Pink what really motivates us. Daniel Pink: Drive: What really motivates us. Reviews of the book

Daniel Pink

Drive. What really motivates us

Dedicated to Sofia, Elisa and Sol - the amazing trio that motivates me

Translator I. Trifonov

Project manager S. Turco

Corrector E. Aksenova

Computer layout K. Svishchev

Cover design M. Lobov

Published under license from The Sagalyn Literary Agency and Synopsis Literary Agency.

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic copy of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Editor's choice - choice of the editor-in-chief

Finally, a book has appeared that convincingly proves that a golden cage does not motivate anyone, and that a person is still more complex than a rat. In a society where the minimum basic needs are satisfied, the true incentive for great achievements can only be internal motivation, only a person’s own conviction in the importance of work.

Sergey Turko,

k.e. Sc., editor-in-chief of the publishing house "Alpina Publisher"

Foreword by publishing partner. So what really motivates us?

Today, most companies, managers and employees live in a world where extrinsic motivation is extremely important: it is believed that in order to increase efficiency and increase productivity, people need to be rewarded for good and punished for bad. This is a kind of Motivation 2.0.

But “external rewards” can only work properly when it comes to algorithmic tasks that an employee solves in the workplace. Whereas, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co, in the United States, only 30% of new jobs are related to algorithmic work, and 70% of people are expected to do activities with elements of creativity and analysis. These statistics force us to radically rethink the approach to modern management.

The most important message, in my opinion, from Daniel Pink is this: “The secret to high productivity and performance lies not in our biological needs or in rewards and punishments, but in our deep desire to manage our lives, develop and expand our abilities and lead a life that has purpose and meaning.”

It’s hard to disagree with this, following step by step the author’s arguments, detailed cases, numerous references to the results of psychological research, etc.

Sociologists say that having wealth above a certain (not so fantastic) threshold does not bring people a higher level of satisfaction. How people spend their money is just as important as how much they earn. Thus, spending money on others or for a good cause increases the feeling of inner well-being. It is impossible to live a truly fulfilling life without feeling that you belong to something greater and more lasting than yourself.

Based on this, Daniel Pink proposes a new motivation system for creative people - 3.0. Three key elements underlie it: freedom of choice, mastery, and having a worthy goal. And these components arise in employees not thanks to the efforts of managers, but come from within, because they are natural for thinking, intellectually and spiritually developed people. It’s up to the company to realize this and create the conditions and atmosphere for their implementation. A healthy society and a healthy business organization begin with a goal and purpose and view profit as a means of moving toward that goal or as a beneficial by-product of achieving it.

Description

The book is dedicated to motivation and what motivates people to achieve the highest results. The author shows that incentives based only on receiving a reward are currently not only useless, but in some cases are harmful to the activities of individuals and entire companies.

You will learn how to awaken in people the inner desire to reach the top, activate the desire for excellence and independence, and learn how to attract people who have an inner desire to win.

This work is considered one of the best books on motivation in recent times. It will change the way you think about work and creativity and provide a wealth of practical techniques. The book will be useful to businessmen, entrepreneurs and people seeking to increase both their personal productivity and the productivity of their business.

The first part is devoted to the consideration of the gamification system as a new operating system in the business world. It talks about motivation, the futility of conventional incentive methods in today's world, and the conditions in which they can still be used. The second part covers the three elements of gamification - autonomy, mastery and purpose.

The final part is practical. In it you will learn strategies for awakening internal motivation, ways to make positive changes at work, and reward rules. The author will also provide a list of must-read books and expert opinions on business strategy, and present motivational exercises and discussion guides.

At the end of the book you will find a summary of the material, a glossary, author acknowledgments and notes.

about the author

PINK Daniel is a famous American analyst and author of five acclaimed bestsellers. His works have been translated into 32 languages and are considered revolutionary because... radically change the world of customary values and predict the onset of a new conceptual era. In 2001, the author was included in the ranking of 50 outstanding business analysts in the world.

Do you show up to work on time, obey your boss, sit your pants down at meetings? Get a bonus!

Are you late? Are you arguing with the director? Didn't tie your tie? Get a fine!

Carrot and stick.

What could be more reliable for motivating employees?

Daniel Pink in his book “Drive. What Really Motivates Us” turns everything upside down. He derives the MOTIVATION 3.0 formula!

With it, your employees will start going to work as if it were a holiday, and staff turnover will drop to zero.

But there are also pitfalls...

This is not a Brazilian carnival - this is the everyday work of Facebook employees in California.

The main pitfall

Why, then, in equally successful modern companies - Renault, Ford, Sony - is there not such a riot of colors and liberties in production? Yes, it is also neat and clean there, but Her Majesty Discipline reigns there.

Pink argues that Motivation 3.0 is ideal for knowledge workers. It is not suitable for mechanical work, for routine, and will even be harmful.

Assembly shop. Yes, graffiti on the walls and teddy bears would look stupid here...

...as well as freestyle clothing.

Anti-Kennedy

I recently did Dan Kennedy's Hardcore Management books. This is an unrealistic “tough guy”. Dan suggests supervising your employees as much as possible - keeping an eye on them in the restrooms, searching their lockers while they're not looking, that sort of thing.

This book amazed many people and “opened their eyes.”

It is all the more surprising that, despite their different approaches, both Kennedy and Pink agree on one thing: creative workers abhor control, while on the contrary, it helps workers in routine work.

I think these books complement each other perfectly.

Positive psychology

This book is a worthy successor of this trend. On Lifehacker I have already written reviews of the books “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and “Flexible Consciousness. A new look at the developmental psychology of adults and children" Carol Dweck. Pink refers to them often.

His book is a development of these ideas.

About the format

In short, “science pop”.

What I liked and what I saw for the first time were the different resume formats at the end of the book.

Damn, this is convenient!

It would be great if such a summary was in every book.

No, I'm not a lazy reader.

But it happens that you need to return to the book after some time, to refresh the main ideas... Such a summary would be very helpful. He would also help with buying a book. I leafed through the notes – I liked the ideas – and bought the book.

Main ideas of the book

For people who feel sorry for 4-6 hours of reading time, I wrote down the main thoughts.

The traditional carrot and stick system for motivation no longer works. He draws this conclusion based on several experiments on humans and primates.
Experiments have shown that people who are passionate about their work even get in the way of rewards.
Carrot and stick can only work well for monotonous, routine work.
Of course, there is a threshold for a person’s minimum income. If he does not reach it, then financial incentives will be effective. However, for wealthy workers it can have the opposite effect.
Material rewards can turn an interesting activity, almost a game, into a tedious routine.
And vice versa - routine can be gamified. The author calls this the “Tom Sawyer” effect.
Try paying your child for math classes and in the near future he will become an excellent student. But this will discourage him from studying mathematics for the rest of his life.
Be careful with your goal setting. We are used to thinking that this is cool. But in reality, goals, especially those imposed from above by superiors, can have a negative effect. For example, people who are motivated by goals are more likely to cheat to achieve their goals. At the same time, a person who works for his own pleasure will not deceive anyone. It just doesn't make sense.
The habituation effect of rewards. Pay your child once to take out the trash, and he will never do it for free again.
Reward makes thinking short-term, limiting its depth and breadth.
The emergence of stock exchanges forces companies to focus on short-term (quarterly) results. In the long run this leads to collapse. This is how all these economic bubbles arise.
An employee will not do more than is required of him for remuneration. If you pay your child to read three books a week, that's exactly what he will read. And this will discourage your love of reading for life.
If you do end up with routine work that you reward financially, don’t forget to tell your employees what this work is for. What higher goals are we moving towards?
Rewards can also be used occasionally in creative work. The main requirements: 1) surprise 2) pay after completion. A nice unexpected bonus at the end.
Of course, do not forget about sincere gratitude. This is the best motivation.
Provide people with feedback on their work.
There are 2 types of people: X and I. X are people who find motivation from outside (money, privileges, show-off). I - people who have found internal motivation (mastery, self-development, higher purpose)
People I are more successful and even richer, funny as it may seem. Happier, healthier.
3 characteristics of work I: employee autonomy, skill, determination
Autonomy: come/leave when they want, choose where to work and with whom. They need to be controlled at the level of results.
Mastery: the desire to become better, the state of flow according to Csikszentmihalyi. It is important that the tasks are feasible - not too difficult and not too easy. Mastery is not easy (see Law of 10,000 Hours)
Determination: Having a high goal. Higher than just personal ambitions.
Involve your employees in choosing company goals.
How much to pay employees: 1) fair pay 2) above average
If you use bonuses for achieving results, then 1) the goals should be varied and 2) the bonus should be small. This will protect you from employees cheating for the sake of a bonus.

Daniel Pink

Drive. What really motivates us

Dedicated to Sofia, Eliza and Sol - the amazing trio that motivates me

Translator I. Trifonov

Project manager S. Turco

Corrector E. Aksenova

Computer layout K. Svishchev

Cover design M. Lobov

Published under license from The Sagalyn Literary Agency and Synopsis Literary Agency.

Editor's choice - choice of the editor-in-chief

Sergey Turko,

k.e. Sc., editor-in-chief of the publishing house "Alpina Publisher"

Foreword by publishing partner

So what really motivates us?

