事业分析师 Dan Pink 揭开动机的秘密，什么是人文社会科学家知道而一般管理者却不知的？传统的报酬是否真的有我们想象的那样激励人心？听他讲述这个令人吃惊的发现 -- 它也许正是我们的未来。
I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school.In America, law is a professional degree: after your university degree, you go on to law school. When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible.Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to.But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.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?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.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.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.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."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.Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?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?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.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.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.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.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.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?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.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.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.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!It makes me crazy. And here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy.This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact.Let me give you an example. Let me marshal the evidence here. I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down.What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.Then they said, "Let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Let's go to Madurai, India and test it." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards.What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No, these are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. Do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience.Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger.Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance."There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, they're interesting, or part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, it's a television set. Somebody invented it. It doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.Some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. You don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy.Some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half.Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. Being Australians, everybody has a beer.They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty; not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever.That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time -- done, famously, at 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.Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), 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.Some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen. Do it because you like to do it.Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation, right? This is the Thrilla in Manila. Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout.Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive-- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.And here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe -- we can change the world.开始前我必须先向你们告解，二十多年前，我做了一件让我后悔莫及的事，一件我丝毫不感到骄傲的事，一件我希望没有任何人会知道的事，但今日我认为我有必要揭发我自己，(笑声)，80年代晚期，因为年少轻狂，我进入法律学院就读。在美国，法律学位是个专业学位，你得先拿到学士，才能进入法律学院，当我进入法律学院时，我的成绩不怎么好，客气地说，我的成绩不怎么好，我的毕业成绩成就了在我之上，那其他九成的同学，(笑声)，谢谢你们，我这辈子从来没做过律师，基本上那样做可能还会犯法。但今日，我违背我的理性，违背我太太的忠告，我想重拾那些过去所学的诉讼技巧，所剩无几的诉讼技巧，我不要向你们说故事，而是提出一个陈述，提出一个有根有据，货真价实的，法庭陈述，来重新思考我们的管理方法，陪审团的女士先生们，请看看这个，这便是有名的蜡烛问题，你们之中有些人可能已经看过了，它是在1945年，由心理学家，Karl Duncker，所创造的，Karl Duncker，创造了这个实验，在行为科学中被广泛运用，情况是，假设我是实验者，我带你进入一个房间，给你一根蜡烛，一些图钉和火柴，告诉你说“现在，尝试把蜡烛固定在墙上，让烛泪不要滴到桌上。”你会怎么做？许多人尝试用图钉把蜡烛钉在墙上，行不通，有些人，台下也有些人，做出这样的动作，有些人想到他们可以，点燃火柴，溶化蜡烛的底部，尝试把它黏在墙上，好主意。但行不通，差不多过了五到十分钟，大部分的人便会想出解决办法，就像图片上那样，重点是克服”功能固着“当你看到盒子，你不过把它当成装大头针的容器，但它还有其它功能，那就是作为放蜡烛的平台。现在我想告诉你另一个实验，利用蜡烛问题，由一个现在在普林斯顿大学，叫做，Sam Glucksberg，的科学家所做的实验，这实验让我们看见动机的力量，他是这么做的。他将参与者聚集在一个房间里，告诉他们“我要开始计时。看看你们能多快解决这个问题？”，他对其中一群人说，，我只是想取个平均值，看一般人需要花多久的时间，才能解决这样的问题。他提供奖励给另一群人，他说“如果你是前25%最快解决问题的人，就能拿到五块钱。如果你是今日所有人里解答最快的，你就有20块钱。”这个实验是几年前的事了，按照通货膨胀，几分钟就能拿到20块是很不错的，是个不错的诱因。问题是：这群人比另一群人，的解题速度快了多少呢？答案是：平均来说，他们比另一组人，多花了三分半种。整整三分半种。这不合理，不是吗？你想想，我是个美国人。我相信自由市场，这个实验不太对劲吧？对吗？(笑声)，如果你想要人们做得更好，，你便给他们奖赏，对吗？红利、佣金、他们自己的真人秀，赋予他们动机。这就是商业法则，但实验里却不是这样，奖励是为了，增强思考能力及创意，但事实却是相反。它阻断了思考和创意能力。有趣的事情是，这个实验不是误差，它被一再重复，在过去的四十年间，这些不同的诱因，如果你这样做，你就得到那个，在某些情况里是可行的，但在许多任务中，它们不是没作用，更有可能产生反效果，这是在社会科学中一项，最有力的发现。同时也是最为人忽略的。过去两年，我研究，人类的动机，尤其是那些外部的激励因素，和内在的激励因素，我可以告诉你，两者相差悬殊，如果你使用科学方法查证，你会发现，科学知识和商业行为之间有条鸿沟，我们必须要注意的是，我们的商业机制，想想这些商业的协议和假设，我们如何激励人心，如何运用人资，全是以这些外部激励因素作为基础，打手心给块糖，对许多20世纪的工作来说是可行的，但面对21世纪的工作，这些机械化的，奖惩分明的作法，已经不管用了，有时更招致反效果，让我呈现我想表达的。Glucksberg做了一个类似的实验，这次他给了他们一个比较不同的问题，像这个图里面的，实验对象必须要找出一个让蜡烛黏在墙上，又不会流下烛泪的方法，相同地，这边：我们要的是平均时间，这边：一样的给他们不同诱因，结果呢？这次，有诱因的那组人，远远地胜过了另一组人，为什么？一旦我们把图钉从盒子里拿出来，问题就变得相当简单不是吗？假设，在这个情况下，奖励就变得非常有效，在规则简单，目标明显，的情况下，奖励，产生了作用，让我们集中精神，变得专注，这便是为何奖励在许多情况下有效的缘故，当我们面对的工作是，范围狭窄，你能清楚见到目标，向前直冲时，奖励便非常有效，但在真正的“蜡烛问题”中，你不能只是这样看，解答不在那里，解答是在周围，你需要四处找寻，奖励却令我们眼光狭隘，限制了我们的想象力。让我告诉你这个问题的重要性，在西欧，亚洲的许多地方，北美洲、澳洲，白领工作者比较少处理，这种问题，更多的是这种问题，那些例行的、常规性的、左脑式的工作，一些会计、一些财务分析，一些电脑编程，变得极为容易外包，变得自动化，软件能处理的更快，世界其他地方的低价供应商能以更便宜的成本来完成，所以更重要的是右脑的，创意，概念式的能力。想想你的工作，想想你自己的工作，你所面对的问题，甚至是我们，今天所谈论到的问题，这些问题，它们有清楚的规则，和一个简单的解答吗？