(Before this quote, Pink was talking about how Wikipedia was written for free. Why do people work on it for free?)
Nobody “manages” the Wikipedians. Nobody sits around trying to figure out how to “motivate” them. That’s why Wikipedia works. Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; nonroutine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.
We have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.
“This is a really big thing in management,” says Ryan. When people aren’t producing, companies typically resort to rewards or punishment. “What you haven’t done is the hard work of diagnosing what the problem is. You’re trying to run over the problem with a carrot or a stick,” Ryan explains. That doesn’t mean that [the new system] unequivocally opposes rewards. “Of course, they’re necessary in workplaces and other settings,” says Deci. “But the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that’s when they’re most demotivating.” Instead, Deci and Ryan say we should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish.
Pink describes "Type I" as an internally-driven person, compared with "Type X", who is externally driven.
Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.
Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed.
In 2004, Deci and Ryan, along with Paul Baard of Fordham University, carried out a study of workers at an American investment bank. The three researchers found greater job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered “autonomy support.” These bosses saw issues from the employee’s point of view, gave meaningful feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to do it, and encouraged employees to take on new projects. The resulting enhancement in job satisfaction, in turn, led to higher performance on the job. What’s more, the benefits that autonomy confers on individuals extend to their organizations. For example, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.
Motivation 2.0 is the carrot-and-stick idea that came out of factory work. Motivation 3.0 is the "Type I" idea of engagement, autonomy and mastery.
Motivation 2.0 assumed that if people had freedom, they would shirk—and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable—and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is a pathway to that destination.
The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element of Type I behavior: mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters. As I explained... Motivation 2.0’s goal was to encourage people to do particular things in particular ways—that is, to get them to comply. And for that objective, few motivators are more effective than a nice bunch of carrots and the threat of an occasional stick. This was rarely a promising route to self-actualization, of course. But as an economic strategy, it had a certain logic. For routine tasks, the sort of work that defined most of the twentieth century, gaining compliance usually worked just fine. But that was then. For the definitional tasks of the twenty-first century, such a strategy falls short, often woefully short. Solving complex problems requires an inquiring mind and the willingness to experiment one’s way to a fresh solution. Where Motivation 2.0 sought compliance, Motivation 3.0 seeks engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential in making one’s way in today’s economy.
What are people motivated by?
[A] study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge—that is, the urge to master something new and engaging—was the best predictor of productivity.
[Baby boomers and Millenials] “are redefining success [and] are willing to accept a radically ‘remixed’ set of rewards.” Neither generation rates money as the most important form of compensation. Instead they choose a range of nonmonetary factors—from “a great team” to “the ability to give back to society through work.”
On the curse of the billable hour:
Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time. If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible). If the rewards come from time, then time is what firms will get. These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation, sap individual initiative, and even encourage unethical behavior. “If one is expected to bill more than two thousand hours per year,” former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once said, “there are bound to be temptations to exaggerate the hours actually put in.” The billable hour is a relic of Motivation 2.0. It makes some sense for routine tasks—whether fitting doors onto the body of a Ford Taurus or adding up deductions on a simple tax form—because there’s a tight connection between how much time goes in and how much work comes out. And if your starting assumption is that workers’ default setting is to shirk, monitoring their time can keep them on their toes. But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable. Imagine requiring inventor Dean Kamen or actress Helen Mirren to bill for their time. If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption—that people want to do good work—then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it. Already, a few law firms are moving in this new, more Type I direction—charging a flat rate rather than a time-based fee—with the presiding partner of one of New York’s leading law firms recently declaring, “This is the time to get rid of the billable hour.”
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