The puzzle of motivation

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I need to make a confession

at the outset here.

A little over 20 years ago,

I did something that I regret,

something that I'm not

particularly proud of.

Something that, in many ways,

I wish no one would ever know,

but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.

(Laughter)

In the late 1980s,

in a moment of youthful indiscretion,

I went to law school.

(Laughter)

In America, law is a professional degree:

after your university degree,

you go on to law school.

When I got to law school,

I didn't do very well.

To put it mildly, I didn't do very well.

I, in fact, graduated in the part

of my law school class

that made the top 90% possible.

(Laughter)

Thank you.

I never practiced law a day in my life;

I pretty much wasn't allowed to.

(Laughter)

But today, against my better judgment,

against the advice of my own wife,

I want to try to dust off

some of those legal skills --

what's left of those legal skills.

I don't want to tell you a story.

I want to make a case.

I want to make a hard-headed,

evidence-based,

dare I say lawyerly case,

for rethinking how we run our businesses.

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

take a look at this.

This is called the candle problem.

Some of you might know it.

It's created in 1945

by a psychologist named Karl Duncker.

He created this experiment

that is used in many other experiments

in behavioral science.

And here's how it works.

Suppose I'm the experimenter.

I bring you into a room.

I give you a candle,

some thumbtacks and some matches.

And I say to you,

"Your job is to attach

the candle to the wall

so the wax doesn't drip onto the table."

Now what would you do?

Many people begin trying

to thumbtack the candle to the wall.

Doesn't work.

I saw somebody

kind of make the motion over here --

some people have a great idea

where they light the match,

melt the side of the candle,

try to adhere it to the wall.

It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work.

And eventually, after five or ten minutes,

most people figure out the solution,

which you can see here.

The key is to overcome

what's called functional fixedness.

You look at that box and you see it

only as a receptacle for the tacks.

But it can also have this other function,

as a platform for the candle.

The candle problem.

I want to tell you about an experiment

using the candle problem,

done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg,

who is now at Princeton University, US,

This shows the power of incentives.

He gathered his participants and said:

"I'm going to time you, how quickly

you can solve this problem."

To one group he said,

"I'm going to time you to establish norms,

averages for how long it typically takes

someone to solve this sort of problem."

To the second group he offered rewards.

He said, "If you're in the top 25%

of the fastest times,

you get five dollars.

If you're the fastest of everyone

we're testing here today,

you get 20 dollars."

Now this is several years ago,

adjusted for inflation,

it's a decent sum of money

for a few minutes of work.

It's a nice motivator.

Question:

How much faster did this group

solve the problem?

Answer:

It took them, on average,

three and a half minutes longer.

3.5 min longer.

This makes no sense, right?

I mean, I'm an American.

I believe in free markets.

That's not how it's supposed

to work, right?

(Laughter)

If you want people to perform better,

you reward them. Right?

Bonuses, commissions,

their own reality show.

Incentivize them.

That's how business works.

But that's not happening here.

You've got an incentive designed

to sharpen thinking

and accelerate creativity,

and it does just the opposite.

It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.

What's interesting about this experiment

is that it's not an aberration.

This has been replicated

over and over again

for nearly 40 years.

These contingent motivators --

if you do this, then you get that --

work in some circumstances.

But for a lot of tasks,

they actually either don't work

or, often, they do harm.

This is one of the most robust findings

in social science,

and also one of the most ignored.

I spent the last couple of years

looking at the science

of human motivation,

particularly the dynamics

of extrinsic motivators

and intrinsic motivators.

And I'm telling you, it's not even close.

If you look at the science,

there is a mismatch

between what science knows

and what business does.

What's alarming here

is that our business operating system --

think of the set of assumptions

and protocols beneath our businesses,

how we motivate people,

how we apply our human resources--

it's built entirely

around these extrinsic motivators,

around carrots and sticks.

That's actually fine for many kinds

of 20th century tasks.

But for 21st century tasks,

that mechanistic,

reward-and-punishment approach

doesn't work,

often doesn't work,

and often does harm.

Let me show you.

Glucksberg did another similar experiment,

he presented the problem

in a slightly different way,

like this up here.

Attach the candle to the wall

so the wax doesn't drip onto the table.

Same deal. You: we're timing for norms.

You: we're incentivizing.

What happened this time?

This time, the incentivized group

kicked the other group's butt.

Why?

Because when the tacks are out of the box,

it's pretty easy isn't it?