不，它们的规则模糊，解答，如果有解答的话，通常是令人意外而不明显的，在这里的每个人，都在尝试解决他自己的，“蜡烛问题”，对所有形式的“蜡烛问题”，在所有领域，这些「如果，那就」的奖励，这些在商业世界里无处不在的奖惩系统，其实没用。这简直让我发狂，这不是重点，是这不是一种“感觉”，我是个律师，我才不信什么感觉，这也不是哲学，我是个美国人，我才不信什么哲学，(笑声)，这是真相，或是我们在华盛顿特区的政治圈常说的，一个“事实真相”，(笑声)，(掌声)，让我给你一个例子，让我收集这些证据，因为我不是在告诉你一个故事，而是陈述一个案子。陪审团的女士们先生们，证据在此：Dan Ariely,一位当代伟大的经济学家，他和三位同仁，对麻省理工学院的学生做了一些研究，他给这些学生一些游戏，一些需要创造力的游戏，需要动力和专注，依照他们的表现给他们，三种不同程度的奖励，小奖励、中奖励、大奖励，如果你做得好，你就得到大奖励，依此类推，结果呢？只要是机械形态的工作，红利就像我们所认知的，奖励越高，表现越好，是的。但如果这个工作需要，任何基本的认知能力，越大的奖励却带来越差的表现。于是他们说，“让我们试试是否有什么文化差距，让我们去印度的马杜赖试试。”，生活水平较低，在马杜赖，北美标准的的中等奖励，在这里有意义多了，一样地，一些不同游戏，三种奖励，结果呢？中等奖励的人，做得不比那些小奖励的人好，但这次，那些能够得到大奖励的人，表现最差，三种实验中，在我们提供的九个游戏中有八个，奖励越高的表现越差。难道这是一种感情用事的，社会主义的阴谋诡计吗？不。这些经济学家来自麻省理工，卡内基梅隆、和芝加哥大学，你知道赞助这实验的是谁吗？是美国联邦储备银行，完全的美国经验。让我们跨海到伦敦政经学院看看，LSE,伦敦经济学院，十一位诺贝尔经济奖得主的母校，训练伟大经济学家的地方，有乔治索罗斯、弗里德里希•哈耶克，和滚石乐团的米克•贾格尔（笑声），上个月，才刚过去的那个月，政经学院的经济学家汇整了51个关于，企业内部绩效薪酬的研究，这些经济学家说，“我们发现金钱的诱因，能对整体绩效带来负面效果。”科学知识和商业行为之间，有条鸿沟，我所忧心的是，在我们站在金融风暴，废墟之间的此刻，仍然有太多团体，仍然以一些过时的、，未经验证的、非科学的，几乎是来自天方夜谭的假设，来制定规则和管理人事，如果我们真的想要摆脱这个经济危机，如果我们真的想要在这些，属于21世纪的核心工作中获取绩效的话，这解答无异是错上加错：用红萝卜来吸引人，或是用棍子来威胁人，我们需要一种新做法。好消息是这些研究人类动机的科学家，已经给了我们一个新方向，这个新方向讲求内在的诱因，我们想做是因为它能改变世界，因为我们喜欢，因为它很有趣，因为它能影响的范围很广，在我心里，这种新的商业机制，围绕在三个基础上，自主性、掌握力和使命感，自主性，想要主掌自己人生的需求，掌握力，想要在举足轻重的事情上做得更好的欲望，使命感，希望我们所做的事情，是为了更高远的理想的渴望，这些便是建立新商业机制的基石。今天我只想提到自主性，20世纪产生了管理学的想法，管理学不是自然发生的，管理学像是，－，它不是一棵树，而是个电视机，对吗？有人发明它，不代表它永远都好用，管理学很好，传统的管理学的概念是好的，如果你需要的是服从，但如果你想要员工全心投入，自动自发更好。有关自动自发，让我给你一些，革命性的例子，代表着，--这样的例子不多，但是你可以发现一些有趣的事情正开始发生，它代表着付给人们合理与，足够的工资，让钱不再是问题，然后给人们很大的自治权，让我举一些例子。在座谁听过一家叫，Atlassian，的公司？看起来一半都不到，Atlassian，是一个澳大利亚的软件公司，他们做了一件很酷的事，一年有几次，他们跟公司里的软件工程师说，“接下来的24个小时，去做你自己想做的事，，只要它和你每天的工作无关，随便你要做什么都行。”，这些工程师便利用这些时间，写出一套有趣的编程，优雅地包装这些想法，在那天的最后，在这个全员到齐，万众一心的会议中，对他们的组员和整个公司，介绍他的发明，当然，身为澳大利亚人，大家都得来罐啤酒。他们叫这是，FedEx，联邦快递日，因为你必须在隔夜交出你的作品，很不赖的想法。虽然违反商标法，但这个想法很聪明。在高度自主的一日中，他们做出了许多软件编程的革新，之前根本没人想到的。这个计划的成功，让，Altlassian，更进一步的发明了，五分之一时间，谷歌把这个想法发扬光大，工程师可以用五分之一的时间，做所有他们想做的事情，他们可以自由的分配他们的时间，工作，组员，和作法，就是这样。完全的自主权，诚如大家所知，在谷歌，一年中有一半的新商品，都来自这五分之一时间，像谷歌信箱、Orkut、谷歌新闻。让我给你一个更具革命性的例子，一个叫做“只论结果的工作环境”，简写是ROWE，由两个美国分析师所创造，用在十多家北美公司上，在ROWE之中，人们没有日程表，他们想来就来，他们不需要在特定时间到公司，任何时间，他们只需要把工作完成，怎么做、何时做，在哪里做、都取决于他们自己，甚至连开会都是选择性的。结果呢？几乎所有公司的生产力都提升了，工作投入度提升，工作满意度提升，人力流失降低，自主性、掌握力和使命感，这便是新工作方式的新基础，在座的某些人可能会看着然后说，“嗯，听起来不错，就是太理想化了。”我说“错了。我有证据。”在90年代中，微软开始了一个，叫做，Encarta，的百科全书计划，他们使用了所有正确的诱因，所有的诱因。他们付钱给专业人士，让他们写和编辑这些文章，收入颇丰的主管们监督着整个计划，确定它不会超过预算和时间，几年后另一个百科全书计划开始了，完全不同的模式，为了兴趣而作。没有人能拿到任何一毛钱，因为自己喜欢做而做。如果你在十年前，到一个经济学家那里去，对他说“我有两种撰写百科全书的模式，拿来相比，谁会赢？”十年前你绝对不会找到任何一个清醒的经济学家，在这个地球的任何角落，能够预知维基百科的模式。这是一个两种模式之间的世纪战役，动机的阿里与弗雷泽之战，就像那场在马尼拉的拳王之战，是吗？内在动机和外在动机，自主性、掌握力和使命感，和胡萝卜和棍子。谁赢了？内在动机、自主性、掌握力和使命感，获得压倒性胜利。结论是？科学知识和商业行为之间，有条鸿沟，一：这些20世纪的奖励，这些我们当作商业中自然一部分的诱因，是有用的。但意外地只在一个非常狭窄的情况下，二：这些奖励往往会破坏创造力，三：高绩效的秘密，不是奖励和惩罚，而是看不见的内在动力，让人为了自己而做的动力，让人有使命感的动力。最好的是，我们了然于心。科学不过确认了我们心里的声音，如果我们改变，科学知识和商业行为之间有的那条鸿沟，如果我们把我们的动机，对诱因的想法，带进21世纪，如果我们越过懒惰的、危险的、理想化的，胡萝卜和棍子的想法，我们可以强化我们的公司，解决许多的“蜡烛问题”，那么或许，或许，或许，我们便能改变世界。陈述完毕。