It’s hard to disagree with this, following step by step the author’s arguments, detailed cases, numerous references to the results of psychological research, etc.

Let's look at some of the features of our current Russian existence from the point of view of the arguments that Daniel Pink gives.

He operates with the concept of G. Mintzberg, within the framework of which decent wages are viewed more as a “hygienic” rather than a determining motivating factor. Russia is still very far from the level of development at which such a concept would become relevant.

Labor productivity in Russia is two times lower than in Mexico and Brazil, three times lower than in England and France, and four to five times lower than in Germany and the USA.

The education and training system is going through hard times.

To implement such approaches, it is necessary to have an effective corporate and national infrastructure.

Poorly algorithmized (heuristic) types of activities exist, as a rule, in high-tech industries, such as service, innovation, inventive activities, applied sciences, R&D, etc. In Russia, these areas are not at all as well developed as we would like.

It is also obvious that it is necessary to have an appropriate economic structure, labor legislation, and business climate.

To implement the Motivation 3.0 system, it is important to go through the stage of routinization and algorithmization of work processes, to have a highly qualified workforce, highly qualified management, etc.

If you do not take into account all of the above, experiments with the introduction of motivational principles that Pink writes about will end very sadly.

It seems that given certain trends in Russia, such a system of employee motivation may well become a reality in the near future! Some companies (and there are many of them) are not only quite capable of applying such approaches, but are already doing it (there are known examples in IT business, engineering, marketing, etc.)

To sum up, we can say that here, dear readers, is an excellent, timely book, inspiring and thought-provoking.

Sergey Anisimov,

President of the Stins Coman group of companies

Preface to the Russian edition

By likening approaches to motivation to outdated and radically new operating systems, Daniel Pink can help the reader “reboot” the mind. It turns out that numerous studies have shown that the “if, then” principle, i.e. tying incentives to achievements, does not always produce a positive effect, and sometimes even inhibits creativity and activity. The approach itself is interesting: let a person get satisfaction from the work itself, from creativity, and he will achieve more than when stimulated by bonuses or recognition. Pink writes about the positive experience of large companies in which 20% of their working time, employees, with the permission and even encouragement of management, were engaged in the projects they wanted. And it was the solutions created in 20% of the time of freedom that turned out to be the most revolutionary and innovative. For example, it was during the period of free creativity that the famous stickers were invented at 3M, without which we can now hardly imagine office life.

True, along with “free motivation,” Pink says that all this will work only if basic, including material, needs have already been fulfilled, and the person is engaged in intellectual and creative work. So I think this book will be most useful to those who manage exactly this type of people. For those who have a different type of staff, where the work is monotonous and routine, the implementation of Pink’s ideas must be approached with caution.

partner and head of the Laboratory of Management Technologies SRC Lab.

Introduction

The puzzling puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci

In the middle of the last century, two young scientists conducted experiments that could have changed the world - but did not.

Harry Harlow was a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin who founded one of the world's first laboratories to study primate behavior in the 1940s. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues grouped eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning problems. The researchers came up with a simple mechanical puzzle like the one shown in the picture below. To solve it, three steps were required: pull out the vertical pin, fold back the hook and lift the hinged lid. Easy for you and me, but much more difficult for a six-kilogram lab monkey.

Harlow's puzzle in its original position (left) and solved state (right)

The experimenters placed puzzles in cages to see how the monkeys responded and to prepare them for tests they would take in two weeks. But almost immediately something strange began to happen. Without any external motivation or encouragement from the experimenters, the monkeys began to play with the puzzles with concentration, determination and noticeable pleasure. And they immediately began to guess how these cunning devices work. When it came time to test the monkeys on the 14th day of the experiment, they were already real experts. They solved the puzzles frequently and quickly, cracking the code in less than 60 seconds in two out of three cases.

And it was unexpected. No one taught the monkeys how to remove the pin, flip the hook, and lift the lid. No one rewarded them with food, affection, or even mild applause when they succeeded. And it went against generally accepted ideas about how primates, including the less hairy, larger-brained primates known as humans, behave.

By that time, scientists knew that behavior was governed by two main motivating forces. The first is biological needs. Humans and other animals ate to be satisfied, drank to quench their thirst, and mated to satisfy their sexual impulses. But there was nothing like that here. “The decision did not lead to the satisfaction of any need: food, water or sex,” Harlow reported.

The second known driving force also did not help explain the unusual behavior of the monkeys. If biological motivations acted from within, then the second type of incentives had an external source - these were rewards and punishments with which the external environment accompanied certain types of behavior. They have proven effective with people who responded solely to such external forces. If we were promised a pay rise, we worked harder. If we were encouraged, in the hope that we would get an A on the exam, we would spend more time studying. If we were threatened with deductions from our pay for being late or filling out forms incorrectly, we showed up for work on time and checked all the right boxes. But this did not explain the behavior of the monkeys. As Harlow wrote (and appears to be scratching the back of his head in thought): “The behavior demonstrated in this experiment raises some interesting questions for motivation researchers because significant gains in learning were observed and high performance was maintained in the absence of specific or external incentives.” "

What else could it be?

To answer this question, Harlow proposed a completely new theory that introduced the concept third motivating force. “The very completion of the task,” he said, “served as an internal reward.” The monkeys solved puzzles simply because they found the activity enjoyable. They were enjoying themselves. The joy of solving a problem was its own reward.

If this theory was radical, then subsequent events caused even greater confusion and more active controversy. Let's assume that this new driving force, which Harlow eventually called "intrinsic motivation," actually exists. But it, of course, must occupy a subordinate position in relation to the other two forces. If monkeys are rewarded, for example, with raisins (!) for solving puzzles, they should undoubtedly show even better results. However, when Harlow put this approach into practice, the monkeys actually performed more errors and less often solved puzzles. “The introduction of food rewards into this experiment,” Harlow wrote, “reduced performance. This phenomenon has not been described in the literature.”

So this was even weirder. To use a scientific analogy, this is equivalent to letting a steel ball roll down an inclined plane to measure its speed, only to find that it floats into the air instead. This led us to assume that our understanding of the influence of gravity on behavior was incorrect, that the laws that we thought were immutable had many gaps. Harlow noted that the monkeys' drive to find solutions to puzzles was characterized by "strength and persistence." He further wrote:

“It appears that this driving force... may be as fundamental and powerful as [other] forces. Moreover, there is reason to believe that [it] can promote learning just as effectively.”

However, at that time two dominant motivating forces held scientific thought firmly in captivity. So Harlow had to sound the alarm. He called on scientists to “forget about most of our theoretical garbage” and come up with more recent and accurate models of human behavior. He warned that our theories about why we do what we do are incomplete. He said that in order to truly understand the inner world of man, we must take into account this third motivating force.

Later, he almost completely abandoned his idea.

Rather than fight the establishment and propose a broader understanding of motivation, Harlow abandoned this controversial line of research and later became famous for his research in the field of attachment psychology. His concept of the third drive has been discussed in the psychological literature, but has remained on the periphery of behavioral science and our understanding of ourselves. Two decades passed before another scientist picked up the idea of Harlow, who so provocatively left his materials on a laboratory bench in Wisconsin.

In the summer of 1969, Edward Deci, a graduate student in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, was looking for a dissertation topic. By then he had already earned an MBA from Wharton and was keenly interested in the problem of motivation, but he suspected that scientists and business people misunderstood it. So, taking a page out of Harlow's experimental journal, he began exploring the topic using a puzzle.

Deci chose the catfish cube, a popular Parker Brothers puzzle at the time that, thanks to YouTube, remains almost iconic to this day. The puzzle pictured below includes seven pieces: six of them have four cubes, and one of them has three. Players can use these seven pieces to create any of several million possible combinations, from abstract shapes to recognizable objects.

Seven catfish cube pieces individually (left) and assembled into one of the possible configurations

For his study, Deci divided male and female university participants into an experimental group (which I'll call Group A) and a control group (Group B). Each subject participated in three one-hour sessions over three consecutive days. Here's how the sessions proceeded: Each participant entered a room and sat down at a table on which were laid out seven puzzle pieces, drawings of three puzzle configurations, and several magazines: Time, The New Yorker And Playboy(remember, it was 1969). Deci sat on the other side of the table, explaining the instructions and timing the task with a stopwatch.

In the first session, members of both groups had to assemble puzzle pieces in such a way as to reproduce the configurations depicted in the drawings given to them. In the second session, they did the same with the other drawings, only this time Deci told Group A that they would be paid $1 (equivalent to about $6 today) for each task they successfully completed. Group B, at the same time, received new drawings without the promise of payment. Finally, during the third session, both groups received new drawings and had to reproduce them without any compensation, as in the first session (see table below).

WORKING CONDITIONS FOR THE TWO GROUPS

In the middle of each session, the experimenter resorted to a trick. After the participant collected two of the three figures shown in the pictures, Deci stopped the experiment. He stated that in order to determine what the fourth task would be, he needed to enter the received data into the computer. And since this was the late 1960s, a full decade before the advent of desktop computers, when large, cabinet-like computers took up entire offices, that meant he had to leave the room for a while.

