Daniel Pink - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
By: Ric Thompson
Daniel H. Pink is the author of several provocative, bestselling books about the changing world of work. His articles on business and technology appear in many publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Wired, where he is a contributing editor. He has provided analysis of business trends on CNN, CNBC, ABC, NPR, and other networks in the US and abroad. He also lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on economic transformation and the new workplace.
The shift from the Information Age-with its premium on logical, linear, computer-like abilities-to what he calls the "Conceptual Age," where right-brain qualities like empathy, inventiveness and meaning predominate, is a favorite topic with him.
RIC THOMPSON: What made you write about motivation?
DANIEL PINK: It's very much that. In my last book, A Whole New Mind, I wrote about this move from left brain, logical, linear abilities which still matter, but aren't enough, to these right brain, big picture, conceptual abilities, which are really the game-changers now. People started asking me, "If that's right, Pink, or if you're more right than wrong, how do you get people to do these things?"
I started looking into the science of motivation, which has been going on for 40 or 50 years. There's just a mountain of research in this. As you suggest, what I thought I knew about motivation just wasn't so. We-and I put myself in this group-tend to think that essentially the way that people perform at the highest level is through some kind of system of carrots and sticks.
You reward what you want more of and punish what you want less of. That's actually true in some circumstances, but for many circumstances that kind of approach-whether it's in business, in your family, or in your own career-of relying pretty much exclusively on carrots and sticks actually doesn't work. There's a much better way to do things.
It's built not around our biological drive-what I call our first drive-or our reward and punishment drive, our second drive, but around our third drive, which is a drive to direct our lives, to do things that matter, and to plug into something larger than ourselves.
RIC THOMPSON: Talk to us about what the disconnect is here. Obviously, we're in business. A lot of us have staff of some sort-whether it's one person or maybe 20, 30 or 100 people-and this impacts us every day in our bottom-line results.
DANIEL PINK: Sure. I think we're seeing this especially in this decade. As this decade comes to a close, it's been a decade of spectacular underachievement. Not much good has happened. I think part of it is that we're relying in some ways on the wrong approach to motivating people. The analogy that I use in this book is the metaphor of the operating system.
Computers all have operating systems. Beneath the programs that you touch and see is this layer of software that allows everything else to function. I think societies have operating systems, too; a set of assumptions, protocols and suppositions about how the world works, and everything is in some way built on top of that. If you think about it, early in the days of human evolution our operating system was pretty simple.
We were trying to survive, so most things were built around the biological drive, that first drive. We eat when we're hungry and drink when we're thirsty. That biological drive is part of what it means to be human. All of us have it. Human beings have that first drive, but eventually we realized that first drive was not sufficient if we wanted to do anything more complex than live with our clan and escape saber-tooth tigers, so we upgraded.
We got a new operating system, which you could call Motivation 2.0. That was built around our reward-and-punishment drive; the desire to get what we're rewarded for and avoid what we're punished for. That was a spectacular achievement. It helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, but what we're seeing now, particularly in this last decade, is that the old approach doesn't work very well.
It doesn't comport with how people are increasingly organizing what they do. If you look at something like the open-source movement or Wikipedia, which have been colossal successes, those are not about some kind of external reward or punishment. That's about people acting autonomously and doing something to get better at it, and doing it with a sense of purpose.
In fact, in some ways, if you'd gone to a business school professor with a business model for Wikipedia 15 years ago, he would have told you that you were crazy, that this thing could never work. Yet, Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Microsoft had to discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia, which is built on the traditional motivators. It doesn't comport. More and more of us, as I mentioned earlier, are doing conceptual creative work.
The science is overwhelming that for creative conceptual work, these kinds of if/then motivators-if you do this, then you get that-simply don't work for creative tasks. In many cases, they do harm. What's going on now is that we have this operating system built on a very outdated notion of human motivation. It's still true that we have biological drives, and it's still true we have this reward-and-punishment drive.
