Dan Pink delivered a really great presentation on “The Science of Motivation” last July in Oxford (UK) for TED. Highly recommended as we deal with motivation in the music biz at all times. Motivating artists, team members, fans, etc. I wrote down some take-away points underneath.
Take-away points:
- There’s a mismatch between what science knows about motivation, and what businesses apply in their reward systems.
- Pay-for-performance rewards, extrinsically focused, by their very nature narrow our focus, concentrate the mind. For tasks with simple set of rules and a clear destination if/then rewards work really well.
- However, for creative and complex problems with non-obvious solutions, this reward structure narrows our focus and restricts our possibilities. One of the most robust, yet ignored, findings in social science: Contingent motivators work in a lot of circumstances, but for some tasks they either don’t work, or even do harm. Further findings:
- The 20th century rewards motivators, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
- Those if-then rewards destroy creativity.
- The secret to high performance isn’t reward or punishment, but the drive to do things because they matter.
- There is a need for a new operating system to motivate people, based on intrinsic motivation, revolves around three elements:
- Autonomy = The urge to direct our own lives. (ie. manage our own project)
- Mastery = The desire to get better at something that matters.
- Purpose = The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
- With this system it has been proven that productivity goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turn-over goes down.
Pingback: The Similarity Between Artists And Cows (Or What You Were Built For)