Heading towards the door, the experimenter said: “I’ll only be gone for a few minutes, you can do something for now.” In fact, Deci did not enter any data into the ancient teletype. Instead, he went into the next room, connected to the experimental room through a one-way mirror, where for exactly eight minutes he observed what people were doing when left alone. Did they continue to tinker with the puzzle, perhaps trying to reproduce the third picture? Or were they doing something else: leafing through magazines, looking at photographs, sitting staring into space, falling into a light doze?

Not surprisingly, in the first session there were no significant differences in the behavior of subjects in Group A and Group B during this eight-minute period of covert observation when they were given a free choice. Participants in both groups continued to play with the puzzle for an average of three and a half to four minutes, suggesting that they had some interest in it.

On the second day, when Group A was paid for each successful configuration and Group B was not, the unpaid group behaved essentially the same as the day before, when they were given the opportunity to freely choose an activity. But the participants who were promised to be paid suddenly for real became interested in the puzzle. On average, people in Group A spent more than five minutes manipulating the puzzle, likely trying to get a head start on the third task or trying to take full advantage of the chance to earn more. It's predictable, isn't it? Their behavior is consistent with our understanding of motivation: give me a reward and I will work harder.

However, what happened on the third day confirmed Deci's suspicions about the unusual functioning of motivation and subtly called into question one of the basic principles of modern life. This time, Deci told the subjects in Group A that there was only enough money to pay for one day, so this third session would not be paid for. Otherwise, the experiment followed the same pattern: two completed tasks, followed by Deci's intervention.

During the subsequent eight-minute break, subjects in Group B, who were not paid, surprisingly played with the puzzle a little longer than in previous sessions. Maybe she was captivating them more and more, maybe it was just a statistical error. But the subjects in Group A, who had previously received payment, responded differently. Now they were spending significantly less time to solve the puzzle - two minutes less than during the paid session, and also almost a full minute less than in the first session, when they first picked up the puzzle and were clearly interested in it.

Confirming what Harlow had discovered two decades earlier, Deci concluded that human motivation seemed to follow laws that went against the grain of most scientists and ordinary citizens. We knew what made people perform with full dedication, whether in the office or on the playground. Rewards, especially cash, fueled interest and increased performance. What Deci found and later confirmed in two additional studies was contrary to our knowledge. “When money is used as an external reward for an activity, people lose a lively, sincere interest in that activity,” he wrote. A reward can provide a short-term boost in performance, just as a dose of caffeine can provide a few extra hours of alertness. But the effect wears off and, even worse, can reduce a person’s long-term motivation to continue working.

People, Deci said, have “an innate tendency to seek new things and overcome difficulties, to develop and apply their abilities, to explore and learn.” But this third motivating force turned out to be more fragile than the other two; a suitable atmosphere was required to maintain it. “Anyone interested in developing and strengthening intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not focus on such external control systems as monetary rewards,” he wrote in a later paper. Thus began what for Deci became a lifelong attempt to rethink why we do what we do. His search, which sometimes led to arguments with fellow psychologists, led to his dismissal from business school and called into question the way organizations operate in all areas of activity.

“It was very challenging,” Deci told me one spring morning, 40 years after experimenting with the catfish cube. “No one expected that rewards could have a negative impact.”

* * *

This is a book about motivation. I want to show that much of what we know about this issue is simply wrong, and that the insights that Harlow and Deci came to decades ago are much closer to the truth. The problem is that most companies have not yet matured to a new understanding of what truly motivates us. There are too many such organizations that still rely on ideas about human potential and personal effectiveness that have not been properly studied, rely more on folklore than science, and are also outdated. They continue to use methods such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes, despite growing evidence that such measures usually do not work and are often harmful. To make matters worse, these unproven methods have infiltrated our schools, where students, our future working generation, are lured with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. And this is a big mistake.

The good news is that the solution lies before us - in the work of a group of behavioral scientists who continued the research of Harlow and Deci. Their research, which has continued quietly over the past fifty years, is revealing a more dynamic picture of human motivation. For too long there has been a gap between scientific knowledge and business practice. The purpose of the book is to fill this gap.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the shortcomings of our reward/punishment system and proposes a new understanding of motivation. Chapter 1 explores how the dominant concept of motivation has become incompatible with many aspects of modern business and everyday life. Chapter 2 provides seven reasons why external incentives such as carrots and sticks often produce the opposite of intended results. (This is followed by a short supplement, Chapter 2a, which describes special circumstances where carrots and sticks may actually be effective.) Chapter 3 introduces what I call behavior type I: A way of thinking and approaching business based on real-world research on human motivation and driven by our third drive—our innate need to take control of our lives, to learn and create new things, and to feel better about ourselves and the world around us.

Part 2, which examines the three elements of Type I behavior, demonstrates how individuals and organizations use them to achieve better results and greater satisfaction. Chapter 4 explores autonomy, our desire for self-government. Chapter 5 analyzes skill, our motivation is to become better and better at what we do. Chapter 6 is dedicated to research determination, our desire to be part of something larger than ourselves.

The third part is a workshop on Type I behavior: a complete set of tips, exercises, and resources designed to help you create the conditions in which such behavior can occur. Here you'll find everything from recommended reading for further study on the topic to questions for your book club discussion to a super-succinct summary of this book that will help you make a good impression at a party. Although the book is primarily about business, in this section I will offer some thoughts on how to apply these concepts to education and to our lives outside of work.

But we'll start with a thought experiment that requires us to go back in time, to the days when John Major was British Prime Minister, Barack Obama was a young law professor, access to the Internet required a modem and a phone line, and the word "BlackBerry" did not mean nothing but berries.

Part one

New operating system

The Rise and Fall of the Motivation 2.0 System

Imagine it's 1995. You are talking to an economist, a business school graduate with a degree in economics. You say, “I have a crystal ball that can see 15 years into the future. I would like to test your ability to make correct predictions."

She is skeptical, but still decides to play along with you.

“I will tell you about two new encyclopedias: one has just been published, the second will be launched in a few years. You have to predict which one will be more successful in 2010.”

“Bring your ball,” she says.

“The first encyclopedia is a Microsoft product. As you know, Microsoft is already a fairly large and profitable company. And when the Windows 95 operating system is released this year, it will be a colossus that will usher in a new era. It is Microsoft that will finance this encyclopedia. It will pay professional writers and editors to write articles on thousands of different topics. Well-paid managers will see to it that this project is completed on time and on budget. Microsoft would then sell the encyclopedia on CDs and later via the Internet.

The birth of the second encyclopedia will not be associated with any company. It will be created by tens of thousands of people who will write and edit articles for their own pleasure. They will not need any special qualifications to participate in this project. And no one will pay them a dollar or a yen for writing and editing articles. Participants will work – some 20, some 30 hours a week – completely free of charge. The encyclopedia itself, which will be an online service, will also be free - those who want to use it will not pay anything for it.

Now, you say to the economist, mentally look 15 years into the future. My crystal ball shows that in 2010 one of these encyclopedias will be the largest and most popular in the world, and the second will cease to exist. So who will win and who will lose?”

I doubt that in 1995 you would have found a single clear-headed economist on the planet who would not have chosen the first of these projects as a successful model. Any other conclusion would be simply ludicrous, since it would contradict virtually every business principle our economist taught her students. It would be like asking a zoologist who would win a 200-meter race: the cheetah or your brother-in-law. As they say, there are no options.

Of course, this motley crew of volunteers could produce something. But there was no way this product could compete with an offering from a powerful profit-driven company. All the motives of these amateurs were untenable. Microsoft was going to capitalize on the success of its product; every participant in the other project knew from the very beginning that success would not bring any money. Most importantly, Microsoft's authors, editors, and managers were paid. Nobody paid those who worked on the second project. On the contrary, these people lost money every time they took on free work, instead of working somewhere for pay. The answer was so obvious that our economist would not have even thought to ask this question during the exam in her MBA course. He was too light.

But you know how it ended.

In 2009, on October 31, Microsoft stopped supporting MSN Encarta, its CD and online encyclopedia that had been on the market for 16 years. Meanwhile, Wikipedia, the second model, eventually became the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world. Only eight years have passed since its appearance, and today it has almost 3 million articles in English and more than 10 million articles in 260 other languages.

What happened? It is very difficult to explain this result within the framework of traditional views of human motivation.

Triumph of carrot and stick

All computers—whether it's the giant mainframe from Deci's experiments, the iMac I work on, or the smartphone in your pocket—have an operating system. Beneath the surface of the devices you touch and the programs you work with lies a complex layer of software that includes instructions, protocols, and conventions that keep the entire system running smoothly. Many of us don't think much about operating systems. We only notice them when they start to malfunction, when the hardware and software they control become so complex that the current operating system can't handle them. Then the computer starts to fail. We are making claims. And smart software developers, always busy patching holes in their program, sit down to write a radically improved, new version of the program.

Society also has its own operating system. The laws, traditions, and economic mechanisms we encounter every day are layered on top of a layer of instructions, protocols, and assumptions about how the world around us works. And to a large extent, our social operating system consists of beliefs about human behavior.

