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.