REAL WORLD - What Really Motivates People?

REAL WORLD is a series of Intermediate English lessons based on real world issues.

Lesson 02 - What Really Motivates People?

Lesson created by Paul Ponce, PLS teacher

FOCUS: Business English (Management, Productivity)

What is the secret of motivation? What drives some people to excel at what they do? Why are some organizations better at motivating their employees to stay and innovate, while others simply have employees who show up to do the work and leave as soon as possible.

Business writer and speaker Dan Pink believes that certain conditions and situations fire up the spark of motivation for many people in work environments. However, he doesn't believe those conditions are always related to the economics of their relationship with an employer.

In this lesson, we will enhance and empower our use of the English language by learning about the secret of motivation. Our focus will be a hand-drawn animated video where Dan Pink explains what he believes this secret is all about.

KEY VOCABULARY: Let's become familiar with it.

1. a little bit freaky: somewhat strange and unusual
2. we've seen this movie before: it's fairly common situation
3. cognitive skills: ability to think creatively and critically in order to solve problems and generate new solutions
4. the top tier of the economics profession: the most prestigious economic professionals
5. The Federal Reserve Bank ("The Fed"): the central bank of the United States of America
6. behavioral physics: how people behave
7. anomalous: something that is not supposed to happen
8. take the issue of money off the table: remove (and ideally resolve) the issue of money so that we don't even need to talk about it
9. fricken: a socially-acceptable version of the f-word, usually to stress an idea... a lot!
10. unmoored: separated

VIDEO: Let's WATCH it once and ANSWER the following questions?

1. What do the studies that Dan Pink talks about call into question?
2. What did the study at MIT consist of?
3. Why were the results of the MIT study unusual?
4. What happened in India?
5. How were staff members at Atlassian given autonomy?
6. What hypothetical example does Dan Pink give when he talks about mastery?
7. According to the author what happens when profit becomes unhitched from purpose?

TRANSCRIPT: Let's READ it and check to see if our answers are correct. Groups can delegate different members to read. Optionally, you can watch the video again after reading the transcript. You WILL NOTICE how much more you understand. 

Later, you can also try to FIND the target vocabulary within the script and PRACTICE making your own sentences with it.

DAN PINK: Our motivations are unbelievably interesting, I mean... I've been working on this for a few years and I just find the topic still so amazingly engaging and interesting so I want to tell you about that. The science is really surprising. The science is a little bit freaky. OK? We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think. There's a whole set of unbelievably interesting studies. I want to give you two that call into question this idea that if you reward something you get more of the behavior you want. If you punish something, you get less of it.

So let's go from London to the mean streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts the northeastern part of the United States and let's talk about a study done at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here's what they did: They took a whole group of students and they gave them a set of challenges. Things like memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzles, other kinds of spacial puzzles even physical tasks like throwing a ball through a hoop. OK, they gave them these challenges and they said to incentivize their performance they gave them 3 levels of rewards. OK? So if you did pretty well, you got a small monetary reward. If you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward. And if you did really well, if you were one of the top performers you got a large cash prize.


Ok, we've seen this movie before. This is essentially a typical motivation scheme within organizations right? We reward the very top performers we ignore the low performers and other folks in the middle. Ok, you get a little bit. So what happens? They do the test. They have these incentives. Here's what they found out. 

1. As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected the higher the pay, the better their performance. Ok, that makes sense, but here's what happens. But once the task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance. Now this is strange, right? A larger reward led to poorer performance. How can that possibly be? Now what's interesting about this is that these folks here who did this are all economists: 2 at MIT, 1 at the University of Chicago, 1 at Carnegie Melanie: the top tier of the economics profession. And they're reaching this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics which is that the higher the reward, the better the performance. And they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill it's the other way around which seems like the idea that these rewards don't work that way seems vaguely Left-Wing and Socialist, doesn't it? It's this kind of weird Socialist conspiracy.


For those of you who have these conspiracy theories I want to point out the notoriously left-wing socialist group that financed the research: The Federal Reserve Bank. So this the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that's quite surprising seems to defy the laws of behavioral physics. So this is strange, a strange funny. So what do they do? They say... This is freaky. Let's go test it somewhere else. Maybe that 50 dollars or 60 dollars prize isn't sufficiently motivating for an MIT student, right? So let's go to a place where 50 dollars is actually more significant relatively.

