Drive - When to Use Rewards: A Simple Flowchart

Great flowchart from Daniel Pink's Drive, titled When to Use Rewards: A Simple Flowchart.

Type I for Organizations, Compensation Teaching, Exercise

I liked Daniel Pink's Drive so much that I took notes on his suggestions on Type I behavior on Organizations, Teaching, and Exercise.

Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

• Try "20% Time" with Training Wheels: Encourage employees to spend one-fifth of their hours working on any project they want. Or start with 10%, or an afternoon. Give people autonomy, and maybe someone in your group will invent the next Post-it note.
• Encourage Peer-to-Peer "Now That" Rewards: Allow anyone in your company to award a $50 bonus to any of their colleagues, without permission at any time.
• Conduct an Autonomy Audit: Ask everyone in your group to rate anonymously on a scale of 0 ("almost none") to 10 ("a huge amount") these four questions: 1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work–your main responsibilities and what do you do in a given day?  2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work–for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?  3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work–that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?  4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work–how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?
• Take Three Steps Toward Giving Up Control: 1. Involve people in goal-setting. People often have higher aims than the ones you assign them, so involve them in goal-setting.   2. Use noncontrolling language. Next time you’re about to say “must” or “should,” try saying, “think about,” or “consider.”  3. Hold office hours. Set aside one or two hours a week when your schedule is clear and any employee can come in and talk to you about anything that’s on their mind.
• Play "Whose Purpose Is It Anyway?": Gather your team, hand out blank 3×5, and have everyone write down the answer to this questions: “What is our company’s (or organization’s) purpose? Collect them, read them out loud, discuss.
• Use Reich's Pronoun Test: Do employees refer to their company as “they” or as “we?”
• Design for Intrinsic Motivation: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) says that the most successful websites and electronic forums have a certain Type I in their DNA. You can do the same with your online presence if you: 1. create an environment that makes people feel good about participating  3. give users autonomy  3. keep the system as open as possible
• Promote Goldilocks for Groups: 1. Begin with a diverse team. You want people who can really cross-fertilize each other’s ideas.  2. Make your group a “no competition” zone. If you’re going to use a c-word, use “collaboration” or “cooperation.”  3. Try a little task-shifting. If someone is bored, see if they can train someone else, and then take on some aspect of a more experienced team member’s work.  4. Animate with purpose, don’t motivate with rewards.
• Turn your Next Off-Site Day into a FedEx Day: Set aside a day where your employees can work on anything they want, with whomever they’d like. People must deliver something the following day.

The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way

1. Ensure internal and external fairness.
2. Pay more than average.
3. If you use performance metrics, make them wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game.

Type I for Parents and Educators: Nine Ideas for Helping Our Kids

• Apply the Three-Part Type I Test for Homework. Refashion homework into home learning by asking yourself three questions. 1. Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work?  2. Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task (as opposed to rote reformulation of something already covered in class.  3. Do my students understand the purpose of this assignment? That is, can they see how doing this additional activity at home contributes to the larger enterprise in which the class is engaged?
• Have a FedEx Day. Let kids come up with projects themselves and complete them overnight.
• Try DIY Report Cards. Ask students to list their top learning goals, and then ask them to “do-it-yourself” grade themselves.
• Give Your Kids an Allowance and Some Chores -- but Don't Combine Them. 
• Offer Praise ... the Right Way. Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence. Make praise specific. Praise in private. Offer praise only when there is a good reason.
• Help Kids See the Big Picture. Why am I learning this? How is it relevant to the world I live in now?
• Check Out these Five Type I Schools: Big Picture Learning (bigpicture.org), Sudbury Valley School (sudval.org), The Tinkering School (tinkeringschool.com), Puget Sound Community School (pcsc.org), Motessori Schools (montessori.org).
• Take a Class form the Unschoolers. They encourage mastery by allowing children to spend as long as they’d like and to go as deep as they desire on the topics that interest them. Start with John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down. 
• Turn Students into Teachers

The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise

1. Set your own goals. Don't accept some standardized, cookie-cutter exercise plan; instead, create one that's tailored to your needs and fitness level.
2. Ditch the treadmill. Unless you really like treadmills, that is. Turn your work(out) into play by gathering friends for informal games of tennis, basketball, dancing, etc.
3. Keep mastery in mind. Pick an activity in which you can improve over time; this should help keep your energy and motivation up. 
4. Reward yourself the right way. If you’re really struggling, consider a quick experiment with Stickk (www.stickk.com) where you publicly commit to goals and must hand over money (to a friend, a charity, or an "anti-charity") if you fail to reach it.

Click here to read all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

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?

Drive - The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books

If you liked my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, you'll want to take a look at his Type I Reading List. 

I've added a few to my list of books to read.

The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books
Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are integral to the human condition, so it's no surprise that a number of writers -- from psychologists to journalists to novelists -- have explored these three elements and probed what they mean for our lives. This list of books, arranged alphabetically by author, isn't exhaustive, but it's a good starting point for anyone interested in cultivating a Type I Life:

1. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P Carse
2. Talent Is Overrated: What Really Seperates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
3. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
4. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L Deci with Richard Flaste
5. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
6. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
7. Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, and William Damon
8. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
9. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
10. The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal by David Halberstam
11. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn
12. Once a Runner by John L Parker Jr.
13. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
14. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
15. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M Senge

I was very surprised that several novels made this list.

