Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink
Description
Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people—at work, at school, at home. It's wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his paradigm-shattering book Drive, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today's world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it's precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today's challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:
Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives
Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.
Drive is bursting with big ideas—the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live.
Key words: Motivation, Leadership
To read reviews of this book visit Goodreads
My Notes
Introduction
In an echo of what Harlow discovered tow decades earlier, Deci revealed that human motivation seemed to operate by laws that ran counter to what most scientists and citizens bellied. From the office to the playing field, we knew what people got going. Rewards – especially cold, hard cash – intensified interest and enhanced performance. What Deci found, and then confirmed in two additional studies he conducted shortly thereafter, was also most the opposite.
“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity”, he wrote. Rewards can deliver short-term boost – just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wards off – and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.
Human beings, Deci said, have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn”. But this third drive was more fragile than the other two; it needed the right environment to survive. “One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards”, he write in a follow-up paper. Thus began what for Deci became a lifelong quest to rethink why we do what we do – a pursuit that sometimes put him at odds with fellow psychologies, got him fired from business school, and challenged the operating assumptions of organizations everywhere.
“It was controversial”, Deci told me one spring morning forty years after the Soma experiments. “Nobody was expecting rewards would have a negative effect”.
Part 1: A New Operating System
The Rise and fall of Motivation 2.0
In our very early days – I mean very early days, say, fifty thousand years ago – the underlying assumption about human behavior was simple and true. We were trying to survive. From roaming the savannah to gather food to scrambling for the bushes when our saber-toothed tiger approaches, that drive guided most of our behavior. Call this early operating system Motivation 1.0. It wasn’t especially elegant, nor was it much different from those of rhesus monkeys, giant apes, or many other animals. But it served us nicely. It worked well. Until it didn’t.
As humans formed more complex societies, bumping up against strangers and needing to corporate in order to get things done, an operating system based purely on the biological drive was inadequate. In fact, something’s we needed ways to restrain this drive – to prevent me from swimming your dinner and you from steeling my spouse. And so in a feat of remarkable cultural engineering, we slowly replaced what we had with a version more compatible with how we’d begun working and living.
At the core of this new improved operating system was a revised and more accurate assumption: Humans are more than the sum of our biological urges. That first drive still mattered – no doubt about that but it didn’t fully account for who we are. We also had a second drive – to seek reward and avoid punishment more broadly. And it was this insight that a new operating system – call it Motivation 2.0 arose.
Motivation 2.0 still wasn’t exactly ennobling. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren’t much different from horses – that they way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked well – extremely well. Until it didn’t.
“Enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most persuasive driver.”
Economics, she explained, wasn’t the study of moony. It was the study of behavior. IN the course of a day, each of us constantly figuring the cost and benefits of our actions and then deciding how to act. Economists studied what people did, rather than what we said, because we did what was best for us. We were rational calculators of our economic self-interest.
We work to master the clarinet on weekends although we have little hope of making a dime (Motivation 2.0) or acquiring a mate (Motivation 1.0) from doing so.
Begin with complexity. Behaviors scientists often divide what we do on the job or learn in school into two categories: “algorithmic” and “heuristic”. An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single path to one conclusion. That is, there is an algorithm for solving it. A heuristic takes is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you’re have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution. Working as a grocery checkout clerk is mostly algorithmic. Creating an ad campaign is most heuristic. You have to come up with something new.
Only 30% of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work. A key reason: routine work ca be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, non-routine work generally cannot.
“Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity”.
Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn’t mesh with the way many new business models are organized what we do – because we’re intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers.
Motivation 2.0 is similar. At its heart are two elegant and simple ideas: Rewarding activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.
Only contingent rewards – if you do this, then you’ll get that – had the negative. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy. Like the gentlemen driving carriages for money instead of fun, they’re no longer fully controlling their lives. And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivational bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.
“People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur to unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.
It tainted an altruistic act and “crowed out” the intrinsic desire to do something good.
The fine shifted the parents’ decisions from a party moral obligation (be fair to my kids’ teachers) to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn’t room for both. The punishment didn’t promote good behavior; it crowded it out.
By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. (If the task were desirable, the agent wouldn’t need a prod).
In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward – and no further.
The first question you should ask when contemplating external motivators: Is the task at hand routine? That is, doing accomplishing it require following a prescribed set of rules to a specific end?
The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.
The more feedback focuses on specifics (“great use of color”) – and the more the praise is about effort and strategy rather than about achieving a particular outcome – the more effective it can be.
We’re keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags or psychosexual conflicts. SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive and happy.
“We should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish”.
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
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 most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, lean about their world, and accomplish something that endures.
Part 2: The 3 Elements
Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices, it’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.
Money, he believes, is only “a threshold motivator”. People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation.
“For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners”. And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.
Management hasn’t changed much in a hundred years. Its central ethic remains control; its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators.
It requires resisting the temptation to control people – and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy. This innate capacity for self-direction is at the heard of Motivation 3.0 and Type I Behavior.
The 3 researchers found greater job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered “autonomy support”. These bosses saw issues from the employee’s point of view, gave meaningful feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to do it, and encouraged employees to take on new projects. The resulting enhancement in job satisfaction, in turn, led to higher performance on the job. What’s more, the benefits that autonomy confers on individuals extend to their organizations. For example, researches at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The business that offered autonomy grew at 4 times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.