At the earliest time - I mean Very long ago, say 50,000 years ago, the basic understanding of human behavior was simple and accurate. We had to survive. In any action: from combing the savannah in search of food to fighting for bushes in which to hide from a saber-toothed tiger, this motive almost completely determined our behavior. Let's call it the operating system Motivation 1.0. It was not particularly elegant and did not differ much from similar systems adopted by rhesus monkeys, great apes or other animals. But she served us faithfully. She worked like clockwork. Until it loses its effectiveness.

As humans developed more complex societies, encountering strangers and realizing the need for cooperation to achieve their goals, an operating system based solely on biological needs no longer met the increased demands. In fact, sometimes we needed ways containment these needs to prevent me from trying to steal your lunch, and you from stealing my wife. And so, in a remarkable feat of cultural engineering, we gradually replaced the existing system with a new version more compatible with our working methods and way of life.

At the core of this new and improved operating system was a revised and refined notion: people are more than the sum of their biological needs. This first motivational force was still important, there is no doubt about it, but it did not provide a complete answer to the question of who we are. We also had a second basic incentive: to seek pleasure and avoid punishment in a broad sense. It was from this insight that a new operating system emerged, let's call it Motivation 2.0. (Of course, other animals also respond to rewards and punishments, but only humans have been able to harness this motivational force to develop aspects of life ranging from contract law to convenience stores.)

The ability to benefit from this second drive has been very important to economic progress throughout the world, especially over the past two centuries. Let's take the industrial revolution. Technical improvements—steam engines, railroads, widespread electricity—played a critical role in stimulating production. But less tangible innovations also played a role, notably the work of an American engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. In the early 1900s, Taylor, who believed that businesses were run irrationally and haphazardly, came up with what he called “scientific management.” His invention was a form of "software" specifically designed to run on top of the Motivation 2.0 platform. And it spread quickly and widely.

Workers in this approach were viewed as parts of a complex machine. If they did their job correctly and on time, the machine functioned flawlessly. And to ensure this, you simply rewarded the behavior you wanted and punished the behavior you considered unacceptable. People would respond rationally to these external influences, these external stimuli, and would prosper, just like the system as a whole. We tend to think that economic growth was fueled by coal and oil. But in a sense, the engine of commerce was driven by carrots and sticks.

The operating system Motivation 2.0 lasted a very long time. In fact, it has penetrated so deeply into our lives that many of us are hardly aware of its existence. The fact is that for as long as memory can reach, we have structured our organizations and our lives in accordance with its central principle: to increase efficiency, increase productivity and promote excellence, we need to reward good and punish bad. .

Despite the increased complexity and loftiness of the goals of the new system, the idea of a person in Motivation 2.0 was not particularly noble. She meant that, in the grand scheme of things, human beings are no different from horses, and that we can be made to move in the right direction by waving a juicier carrot in front of our noses or threatening us with a thicker whip. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it more than made up for in efficiency. It worked well, even exceptionally well. Until it stopped working completely.

Over time, with the complexity of the economy, with increasing requirements for the qualifications of people who had to master new, more advanced skills, the approach based on Motivation 2.0 began to meet with some resistance. In the 1950s, Abraham Maslow, a former student of Harry Harlow, developed a new, humanistic movement in psychology that rejected the idea that human behavior, like that of rats, was reduced solely to seeking positive stimuli and avoiding negative ones. In 1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Douglas McGregor borrowed some of Maslow's ideas to apply them to the field of business. McGregor questioned the concept of fundamental human inertia, which holds that without external rewards and punishments we could achieve nothing. People are driven by other, higher motives. And these motives could benefit business if managers and business leaders recognized their importance. Thanks in part to McGregor's work, the companies have undergone a certain evolution. Requirements for appearance have become less strict, work schedules have become more flexible. Leaders of many organizations were looking for ways to give people more autonomy and promote their professional growth. These improvements corrected some of the system's shortcomings, but overall amounted to a modest improvement rather than a major update, and thus contributed to the emergence of Motivation 2.1.

So the overall approach remained the same because, after all, it was easy to understand, easy to control and easy to implement. But in the first ten years of this century, during a period of deep stagnation in everything from business, technology, and social development, we discovered that this staunch, old operating system performed extremely poorly. It freezes - often and unpredictably. It forces people to find workarounds to compensate for its shortcomings. And most importantly, it turns out to be incompatible with many aspects of modern business. And if we look deeper into these incompatibility issues, we will realize that modest changes that amount to patching holes will not solve this problem. What we need is a full-blown update.

Three incompatibility problems

Motivation 2.0 still serves some purposes well. But she is not reliable. Sometimes it works, but in many cases it is ineffective. And knowing its defects will help us determine which parts should be kept and which ones should be discarded when we start updating it. Its disadvantages fall into three broad categories. Our current operating system has become much less compatible and at times directly conflicts with the way we we will organize your activities; what we thinking about its activities; what are conditions our activities.

How we organize our activities

Let's return to the encyclopedic duel between Microsoft and Wikipedia. According to the postulates underlying Motivation 2.0, the result we have is simply impossible. The triumph of Wikipedia seems to refute the laws of behavioral science.

However, if this encyclopedia, created from start to finish by amateur volunteers, were the only example of its kind, we could reject it as a deviation from the norm, an exception that only proves the general rule. But that's not true. On the contrary, Wikipedia represents the most powerful and innovative business model of the 21st century: open-source, an open-access project.

For example, when you turn on your home computer and go online to check the weather forecast or order new shoes, you're probably using Firefox, a free, open-source Internet browser created almost entirely by volunteers around the world. Workers who do not receive payment and give away their product for nothing? There's no way this could be viable. Their motives are illogical, they contradict the system. However, Firefox currently has over 150 million users.

Walk into the IT department of a large company anywhere in the world and ask for a tour. It may well be that the company's corporate servers are running Linux, software created by an army of pro bono programmers and distributed for free. One in four corporate servers these days runs on Linux. Then ask the employee to explain how his company's website works. Perhaps hidden behind the site's beautiful interface is Apache, an open-source web server software created and maintained by a large group of volunteers from around the world. Apache has a 52% share of the enterprise web server market. In other words, in companies that routinely rely on external incentives to manage their employees, some of their most important systems run on software created by outsiders who apparently have no need for these incentives.

This includes not only tens of thousands of software development projects from around the world. Today you can find open source cookbooks, open source textbooks, open source automotive design projects; open health research; free legal advice, open photo storage; free prosthetics; public credit cooperatives, cola produced according to a recipe that is freely available, and for those for whom soft drinks are not enough - beer produced according to the same principle.

This new way of organizing your activities does not exclude the possibility of external incentives. People contributing to the open source movement did not take a vow of poverty. Participation in these projects can help many of them strengthen their reputation and hone their professional skills, which in turn will allow them to earn more. Entrepreneurs have created new and sometimes very profitable companies that help organizations implement and use open source software applications in their work.

But ultimately, just as much as old business models relied on extrinsic motivation, open source depends on intrinsic motivation, as several scholars have demonstrated. MIT management professor Karim Lakhani and Boston Consulting Group consultant Bob Wolf surveyed 684 open source developers, mostly from North America and Europe, to find out why they participate in such projects. Lakhani and Wolf identified a range of motivations, but found that “enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, that is, the creative experience associated with working on a given project, is the strongest and most common motivating force.” The researchers found that the vast majority of programmers, they said, often reached an optimal state for solving problems, known as flow. In addition, three German economists who studied open source projects around the world concluded that their participants are driven by “a set of largely internal motivations,” specifically “the pleasure derived from successfully solving a problem in software” and “the desire to give back to the programming community.” ". In the Motivation 2.0 system, impulses of this kind simply have no place.

Moreover, open source is just one way in which people are restructuring their activities along new organizational principles and with different motivations. Let's move from programming to the legal field. The laws in most developed countries generally allow for two types of formal organizations: for-profit and non-profit. Some make money, others do good. And the most prominent representative of the first category is a public corporation, owned by shareholders and managed by executives overseen by a board of directors. Officers and directors have one overriding responsibility: to provide shareholders with maximum returns. Other types of business structures are guided in their activities by the same principles. For example, in the United States, partnerships, S-corporations, C-corporations, limited liability companies, and other forms of business all have the same purpose. The goal of those who manage them - practically, legally, in some sense morally - is to obtain maximum profit.

I am sincerely glad that such organizational forms exist and progressive countries in which citizens have the opportunity to create these organizations. Without them, our life would not be as prosperous, safe and happy. But in the last few years, different people in different countries have begun to change the rules and create recipes for new organizational structures.

For example, in April 2008, Vermont became the first American state to recognize a new type of business entity called the “non-profit limited liability company.” Abbreviated to L3C, this organization is a corporation, but not the way we usually think of it. As one report explains, "L3C operates similarly to a for-profit organization, generating at least a modest income, but its primary goal is to provide significant public benefit." Three other US states followed Vermont's lead. In North Carolina, for example, one L3C is buying up abandoned furniture factories across the state, renovating them to modern environmental standards, and leasing them at low rates to struggling furniture manufacturers. The company hopes to make money from this, but its real goal is to help breathe new life into an ailing region.

Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus began working on the concept of so-called “social business.” These are companies that raise capital, develop products, and sell them on the open market, but do so in pursuit of a broader social mission or, as he puts it, “replacing the principle of maximum profit with the principle of social benefit.” The Fourth Sector Network in the United States and Denmark establishes “public benefit organizations,” a hybrid that it says represents a new category of organizations that are both economically viable and serve a public purpose. One example: Mozilla, the company that gave us Firefox, was founded as a “public good organization.” And three American entrepreneurs came up with the “B corporation,” a name that means companies must amend their charters to change incentives to favor long-term value and public benefit rather than short-term economic gain.

Of course, neither open source projects nor “not just for profit” ventures, which were once unimaginable, have yet become the norm. And they will not send the joint-stock company to the dustbin of history. But the very fact of their appearance tells us something important about where we are going. “A whole movement has already formed, although it is not yet being taken seriously,” he told the journalist The New York Times lawyer specializing in non-profit organizations. One reason for this is probably that the goal of traditional forms of entrepreneurship—maximizing profits—is perfectly aligned with Motivation 2.0. While new organizations are aimed at providing maximum benefit- which does not fit into this outdated operating system, since it violates its main principles.

What do we think about our activities?

When I took my first economics course in the early 1980s, our teacher—a brilliant lecturer with the same poise as General Paton—made one important point before chalking out her first indifference curve on the board. Economics, she explained, is not the study of money. She studies behavior. Throughout the day, each of us constantly evaluates the benefits and costs of our actions and then decides how to act. Economists study not what people say, but what they do, because we do what is best for us. We are rational calculators, calculating our own economic interests.

When I was studying law a few years later, a similar idea appeared on the horizon again. The then new field of knowledge “law and economics” was based on the fact that precisely because of our unsurpassed ability to look after our own interests, laws and regulations often make it more difficult than easier to obtain reasonable and fair results. I survived law school in no small part because I found a talismanic phrase to recite during exams: “In a world of perfect information and low transaction costs, parties to a negotiation will seek the best possible outcome.”

Then, about ten years later, events took such an unusual turn that they made me doubt much of what I had worked so hard on and spent a huge amount of borrowed money studying. In 2002, the Nobel Committee awarded its prize in economics to a man who was not even an economist. And he was given the most prestigious award in the field, basically for discovering the fact that we don't we represent purely rational calculators programmed to calculate their own economic interests, and that parties often don't strive achieve the most beneficial result for yourself. Daniel Kahneman, an American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics that year for work he did with Amos Tversky, an Israeli psychologist, helped change the way we think about our own performance. And one of the consequences of this new way of thinking is that it calls into question many of the tenets of Motivation 2.0.

Kahneman and other behavioral economists agreed with my professor that economics is the study of human economic behavior. They just thought we were putting too much emphasis on economic component and we pay insufficient attention human. In their opinion, a super-rational person with a calculator instead of a brain does not exist in reality. It's just a convenient fiction.

In real life, our behavior is much more complex than described in textbooks, and often contradicts the idea that we are purely rational beings. We don't save enough money for retirement, even though it's clearly in our economic interests to do so. We hang on to bad investments longer than we should because we feel the pain of losing money more keenly than the joy of gaining the same amount. Give us two TVs to choose from and we'll choose one of them; add a third, unremarkable option, and we change our choice. In short, we're irrational, and predictably so, says economist Dan Ariely, author of , a casual and entertaining overview of behavioral economics.

The problem in our case is that Motivation 2.0 assumes that we are the same robotic gain-maximizers that I studied a couple of decades ago. Indeed, the very concept of external stimuli is based on the fact that we will always respond to them rationally. But most economists are no longer convinced. Sometimes these incentives work. Often they don't work. And in many cases, their use is accompanied by negative consequences. In short, the new understanding of our activities in economic terms is difficult to reconcile with Motivation 2.0.

Moreover, if people act for reasons that are illogical and outdated, why can't they act for reasons that help them find meaning and realize their own potential? If we are predictably irrational—and we obviously are—why shouldn't we also be predictably eccentric?

If you think this is a stretch, consider some examples of our strange behavior. We leave lucrative jobs for low-paying jobs that give us the opportunity to more clearly understand the meaning of our work. We learn to play the clarinet on the weekends, not expecting that it will help us make money (Motivation 2.0) or find a partner (Motivation 1.0). We play with puzzles even if we don't get a few raisins or dollars for solving them.

Some scientists are already pushing the boundaries of behavioral economics to assimilate these ideas. The most prominent of them is Bruno Frey, an economist at the University of Zurich. Like behavioral economists, he believes we need to go beyond the concept Homo Oeconomicus(“economic man” is a fiction that represents people as robots seeking to maximize their own benefit). He proposes moving in a slightly different direction - towards what he calls Homo Oeconomicus Maturus(or "mature economic man"). “This figure,” he says, “is more ‘mature’ in the sense that it is endowed with a more sophisticated motivational structure.” In other words, to fully understand human economic behavior, we must get used to an idea that conflicts with Motivation 2.0. As Frye writes, “intrinsic motivation has great value in all types of economic activity. It is unthinkable for people to be motivated solely or even predominantly by external incentives."

What are the conditions of our activity

If you manage other people, take a quick look over your shoulder. There's a ghost looming there. His name is Frederick Winslow Taylor (remember we talked about him in this chapter?), and he whispers something in your ear. “The work,” Taylor says, barely audible, “consists mostly of simple, not particularly interesting tasks. The only way to get people to do them is to properly incentivize them and carefully monitor them.” In the early 1900s, Taylor was basically right. Today, for residents of most countries, this is no longer entirely true. Yes, some people are still engaged in routine, uninspiring work that requires external control. But a surprisingly large number of people are doing more complex, more interesting and more independent work. And this type of work represents a direct challenge to the tenets of Motivation 2.0.

Let's start with the difficult one. Behavioral scientists often divide the activities we engage in at work or school into two categories: “algorithmic” and “heuristic.” When solving an algorithmic problem, you follow a set of set instructions, following a single path that leads to the only correct result. That is, this is a job that has an algorithm for its implementation. With the heuristic task the opposite is true. Precisely because there is no algorithm for it, you must experiment, use different possibilities and find non-standard solutions. A grocery store cashier's job is largely algorithmic. Basically you are doing the same thing over and over again. Developing an advertising campaign is primarily a heuristic job. You must create something new.

Throughout the 20th century, most work was algorithmic, and not just the kind of work that involved turning the same screws in the same way all day long. Even after we traded blue collar jobs for white ones, the tasks we performed often remained routine. That is, most activities - in accounting, in law, in finance, in programming and other areas - could be reduced to a script, to a specification, to a formula, a sequence of steps that led to the desired result. But today, throughout much of North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and Australia, routine white-collar jobs are disappearing. It is transferred to where it is cheaper to implement. In India, Bulgaria, the Philippines and other countries, workers who are paid less basically run an algorithm, figure out the correct solution, and immediately send it from their computer to someone on the other side of the Earth.

But the transfer of activities abroad is only one of the reasons for the reduction in the number of people engaged in algorithmic work that requires left-hemisphere activity. Just as draft animals and forklifts once replaced simple physical labor, computers today make simple intellectual work easier. So, in parallel with outsourcing, which is just beginning to gain momentum, software is being improved that can perform algorithm-based professional functions better, faster and cheaper than we do. This means that your cousin, the CPA, if he does mostly routine work, faces competition not only from his colleagues in Manila who are willing to work for less pay, but also from a regular computer program capable of preparing tax returns, which can Anyone can download it by paying $30. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30% of new jobs involve algorithmic work, while 70% of new workers are heuristic-based. Key reason: Routine work can be outsourced or automated in a way that creative, demanding, non-routine activities typically cannot be done.

This fundamentally changes the way we think about motivation. Researchers such as Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School have found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work great when applied to algorithmic problems. But they can be destructive for heuristics. This type of challenge—finding innovative solutions or creating products that people didn't even know they needed—depends entirely on Harlow's third drive. Amabile calls this the principle of intrinsic motivation for creativity. She writes, “Intrinsic motivation promotes creativity; controlling external motivation is detrimental to him.” In other words, the main tenets of Motivation 2.0 are actually negatively influence on the effectiveness of heuristic, right-hemisphere activity, on which modern economies depend.

Work is now more enjoyable, partly because it is more creative and less routine. And this also goes against the provisions of Motivation 2.0. This operating system is based on the belief that work can not to be pleasant in itself, and that is why we must seduce people with external rewards and threaten them with external punishments. One of the surprising discoveries of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which we will talk about more in Chapter 5, is that people are much more likely to experience “optimal experiences” at work than during leisure time. But if work is, by definition, enjoyable for more and more people, then the extrinsic incentives at the heart of Motivation 2.0 are becoming less and less relevant. Moreover, as Deci noted 40 years ago, adding extrinsic rewards to initially interesting tasks can often suppress motivation and reduce performance.

