To get the best results out of people in the workplace author Dan Pink says give them the tools to succeed then GET OUT OF THEIR WAY!
Pink argues that in your job you want to direct your own life, get better and better at something that matters, and yearn to do what you do in the service of something larger than yourself, or as he classifies it respectively: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Check some or all of these boxes and your workplace will be on its way to better ideas, greater productivity, and generally happier people. These ideas fly in the face of general business practices, even those traditionally considered to be progressive, which promote strict office schedules, long meetings, and disadvantageous work environments. Pink touts companies that allow employees the freedom to create their own schedules, choose their own teams, and even decide what they want to spend their time doing as progressive and ultimately more successful.
Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a Gladwell-esque assemblage of other people’s research, and though Pink makes clear that this hands-off approach to management does not fit every business model (an assembly line that works from home is less than ideal) his message is clear and insightful – people are intrinsically motivated to do more and be more. If this is true, and myriad studies seem to validate that it is, then it should be possible to scale this method of management into other structures that promote control from the top and rely on extrinsic motivators (think carrot and stick) to get desired results. One such troubled bureaucracy with an enduring legacy of management woes and outcome failures, the likes of which are hard to match anywhere, is international development aid.
The status quo of international aid functions in a very similar way to the rigid model of the business world, and a shift in understanding motivations may lead to some useful ideas about how aid should work. Traditionally aid has been passed down from richer countries to poor with conditions attached ostensibly meant to reshape the image of the unwashed and underdeveloped world into that of the developed. Between countries this aid has taken the form of low interest loans meant for investment and consumption, yet when the recipient country fails to grow it finds itself in debt to those who had tried to help in the first place. What money they do make just goes to pay down the interest, to which many carrying a credit card balance can relate.
This model of dependency has also extended to poor individuals. Plans that deliver food discourage people from making their own while delivered goods can devastate local producers. In homage to the ‘teach a man to fish’ parable programs have attempted to show poor communities how to farm, sometimes forcing them to become indebted to buy seeds or, more often, entirely failing to cater farming methods to the locality resulting in failure. The crowning assumption heaped upon the poor of the world by nearly all development organizations and programs is that people are poor solely because they don’t know how not to be poor. Meaning that all we need to do to ‘help
Unconditional cash transfers are a system by which cash is put directly in the hands of poor people…and that’s it. Besides being a completely revolutionary notion, it not only is one of the most rigorously researched aid concepts, but is in all likelihood the most successful aid program ever. The idea is simple, if you give money to the impecunious they will spend it on all the things they could not buy before. One might think that this means booze and cigarettes but that doesn’t turn out to be the case, at all. Studies have shown that cash recipients are most likely to spend the money on food security, upgrading their domicile, health expenses, and sending children to school, among many others.
We must check our enthusiasm though with the realities of the real world. No one program is going to be the cure all, and the nascent cash transfer system is still in great need of wider application to form a more robust data set on effectiveness. Though speculations abound about cash transfers, there is even disagreement within the concept regarding the nature of these transfers. Some organizations feel that conditional cash transfers that peg the open use of money with some developmental necessity, such as compulsory trips to the health clinic or enrollment in schools, are the only way to truly raise people out of poverty. Even these conditions seem to promote the lingering interests of the past aid schema though. There is still uncertainty about who should get the money, how much, and according to what schedule should the payouts be disbursed: one-time, monthly, or otherwise.
Empowering people to intrinsically advance their lives at home or at the office seems to require little more than autonomy, mastery, purpose, and a big step out of the way of their progress! In light of the legion of questions still faced by this shift in the conceptualization of motivation we are not likely to see every business or aid group hand out pockets full of money and then up and leave the building. But being aware of these biases should help to broaden the conversation about how people can be and do more.
Deeper: For more in depth articles about cash transfers see this Slate piece, but definitely take the time to read the offering by The Economist. Many eyes in development are trained toward India for its new cash transfer plan as one of the highest stakes applications yet. Dan Pink has talked at length at RSA and TED. For more on the fascinating idea that extrinsic motivators actually hurt creativity watch this splendid and short talk about the marshmallow-spaghetti tower.