He decided to encourage them to spend a day working on any problem they wanted, even if it wasn’t part of their regular job.
And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering me that tone of these essential features is autonomy - in particular, autonomy over 4 aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian’s experience shows, Type I Behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the 4 T’s; their Task, their Time, their Technique, and their Team.
At W.L.Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.
Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable – and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is a pathway to that destination.
Of course, because most workplaces still reverberate with the assumptions of the old operating systems, transitioning to autonomy won’t – often can’t – happen in one fell swoop. If we plunk people out of controlling environments, when they’ve known nothing else, and plop them into ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they’ll struggle. Organizations must provide, a Richard Ryan puts it, “scaffolding” to help every employee find his footing to make the transition.
So the best strategy for an employer would be to figure out what’s important to each individual employee.
We’re born to be players not pawns.
“The course of human history has always moved in the direction of greater freedom. An there’s a reason for that – because it’s nature to push for it”
Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.
Type I Behavior: mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
Once 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.
… What people believe shapes what people achieve? Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities – what she calls our ‘self-theories’ – determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish.
Mastery is mindset.
“Being a professional”, is doing the things we love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.
This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote.
You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cezanne, you can never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully.
Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
…that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn’t a nicety. It’s a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.
Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable.
Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.
Do the workers refer to the company as “they”? Or do they describe it in terms of “we”? “They” companies and “we” companies, he says, are very different places. And in Motivation 3.0, “we” wins.
A central idea of this book has been the mismatch between what science knows and what business does. The gap is wide. Its existence is alarming. And though closing it seems daunting, we have reasons to be optimistic.
The science shows that “if-then” rewards – the mainstays of the Motivation 2.0 operating system – not only are ineffective in many situations, but also can crush the high-level, creative conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress. This science shoos what the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive – our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
We’re designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice – doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.
Part 3: Type I Toolkit
“A great man”, she told him, “is one sentence”. Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.”
Here’s something you can do to keep yourself motivated. At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you are better today that you were yesterday.
Instead, look for the small measure of improvements such as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you self-off on checking e-mail until you finished that report you need to write. Reminding yourself that you don’t need to be a master by day 3 is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day 3,000.
People usually spend the first twenty-five or so years of their lives learning, the next forty or so years working, and the final twenty-five in retirement. Why not snip 5 years from the retirement and sprinkler them into your work years?
Your mistake was a hidden intention.
5 Steps Closer to Mastery
Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance.
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
Seek constant, critical feedback
Focus ruthlessly on where you need help
Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting.
“What gets you up in the morning”?
“What keeps you up at night”?
Conduct and Autonomy Audit
How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work – your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day?
How much autonomy do you have over your time at work – for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?
How much autonomy do you have over your team at work – that is, to what extent you are able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?
How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work – how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?
Type X bosses relish control. Type I bosses relinquish control.
Involve People in Goal-Setting: People often have higher aims than the ones you assign them.
Use Non-controlling language: “think about”, or “consider” rather than “must” or “should”
Hand everyone a blank 3x5 inch card. Then ask each person to write down his or her one-sentence answer to the following question: “What is our company’s purpose”?
If people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, how can you expect them to be motivated to do it?
Are you a “we” organization or a “they” organization? The difference matters. Everybody wants autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The thing is, “we” can get it – but “they” cant.
Try a little task-shifting - If someone is bored with his current assignment, see if he can train someone else in the skills he’s already mastered. Then see if he can take on some aspect of a more experienced team member’s work.
Paying great people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduced turnover, and boost productivity and morale.
Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence. As Dweck’s research has shown, children who are praised for “being smart” often believe that every encounter is a test of whether they really are. So to avoid looking dumb, they resist new challenges and choose the easiest path. By contrast, kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.
One of the best ways to know whether you’ve mastered something is to try to teach it.
… As Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
Collins suggests 4 basic practices for creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish:
“Lead with questions, not answers”
“Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion”
“Conduct autopsies, without blame”
“Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms.” In other words, make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when they identify a problem.
Big Idea: The results-only work environment ROWE… affords employees complete autonomy over when, where, and how they do their work. The only thing that matters is results.
Type I Insights: Among the basic tenants of ROWE:
“People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their, the customer’s time, or their company’s time”.
“Employees have the freedom to work any way they want”
“Every meeting is optional”
“There are no work schedules”
Drive: The Recap
Carrots and sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.
When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knowns 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 3 essential elements:
Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives
Mastery – the urge to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Human beings have a biological drive that includes hunger, thirst, and sex. We also have another long-recognized drive: to respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. But in the middle of the 20th century, a few scientists began discovering that humans also have a 3rd drive – what some call “intrinsic motivation”.
For non-routine conceptual tasks, rewards are more perilous – particularly those of the “if-then” variety. But “now that” rewards – non-contingent rewards given after a task is complete – can somethings be okay for more creative right-brain work, especially if they provide useful information about performance.
Motivation 1.0 presumes that humans biological creatures, struggling for survival.
Motivation 2.0 presumes that humans also respond to rewards and punishments in their environment.
Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a third drive – to learn, to create, and to better the world.