So we take the experiment, we're going to Madurai, India. Rural India, where 50 dollars, 60 dollars whatever the number was, is actually a significant sum of money. So they replicated the experiment in India roughly as follows: Small rewards, the equivalent of 2 week's salary. I'm sorry, I mean low performance 2 week's salary. Medium performance about a month's salary. High performance about 2 month's salary. Ok, so these are real good incentives so you're going to get a different result here.

What happened though, was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward but this time around, the people offered the top reward they did worst of all. Higher incentives led to worse performance.

What's interesting about this is that it actually isn't all that anomalous. This has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists by sociologists and by economists, over and over and over again. For simple, straight-forward tasks, those kinds of incentives: if you do this then you get that, they're great! With tasks that are an algorithmic set of rules where you have to just follow along and get a right answer "If-then" rewards, carrots and sticks, outstanding!

But when the task gets more complicated when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking those kind of motivators demonstrably don't work. Fact: Money is a motivator, at work. But in a slightly strange way if you don't pay people enough they won't be motivated. What's curious about, there's another paradox here which is the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so they are not thinking about money and they're thinking about the work. Now once you do that, it turns out there are 3 factors that the science shows, lead to better performance not to mention, personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed: to direct our own lives. Now in many ways, traditional methods of management run afoul of that. Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement which is what we want in the workforce today as people are doing more complicated, sophisticated things self-direction is better. 


Let me give you some examples of this of the most radical forms of self-direction in the workplace, that lead to good results. Let's start with this company right here, Atlassian an Australian company. It's a software company and they do something really cool.

Once a quarter on Thursday afternoon, they say to their developers "For the next 24 hours, you can work on anything you want. You can work at it the way you want. You can work at it with whomever you want. All we ask is that you show the results to the company at the end of those 24 hours." and this fun kind of meeting, not a star chamber session but this fun meeting with beer and cake and fun and other things like that. 

It turns out that one day of pure undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software a whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise have never emerged. One day. Now this is not an "if-then" incentive. This is not the sort of thing that I would have done 3 years ago before I knew this research. I would have said "You want people to be creative and innovative?" Give them a fricken innovation bonus. If you could do something cool, I'll give you 2,500 dollars.

They're not doing this at all. They're essentially saying you probably want to do something interesting. Let me just get out of your way. One day of autonomy produces things that never emerge.

Now let's talk about mastery. Mastery is our urge to get better at stuff. We like to get better at stuff. This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend. You have all these people who're acting in ways that seem irrational economically. They play musical instruments on weekends, why? It's not going get them a mate. It's not going to make them any money. Why are they doing it? Because it's fun. Because you get better at it, and that's satisfying.

Go back in time a little bit. I imagine this: If I went to my first economic's professor a woman named Mary Alice Shulman. And I went to her in 1983, and said "Professor Shulman, can I talk to you after class for a moment?" "Yeah." "I've got this inkling. I've got this idea for a business model. I just want to run it past to you.

Here's how it would work: You get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20, sometimes 30 hours a week." Ok, she's looking at you somewhat skeptically there. "Oh, but I'm not done. And then, what they create, they give it away, rather than sell it. It's going to be huge."

And she truly would have thought I was insane. All right, you seem to fly in the face of so many things but what do you have? You have Linux, powering 1 out of 4 corporate servers and Fortune 500 companies. Apache, powering more than the majority of web servers. Wikipedia...What's going on? Why are people doing this? Why are these people, many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled people who have jobs, ok? They have jobs! They're working at jobs for pay doing challenging, sophisticated, technological work. And yet, during their limited discretionary time they do equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work not for their employer, but for someone else for free! That's a strange economic behavior.

Economists who look into it "Why are they doing this?" It's overwhelmingly clear: Challenge in mastery along with making a contribution, that's it.

What you see more and more is a rise of what you might call the purpose motive. It's that more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose partly because it makes coming to work better partly because that's the way to get better talent. And what we're seeing now is, in some ways when the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive bad things happen. Bad things ethically sometimes but also bad things just like, not good stuff: like crappy products like lame services, like uninspiring places to work.