Enjoy!

Drive: Create Your Own Motivational Poster

As I've mentioned before, I've really enjoyed Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and the section Create Your Own Motivational Poster reminded me of B Romain's 60 Quotes Project.

Pink suggests using one of the following websites to create your own motivational poster -- whether it's silly or serious, just make it deeply personal since only you know what words or images will resonate with you:

• Despair Inc - http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php
• Big Hugs Labs - http://bighugslabs.com/motivator.php
• Automotivator - http://wigflip.com/automotivator/

Click here to view all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Drive: Move Five Steps Closer to Mastery

Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us also provides a list of five steps to get closer to mastery:

1. Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. "People who play tennis once a week for years don't get better if they do the same thing each time," Ericsson has said. "Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time."
2. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition matters. Basketball greats don't shoot ten free throws at the end of team practice; they shoot five hundred.
3. Seek constant, critical feedback. If you don't know how you're doing, you won't know what to improve.
4. Focus ruthlessly on where you need help. While many of us work on what we're already good at, says Ericsson, "those who get better work on their weaknesses."
5. Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting.  That's why so few people commit to it, but that's why it works.

Sounds a bit similar to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (click here to view my posts on Outliers).

Click here to view all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Drive: Ask yourself questions, and take a Sagmeister

I really liked Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

In Drive, Pink suggests asking yourself "What's your sentence?" (examples include "He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults" or "She invented a device that made people's lives easier" or "She taught two generations of children how to read.") and then asking every night before your go to bed "Was I better today than yesterday?"

Pink also suggests trying the following exercise from Alan Webber's Rules of Thumb:

Get a few blank three-by-five inch cards. On one of the cards, write your answer to this question: "What gets you up in the morning?" Now, on the other side of the card, write your answer to your question: "What keeps you up at night?" Pare each response to a single sentence. And if you don't like an answer, toss the card and try again until you've crafted something you can live with. Then read what you've produced. If both answers give you a sense of meaning and direction, "Congratulations!" says Webber. "Use them as your compass, checking from time to time to see if they're still true. If you don't like one or both of your answers, it opens up a new question: What are you going to do about it?"

Pink also suggests following designer Stefan Sagmeister's lead and taking one year off every seven years, during which you travel, experiment with new projects, and generate ideas that (at least for Sagmeister) often provide income for the next seven years. 

"Taking a Sagmeister" (as Pink calls it) sounds intense but it's something I've advocated for years. 

Click here to view all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Type I (versus Type X)

I'm very intrigued by Daniel H Pink's Type I description, as written in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Where Type X (extrinsic motivation) is the center of Motivation 2.0, Type I (intrinsic motivation) is the center of Motivation 3.0. Here's more about Type I:

• Type I behavior is made, not born. 
• Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run. 
• Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. 
• Type I behavior is a renewable resource.
• Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.

Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose. 

Some might dismiss notions like these as gooey and idealistic, but the science says otherwise. The science confirms that this sort of behavior is essential to being human -- and that now, in a rapidly changing economy, it is also critical for professional, personal, and organizational success of any kind.  

So we have a choice. We can cling to a view of human motivation that is grounded more in old habits than in modern science. Or we can listen to the research, drag our business and personal practices into the twenty-first century, and craft a new operating system to help ourselves, our companies, and our world work a little better. 

It won't be easy. It won't happen overnight. So let's get started. 

Doesn't it sound so inspiring?

Click here to view all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Carrots and Sticks: The Seven Deadly Flaws

As I promised, here's more about Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

I particularly liked this list from Chapter 2, Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don't Work.

Carrots and Sticks: The Seven Deadly Flaws

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking. 

Click here to view all my posts on Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Daniel Pink's Drive

I've just finished reading Daniel H Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

It was a surprisingly good read with a strong basis in positive psychology (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, noted for his work on happiness, creativity, and "flow", is frequently mentioned and quoted).

Pink breaks down the history of human motivation into several operating systems. Motivation 1.0 was based on survival and was very effective in the early days of humans.

Motivation 2.0 was developed during the Industrial Revolution and was based on the idea that people respond rationally to external forces (extrinsic motivators) like rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. The economic development of the past century was fueled by Motivation 2.0.

Motivation 2.1 was an incremental improvement on Motivation 2.0 based on MIT professor Douglas McGregor's research that poeple have hgher drives that could benefit businesses if managers and business leaders respected them. This led to loosening of dress codes, flex-time schedules, and other perks to grant employees greater autonomy.

But Pink suggests we need a total upgrade to Motivation 3.0, based on what he calls Type I behavior.

Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic drives than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.

I'll write more about this book over the next week or two, especially about Type I behavior and improving your life (and business).

Daniel Pink's self written cocktail party summary of Drive is:

When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system–which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators–doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives. 2. Mastery — the urge to get better and better at something that matters. 3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

In the meantime, click here to take a survey to determine whether you exhibit Type I behavior.