What do Dan Pink, Scientific Blogging, Smart CEOs and I have in common? (I love putting myself in such company.) We know employees' performance is best when they are allowed to do whatever they want.
For Scientific Blogging, Andrea Kuszewski relays Dan Pink's advice,
which is to reduce rules and remove restrictions so people can get
things done.
She also shares intriguing results from "Duncker's famous 'candle problem' illustrating Functional Fixedness (1945)," in which
"subjects are asked to attach a candle to wall in a way to prevent wax from dripping on the table- given only a candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks. Some subjects tried to tack the candle to the wall, others tried to melt the wax on the side of the candle to stick it to the wall. Neither of these worked. The solution is shown here."
via www.scientificblogging.com
Kuszewski writes that Sam Glucksburg, a professor of psychology at Princeton, added to the experiment offering a financial incentive to complete the task in a shorter period of time, and the incentive made people take longer. Why? Because a certain part of our brain gets focused on the money and prevents the other parts of our brain from being creative.I happen to know a little about that part of the brain: the Nucleus Accumbens. It not only gets triggered by money, it is also the part of the brain that lights up when drug addicts focus on their fix. Sort of makes you wonder if companies want to treat their employees like drug addicts.
I just finished reading Sway, a book which has as perfect a subtitle as subtitles go: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. The book ties in nicely because it explains clearly how the nucleus accumbens reacts to incentives and how the incentive backfires!
The authors, brothers Ori and Ram Brafman, tell an interesting story about incentives given to teachers at an Ohio charter school. Because the teachers' nucleus accumbens were so fired up by the promise of bonus money, they became worse teachers, sacrificing lesson time for parties that lured students into better attendance numbers. Otherwise good teachers, they were led astray when their hard-wiring (the nucleus accumbens) would only light-up for the school's monetary incentives.
You can see Dan Pink's presentation for TED Glodal 2009. Pink covers the candle experiment and the timed incentive and makes a pseudo (his joke) legal case for letting us do what we want!
And if you want to know why you just can't help but to act irrationally, read Sway.
