All of the companies mentioned in this video are SOFTWARE companies. The nature of work at a software company is much different than at say, a bakery. So I'm a bit skeptical that this kind of thinking translates to other workplaces.

Plus, a lot of software is overrated nonsense anyway.

Oh great, studies from psychologists, sociologists, and economists. Without knowing, in detail, their methodology, I have zero reason to believe what any of them have to say. The track records for these "sciences" is spotty at best. Famous example #1The Stanford Prison Experiment by Zimbardo and some other guy - flawed because the ad to attract subjects read something like "Paricipate in a Psychological Prison Experiment." The key word here is "prison." This is going to attract a certain type of person and not the general public. Famous example #2 The Milgram Experiment on obeying authority. Well, we live in a society that (generally) does not torture people so why would the test subjects believe they were actually causing the person pain? Famous example #3 Fuck it, just look at the state of the world economy right now.

Lots and lots and lots and lots of bad science has been conducted and used as the basis for more experiments and, to me, the conclusions drawn are completely unreliable. I'm sure there are blogs dedicated to this but I'm too lazy to search for any of them.

Another pet peeve. Any study conducted in which the placebo is a sugar pill. Sugar is not a placebo; it is not inert. Sugar has numerous and pronounced effects on the body.

While I appreciate the effort that went into this, without a detailed explanation of how these experiments were conducted, you should take it with a huge grain of salt. Might want to visit the Dead Sea for sufficient supplies.

Who was the artist?

Hi - I have mixed emotions about this video. While, on the one hand I agree that people want to be autonomous and want to be part of something larger having a sense of purpose. Sometimes previous experience holds them back from pursuing larger ideas. It is very hard to break someone out of a conundrum and being in a conundrum holds back more than just a single person. In some cases it holds back an entire team.

I am a software architect and development manager with over 35 years of experience. I thrive on big ideas and doing things that have never been done before and would definitely do it for free. However, conveying ideas and getting people to look up from their current rut, is sometimes a monumental task.

Another thing I take a little bit of an issue with is the fact that, while many people love doing certain things, they hate doing others. The bad thing is that those "other" things are as important to the process as the things folks love to do.

Here is an example, I love to plant perennials in my garden but I hate to weed. I would plant flowers all day long for free but would prefer to receive a million dollars for weeding. Software development is much the same way. A team of individuals, each with a set of skills and experience all of whom are top notch in their particular area but only some will look up from the rut of their past experience to move on to something larger than they themselves can get their arms around. Further, someone has to manage the source code, build tests, follow standards, check things in and out, document what they have done. All of the un-fun things around the development process.

Here is the real coup de gras. Each one has their own idea of what autonomous means and by simply allowing autonomous development to occur you wind up with pieces that are like ships passing in the night. When you ask them to follow standards and talk to their co-workers about that they need it seems to them that they are not longer autonomous.

Thirty-five years of seeing this phenomenon over and over would cause me to be inclined to ultimately disagree with the notion that autonomy will make people more productive.

Here’s what will make a individuals more productive. Grabbing onto an idea that is so much bigger than any individual that everyone involved knows they must depend upon and draw from all of the other team members to accomplish the task!

But realistically, most people simply to the minimum required to get by! Incentive, one way or the other makes little difference.

Quite convincing at first glance - nicely presented. But one needs to look below the covers. The study fails to take into account individual personalities that play a huge part in what motivates an employee. From my experience, there is a factor of self-motivation that plays a huge part - employees that remain motivated in almost any situation. Ultimately, what motivates is perceived fairness. Fairness in salaries, fairness in how you appraise and employee - employee must feel that the management is being fair to them. As long as they feel that they will stay motivated.

Women in Madurai don't dress the way this illustration seems to indicate.(See video 3:54)

How do they dress? Well, go to google images and type in "madurai woman". See, no head covering, and no salwar kameez. They wear sarees.

If you talked about an iPad in your video and showed me a blackberry as illustration, I would come to the same conclusion - that maybe you're not a very thorough person...

