Stand up and dance like nobody’s watching. We are watching though, everyone is, and that’s why being the initiator feels so scary. You are afraid of looking like a fool, we all are. So we wait and watch you dance.

Genuine passion is contagious, and as you dance freely and passionately one person sees the genius in what you are doing and has the courage to join you.

Simple dancing, nothing fancy. You dance because you love to dance and you embrace your friend in the dance. We continue to watch you dance, the two of you. It is still a novelty and still too early and much too risky to join you.

You dance openly and eagerly and another person is infected by the brilliance of what you are doing and comes to join you.

You dance wildly and keenly and as passionately as ever, the energy levels race higher, the tension grows, and the attraction of the dance becomes so compelling that people are wonderfully and inescapably drawn towards the dance. A few people begin to walk and others start to run.

The movement has started.

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Mismatch between what science knows and what business does

Daniel Pink puts forward the idea that there is currently a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

Pink presents the Candle Problem, an experiment invented in 1945 by Karl Duncker. The experiment works as follows: I bring you into a room and give you a candle, a box of tacks, and some matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax doesn’t drip onto the table. This is a seemingly simple problem, but the problem is difficult to solve because of the difficulty of overcoming something known as “functional fixedness”. The items are presented in such a way that there is a “mental block against using [them] in a new way that is required to solve a problem” (Duncker 1945). Watch the video to see a good explanation of the Candle Problem.

Now here is the interesting thing. At Princeton University, an experiment was conducted using the Candle Problem to look at the power of incentives. Two groups of people were taken and the first group were offered individual monetary rewards if they solved the Candle Problem quickly. The control group were not offered an incentive. The result was amazing, the incentivised group performed significantly worse than the control group … external incentives reduced performance.

Pink makes a number of insightful points on motivation, in summary:

• As long as a task requires only mechanical skill, bonuses work as they would be expected – the higher the pay, the better the performance.
• Once a task calls for even a rudimentary amount of cognitive skill, a larger reward often leads to poorer performance.
• Extrinsic motivators, which Pink refers to as “if-then” rewards, often destroy creativity.
• In early 2009, economists at LSE looked at pay for performance schemes and concluded that “financial incentives … can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”
• The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishment but rather that unseen intrinsic drive, the drive to do things for their own sake, the drive to do things because they matter.

Autonomy, mastery and purpose

The solution to achieving high performance in business in the 21st century will be based on intrinsic motivation, on the desire to do things because they matter, because they are interesting, and because they are important. Pink argues that this new operating system for business is to be based around 3 elements:

1. Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives;
2. Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters; and
3. Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

As Pink argues, if we can repair the mismatch between what science knows and what business does, and bring our notions of motivation into the 21st century, we can strengthen our businesses, solve a lot of those Candle Problems … and maybe even change the world.

Book version of this speech

I wrote Dan an email to thank him for this great speech.  He informs me that the book versionof the speech will be released in the US in December and in Australia around April or May.  If the book is even half as insightful as the speech, I think it will be well worth reading.

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Last night I attended my first independently organised TED event, TEDx EmeraldCity.

The event was organised by the ever dynamic and always delightful Melissa O’Young. The name of the event sounds pretty random, and it is, but it is also quite clever. Since this was an Australian TED event the thinking was as follows: Australia – Oz – Wizard of Oz – Emeral City … but of course!

There were twelve of us at the event, all from a diverse range of backgrounds: artist, journalists, lawyers, bloggers, photographer, fashion design, financier, film producers, travellers, and entrepreneurs.   It certainly was an interesting and unlikely group of people to be assembled in the one place, not your ordinary pizza and beer night.

The evening was driven by the high minded desire to share interesting and important ideas, watch a number of TEDTalks videos, network with people from outside our normal group or friends, and to get inspired by new ideas, projects and opportunities. It was an engaging and thought provoking evening, and I feel lucky to have been a part of it.

Over the course of the evening we watched four TEDTalks videos, all very different, all of them fascinating. If you’re interested, I have linked to each them:

1. Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
2. Dave Eggers’ wish: Once Upon a School
3. Rick Smolan tells the story of a girl
4. Eric Lewis plays chaos and harmony

My personal favourite is the one by Alain de Botton on his kinder, gentler philosophy of success.  This talk is particularly relevant and eye opening to all of us who strive for “success”, what ever that may mean. Check it out!

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