[book] Drive - What motivates us 2016-10-04

Drive (Pink, Daniel H.)

Cocktail party summary

When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements:

As one leading behavioral science textbook puts it, People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity. This is one of the most robust findings in social science and also one of the most ignored.

But goals are more toxic than Motivation 2.0 recognizes. In fact, the business school professors suggest they should come with their own warning label: Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.

By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. But that initial signal, and the reward that goes with it, forces the principal onto a path that’s difficult to leave. Offer too small a reward and the agent won’t comply. But offer a reward that’s enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal is doomed to give it again in the second. There’s no going back.

Pay your son to take out the trash and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free.

What’s more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you’ll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance.

CARROTS AND STICKS

The Seven Deadly Flaws
  1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
  2. They can diminish performance.
  3. They can crush creativity.
  4. They can crowd out good behavior.
  5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
  6. They can become addictive.
  7. They can foster short-term thinking.

Using rewards

You’ll increase your chances of success by supplementing rewards with 3 important practices:

  1. Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that’s not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it’s part of a larger purpose.
  2. Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgment will help people understand why this is the rare instance when if-then rewards are part of how your organization operates.
  3. Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need.

But you may still be able to boost performance a bit more for future tasks than for this one through the delicate use of rewards. Your efforts will backfire unless the rewards you offer meet one essential requirement. And you’ll be on firmer motivational footing if you follow two additional principles.

The essential requirement: any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.

Deliberate practice

…has one objective: to improve performance. People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time. Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.

Most leaders believed that the people in their organizations fundamentally disliked work and would avoid it if it they could. These faceless minions feared taking responsibility, craved security, and badly needed direction. As a result, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organizational objectives. But McGregor said there was an alternative view of employees one that offered a more accurate assessment of the human condition and a more effective starting point for running companies. This perspective held that taking an interest in work is as natural as play or rest, that creativity and ingenuity were widely distributed in the population, and that under the proper conditions, people will accept, and even seek, responsibility.

The Motivation 2.0 operating system depended on, and fostered, what I call Type X behavior. Type X behavior is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones.

The Motivation 3.0 operating system the upgrade that’s needed to meet the new realities of how we organize, think about, and do what we do depends on what I call Type I behavior. Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself […] more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.

Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive and autonomy can be the antidote.

If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible). If the rewards come from time, then time is what firms will get. These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation, sap individual initiative, and even encourage unethical behavior.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model.

Flow

One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. (Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi titled his first book on autotelic experiences Beyond Boredom and Anxiety.) But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.

The immature one

Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a one-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed?That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.

A little kid’s life bursts with autotelic experiences. Children careen from one flow moment to another, animated by a sense of joy, equipped with a mindset of possibility, and working with the dedication of a West Point cadet. They use their brains and their bodies to probe and draw feedback from the environment in an endless pursuit of mastery. Then at some point in their lives they don’t. What happens? You start to get ashamed that what you’re doing is childish[…]. What a mistake. Perhaps you and I and all the other adults in charge of things are the ones who are immature.

Affirmative action

Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action one that wants to make the world a better place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the organization must meet to show that it isn’t discriminating. Now the organization isn’t focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won’t get sued). Before, its workers had an intrinsic motivation to do the right thing, but now they have an extrinsic motivation to make sure that the company doesn’t get sued or fined.

In other words, people might meet the minimal ethical standards to avoid punishment, but the guidelines have done nothing to inject purpose into the corporate bloodstream. The better approach could be to enlist the power of autonomy in the service of purpose maximization.

External References