However, our businesses, in particular, have utterly neglected our third drive, which is the drive to direct our own lives, the drive to get better and better at something that matters, and the drive to be a part of something larger than ourselves. I think there's a societal urgency in upgrading to this Motivation 3.0, but there's also a lot of evidence out there, particularly in companies that are performing at a high level, of a very different approach to motivating people.
RIC THOMPSON: I think Motivation 2.0 is pretty simple to explain: "You do X-task and I'll pay you X-number of dollars." That's what all of our businesses, for the most part, have been based upon. That's what business is when you hire staff.
DANIEL PINK: Sure, and I think that's still part of it. I'm not saying we should stop paying people. There is basically a baseline set of rewards. If people are getting paid unfairly or they're struggling to support their families, any notion of motivation is pretty weak. In some ways, it's a joke. Once you get past that baseline where people are being paid fairly and feel a sense of equity, additional units of money have very, very little effect on greater performance, and for certain kinds of things, particularly creative tasks, they can actually impair performance.
RIC THOMPSON: This is where things get really fascinating in the book. Let's assume, then, that we have staff and that they're paid fairly competitively, and maybe even a little bit above competitively. What are some of these extra motivational factors that we can tap into to really take things to the whole next level?
DANIEL PINK: There are a few things. First of all, it is thinking about that third drive, that intrinsic motivation, and figuring out the components of it. One of the components is autonomy. That doesn't mean independence or freedom from all other people or disconnection. It means autonomy-the ability to direct your own life. What we're seeing now in autonomy are companies that are allowing people autonomy and freedom over their time, when they work, over their technique, how they work, over their task, what they do at work, over their team, and who they do it with.
Companies that are doing this are really flourishing. There are some great examples of this. One of my favorites is FedEx Day, which is something done by a company called Atlassian, a software company in Australia. One day a quarter, they tell all their software developers, "For the next 24 hours you can work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. All you have to do is show your results to the company at the end of those 24 hours."
They call it FedEx Day because you have to deliver something overnight. It turns out that that one day of intense, undiluted autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes, a whole array of ideas for upgrades of their product, and a whole array of ideas for other products that wouldn't have otherwise emerged. They're not saying, "If you come up with a great idea, I'll give you $100."
They're saying, "Here's the freedom to do something cool and interesting." People will deliver. That has worked so well, in fact, that they've taken it to the next level with something called, '20% Time' where they're letting workers work on anything they want for 20% of their time. Now, 3M™ has done this for years with their senior scientists. In fact, the Post-it® Note, which is one of 3M's signature products, was not an official project.
It was something that emerged from a scientist's '15% Time' when he was just doodling and figuring out something cool. He wasn't incentivized in the classic way for it. Google does '20% Time' now, too. Of course, if you think about something like Google News, which has had a huge effect on the newspaper industry, Google News was not an official project. It was a '20% project'. Gmail was not an official project; it was a '20% project'.
These companies are not offering these if/then rewards: "If you come up with something great, then we'll give you a big bonus." What they're doing is they're paying people enough to take the issue of money off the table and giving people the freedom to do great work. There are a lot of really cool and interesting examples like that on the fringes of the economy right now that point a way toward a very different way to organize companies and a very different way for people to do their very best.
RIC THOMPSON: You give a number of incredible examples. I feel like sharing something really personal with you. After reading your book, we just did a little experiment at home. I have two boys; one just turned 13 and one's four. We did a little FedEx session for cleaning up the house after Christmas.
DANIEL PINK: Interesting.
RIC THOMPSON: Here's what we did, everybody. This is just something kind of fun. I thought, "Let's see what happens here." I gave them a parameter, in terms of 20 minutes. I said, "For the next 20 minutes, we're going to clean the house. You can do anything that you want to do, but it has to be directed somehow, someway towards cleaning the house, whether it's bringing your dirty clothes downstairs, or whether it is picking up toys and putting them away."