(Laughter)

If-then rewards work really well

for those sorts of tasks,

where there is a simple set of rules

and a clear destination to go to.

Rewards, by their very nature,

narrow our focus, concentrate the mind;

that's why they work in so many cases.

So, for tasks like this,

a narrow focus, where you just see

the goal right there,

zoom straight ahead to it,

they work really well.

But for the real candle problem,

you don't want to be looking like this.

The solution is on the periphery.

You want to be looking around.

That reward actually narrows our focus

and restricts our possibility.

Let me tell you why this is so important.

In western Europe,

in many parts of Asia,

in North America, in Australia,

white-collar workers are doing

less of this kind of work,

and more of this kind of work.

That routine, rule-based,

left-brain work --

certain kinds of accounting,

financial analysis,

computer programming --

has become fairly easy to outsource,

fairly easy to automate.

Software can do it faster.

Low-cost providers can do it cheaper.

So what really matters

are the more right-brained

creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.

Think about your own work.

Think about your own work.

Are the problems that you face,

or even the problems

we've been talking about here,

do they have a clear set of rules,

and a single solution?

No. The rules are mystifying.

The solution, if it exists at all,

is surprising and not obvious.

Everybody in this room

is dealing with their own version

of the candle problem.

And for candle problems of any kind,

in any field,

those if-then rewards,

the things around which we've built

so many of our businesses,

don't work!

It makes me crazy.

And here's the thing.

This is not a feeling.

Okay? I'm a lawyer;

I don't believe in feelings.

This is not a philosophy.

I'm an American;

I don't believe in philosophy.

(Laughter)

This is a fact --

or, as we say in my hometown

of Washington, D.C.,

a true fact.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Let me give you an example.

Let me marshal the evidence here.

I'm not telling a story,

I'm making a case.

Ladies and gentlemen

of the jury, some evidence:

Dan Ariely, one of the great

economists of our time,

he and three colleagues

did a study of some MIT students.

They gave these MIT

students a bunch of games,

games that involved creativity,

and motor skills, and concentration.

And the offered them, for performance,

three levels of rewards:

small reward, medium reward,

large reward.

If you do really well

you get the large reward, on down.

What happened?

As long as the task

involved only mechanical skill

bonuses worked as they would be expected:

the higher the pay,

the better the performance.

Okay?

But once the task called

for even rudimentary cognitive skill,

a larger reward led to poorer performance.

Then they said,

"Let's see if there's any

cultural bias here.

Let's go to Madurai, India and test it."

Standard of living is lower.

In Madurai, a reward that is modest

in North American standards,

is more meaningful there.

Same deal. A bunch of games,

three levels of rewards.

What happens?

People offered the medium level of rewards

did no better than people

offered the small rewards.

But this time,

people offered the highest rewards,

they did the worst of all.

In eight of the nine tasks we examined

across three experiments,

higher incentives led

to worse performance.

Is this some kind of touchy-feely

socialist conspiracy going on here?

No, these are economists from MIT,

from Carnegie Mellon,

from the University of Chicago.

Do you know who sponsored this research?

The Federal Reserve Bank

of the United States.

That's the American experience.

Let's go across the pond

to the London School of Economics,

LSE, London School of Economics,

alma mater of eleven

Nobel Laureates in economics.

Training ground for great

economic thinkers

like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek,

and Mick Jagger.

(Laughter)

Last month,

just last month,

economists at LSE looked at 51 studies

of pay-for-performance plans,

inside of companies.

Here's what they said:

"We find that financial incentives

can result in a negative impact

on overall performance."

There is a mismatch

between what science knows

and what business does.

And what worries me,

as we stand here in the rubble

of the economic collapse,

is that too many organizations

are making their decisions,

their policies about talent and people,

based on assumptions that are outdated,

unexamined,

and rooted more in folklore

than in science.

And if we really want to get

out of this economic mess,

if we really want high performance

on those definitional tasks

of the 21st century,

the solution is not to do

more of the wrong things,

to entice people with a sweeter carrot,

or threaten them with a sharper stick.

We need a whole new approach.

The good news is that the scientists

who've been studying motivation

have given us this new approach.

It's built much more

around intrinsic motivation.

Around the desire to do things

because they matter,

because we like it, they're interesting,

or part of something important.

And to my mind, that new operating

system for our businesses

revolves around three elements:

autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy: the urge

to direct our own lives.