Once again, some basic ideas suddenly turn out to be not so immutable. Let's give an interesting example: Vocation Vacations (free work during vacation). This is a business where people pay their hard earned money... to work somewhere else. They use the time allotted for relaxation to try themselves in the place of a chef, the owner of a bicycle shop or the manager of a homeless shelter. The emergence of this and similar enterprises suggests that work, which economists always believed was a "burden" (something we should avoid unless we were paid for it), is becoming a "joy" (something , something you can strive for even in the absence of tangible benefits).

Finally, because work is seen as boring, Motivation 2.0 implies that people need to be supervised to make sure they don't slack off. This idea is also becoming less relevant and in many ways less feasible. Consider, for example, that in America alone there are more than 18 million businesses that the U.S. Census Bureau calls “nonemployer businesses,” meaning businesses that do not have paid jobs. Since people in these enterprises do not have subordinates, they do not need to manage or motivate anyone. Well, since they have no bosses, there is no one to guide and motivate them. They govern entirely by themselves.

The same goes for people who are technically self-employed. In the United States, 33.7 million people work from home at least one day a month, and 14.7 million do so every day, removing a significant portion of the workforce from management scrutiny. Under these conditions, people are forced to independently manage their own work. Although many organizations do not take such measures, in general they become leaner and less hierarchical. In an attempt to cut costs, they are trimming their bloated management team. This means that the remaining managers have to oversee more people, and as a result, they look less closely at each individual employee.

As organizational hierarchies flatten, companies need people who motivate themselves. This is forcing many organizations to become more like, uh, Wikipedia. The participants in this project are not “led” by anyone. No one sits staring at the ceiling trying to figure out how to “motivate” them. That's why it works. Routine, not very interesting activities require guidance; unconventional, more creative work depends on self-management. One business leader, who did not want us to mention his name, put it quite bluntly. When he conducts a job interview, he tells potential employees, “If you need me to motivate you, I probably won’t hire you.”

* * *

To summarize, Motivation 2.0 suffers from a threefold incompatibility problem. It fits very poorly with the principles of work organization that many new business models adhere to, which take into account that we are internally motivated to strive for high goals, and not just to maximize personal gain. It does not correspond to the ideas of 21st century economists about human activity, because economists are finally beginning to understand that we are fully developed people, and not economic robots living for one purpose. And, perhaps most importantly, it is difficult to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work, because more and more people find themselves engaged in creative, interesting and independent work, rather than hopelessly routine, monotonous and needy work. external control of labor. All these compatibility issues warn us that something is wrong with our operating system.

But to find out what exactly is wrong, and to take an important step towards building a new operating system, we need to take a closer look at the defects themselves.

Seven reasons why the carrot and stick approach (often) doesn't work...

D a visible object will continue to move, and an object at rest will remain motionless unless acted upon by an external force.

This is Newton's first law. Like his other laws, it is simple and elegant, and this is part of its strength. Even people like me, who struggled through school physics, are able to understand it and use it to explain phenomena in the outside world.

Motivation 2.0 is somewhat similar to it. It is based on two simple ideas.

Rewarding a behavior usually leads to its reinforcement. Punishment for behavior usually leads to its extinction.

And just as Newton's principles help us explain the world around us or calculate the trajectory of a thrown ball, the principles of Motivation 2.0 can help us understand the social environment and predict the trajectory of human behavior.

But at the subatomic level, Newtonian physics faces problems. There, in the world of hadrons, quarks and Schrödinger's cats, everything becomes strange and incomprehensible. The cold rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the extravagant unpredictability of Lewis Carroll. And in this regard, we can also draw some analogies with Motivation 2.0. When rewards and punishments collide with our third drive, something like behavioral quantum mechanics comes into play and strange things begin to happen.

Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: people have to earn a living. Salary, contract pay, some allowances and a few perks make up what I call “basic compensation.” If a person's basic reward is inadequate or biased, then all his attention will be completely absorbed by thoughts about the inferiority of his situation or anxiety about his financial situation. You will get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the whimsicality of intrinsic motivation. You won't get any motivation at all.

But once we cross that threshold, carrots and sticks can produce results, right opposite what we set out to achieve. Mechanisms designed to increase motivation can suppress it. Tactics aimed at stimulating creativity can actually reduce it. Programs to reward good deeds can lead to their disappearance. At the same time, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can, on the contrary, release it and provoke the growth of fraud, the development of addiction and dangerous rigidity of thinking.

This is all very unusual. And it does not manifest itself under any circumstances (which we will talk about in more detail in the appendix to this chapter). But, as Edward Deci's experiment with catfish cubes shows, many methods, the effectiveness of which we do not doubt, give paradoxical results: the consequences can be exactly the opposite of those we expected. These are the defects of the Motivation 2.0 system. And they manifest themselves in any activity, no matter what we do.

Less desired results

One of the most famous scenes in American literature offers us an important lesson about human motivation. In the second chapter of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom is faced with an unbearably boring task: whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence with a total area of 75 square meters. It cannot be said that this order made him very happy. “Life seemed empty to him, and existence a heavy burden,” writes Mark Twain.

But just at that moment when Tom had almost lost all hope, inspiration struck him. “No more and no less than a true dazzling inspiration.” When his friend Ben, passing by, begins to mock Tom about his sad lot, Tom behaves unexpectedly. Driving a brush along a fence is not a terribly chore, but a fantastic privilege, a source of, uh... inner motivation. The work turns out to be so exciting that when Ben asks to be allowed to do a few strokes, Tom refuses. He doesn't give in until Ben gives him his apple in exchange for this rare opportunity.

Soon other boys approach, who all fall into the trap set by Tom and end up whitewashing the fence - in several layers - instead of him. From this episode, Twain derives a key principle of motivation, namely: “that Work is what a person MUST do, and Play is what he is not obliged to do.” He further writes:

“There are rich gentlemen in England who like to drive a mail coach drawn by four horses in the summer, because this privilege costs them a lot of money; but if they were offered payment for this activity, the game would turn into work and would lose all interest for them.”

In other words, rewards can play the role of the philosopher's stone in behavioral alchemy: they can turn an interesting task into a tedious routine. They can turn play into work. And by reducing intrinsic motivation, they can undermine performance, creativity, and even impeccable behavior. Let's call this the “Sawyer effect”. A number of intriguing experiments conducted in different countries highlight four areas in which this effect manifests itself, once again demonstrating the gap between scientific knowledge and entrepreneurial practice.

Intrinsic motivation

Behavioral scientists like Deci came up with the discovery of the “Sawyer effect” almost forty years ago, although they did not use the term. Describing the paradoxical consequences of using external incentives, they used a concept called “hidden costs of incentives.” The term even gave the title to the first book written on the topic, a 1978 collection by psychologists Mark Lepper and David Greene.

One of Lepper and Green's early studies (which they conducted with Robert Nisbett) has achieved classic status and is one of the most referenced studies in the motivation literature. Three researchers observed a group of preschoolers for several days and identified children who preferred to spend their free time drawing. They then set up an experiment to see how rewards would affect activities that these children clearly enjoyed.

The experimenters divided the children into three groups. The first is the “expected reward” group. They showed each child a blue ribbon "Game Winner" certificate with their name on it and asked if they would draw to win the award. The second is the “unexpected reward” group. The researchers simply asked these children if they wanted to draw. If they agreed, then at the end of the session the scientists presented each of them with a “Game Winner” certificate. The third is the “no encouragement” group. The researchers asked these children if they wanted to draw, but they were not promised or given anything.

Two weeks later, during free-choice activities, teachers handed out paper and markers while researchers secretly observed the students. Children who were previously in the “unexpected reward” and “no reward” groups drew as much and with the same pleasure as before the experiment. But the children in the first group, who expected and then received a reward, showed much less interest in drawing and spent much less time on it as a result. The Sawyer effect manifested itself. Even after two weeks, these attractive prizes - so common in classrooms and offices - turned play into work.

It should be made clear that rewards per se did not necessarily suppress children's interest in drawing. Remember, if children did not expect a reward, receiving it had very little effect on their intrinsic motivation. Only conditional rewards—if you do this, you'll get that—had a negative impact. Why? If-then incentives require people to give up some of their autonomy. Like gentlemen who drive carriages for money rather than pleasure, they lose some control over their own lives. And this can cut off the source of their motivation, depriving the activity of any pleasure.

Lepper and Green repeated this experiment several more times and obtained similar results. Over time, other researchers encountered similar results in studies conducted with adult subjects. Over and over again, they found that when exposed to external rewards—especially conditional, expected, if-then rewards—the third motivating force was extinguished like a candle in the wind.

These discoveries were so incredible—after all, they challenged the standard methodology used in most companies and schools—that in 1999, Deci and two colleagues re-examined three decades of research on the topic to confirm their findings. “A careful examination of the effects of rewards across 128 experiments suggests that financial incentives tend to have a largely negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they found. “When institutions—families, schools, companies, and sports teams—focus on short-term goals and find it necessary to control people's behavior, they cause significant and irreparable harm.”

