Think! And! Feel!

You may remember the candle experiment from the recent post “Motivation 2.0: Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation“. The whole point of the candle experiment is to demonstrate that overcoming functional fixedness can not be accelerated with carrots and sticks – on the contrary.

Here, I’d like to give three real-world examples for overcoming functional fixedness. Or actually… one example for, two examples against it.
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… from the “anecdotes for project managers” series …

This time, the story comes from ShadowCulture’s BugBash. It’s so nicely written that it can well stay there.

Enjoy!

Last Friday, I’ve spent quite a chunk of time on the “E=H2O” simulation that IEEE Spectrum had organized together with the Institute for the Future.

Actually, it earned me a “Heisenberg award”.
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Every once in a while, I get delusions of grandeur and think I can understand the world.
Given the latest major pieces of news about Twitter, I get the impression it’s that time again.

The other day, I was studying “Inside the Tornado” once again. (See Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets)

With that fresh in my mind, latest news about Twitter seem to ring a bell…

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The other day, a friend of mine recommended another TED-Video to me: “Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation” (~18 Minutes). I think everybody who’s into management and/or leadership should have seen it.

It’s clearly worth watching, because Daniel is a truly gifted speaker. Still, for the hurried reader, here are the core points as I picked them up. The main theme is

There’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.

What he’s referring to is the “candle problem“: A cognitive performance test dating back to 1945. This test and a range of other examples Daniel quotes clearly shows that “sticks and carrots” (aka incentive plans etc.) actually reduce performance in cognitive tasks.

Incentives do work for mechanical tasks (which were predominant through much of the 20th century). They do not work for cognitive tasks, which dominate the 21st century. That’s the gap Daniel is talking about, and I’d like to add that this especially applies to the business of software

While science knows for more than 60 years that a bonus plan, say, for managers, reduces effectiveness, businesses reach out to higher and higher incentives in the areas where they are known to work least. One could say: They don’t know better. How else to motivate people?

And Daniel has an answer to that question: Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery.

In the video, he goes on to explain purpose – the topic in its entirety is covered in Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Since then, I keep asking myself: Do you create a sense of purpose in the people you are working with?