
available cash begets lower headcount, and repeat until either the equation
stabilizes or everyone is gone. The difference is that the employees remained
another six months or so, and no one in the future will hold them responsible
for the death of the organization. No surprise, they constructed an entire
organization around not being held responsible for anything.

Hell, even as a society we don't -- at least in the USA. It just occurred to
me; if you need proof of that, look no further than our unemployment insurance
system. The entire premise of that system is that, if you were laid off from
an employer, it was through no fault of your own. The system even encourages
you to get back to a place where you can't be held at fault again, and
threatens to cut benefits if you aren't actively looking. If you were fired,
in many states you don't get UI. If you quit, even fewer _if any_ provide UI.
If a business you built goes bankrupt, you are likewise screwed.

The entire incentive system in this country is based around cowering in a
cubicle, because everyone is convinced the risks are an absolute certainty,
and outside of a narrowly incentivized path there is no hope for survival.

As I mentioned above, the problem with this is that it screws us in the long
term _really badly_. We end up running like an extremely badly tuned engine,
operating at some small fraction of our total possible productivity. We make
ourselves less rich than we might otherwise be, we make ourselves _less_
secure because we flirt much closer with the break even point of productivity
in a monetary sense, and we make ourselves _less_ happy because we are all
abjectly aware of our own precarious condition. I don't have the data for
this, but I honestly wonder if cracks in this precarious balance aren't what
drove some of this recession we are now in.

For what its worth, this is where I look very positively upon the startups of
the world. To all of them on HN who are listening, huge props to all of you.
Likewise, props to the other companies who have figured this out. You all give
me the hope that by serving as a testbed for some of Dan Pink's ideas --
perhaps by necessity --, you push all the people who drag their feet into the
better world they are so desperately afraid of.

 _sigh_. And sorry about the length of this; it would probably take me some
time to edit it down to a smaller size, and I'd rather get the ideas out there
now.

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mrbgty
The material in this talk doesn't only apply to business. imo, every parent
could benefit from considering an angle other than rewards and punishments.

~~~
extension
At least one school figured it out 88 years ago:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School>

_"Summerhill is noted for its philosophy that children learn best with freedom
from coercion. All lessons are optional, and pupils are free to choose what to
do with their time."_

The idea that coercion stifles creativity is an old one and there have always
been people on the fringes of society who know it. Until recently, the western
world has been able to make progress with the factory model, leaving the
creative work to those few fringe people, but it looks like that has run its
course.

It may be that the next model is _everybody_ doing creative work, but I have
no idea what that would actually look like.

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mixmax
The guy is an amazing speaker. Look at his body language, his build-up and his
timing. A lot of people could learn from that.

~~~
caffeine
The idea was more interesting than his speaking, at least for me. I felt like
Walter from The Big Lebowski - "... I _did_ not know that...".

------
tc
The talk claims to be about _motivation_ , but his main piece of evidence only
points to a link with spontaneous creativity. If you reran the candle
experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in
advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more _motivated_
to think through the problem the night before.

~~~
azanar
_If you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem
statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would
be more motivated to think through the problem the night before._

Motivation is a vector, not a scalar. The problem isn't that the people who
are incentivized by reward aren't motivated, it is that the motivation they
are given makes them _behave_ a different way. In the case of largely creative
work, the motivation they are given modifies their behavior in entirely
suboptimal ways.

It's not just that you motivate people, it is what you motivated them
_toward_.

------
geezer
Its not just the business world. Most of our academic system is built around
carrots and sticks. Exams and tests are the primary basis that determine our
academic success. Creativity is the last thing that will help you in a timed
exam. You have to get to the correct answer in a short amount of time. It is
very mechanical.

The same system of measuring competence seeps into the corporate world. Job
interviews, especially technical interviews are very similar to the exams,
maybe worse.

------
discojesus
This kind of stuff that Mr. Pink (someone should invite him out to dinner and
find out if he doesn't tip :P) mentioned and guys like Alfie Kohn harp on
about is intriguing, but there is one huge hole in the plot that I have never
seen them address: The Problem of the Paycheck.

The studies that are being referenced lead naturally to the hypothesis "what
would happen if I didn't give my employees any kind of artificial incentive at
all?" (let's assume that they are all knowledge-work employees, say
programmers for example).

The studies referenced in the talk and in Alfie Kohn's books suggest that you
would see an increase in productivity, since that pesky, harmful incentive has
moved out of the way.

Common sense (and experience, should anyone be foolish enough to actually try
it) suggests that your workers will simply walk.

So while I think there is a lot of valuable insights to be gained from these
experiments (e.g. people work like hell when something has meaning for them -
see the works of Viktor Frankl for more on this), I think there's too much of
a tendency to oversimplify and say "incentives are bad, mmkay?"

