Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
The Drive to Thrive
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Carrots and sticks are so 20th century. We need to understand the drive to thrive in the 21st century. That’s my twitter summary of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.
Summary
There is a great disconnect between what we practice in business – and I will add, in life – and what science is telling us in the area of motivation. The current model of motivation is carrots or sticks, money or termination. If-then rewards actually extinguish intrinsic motivation and diminish performance, crush creativity, and reduce good behavior. They also motivate people into behavior we do not want to see happen: unethical behavior, additions, and short-term thinking.
While carrots and sticks are not the best motivators, they are not all bad, however. They can be effective for rule-based routine tasks that are not very interesting and do not demand much creative thinking, though their motivation is minimal.
Science, however, shows us that we need to upgrade our operating system to motivation 3.0.
The new OS has three essential elements: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Autonomy “involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice.” Motivation is different from independence. It is not the go-it-alone individualism of the American West. It means acting with a choice, meaning we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And more importantly, this is a human concept, not a Western one.
Autonomy has a powerful effect on performance. It promotes great conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being. In addition, autonomous people impact the workplace. A study by Cornell University demonstrated that businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of non-autonomous businesses and had one-third the turnover.
The opposite of autonomy is control. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. Engagement leads to mastery, the desire to get better at something that matters. For the tasks of the 21st century, an inquiring mind and willingness to experiment to find a fresh solution is required. That means the ability to have autonomy over our tasks, techniques, team, and time. This all works to allow people to be engaged in their tasks and to master them.
Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people connect their desires to a cause larger than themselves.
Thoughts
I really enjoy the writings of Daniel Pink. He assembles complicated research and makes it accessible to the masses. I appreciate how Pink makes the research in the areas of motivation easy for those who are not scientists to understand. In fact, in Drive, he does a magnificent job.
Much of the background for this book comes from the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22. Now at Claremont Graduate University, he is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College. He is noted for his work in the study of happiness and creativity, but is best known as the architect of the notion of flow and for his years of research and writing on the topic. He is the author of many books and over 120 articles or book chapters. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, described Csikszentmihalyi as the world’s leading researcher on positive psychology.
I do a lot of church planter assessments and one of the things we look for is intrinsic motivation. This allows us to see what will keep them going when things get tough. It also allows us to determine if money is a primary motivator. Drive provides us with the research behind the importance of this needed tool for church planting. And for ministry in the 21st century as well.
Drive is also a marker for entrepreneurial ministry. And entrepreneurialism in general.
The book is easy to read despite its topic. It makes good use of emerging research. But it’s a very practical book as well. At the end of the book, Pink provides a toolkit. In it, he provides strategies for awakening motivation for individuals, parents, educators, and businesses. He provides a great reading list of 15 essential books to encourage and promote a healthy environment for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He also provides a discussion guide to get the discussion started.
This is a fabulous book, and will be effective for leaders and followers alike. Whether you are a pastor, small group leader, or business person, this will help motivate those you lead and even help you understand yourself better. Pick it up at amazon, barnes & noble or your local bookstore.
Learning How to Die?
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Is the real purpose of life living? Or learning how to die?
Researchers in contemporary science, psychology and philosophy are trying to respond to humans’ confusion and wonder about what happens after death. In fact, it’s a difficult question that has been challenging humankind since ancient times. It even challenged the man many believe was the greatest philosopher in Western history, Socrates.
After being condemned to death by Greek authorities in the fourth century BC, Socrates told them that death is not an evil thing, but on the contrary a good thing. In saying that, Socrates did not presume to know what happened to humans after death. He was satisfied with being an agnostic about the afterlife. In fact, Socrates said, “Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change; a migration of the soul from this place to another.”
The story of Socrates’ lack of fear about death makes up the opening chapter of The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage), by Simon Critchley, which explores what 190 famous philosophers thought about death and how they died. In his book, Critchley argues that real philosophy should be “about learning how to die.” Paradoxically, that is the goal of living. Our ultimate purpose, as Critchley puts it, should be “cultivating the appropriate attitude to death.”
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, which this week released it’s latest technology, the iPad, has come to believe that death is life’s greatest teacher. In a 2005 speech to Stanford’s graduating class, Jobs, who had then begun battling pancreatic cancer, stated,
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
During this weekend, celebrated in much of the world as Easter, the focus is on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the period when the tomb becomes the womb, when His death is the seed to life, to rebirth, and to recreation. But we must remember that this a journey we all have to take. We all have to die, and in dying, experience rebirth and life recreated. It is the only way to live. Learning how to die, to our selfishness, our demands, and our attempts at being God, is a journey to life and living. If we can practice dying daily, we can live in an appropriate relationship with Him. That is really living. And when we do physically die…Wow! What a life we will have then!
Help from the article Is there life after bodily death?