I think i tend to agree with Daniel. I work in a multi national company where profits are supreme. But in their race to make profits the purpose behind organizational goals have been lost. This has begun to show on the quality of the products delivered and their treatment of employees. Very much agree with what he says

PEOPLE.......INDIVIDUALLY.......DO make the difference!!! IT IS JUST THAT SIMPLE..........AND....Daniel GETS IT........the science PROVES IT!!!!!!
Hanging on loosely, as a management principle, really is a driver allowing proud people to be the only key "building" block.
Thanx for paying this forward in such a meaningful way Daniel!
Dave Gregory Partner - Brand Insights Group (Calgary)

Fantastic animation and challenges traditional approaches to rewarding. Will be good to see detailed study on this. We can also learn from how a child is motivated, very small things like a color band or sticker motivates my child to complete her homework(good she doesnt yet know what $ means;-)), so there has to be an individual pattern associated with rewarding, its not just $$$$. My husband would be very delighted if you give him books as a gift coupon because he is an inherent quizzer. Also top performers in teams have consistent record, they anyways perform well because they just love what they do and they have higher cognitive skills. However I agree on observations on one day autonomy (have observed similar things on innovation days).

i think there are so many info which is help many!

I sent this out to everyone at work! Very inspiring indeed!

Thanks! Where I can give a map like this for myself?

well friend i look this site and so fine!

We don't have the details, but based on what's been presented, here is an alternative interpretation of the results of these studies: Motivation actually works exactly as expected. Greater monetary rewards yield greater motivation and greater performance. It's just that people weight the potential rewards by the probability of actually attaining them. In the experiments, subjects were given an all or nothing proposition: meet the target performance and get the monetary reward or don't and get nothing. The researchers seem to assume that behavior would be entirely driven by the size of the potential reward regardless of the difficulty of achieving it. But it appears that the subjects actually factored in this important variable in making their value judgments. (After all, what value is a reward of 2 months salary if you can't actually get it). We don't know the probabilities so we can't tell, but it may be that the greater the probability weighted reward, the greater the performance. This alternative interpretation is consistent with the results that simple manual labor tasks worked as expected. This might be because the probability of getting the reward was virtually 100% if enough effort was expended. In that case, the probability weighted reward was the same as the potential reward. It would be nice to see the study details. I suspect there is a lot more to it than what has been presented.

@statg: we do have the details (follow link to video of actual talk by Dan Pink, pause at 10:45, read research paper authors from slide presentation, google them : http://management.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/docs/large-stakes.pdf). There are three levels of reward for each participant dependent on performance, but there are three different levels of treatment also, so any given participant will be randomly assigned to receive either low treatment (0,2 or 4 rupees), medium (0,20,40 rupees) or high (0,200,400 rupees). So the poor performance correlates solely to the high payout, not to perceived difficulty.

I don't disagree with these points. But I do think that the recommendation to remove $ as an issue if possible -- pay individuals well for their cognitive skills-- works for that very reason. When you're asked to do something that is complex and the chance of success is somewhat questionable, taking $ out of the equation and boosting their sense of autonomy, mastery, etc. is liberating and more likely to lead to innovation. I'm not sure more incentive $ really does anything except cause the goals to be dumbed down so they can be achieved. I see this all the time-- corporate executives with bonus incentives that are really pretty pathetic. There's an intuitive understanding that to link bonus $ to things that may be out of your control, doesn't really make sense. But rewarding them every day for working hard and giving them good work conditions I think does.

Very inspirational and useful; simple yet brilliant! Thanks for doing this.

All the real-world examples Mr. Pink cites are software or IT-related firms, esp regards to doing work for free and giving it away which is such a recent phenomenon that it’s basically a blip in the time of human existence; hardly proven to be enduring and with little ‘en masse’ precedent. Where in 18th century China or 19th century Europe or 15th century Africa did the folks (above subsistence) en masse give away stuff for free? Consistently. This observable human behavior remains a blip-in-time until it proves its endurance across professions, occupations and sectors, cultures, and over time.
Maybe from certain vantage points the world does seem to consist of only IT, of people with good paying jobs, and bright MIT undergrads. But each is hardly representative of American demographics.
Back in the real world, I’d have to work hard (and not for free) to successfully adapt the study’s findings, on pro-motivation work environments, to the real world where most people are older than MIT students, are distracted by daycare scheduling snafus, petulant teens at home, their thickening waists and ill-fitting clothes, their sore middle-aged feet and aching backs, and are bombarded by online ads telling them they’ll have a great sex life if they just buy this car model or shampoo brand.
That’s the demographic of the American workforce.
I think I can make some adaptations and applications of the points in this video…but probably would NOT show this video to that American demographic cuz they’ll see the holes I described above and it will likely cause em to dismiss all the ideas out-of-hand. That’d be a bummer.