That when the profit motive is paramount or when it becomes completely unhitched from the purpose motive people don't do great things. More and more organizations are realizing this and sort of disturbing the categories between what's profit and what's purpose. And I think that actually heralds something interesting. And I think that the companies, organizations that are flourishing whether they're profit, for-profit or somewhere in-between are animated by this purpose.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Here's the founder of Skype. He says our goal is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place. Pretty good purpose. Here's Steve Jobs. "I want to put a Ding in the universe." All right? That's the kind of thing that might get you up in the morning, racing to go to work. So I think that we are purpose maximizers, not only profit-maximizers. I think that the science shows that we care about mastery very, very deeply. And the science shows that we want to be self-directed.

And I think that the big take-away here is that if we start treating people like people and not assuming that they're simply horses you know, slower, smaller, better-smelling horses if we get past this kind of ideology of "carrots and sticks" and look at the science I think we can actually build organizations and work lives that make us better off but I also think they have the promise to make our world just a little bit better.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: If you belong to an English Practice Group or if you are a teacher, we recommend you discuss the following questions as a group.

1. What motivates you at work?
2. How important are autonomy, mastery and purpose in your industry?
3. How important are they in your specific job?

ROLE PLAYING: If you belong to an English Practice Group or if you are a teacher, we recommend you role-play the following questions as a group.

Part A. Discuss in groups what would be a really good "autonomy" activity for special areas of  your company and prepare to share it with the other groups?

Part B. Prepare in groups strategies for taking more advantage of mastery among staff members (as defined by Dan Pink), but in benefit of your company.

Part C. What is the purpose of your industry? What is the purpose of your department? Discuss in groups the following question: How beneficial to the company is it to establish a stronger relationship between the two? Present results.

Final Tip: watch the VIDEO one last time after the lesson and discussion and you will subconsciously incorporate a lot of the language you worked on.

That's the Real World! 

What MOTIVATES people at work?

Among the many topics in business today, motivation in the workplace is the subject of great debate. In our post today, we would like to invite English users to listen to what writer and speaker Dan Pink - an expert on the subject matter - has to say about it during his 20 minute TED talk. 

In the transcript below, we highlighted certain words or expressions and linked them to their meaning or explanation. We hope you enjoy this topic and we highly encourage you to discuss this topic in your class, with your teacher or with other English users.

I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of, something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter)

Now, in America law is a professional degree: you get your university degree, then you go on to law school. And when I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to. (Laughter)

But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might have seen this before. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. Karl Duncker created this experiment that is used in a whole variety of experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do?

Now many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. Somebody, some people -- and I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or 10 minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem.

Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University in the U.S. This shows the power of incentives. Here's what he did. He gathered his participants. And he said, "I'm going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?" To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem."

To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator.

Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. Three and a half minutes longer. Now this makes no sense right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work. Right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.

And what's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over and over again, for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.

I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what's alarming here is that our business operating system --think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources -- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you what I mean.

So Glucksberg did another experiment similar to this where he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Okay? Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it? (Laughter)

If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. And so, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is not over here. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.

Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.

Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, are those kinds of problems -- do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work.

Now, I mean it makes me crazy. And this is not - here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let me marshal the evidence here, because I'm not telling you a story, I'm making a case.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. Okay? If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

Then they said, "Okay let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Lets go to Madurai, India and test this." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal.  A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.

Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No. These are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. And do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience.

Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics -- LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter)Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what the economists there said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance."

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.

And the good news about all of this is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. 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. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.

I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is like -- it's not a tree, it's a television set. Okay? Somebody invented it. And it doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.

Let me give you some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. What this means -- you don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, because what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy. Let me give you some examples.

How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half.(Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want."So that engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and wooly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. And then, being Australians, everybody has a beer.

They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty. It's not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.

And it's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20 Percent Time --done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can work, spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.

 Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment, the ROWE, created by two American consultants, in place in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.

What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Now some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof."

The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it.

Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.

This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation. Right? This is the Thrilla' in Manila. Alright? Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks. And who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up.

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive -- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.

And here's the best part. Here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world. I rest my case. (Applause)