I stumbled across this video while flicking through some of the great content on TED. It's about one of the most ignored lessons from social science, that traditional incentives in a creative environment can decrease performance and generally block creative output.
The speaker is Dan Pink, the author of a number of books on the changing world of work, an editor for Wired and a former speechwriter for Al Gore. You may have heard some of this content in other forms before, but Dan adds a practical application for business.
Working in web development I identified with Dan's ideas. Creative thinking is vital as we are in the business of developing solutions for our clients every day. Dan's reference to "the candle problem" is something we constantly tackle. It doesn’t matter if you are a designer, software engineer, business analyst or project manager, you have to think outside the box to be successful.
Why don’t traditional incentives work? Incentives narrow your focus and allow the mind to concentrate, which improves performance on simple tasks. However when you apply this mindset to tasks where the solution is not obvious, the sharpened focus generally blocks creativity.
So how do you motivate creative thinking? Dan breaks it down into the following three key areas:
- Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives
- Mastery, the desire to get better at something that matters
- Purpose, the urge to do something in service of something bigger than ourselves
I really like the idea of giving people the responsibility to deliver with a purpose of the greater good. You see this in sport all the time. Whether it’s wearing the baggy green cap or pride in your footy club's jumper, people are inspired by something greater than themselves.
A classic example of this is in practice is Google’s famous "20% time". In this time, Google staff are freed of traditional constraints and can think freely to come up with and work on ideas, and be inspired to create something great aligned with Google’s innovation ideology. The results are amazing; half of Google's products released into BETA are born in their staff's 20% time.
To get the best results from team, your project or business, it’s important to set up the foundations of the right motivations. Not every business can afford 20% time, but you can easily set up Autonomy and Purpose by fostering an environment where responsibility is allocated and rewarded, and the greater good is communicated.