Try to encourage your child to study mathematics by paying him for each page of solved problems in the book of exercises, and he will almost certainly become a more diligent student for a while, but will lose interest in mathematics for the rest of his life. Take an industrial designer who loves his job and try to make him perform better by making his compensation contingent on the success of the product, and he will almost certainly work like a maniac for a while, but in the long run his interest in his work will decrease. As one of the most authoritative books on behavior puts it: “People use rewards in hopes of benefiting from increased motivation and influencing another person’s behavior, but they often suffer unanticipated and invisible costs by undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation for the activity.”

This is one of the most proven discoveries made in the social sciences, and also one of the most ignored. Despite the efforts of several skilled and passionate popularizers, notably Alfie Kohn, whose prophetic book Punished by Reward makes a scathing indictment of external incentives, we persist in trying to motivate people through this method. Maybe we are afraid to abandon Motivation 2.0, despite its obvious shortcomings. Perhaps we can't wrap our heads around the weird quantum mechanics of intrinsic motivation.

Or perhaps there is a more compelling reason. Even if controlling if-then rewards produce the Sawyer effect, might they make people perform better? If so, then they probably aren't that bad. So let's ask the question: Do extrinsic rewards improve performance? To find out, four economists traveled to India.

High efficiency

One of the difficulties in laboratory experiments examining the effects of extrinsic motivators such as money is their cost. If you expect to pay people for some activity, you must offer them a more or less significant amount. And in the United States or Europe, where the standard of living is quite high, an amount that seems significant for one individual, multiplied by dozens of participants, can result in unacceptably high bills for scientists studying human behavior.

Partly in an effort to get around this problem, a quartet of economists, including Dan Ariely, whom I mentioned in the last chapter, set up a laboratory in the Indian city of Madurai to study the influence that external incentives have on performance. Because the cost of living in rural India is much lower than in North America, the researchers could offer subjects large rewards without the risk of ruining themselves.

They recruited 87 participants and asked them to play a variety of games, such as throwing tennis balls at a target, solving anagrams, memorizing sequences of numbers, and others that required motor skills, creativity, or concentration. To test the impact of incentives, experimenters offered three types of rewards for achieving certain levels of performance.

A third of the participants could receive a small reward - 4 rupees (which was about 50 American cents at the time and equal to a day's earnings in Madurai) for achieving a certain level of performance. The second third could earn an average remuneration of 40 rupees (about 5 dollars, that is, two weeks' earnings). And another third could receive a very large reward - 400 rupees (about 50 dollars - approximately five months' earnings).

What happened? Could compensation predict performance levels?

Yes. But not in the way one might expect. As it turned out, people who were offered medium-sized bonuses did not perform any better than those who received small rewards. What about the members of the group that received super incentives of 400 rupees? They performed the worst. In almost all respects, they lagged behind participants who received low and medium rewards. In presenting the results of the study in a report to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the scientists wrote: “In eight of the nine tasks that we monitored in three experiments, higher incentives led to deterioration results".

Let's take a closer look at this conclusion. Four economists—two from MIT, one from Carnegie Mellon University, and one from the University of Chicago—undertake to conduct research for the Federal Reserve, one of the most powerful economic players in the world. But instead of confirming the simple business principle that higher compensation leads to better results, they seem to prove it wrong. And it is not only American researchers who come to these paradoxical conclusions. In 2009, experts from the London School of Economics, the alma mater of 11 Nobel laureates, analyzed the performance of 51 corporations in which employee salaries depended on labor efficiency. Here's what these economists concluded: "We believe that financial incentives... may ultimately have a negative impact on overall performance." On both sides of the Atlantic there is a gap between what science knows and what business does.

“Many existing institutions offer very large incentives to those who solve problems of the same type that we used,” Ariely and his colleagues write. “Our results call [this] practice into question.” Our experiment suggests...that we cannot be certain that introducing or increasing incentives will consistently improve performance.” On the contrary, in many cases, conditional incentives—the lifeline of all managers trying to motivate employees—can be a “losing strategy.”

Despite the opinion of respected authors, few of us devote our working hours to throwing tennis balls or solving anagrams. What about more creative tasks that have more in common with what we actually do at work?

Creativity

There are few tests as suitable for quickly testing problem-solving skills as the test called the Candle Problem. Invented by psychologist Carl Dancker in 1935, the test is used in a wide variety of experiments in the behavioral sciences. Try it again and see what you can do.

You sit at a table against a wooden wall and the experimenter gives you the items shown below: a candle, a box of tacks, and a box of matches.

Candle problem. Initial conditions

Candle problem solved

Your task is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip onto the table or floor. Think about how you would solve this problem. Many people start by trying to attach the candle to the wall with thumbtacks. But nothing comes of this. Some people try lighting a match, melting the side of the candle and attaching it to the wall. This doesn't help either. But after spending five or ten minutes, most people find the solution, which you can see below.

The key is to overcome what is called “functional fixedness.” You look at the box and see only one function - a container for buttons. But, upon reflection, you eventually realize that this box can serve another function - a candle stand. Using the expressions from the previous chapter, the decision is not algorithmic (follow a given path), but heuristic (discard the usual patterns to find a non-standard strategy).

What would happen if you gave people a conceptual problem like this and offered them a reward for solving it quickly? Sam Glucksberg, a psychologist now at Princeton University, tested this decades ago by using a stopwatch to measure how quickly two groups of participants solved problems. He told one group that he would keep track of how long they worked simply to determine the norm: how long it would normally take a person to solve a similar puzzle. He offered incentives to the second group. If, according to the test results, the subject fell into the best group, which consisted of 25% of the participants who showed the shortest time among all those tested, he received 5 dollars. If the participant's time was the best, the reward was $25. Taking into account inflation, this was quite decent money that could be received for a few minutes of work, in short, an excellent incentive.

The results of the experiment showed that reward-motivated subjects took an average of three and a half minutes to solve the problem more than participants who did not receive compensation. Contrary to all the tenets of Motivation 2.0, the stimulus designed to sharpen thinking and activate creativity ended up dulling thinking and stifling creativity. Why? Rewards, by their nature, narrow our focus. This is useful when there is a clearly defined path to solving a problem. They help us look forward and act faster. But the influence of “if-then” motivators is detrimental when it comes to solving a problem like the candle problem. As the experiment showed, rewards narrowed people's focus and prevented them from looking at things more broadly, which would allow them to find new uses for known objects.

Apparently, something similar happens in cases where it is not so much necessary to solve an existing problem as to constantly create something new. Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School and one of the leading creativity researchers, has conducted numerous experiments studying the impact of contingent rewards on the creative process. For one study, she and two colleagues recruited 23 professional artists from the United States who worked both for commissions and “for the hobby.” They asked artists to randomly select ten paintings each painted for sale and those painted for themselves. Amabile and her team then submitted these works to a panel of trained artists and experts who knew nothing about the study, and asked them to rate the works in terms of creativity and technical skill.

“The results were simply amazing,” the scientists wrote. – Commissioned works were rated as much less creative than non-commissioned works, although they were rated equally in terms of technical quality. Moreover, the artists themselves admitted that they feel much more constrained when working on commission than when they write for themselves.” One artist they interviewed describes the Sawyer effect in action:

“Not always, but most of the time, when you paint for someone else, it becomes more of a “job” than a fun time. When I write for myself, I feel exclusively the joy of creativity and can work all night without even noticing it. When working on a commissioned painting, you must restrain yourself and try to do what the client wants."

Another longitudinal study of artists found that preoccupation with extrinsic rewards may, surprisingly, be a hindrance to eventual success. In the early 1960s, researchers conducted a survey among second- and third-year art students at the Art Institute of Chicago, finding out their attitudes towards work and the leading type of motivation: internal or external. Using this data as a baseline, another researcher followed these students in the early 1980s to find out how their careers were progressing. Here is one of the most interesting findings, especially relevant for men: “The less evidence of extrinsic motivation was noted during art school, the more significant was professional success in art, both a few years after graduation and almost twenty years later. " Intrinsically motivated painters and sculptors, whose main rewards were the joy of discovery and the solving of creative problems, were able to survive the difficult times - and the lack of money and recognition that are almost inevitable accompaniments of an artist's career. And this gave rise to another paradox through the looking glass of the third driving force. “Those artists who painted and sculpted for the pleasure of the creative process rather than for external rewards created works that received more social recognition,” the study says. “It was those who least pursued external rewards who ultimately received them.”

Of course, this result is not true for all types of problems. Amabile and other scientists have found that external incentives can be effective in solving algorithmic problems that depend on following a known path to its logical conclusion. But for right-brain activities that require flexibility, creativity, or perspective, conditional rewards can be dangerous. Employees encouraged in this way often find it difficult to notice what is happening on the periphery and find original solutions. And this is also one of the firmly established facts in the field of social sciences, which has been subjected to repeated testing and detailed research over several years by Teresa Amabile and other scientists. For artists, scientists, inventors, students and many others, intrinsic motivation - the desire to do something because it is interesting, exciting and challenging - is a necessary condition for achieving creative heights. But the “if-then” incentives that are central to most companies' management strategy tend to stifle rather than spark creative thinking. And as economics moves toward more heuristic, right-brain work and most of us have to deal with our own versions of the candle problem, this is perhaps the most alarming gap between scientific knowledge and entrepreneurial practice.

