Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation [video]
ted.com
ted.com
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.
"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.
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.
The same system of measuring competence seeps into the corporate world. Job interviews, especially technical interviews are very similar to the exams, maybe worse.
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?"
Salaries should be fair, based on market value, and completely out in the open. I don't understand the absurd secrecy and awkwardness around compensation, culminating in the unholy obscenity of the yearly performance review. You make what you make because that's what it takes to keep you there. If you don't love it, leave. If you're not happy with the money, get another offer. Apart from that, your work should be what motivates you, not the paycheck.
The Netflix culture slides captured my feelings on the topic well: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 If I ever go to another BDC after Yahoo, it'd probably be Netflix.
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.
That's fine, but you still need a control group that is given no compensation at all as a baseline.
He might have something valuable to say but his voice and attitude are just too aggravatating to keep listening.
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.
I thought that just made it better - people who are interested in what they're talking about and want to tell you about it tend to be more interesting than those that just do it because they need to.
http://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown.html
Not only does he have the stage manner of an uncaring dentist, it's worth remembering he's an undemocratically elected leader espousing all sorts of nonsense about democracy.
Care to explain what you mean by that?
(I should point out that people might not understand the Westminster system even if they live in a country that uses it. In Canada last year, there was a fiasco about how three opposition parties wanted to form a coalition government to replace the Prime Minister without an election. Perfectly legal, but a lot of Canadians were convinced that it was a sort of coup. The current Prime Minister exploited this and ended up keeping his seat.)
That's legally true but pragmatically false. Sure, we vote for the MP to represent our local seat and then a majority of MPs results in a leading party, but that's not how elections are pitched.
Back in 1997, we had a worse than useless Conservative party headed by John Major and a fresh, rebranded "New Labour" party headed by Tony Blair. People voted for Labour MPs in their droves to get Tony Blair into power. He was not technically democratically voted to the position of PM but that was considered the natural result of voting Labour.
We did not, however, vote for Brown in any form, legally or pragmatically. Indeed, it was not even considered at the time that he would be a successor. The same situation occurred with both Callaghan and Major but I personally feel the British public has less of a taste for the old school Westminster style and has a better feel for the almost presidential style brought in by Blair.
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).
I understand that the Netflix "experiment" has no control, but that doesn't mean we should dismiss it as evidence. (And start talking X-Prize, Darpa grand challenge, etc. My assertion is that payments work sometimes, and clearly don't work other times, and I'm wondering why that is.)
The X-Prize and Darpa challenges are qualitatively different in that the tasks require (expensive) material components, not just the undervalued resource of time. Nothing in the talk covers this scenario, and I'd suggest extra experiments.
This is where we disagree; I don't think the netflix prize would have been successful without a monetary reward.
I don't have a good argument at the moment, mainly because I don't think anybody has a good argument why Linux and Wikipedia worked.
I also think the X-Prize and Darpa challenges are more similar than you think they are, but need some time to think. Thanks for responding intelligently and giving me food for thought.
(Also, if you want to follow Pink's argument exactly, you need to claim that success would have come faster not merely as fast had there been no monetary reward.)
Same with the X-Prize, and the Darpa grand challenge. Those teams spent way more on their entries than the challenge money brought back. Throwing in a few million just legitimizes the fun that everybody's having; it's not actually the motivator. I mean seriously; you think Red doesn't build robots when Darpa doesn't have prizes?
I assume Red is some dude who builds robots. I apologize for not knowing who you're referring to.
But anyway! I'll assume he's a Darpa grand challenge winner and some awesome robotics dude.
I don't think he would have gained as much as he has, technologically, without the competition that most certainly wanted to win the Darpa challenge.
These competitions don't change the dominant players in the game; what they do is move the margin, and force the dominant players to be that much better, because they want to remain dominant.
My theory is that $1 million -> prestige -> more entrants in DGC -> better tech than would have been created otherwise. Thoughts?
Yes. Your theory is correct. But the key link is prestige. The DGC entrants aren't really expecting make a profit.
Fair enough. A counterexample: "the paycheck." :)
A significant reward past some threshold (which will differ by society) is bound to motivate.
This seems questionable, though likely, without empirical evidence. Especially given what data we do have.
I'm merely trying to think about where that threshold could be, or what the differentiating factors are in the netflix prize, that could cause it to be fundamentally different than Ariely's rewards. Was his "large reward" simply not large enough? Is it on "medium difficult" tasks that his result holds, but not on very difficult tasks combined with very large rewards?
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.
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 :)
Oh, you mean the CEOs will give up their financial incentives? I think they're laughing their collective heads off.
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."