~~~
delackner
Actaully he addressed the paycheck problem quite directly: pay people
decently, fairly, and then the team can focus properly without being
distracted with worries about money (lack thereof or competing for bonuses).
The logical extension of this is not "don't pay people" but pay everyone well
enough and then ask them to impress you.

~~~
discojesus
OK then that naturally leads to a slightly different hypothesis: take the
candle problem, but have 3 groups: a control group that is paid nothing, a
group that is paid "decently and fairly", and a group that is paid according
to incentives.

~~~
PieSquared
The idea isn't that a group is paid vs unpaid.

Salary, in this case, is not the type of incentive we're talking about. Having
a decent salary is just to get the employee willing to work - not as an
incentive to work at max capacity.

What we're talking about, really, is already past salary: is a group of fairly
paid people more efficient and creative when motivated financially (say, by
extra bonuses or salary increases) or by promises of autonomy (say, 20% time).

Thus, the candle problem, when placed in the real world, would have three
groups: a control group which is paid 'decently and fairly', and a group that
is paid 'decently and fairly' and is given financial incentives beyond that,
and a group that is payed 'decently and fairly' and is given autonomy as an
incentive.

~~~
discojesus
_Thus, the candle problem, when placed in the real world, would have three
groups: a control group which is paid 'decently and fairly', and a group that
is paid 'decently and fairly' and is given financial incentives beyond that,
and a group that is payed 'decently and fairly' and is given autonomy as an
incentive._

That's fine, but you still need a control group that is given no compensation
at all as a baseline.

~~~
PieSquared
Not if that type of compensation is irrelevant to what you're testing. That
would be like having a control group which wasn't fed.

~~~
discojesus
A valid point, however not providing such a control group in this case would
mean that you're simply assuming that your definition of 'decent and fair
payment' is accurate, which is quite a large assumption.

------
marc28443
This might be the most annoying TED speaker ever (come to think of it, the
only one).

He might have something valuable to say but his voice and attitude are just
too aggravatating to keep listening.

~~~
thisduck
I disagree, I thought he spoke well. And at one point he got very passionate,
and that's simply the way he expresses himself. It was refreshing to see.

~~~
xenonite
yes, he talked very well.

Still, I had to pause and rewind the video several times, because he talked
too fast. Thats because several links sprung up in my head, and ideas came.

------
mitko
It explains very nicely the average case. For people like the HN or TED
audience and Google employees autonomy could be really effective motor. Yet
among them there could be some individuals that really work better given
carrot and stick.

I think one nice example in which autonomy works really well is academia.
Neither there are big salaries for professors, nor they are dependent of a
boss (in case they got tenured).

------
dasil003
There's another problem no one has raised here, which is the problem of
recruiting the best people. If you have the most exciting business, sure you
can recruit great people. But for a lot of important-yet-boring businesses,
incentives are the only place you can compete. So do you sacrifice your
current employee's productivity or your recruiting potential?

------
llimllib
Counterexample: the netflix prize.

~~~
petercooper
Two factors cause the Netflix prize to be an exception to the rule:

1) The prize was so large as to throw usual rules of motivation out of the
window. Anyone would attempt almost anything for $1 million.

2) The prize is a once-off, not an individual form of motivation. There's only
one prize and to get it means prestige, beating others. The competition
element counts for a lot. If your boss offers $10 to all workers who beat a
certain quota, that's not the same thing.

~~~
llimllib
I think that there's something to either one or both of your arguments, and
that there are lots of further arguments:

3) The "candle experiment" applies only to medium-scale creative tasks

4) The "candle experiment" is one of a small class of lateral thinking
problems for which monetary reward is negatively correlated with success

5) The "candle experiment" result only holds on tasks that last a short time

My question is, which hold, what's your evidence, and what experiments should
be done next? I can think of a bunch, so if anybody wants to fund some
research, let me know :)

------
philfreo
I thought this was great. I typed up a few summary notes that I can refer back
to on it: <http://philfreo.com/blog/interesting-ted-talk-on-motivation/>

------
rodyancy
When he mentioned the experiments where monetary reward is shown to stifle
creative problem solving, it made me think of the frequently quoted advice: do
what you love and the money will come. I wonder if there is a link there?

~~~
ramidarigaz
I think a lot of old proverbs have a significant amount of truth in them.

------
ryanwaggoner
Does this apply to goals you set for yourself? I've always been very goal-
oriented, and I record and track my goals. I review and adjust them as I go,
to try and avoid becoming a slave to some decision I made five years ago, but
are goals still likely to end up blinding you to creative possibilities
because you're too focused on what you already see?

------
feverishaaron
CEOs and analysts/associates at our fine US financial institutions are
probably going to be a little miffed by this talk.

~~~
Perceval
I hope they begin to reconsider their model of giving multi-million dollar
bonuses and 'guaranteed bonuses.' The TED speaker pointed out that when
incentivized, workers' range of thought focused rather than thinking about the
big picture.

A great deal of the current meltdown was caused by focusing on the immediate
task of making the day's trades, but missing the looming crisis of
fundamentals. Some called this, "picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer."

------
10ren
relation to hackers (esr) [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/homestead...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/homesteading/ar01s19.html)

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html>