Good deeds

Philosophers and doctors have long debated whether donors should be paid for donating blood. Some have argued that blood, like the tissues or organs of the human body, is a special case and we should not be able to buy or sell them in the same way as a barrel of crude oil or a box of bearings. Others argued that excessive scrupulousness was inappropriate here, since the payment for the delivery of this substance would ensure sufficient supplies of it.

But in 1970, British sociologist Richard Titmuss, studying blood donation in the United Kingdom, made a bold suggestion. Paying to donate blood isn't just immoral, he said. It is also irrational. If Britain decides to pay its citizens to donate, it will actually will reduce blood supplies in the country. No doubt about it, it was an eccentric thought. The economists chuckled. But Titmuss never tested his idea in practice; it was just a philosophical premonition.

But a quarter of a century later, two Swedish economists decided to see if Titmuss was right. In an intriguing field experiment, they visited a regional blood transfusion center in Gothenburg and found 153 women interested in donating blood. Then - and this seems to be a tradition among motivation researchers - they divided the women into three groups. The experimenters told members of the first group that donating blood was voluntary. These participants could donate blood, but did not receive any payment. The second group was given different instructions. If these participants donate blood, they will each receive 50 Swedish kronor (about $7). The third group heard a new variation of the second offer: a reward of 50 SEK with the option to immediately donate it to a children's cancer fund.

Of the first group, 52% of women ultimately decided to donate their blood. Undoubtedly, they were altruists who wanted to do a good deed for their fellow citizens even in the absence of compensation.

What about the second group? Motivation 2.0 suggests that this group might be a little more interested in donating. They volunteered, indicating intrinsic motivation. Receiving an additional few crowns could further strengthen this impulse. But, as you probably already guessed, that’s not what happened at all. In this group, only 30% of women decided to donate blood. Instead of increasing the number of blood donors, the proposed payment to people reduced this number is almost half.

Meanwhile, the third group, which had the option to immediately give the money they received to charity, responded largely the same as the first group: 53% of participants became blood donors.

Ultimately, Titmuss's hunch appears to have been correct. Adding a monetary incentive did not increase the number of people engaging in the desired behavior. It led to their reduction. The reason is that he distorted the very meaning of the altruistic act and “repressed” the inner desire to do something good. A good deed is the highest meaning of blood donation. It gives “a feeling that money can’t buy,” as the American Red Cross brochures say. This is why the number of voluntary blood donors invariably increases during natural disasters and other disasters. But if governments were to commit to paying people to help their neighbors during these crises, donation could die out.

Yet in this Swedish example, the offer of a reward was not itself destructive. The ability to immediately donate the 50 crowns received, instead of putting it in your pocket, negated this effect. And this is also extremely important. The point is that rewards are not necessarily a bad thing. For example, when the Italian government provided paid time off for blood donors, blood donations increased. The law removed the barrier that stood in the way of altruism. So while some proponents of this view will tell you that extrinsic rewards are inherently evil, this is simply not empirically true. It is true that mixing incentives with intrinsically interesting, creative or noble tasks, introducing them without understanding anything about the intricacies of motivation, is a very dangerous game. When if-then stimuli are used in these types of situations, they usually do more harm than good. By excluding the ingredients of true motivation - independence, skill, determination, they limit us in terms of possible achievements.

More unwanted results

In the third-motive universe, where everything is turned upside down, rewards can lead to the extinction of the behaviors they are designed to reinforce. But that is not all. Inappropriate use of external stimuli can have another side effect: they can develop behavior that we consider undesirable. And here practical activity also lags behind the achievements of science. And scientists tell us that carrots and sticks can encourage negative behavior, become addictive, and encourage short-term thinking at the expense of long-term thinking.

Unethical behavior

What could be more useful than having a goal in mind? From the very first days, teachers, coaches and parents advise us to set goals and work tirelessly to achieve them, and they do this not in vain. Having a goal is really helpful. The scientific literature shows that goals, by helping us disconnect from distractions, can motivate us to try harder, work longer, and achieve more.

Recently, however, a group of experts from Harvard Business School, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School questioned the validity of this widely accepted recommendation. “Goal setting should not be offered as an over-the-counter miracle cure for productivity, but rather should be selectively prescribed, come with a warning on the label, and be used under medical supervision,” they wrote. Goals that people set for themselves that are mastery-oriented are usually beneficial. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly profits, test scores, etc.—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.

Like all external stimuli, goals focus our attention. This is one of the reasons why goal setting can be effective; it helps focus your mind. But as we already know, focused attention has its costs. For complex or abstract problems, offering a reward may limit the breadth of thinking needed to find innovative solutions. In addition, if an external goal is a priority, especially a short-term goal with a predictable outcome, the achievement of which promises a significant gain, its presence may interfere with the perception of one's own behavior in a broader context. As leading business school professors write, “much evidence suggests that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can encourage unethical behavior.”

Examples of this are legion, researchers note. Sears sets a sales quota for its auto repair shop staff, and the workers respond by shortchanging customers and charging them for extra, unnecessary repair work. Enron has high profit targets, and the pressure to deliver at all costs may be the catalyst for the company's downfall. Ford is determined to produce a car of a given weight, at a given price, by a target date, so it neglects safety tests and produces the dangerous Ford Pinto.

The problem with making extrinsic rewards the only goal that matters is that some people tend to take the shortest route to get there, even if that route is quite muddy.

Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that seem to be part of modern life involve attempts to take shortcuts to success. Managers manipulate quarterly profit figures to receive performance bonuses. High school counselors falsify grades on academic transcripts so their students can get into college. Athletes take steroids to perform well, which promises them big prizes.

Compare this approach to the behavior exhibited by intrinsically motivated people. Where the reward is the activity itself, be it increasing the level of education, satisfying customers, realizing one's own potential, there are no shortcuts. The path leading to such a goal cannot be immoral. In a sense, it is simply impossible to act unethically, because it is not your competitor who will suffer, but you yourself.

End of introductory fragment.

Corporations subject to special taxation under Title S of the US Internal Revenue Code. – Note ed.

Standard corporation with ordinary taxation. – Note ed.

Another name for this discipline is economic analysis of law. – Note ed.

Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. N.Y., 2008. Russian edition: Arieli D. Positive irrationality. How to benefit from your illogical actions. – M., 2010.

Note ed.: Let me quote the passage from the novel where this transformation is described.

“What, old man, you have to work, huh?<…>

Tom looked closely at Ben and asked:

-What do you call work?

– And this, in your opinion, is not work, or what?

Tom began to whitewash again and answered casually:

“Well, maybe it’s work, maybe it’s not work.” All I know is that Tom Sawyer likes her.

- Come on, it’s like you like whitewashing so much!

The brush still moved evenly along the fence.

- Like? Why not? I suppose it’s not every day that our brother gets to whitewash the fence.

After this the whole matter appeared in a new light. Ben stopped chewing the apple. Tom carefully moved the brush back and forth, stopping from time to time to admire the result, adding a stroke, another, again admiring the result, and Ben watched his every movement, showing more and more interest in the matter.” (M. Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Translated by N. Daruzes).

The two-pronged definition of the Sawyer effect is: the result of practices that can turn play into work or work into play.

Kohn A. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. N.Y., 1993.

The 119 men who took part in the experiment showed slightly different results. Offering money did not have a statistically significant effect, positive or negative, on the decision to donate blood.

Quotes
"One business leader... was quite blunt about motivation. When he interviews for a job, he tells potential employees, 'If you need me to motivate you, I probably won't hire you.'
“A careful study of the effects of rewards across 128 experiments suggests that financial incentives tend to have a largely negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they found. “When institutions—families, schools, companies, and sports teams—focus on short-term goals and find necessary to control people's behavior, they cause them significant and irreparable harm."
"Try to encourage a child to study mathematics by paying him for each page of solved problems in a book of exercises, and he will almost certainly become a more diligent student for a while, but will lose interest in mathematics for the rest of his life. Take an industrial designer who loves his job, and try to get him to work better by making his compensation contingent on the success of the product, and he will almost certainly work like a maniac for a while, but in the long run his interest in his work will decrease."

What is this book about
This is a book about motivation. About what really motivates people to achieve outstanding results. You may be thinking: well, of course it's money. Much money. After all, people work for money, and the practice “do A and I’ll give you B” has become almost a management classic. It's surprising to hear that this is completely wrong!

In his provocative bestseller, Daniel Pink convincingly argues that in the information age, the behaviorist system of motivation, based only on rewards for achieving results, has become not only useless, but in some cases directly harms both employees and the company. But how then can you motivate staff to achieve goals and defeat competitors? Emphasize each person's natural desire for excellence, mastery, and independence, and only hire people who are intrinsically motivated. It is not as difficult as it might seem, and in the book you will find simple and understandable tools for building a new motivation system.

Why the book is worth reading
Because this is the most important book on motivation written in the world in recent years.
The book radically changes our understanding of the factors influencing work results, motivation to work, and creativity. The author backs up all his thoughts with more than convincing results from hundreds of psychological studies on human behavior.
The second half of the book is very practical - the author gives many tools and methods for creating a new motivation system. This is a unique blend of humanistic psychology and real management practice!
2nd edition.