https://www.ted.

com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation

Dan Pink - The Puzzle of Motivation

The Candle Problem is a classic test of creative problem solving developed by
psychologist Karl Duncker in 1945.
Equipment: a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches
Goal: Fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the table
below.
The test challenges functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that makes it difficult The Candle Problem
to use familiar objects in abnormal ways.
What do you think the solution is?

Vocabulary Meaning
Reward
Incentive
Punishment
Motivator
Extrinsic / Intrinsic
Compliance
Creativity

Questions

 Dan Pink talks about ‘extrinsic motivators’ or ‘carrots and sticks’ to motivate employees. Can you think
of some examples from your organization?
 What sort of work do you do? Routine, rule-based, mechanical skilled, left-brain work (e.g. certain
kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming) or more right-brained creative,
conceptual kind of work?
 He says the result of rewards and incentives is to ‘narrow our focus’ and go straight for the goal. Why
can this be negative?

Now watch the video (1:47 – 8:26).

Intrinsic Motivation

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at
something that matters.
Purpose: the desire to do what we do in the
service of something larger than ourselves.
  He says traditional extrinsic motivators don’t work. Why?
 “Traditional notions of management are great if you want
compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works
better.” Do you agree?

The Candle Problem: Solution

 Do you think your organization encourages compliance or creativity? How?

 What would you like to change about your organization?
 Do you think the ideas below could be used in your organization?

Real Examples

20% Time
Google -- where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy
over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of
you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20% time: things like Gmail,
Orkut, Google News.

The ROWE (Results Only Work

Environment)
Created by two American consultants, in
place at a dozen companies around
North America. In a ROWE people don't
have schedules. They show up when
they want. They don't have to be in the
office at a certain time, or any time.
They just have to get their work done.
How they do it, when they do it, where
they do it, is totally up to them.
Meetings in these kinds of environments
are optional.

What happens?
Almost across the board, productivity
goes up, worker engagement goes up,
worker satisfaction goes up, turnover
goes down. Autonomy, mastery and
purpose, the building blocks of a new
way of doing things.
Transcript
01:47 - So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you
might know it. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. He created this experiment that is
used in many other experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter.
I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job
is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do?

02:21 - Many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. I saw somebody kind of
make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the
candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or ten
minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here.

02:46 - The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a
receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle
problem.

03:00 - I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam
Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US. This shows the power of incentives.

03:12 - He gathered his participants and said: "I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem."
To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes
someone to solve this sort of problem."

03:26 - To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get
five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several
years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator.

03:48 - Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?

03:53 - Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense,
right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work, right?

04:10 - If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality
show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive
designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks
creativity.

04:34 - What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and
over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some
circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the
most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.

05:05 - I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of
extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science,
there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

05:21 - What's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and
protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources-- it's built
entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th
century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work,
often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you.
05:52 - Glucksberg did another similar experiment, he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like
this up here. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing
for norms. You: we're incentivizing.

06:08 - What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why?
Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it?

06:27 - If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear
destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they
work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom
straight ahead to it, they work really well.

06:51 - But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is on the periphery.
You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.

07:04 - Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in
Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine,
rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming -- has
become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers can do it
cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.

07:45 - Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the
problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules
are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing
with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then
rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work!