Preposterous Thinking

11 Jun 2010

Dan Pink on the surprising truth about what motivates us

Dan Pink, author of Drive, talks about the three factors that motivate us to increased performance and personal satisfaction. Surprisingly money is not one of the factors that motivate us. In fact he claims that monetary incentives lead to decreased performance.

The three factors that lead to better performance are:

1. Autonomy
2. Mastery
3. Purpose

Autonomy gives us self-direction, which increases our engagement to an activity and thus increases our motivation. Getting better at a task or activity is satisfying and that drive for satisfaction increases our motivation. A purpose, a vision or a goal makes coming to work better for employees and organizations imbedded with a strong purpose attract better talent.

8 Sep 2009

Dan Pink on How Contingent Motivation Dulls Thinking and Blocks Creativity

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Dan Pink makes several great points in his Ted Talk about why extrinsic, contingent motivation doesn't work on employees. His point is that rewards narrow our focus and restrict possibilities. Tests have proven that when tasks call for rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward consistently leads to poorer performance.

There is a fundamental mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Extrinsic motivation results in poorer performance yet organizations continue to utilize reward systems as motivation. Dan proposes utilizing a intrinsic reward system built on the concepts of autonomy, mastery and purpose to produce better results from employees.

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: The desire to get better and better at a specific task.
Purpose: Yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Progressive companies should consider crafting their culture around these three concepts if they want to push the boundaries of innovation.

29 Jul 2009

The Paradox of Choice

via ted.com

This Ted Talk from Barry Schwartz is a few years old but I think his take on the paradox of choice is interesting and still relevant today. In this talk Barry shines a light on two of the negative effects of too much choice:

1) Choice produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to chose from people find it very difficult to chose at all.

2) We end up less satisfied with the result of our choice than we would have been if we had fewer options to chose from.

Barry explains in further detail why we are less satisfied when we have more choices, not less. With so many options available to us, it's easy to imagine we could have made a choice that's a lot better than the one we made. This imagined alternative induces us to regret our decision. The more options we have the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the choice we made.