ented participants with the box, the box was empty and the thumb tacks were on the table beside it. In other words, he made the problem easier because once the box wasn’t being used as a container it took less mental flexibility to be able to assign a different function to it.
This time, the group that was being rewarded finished the task a lot faster than the other group.
The conclusion we can reach from these findings is that rewards–that is, extrinsic motivation–work well for tasks with a simple set of rules and a clear destination to move toward. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus and concentrate the mind.
But for the real candle problem–the one with the thumb tacks in the box–you don’t want tunnel vision: you want to be able to see what’s on the periphery; you want to be looking around; you want to expand your possibilities.
Main Conclusions Presented by Dan Pink
Pink concludes that routine, rule-based, left-brained work has become fairly easy to outsource and fairly easy to automate. This includes work such as the following.
- Certain kinds of accounting;
- Certain kinds of financial analysis;
- Certain kinds of computer programming, and so on.
Therefore, what really matters are the more right brained, creative, conceptual kinds of abilities, for which “if-then” rewards don’t work.
Here are some more conclusions reached by other researchers studying the effects of extrinsic motivation:
- “As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
- But once the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill”, a larger reward “led to poorer performance”.
- “In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.“
- “We find that financial incentives . . . can result in a negative impact on overall performance.” (This is the conclusion reached by the London School of Economics after studying 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans in different companies. )
Obviously we need a whole new approach: an approach built around intrinsic motivation; around the desire to do something because it matters, because we enjoy it, because it’s interesting, and because it’s part of something important. It’s about the drive to do things for their own sake.
According to Pink, the new operating system revolves around three elements:
- Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.
- Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
- Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in service to something larger than ourselves.
Aiming For The Flow State
The drive to do things for their own sake–instead of relying on extrinsic rewards–which Pink refers to in his Ted.com talk discussed above, is closely related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as, “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement”.
In the course of his doctoral research, Csikszentmihalyi noticed that the artists he was studying would spend hour after hour each day painting or sculpting with great concentration. They were obviously enjoying their work immensely.
And yet it was typical for them to lose interest in the painting or sculpture once it was done. Few of them expected their art to make them rich or famous. So why did they work as hard on their craft as an executive hoping for a promotion?
It was obvious that the activity of painting produced its own autonomous rewards; that is, the rewards of painting came from painting itself.
Here’s a quote from Csikszentmihalyi:
“To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one’s entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one’s life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.”
If you’d like to learn how to reach the flow state, read my blog p