The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking

If you liked my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, you'll love this discussion guide.


The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking

1. Has Pink persuaded you about the gap between what science knows and what organizations do? Do you agree that we need to upgrade our motivational operating system? Why or why not?
2. How has Motivation 2.0 affected your experiences at school, at work, or in family life? If Motivation 3.0 has been the prevailing ethic when you were young, how would your experiences have differed?
3. Do you consider yourself more Type I or Type X? Why? Think of three people in your life (whether at home, work, or school). Are they more Type I or Type X? What leads you to your conclusions?
4. Describe a time when you’ve seen one of the seven deadly flaws of carrots and sticks in action. What lessons might you and others learn from that experience? Have you seen instances when carrots and sticks have been effective?
5. How well is your current job meeting your need for “baseline rewards”–salary, benefits, a few perks? If it’s falling short, what changes can you or your organization make?
6. Pink draws a distinction between “routine” work and “nonroutine” work. How much of your own work is routine? How much is nonroutine?
7. If you’re a boss, how might you replace “if-then” rewards with a more autonomous environment and the occasional “now that” reward?
8. As you think about your own best work, what aspect of autonomy has been most important to you? Autonomy over what you do (task), when you do it (time), how you do it (technique), or with whom you do it (team)? Why? How much autonomy do you have at work right now? Is that enough?
9. Would initiatives like FedEx Days, 20 percent time, and ROWE work in your organization? Why or why not? What are one or two other ideas that would bring out more Type I behavior in your workplace?
10. Describe a time recently when you’ve experienced “flow.” What were you doing? Where were you? How might you tweak your current role to bring on more of these optimal experiences?
11. Is there anything you’ve ever wanted to master that you’ve avoided for reasons like “I’m too old” or “I’ll never be good at that” or “It would be a waste of time”? What are the barriers to giving it a try? How can you remove those barriers?
12. Are you in a position to delegate any of the tasks that might be holding you back from more challenging pursuits? How might you hand off these tasks in a way that does not take away your colleagues’ autonomy?
13. How would you redesign your office, your classroom, or your home–the physical environment, the processes, the rules–to promote greater engagement and mastery by everyone?
14. When tackling the routine tasks your job requires, what strategies can you come up with to trigger the positive side of the Sawyer Effect?
15. Drive talks a lot about purpose–both for organizations and individuals. Does your organization have a purpose? What is it? If your organization is for-profit, is purpose even a realistic goal given the competitive pressures in every industry?
16. Are you–in your paid work, family life, or volunteering–on a path toward purpose? What is that purpose?
17. Is education today too Type X–that is, does it put too great an emphasis on extrinsic rewards? If so, how should we reconfigure schools and classrooms? Is there an elegant way to reconcile intrinsic motivation and accountability?
18. If you’re a mom or dad, does your home environment promote more Type I or Type X behavior in your child or children? How? What, if anything, should you do about it?
19. Does Pink underplay the importance of earning a living? Is his view of Motivation 3.0 a bit too utopian–that is, is Pink, if you’ll pardon the pun, too rosy?
20. What are the things that truly motivate you? Now think about the last week. How many of those 168 hours were devoted to these things? Can you do better?