Not interested in your money, I’m a purpose driven Millennial: Lessons from Daniel Pink’s Drive

This is the second book by Daniel Pink that I read. “To Sell Is Human” was the first one, and I really connected with the way he explains ideas and depicts them in a way that feels like your being told pretty obvious things but that for some reason, you weren’t fully aware of.

Drive is an exploration through the human psyche from the perspective of the phenomenon of incentives and motivation. The book is definitely not a heavy read, as it explores every topic using plain language and more often than not using real life examples, both in daily life and in companies we can all relate to. This makes the whole reading experience light and relatable, so that the various points Pink is trying to make about what motivates us to act land crystal clear.

The book in a sentence: a carrots and sticks approach to human motivation should never be implemented as a standalone incentives mechanism, it should always involve a deeper analysis of additional motives that might be hiding in plain sight.

We human beings are complex thinking organisms that don’t respond to incentives in the way we intuitively think. We expect a reward for our proper behavior, and the truth is, we also expect to be punished when we know that our actions are in detriment of the rules that apply to us. We constantly float between the lines of what we should do and what we’re not supposed to, interacting with systems that reward our actions and punish our misses. Our behavior becomes conditioned to these realities because we, like trained dogs, create unconscious behaviors that govern our responses to certain cues. The result is a behavior that is in part rational, and in part, apparently, irrational.

It’s pretty intuitive to think that if you offer me money to complete a certain task, I will try harder and therefore my results are going to be better that if there was no prize involved. Sure, this is pretty much how sales representatives are incentivized all over the world. But in reality, as Pink elaborates, this incentive mechanism does is not always work. It certainly does for some tasks and under certain conditions, but in others, an explicit and preannounced reward is not only ineffective improving performance, it’s actually detrimental.

In fact, reward-punishment motivators encourage cheating and unethical behavior, cause addiction, destroy creativity and promote short-term thinking

Pink astutely elaborates on this finding discussing The Candle Problem.

The Candle Problem This test measures the influence of functional fixedness in a subject’s problem solving capabilities. In plain language, it measures how much we allow the presence of an incentive to get in the way of our focus when we’re solving a problem. What’s more, the task it proposes is not a mechanical task that you could solve following a commonly know method (think multiplying two very large numbers, or counting all the vowels in 10 pages of text); to solve The Candle Problem you actually need to be a little creative. If you’ve never heard of this experiment, let’s play a small game right here, right now. I’m going to lay out the rules and I won’t tell you the answer. You’re going to try to figure it yourself with no reward involved (at least not an economic one from me), so you will be doing it just like the control group in the experiment. Then I’m going to give you the link to the solution and round up the point.

So here we go.

You have to fix and light a candle on a wall in a way so the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below. To do so, you may only use the candle, a book of matches and a box of thumbtacks (see game arena below)

done?

Well, here’s the solution.

It turns our that given the non linear nature of this problem, solving it requires to explore various options and play around with the possibilities, instead of simply racing down a known path towards a known solution. Now, a variation of the problem where the initial setup is slightly modified and the thumbtacks are placed next to the box (rather than inside of it) offered the real breakthrough in motivation understanding: rewards actually work when the problem’s solution is fairly obvious. This demonstrates that external motivators (i.e. economic rewards) help narrow our focus so that we can sprint faster towards the goal.

My Experience with Sales Quotas

The financial industry is famous for having an incentive scheme that shares part of the profits with the employees, shall they meet their sales quotas. I’ve worked in various companies where, just like that, the bonus was used as a tool to align the incentives of the employees. As part of the incentive system, I my opinion about it was totally biased by the money I could potentially make if I met my share of the sales objective. My task was very clear: sell more. And to be fair, that is pretty straightforward task. The problem is that, for those of us who are not natural sales people, creativity and resourcefulness come a pretty long way in getting ourselves to the goal. I now understand why when in those circumstances, most of us simply tried harder: we called more customers, pushed harder, became more wordy about the product. We didn’t necessarily try new approaches to the sell, we just tried the known approach with more perseverance. This is wrong and inefficient. This doesn’t pay off in the 21st century.

To make things worse, think about the tasks that we take care in our current jobs as marketers, business strategists, programmers, designers, customer success specialists, project managers. We don’t solve simple but computationally intensive problems (we have computers for that!), we solve complex problems with high uncertainty and typically not a unique correct answer. How about being tasked to make a plan to take the company in a new direction? How about the creation of a new business unit? What if we spice things up by supposing that because the company is currently facing increasing competition and lower returns on the industry it has competed for years, the management wants you to lead the efforts towards uncharted waters as it diversifies? Probably there is a big bonus waiting for you at the end of the road, and you sure could have a lot of fun spending it, but according to Pink’s findings, you are more likely to perform poorly as your mind is on the reward, rather than exploring novel ways to attack the problem.

Enter, Intrinsic Motivators

At the core of every enterprise are its employees. Specially in industries that tend to have less fixed assets, other than the patents and brand awareness, the main asset is the employee base. Yet contemporary enterprises still rely on rewards and punishments to “align” incentives. Pink discusses Intrinsic Motivators as less obvious mechanisms that have a leverage on the intrinsic interest that an individual has over certain task. In a way, they manage to present employees with tasks that feel less like work and more like play, because the core premise is that if the employee would happily engage in a certain task even in the absence of an external motivator, then the employer can rest assured that the result will be as good as the employee can provide, because he will be doing for himself, not for others.

Pink presents a couple of fascinating examples of companies using these techniques to handle intrinsic motivation based on what he calls Type I and Type X kinds of people (I for intrinsic and X for extrinsic). This two personality types refer to those of us who are more drawn to respond to extrinsic motivators and explicit rewards, and those who tend enjoy the process more than the result itself. By the way, Type I people tend to be more successful and according to Pink, it’s a skill, rather than a personality trait, so we all can become a little more intrinsically oriented in order to be more successful.

Final Remarks

Although Pinks exploration on the topic of hidden motivation is quite broad, the very non-programmatic nature of the problem calls for a creative solution. Google and 3M use their famous 20% rule, other companies have fully ROWE organizations (Results Only Work Environment, where there is no meetings, no mandatory time on your cubicle, no office time, only results and full autonomy). And I can even imagine the milliard of other techniques used by companies around the world.

Do you know about methods other than the ones mentioned, where companies foster Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose?

Personally, I’m thrilled to see how I can apply these ideas in what I hope can become the beginning of a corporate change in the company where I currently work, as well in those where I have the opportunity to offer my advice as consultant and collaborator.

Thank you for reading and if you found this interesting, don’t hesitate to comment or reach out. I’ve found that a healthy discussion about a topic of our interest is the best way to digest the content.

I’m a Product Manager with a proclivity for web design and programming. I live in Japan and currently help a number of tech startups in AgTech and EdTech get off the ground. Happy to connect on LinkedIn or Instagram. And while you’re at it, here’s my website and YouTube channel as well.