Motivation 3.0

One of the perks of being at Chautauqua all season with a job that has most of it's events in the evening is that I get to attend the great lectures that take place twice daily. Today's 10:45 lecture was Daniel H. Pink.

Credentials: 3 Best selling books (NYT, Wash Post, and BusWeek), Yale JD, and vice-presidential speech writer.

Pink's lecture was a case against the motivation factors that have prevailed for business and education over the last, I believe he said 400 years. Incentive-based pay. Or as he called it, Motivation 2.0. Slightly above Motivation 1.0 which is the motivation to survive. Instead, he highlighted a series of scientific studies to make the case that incentive-based pay does not work the way we think it does (since I'm no longer attached to a legit library, you'll have to deal with this Harvard Business Review article to back him/us up). What does work however, is autonomy, creativity and purpose.

That is to say give someone something to do that allows them to think outside the box, manage their own work, and show them how this work will be of great impact on society and people will perform above and beyond what you could even imagine.

Governing our business and even our school systems around this is certainly Idealistic. But the illusion is thinking that our current economic crisis had nothing to do with the motivation strategies used in business in the 20th century. It's an illusion then to think that Pay for Performance will work in our Education system.

What these studies done over the last 40 years show is that pay for performance will work, if you want students to get higher test scores. Pay for performance will not work if you want teachers who will work towards genuinely educating the mind of our future. Pay for performance will churn out data. But it will not yield the teaching that will encourage students to continue to learn. Why will this, why did this, not work? It is because the problem with incentive based pay is that once the incentive is removed the behavior stops. Do we really want teachers who only work hard when there's an incentive for them if we've seen what happens when CEO's only work hard when there's an incentive for them?

When it comes to white-collar jobs and teaching, the idealistic solution without illusions is a fair wage that eliminates financial stress, the opportunity to chart the course as you see fit, so long as you know it will benefit society.

Autonomy, Creativity, and Purpose.