if-then reward

Dan Pink has given a very interesting presentation on the surprising science of motivation. Contradict to what we believed that incentives will motivate people hence much better performance, evidence has proved that for certain tasks, those require much creativity, commitment, outside-of-box thinking work, higher incentives will have negative effects. Dan quoted Candle problem created by a psychologist named Karl Duncker in 1945. You can find the details of this experiment on wiki.

This experiment has demonstrated our behavioural response under incentives will not always help us to achieve better performance, especially for those results can not be pre-determinated, e.g. creative tasks. Instead, traditional incentive-driven approach will narrow people's mind and sight, focus on what is not there yet, rather than keeping eyes and ears open, radar has been tuned to very limited frequency bands. What comes out from that would only be ok at best. Unfortunately, for these tasks, ok is simply not enough; ok means failure.

There are already many 21st century companies (just for you know, there are way too many last century ones around!) have already started to notice this discrepancy between 'common-sense' and what is really happening. Introducing 20% time for engineers to do whatever is not their daily jobs, breaking down hierarchical structure into small team with autonomous operation ability, motivating people by exposing information and searching for purpose which is bigger than individuals, these have been giving us surprisingly good returns. Most of Google's popular products stemmed from 20% time. Organisations start to realise the huge difference in a bunch of motivated people and what they can achieve - something not in the 'plan', something generates new revenue, channels, models.

"if you do this", "then you will get this and that amount" does not apply anymore. If you really look into it, you will realise work requiring self-motivation does not generally come from financial benefits, not anymore. Financial concerns will only play its part to a certain level, in clear defined target, or in Dan's word - tasks for dummies.