Yes, I would love to hear Daniel Pink's response to this very sensible comment.
C.

Hugely enjoyed this presentation, both the content and the method. But Dan Pink thinks motivating horses is any easier than people! I thought about whether these conclusions of how to motivate employees could be applied to getting the most out of a horse.

A bucket of hard feed (oats, corn etc) has the same kind of effect on a horse as a wedge of cash. They get a glazed look in their eye and it's hard to get them to focus on anything else! So a feed works well for simple tasks, like getting them to come in from the field, but as a tool for training, not so well. If I use feed to try and encourage behaviour I want, they quickly turn their attention to how they can get to the feed without doing what I want, so I stopped using feed as a motivator.

When teaching a horse a new skill, and they get bored really quickly keeping them engaged with new stuff is a good idea otherwise they tend to think up undesirable new stuff of their own, I try to give them to space to work out the puzzle rather than force them into doing what I want. If I want them to move backwards when I put my hand on their chest, I could just push hard until they do what I want, but if I tap them increasingly sharply so it becomes uncomfortable they start looking for ways to make me stop and as soon as they try going backwards, magic, they have made me stop. They learn incredibly quickly when given this kind of autonomy.

Horses also get a sense of satisfaction from being able to perform a task well. Yes I know what that signal means and zoom backwards and I see their confidence grow as they develop more and better skills. (How much is related to what is happening with the human and how much is them I don't know).

OK, struggling a bit with purpose. Horses do know the difference between us making them do stuff because we can (bullying) and asking them to do reasonable tasks for a reason, but again that is to do with the human not the horse.

Horses aren't people, they are really bad at logic or forward thinking. One oat now or a bucket of oats this evening? - the horse will choose the one oat now every time. But they are very sophisticated social animals and I find I learn a lot about people from learning how to engage and motivate horses.

Absolutely great and great way of presenting! I love it. Tx

Agreed on the image. Would love to buy and post in my office. Where can I buy it?

The problem, sir, is that typically, management does NOT want to "make the world a little bit better".
"That's the job of foolish dreamers and useful idiots" who "we have to manipulate to maximize profits".
Management is the art of manipulating idiots with greater skills than you into doing what you want them to do. It's not about getting better results. It's about extracting more out of less. That is the epitome of management.

/End Sarcasm.

We need the system as a whole to educate people that amassing currency will not make life fulfilling, and that material pleasure is not the ultimate aim of life. But various religious, spiritual, philosophical and social geniuses have failed repeatedly at educating a section of the population in this regard - the very section that holds the aces.
So good luck to one more honest endeavor, but I'm not sure it will work on people bred on the belief of superiority of manipulative intelligence. It is simply too tempting to the bestial ego to resist.

Is there any way to get the picture drawn by RSA Animate? I would love to put this across the plotter and put it up at work as a reminder? Happy to purchase it but from where?

What a brilliant piece of work - and how relevant to the discussioon over on the Fellowship site, about starting an RSA social entrepreneur network.
http://rsafellowshipcouncil.ning.com/group/socialentrepreneursnetwork
Dan's work suggest's money is not the best incentive once people have a decent wage: good news for social enterprise where there is likely to be a strong purpose, and there is scope for mastery and autonomy. But there are issues of how to sustain that effort, and how founders can move on to the risk of another career without much in the way of personal assets. Context, as ever, is important.

This is great authentic work. It summarizes exactly what we're up to at Step up and Lead. check it out @theRSAorg RSA Animate – Drive http://ow.ly/1quOlB

How interesting!