Mastery: the desire to get better

and better at something that matters.

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do

in the service of something

larger than ourselves.

These are the building blocks

of an entirely new operating system

for our businesses.

I want to talk today only about autonomy.

In the 20th century, we came up

with this idea of management.

Management did not emanate from nature.

Management is not a tree,

it's a television set.

Somebody invented it.

It doesn't mean

it's going to work forever.

Management is great.

Traditional notions

of management are great

if you want compliance.

But if you want engagement,

self-direction works better.

Some examples of some kind

of radical notions of self-direction.

You don't see a lot of it,

but you see the first stirrings

of something really interesting going on,

what it means is paying people adequately

and fairly, absolutely --

getting the issue of money off the table,

and then giving people lots of autonomy.

Some examples.

How many of you have heard

of the company Atlassian?

It looks like less than half.

(Laughter)

Atlassian is an Australian

software company.

And they do something incredibly cool.

A few times a year

they tell their engineers,

"Go for the next 24 hours

and work on anything you want,

as long as it's not part

of your regular job.

Work on anything you want."

Engineers use this time to come up

with a cool patch for code,

come up with an elegant hack.

Then they present all of the stuff

that they've developed

to their teammates,

to the rest of the company,

in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting

at the end of the day.

Being Australians, everybody has a beer.

They call them FedEx Days.

Why?

Because you have to deliver

something overnight.

It's pretty; not bad.

It's a huge trademark violation,

but it's pretty clever.

(Laughter)

That one day of intense autonomy

has produced a whole array

of software fixes

that might never have existed.

It's worked so well that Atlassian

has taken it to the next level

with 20% time --

done, famously, at Google --

where engineers can spend

20% of their time

working on anything they want.

They have autonomy over their time,

their task, their team, their technique.

Radical amounts of autonomy.

And at Google, as many of you know,

about half of the new products

in a typical year

are birthed during that 20% time:

things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.

Let me give you an even more

radical example of it:

something called the Results Only

Work Environment (the ROWE),

created by two American consultants,

in place at a dozen companies

around North America.

In a ROWE people don't have schedules.

They show up when they want.

They don't have to be in the office

at a certain time, or any time.

They just have to get their work done.

How they do it, when they do it,

where they do it, is totally up to them.

Meetings in these kinds

of environments are optional.

What happens?

Almost across the board,

productivity goes up,

worker engagement goes up,

worker satisfaction goes up,

turnover goes down.

Autonomy, mastery and purpose,

the building blocks

of a new way of doing things.

Some of you might look at this and say,

"Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian."

And I say, "Nope.

I have proof."

The mid-1990s, Microsoft started

an encyclopedia called Encarta.

They had deployed

all the right incentives,

They paid professionals

to write and edit thousands of articles.

Well-compensated managers

oversaw the whole thing

to make sure it came in

on budget and on time.

A few years later,

another encyclopedia got started.

Different model, right?

Do it for fun.

No one gets paid a cent,

or a euro or a yen.

Do it because you like to do it.

Just 10 years ago,

if you had gone to an economist, anywhere,

"Hey, I've got these two different

models for creating an encyclopedia.

If they went head to head, who would win?"

10 years ago you could not

have found a single sober economist

anywhere on planet Earth

who would have predicted

the Wikipedia model.

This is the titanic battle

between these two approaches.

This is the Ali-Frazier

of motivation, right?

This is the Thrilla in Manila.

Intrinsic motivators

versus extrinsic motivators.

Autonomy, mastery and purpose,

versus carrot and sticks, and who wins?

Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery

and purpose, in a knockout.

Let me wrap up.

There is a mismatch between

what science knows and what business does.

Here is what science knows.

One: Those 20th century rewards,

those motivators we think

are a natural part of business,

do work, but only in a surprisingly

narrow band of circumstances.

Two: Those if-then rewards

often destroy creativity.

Three: The secret to high performance

isn't rewards and punishments,

but that unseen intrinsic drive--

the drive to do things for their own sake.

The drive to do things cause they matter.

And here's the best part.

We already know this.

The science confirms

what we know in our hearts.

So, if we repair this mismatch

between science and business,

if we bring our motivation,

notions of motivation

into the 21st century,

if we get past this lazy,

dangerous, ideology

of carrots and sticks,

we can strengthen our businesses,

we can solve a lot

of those candle problems,

and maybe, maybe --

we can change the world.

I rest my case.

(Applause)