We got Nerf guns for Christmas, so there are those little Nerf bullets all over the house. I said, "Whatever you want to do, just do it." Here's what I found. When they had complete control-I didn't even supervise; mom and dad got involved, and we just went-things moved very quickly. They were having a blast. It was a real surprise, but there was an interesting shift.
DANIEL PINK: Interesting. What was the shift?
RIC THOMPSON: About three-quarters of the way through, where your options of what you could do were now limited because so much had been done, motivation started dropping, because now it was more like, "Dad says we have to clean the house. There are three things left to do. I don't get to do what I want to do anymore. I have to do one of these three things."
It was really interesting to watch our own kids and that whole shift of, "When I can pick anything, when I have this wide range of stuff, great! Let's go do it," versus "Pick A, B or C," and "Now I'm not so excited anymore."
DANIEL PINK: Yes, although this is a really great example, Ric. It's a brilliant example. I'll respond in a couple of ways. Number one, there's something in the book that I call the Sawyer Effect, which has a negative side and a positive side. The negative side is that by giving these kinds of if/then rewards to interesting tasks, it can turn play into work, but actually giving people autonomy can turn work into play, which is what you're doing.
I think that's why it works so brilliantly, at least for the first three-quarters. For the next three-quarters it's interesting to think about the elements of autonomy. What you've done is given people incredible autonomy over task, over what they did. I think the key on those remaining tasks-whatever they are, like putting dishes in the dishwasher, or whatever-is to somehow think about how to make those more game-like and interesting.
I think that's a way to enhance motivation. The other thing is to go back to first principles and say why we're doing this in the first place. "We're doing this in the first place because families take care of each other, because we're all in this together, because we all enjoyed the Christmas unraveling of everything, and now we have a responsibility to put it all back together again."
What I'm glad you didn't do-which I see parents doing, and it's just a short step from what they do in the workplace-is to say to the kids, "If you clean up I'll give you $5.00." That's a perfect way to get the house cleaned up quickly today and a perfect way to ensure that your kids will basically demand money for every other task. This is why I believe in chores and I believe in allowances, but I don't believe in combining allowances and chores.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, as a parent that was good to read, because we're the same way from our perspective. I'm a self-employed person. I have been for years. I'm not really into the whole concept of a job. That's my personal bias.
DANIEL PINK: Listen, I wrote a book called Free Agent Nation, so I'm part of your Hallelujah Chorus.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes. I didn't want to train the kids to have a job. The reality is that our society here in the US-certainly, if you go to school-it's very much a typical job-type, if/then workplace situation. You make examples of kids, and then you have to look at your staff and say, "I'm kind of treating my staff like people treat their kids. If you do this, I'll give you $5.00." Then we want something more out of them. We want something, and they aren't willing to give it because it's not how we've all been trained to play.
DANIEL PINK: Absolutely. I think a lot of times people think that they're exceptions, and they're not. There aren't that many exceptions out there. That's why there are rules. I've talked to people who say, "Listen, Pink, yes, this autonomy, this sense of self-direction, mastery, wanting to get better at stuff, purpose, and wanting to be part of something larger than yourself, yes, that's true. That's what really motivates me. That's what I care about, but not everybody's that way."
If everybody says that, it just doesn't make any logical sense. If you think about treating employees like kids, think about being an employee. Would you want to be treated like a kid, or would you rather be treated like-how about this-an adult? A lot of it also goes to what we think about as the basic human condition. If left unchecked, are we all going to be slackers and not do anything, or do we have this innate drive to do stuff that matters?
I'm convinced that we do. What we're doing in many companies is systematically squashing that. There's an innate drive to contribute and do good things, but the award scheme and other factors within firms are systematically suffocating that. That's bad for human beings and it's bad for business.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's talk about this, then. Let's say, for instance, that my company has very stereotypical Motivation 2.0, if/then-type rewards. How do I start making that shift?
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