Are you motivated by the carrot or the stick? reward or punishment? These are the traditional motivators of most traditional business models. Reward the person who is most productive; punish those that fall short.
Extrinsic Motivators
Extrinsic incentives (like reward and punishment) work really well for activities that need narrow focus on a goal that you can see. Bake twenty cakes following this exact recipe and get a reward. I do the same thing twenty times to get paid the reward.
However, extrinsic incentives stifle creativity. If you are trying to motivate creative problem solving and creative inventions, many large corporations are realizing that intrinsic motivators are more important.
Intrinsic Motivators
- 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
At corporations like Google, engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. More than half of the innovative new products each year come from this 20% time. (Autonomy.)
How do projects like Wikipedia succeed if writers don’t get paid? It turns out that intrinsic motivators are pretty powerful. People write for Wikipedia because they like doing it.
We need the right balance of motivators in our life. Much of the time it depends on the project.
Five years ago, I decided to use my free time (autonomy) to learn storytelling as a performance art. It was fun! No one made me do it. Yet, it was challenging. I had talent, but I wanted to get better (mastery). In a world of disconnection, storytelling connects us and heals communities. I wanted to share this with others (purpose). Five years later, I teach a class called “Storytelling as Healing” at a local university. Why? Because I like doing it and someone felt I had achieved some level of mastery. Looking back, I am still amazed. If I had gone to a traditional academic program with grades (given as rewards or punishments), I could never have relaxed and been so creative as a storytelling performer. It would have become “work.” I knew that I had to keep this fun and playful; only then would I continue to be motivated to achieve mastery because I am doing something that I love (intrinsic motivation).
Watch The Puzzle of Motivation by Daniel Pink
Check out the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink
I enjoyed watching this Ted Talk. I have taught Motivational Interviewing to behavioral health professionals for many years and I think this video might be helpful in my trainings. Although I’m curious, if you give people the opportunity to be creative in their practice, it won’t be evidence based for quite a long time. Substance abuse counselors are being required to use EBP’s which may squelch their creativity. Any thoughts?
Great topic. Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is based on population data. The central idea is that what’s good for the group is good for you. The concept of coming up with new ideas and testing them out is part of research to create new studies. Yes, it does squelch creativity to only use evidence-based medicine. Yet, it also standardizes care to a quality standard. We have to find a balance. For new ideas, the “evidence” is the “logic” that explains why you think it will work. Many people are very convincing at using anecdotal evidence or transferring knowledge from another field of study that makes sense. For medicine, the next step are the studies of what happens when you put the idea into practice. I have seen medical practices change completely as new studies provide new evidence. We must look at “Evidence-Based Medicine” as a creative process that continues to evolve. Individual-Based Medicine (I made that up, there is not a settled on name for this yet) is now becoming popular. It comes directly from “evidence” of genetic markers that we can test for. We know that people respond differently to medicines, sometimes a genetic marker will tell you if the medicine will work for them or if they will have a side effect. While this is still based on groups that have the same genetic markers and still being worked out, I like the central idea that as we treat populations … there are individuals within it. To counter the old adage, “What’s good for the goose, is not always good for the gander.” This is one place where we must be creative when we find the goose (or swan) among the ducks.