Economists would have bet on paid experts. Volunteers won anyway
Bonuses can hurt creative work; wanting to direct your own life, get better, and serve something larger works better.
TED · The puzzle of motivation | Dan Pink | TEDDan Pink, speaking to an audience about business motivation, pointed to two different ways of building an encyclopedia that no economist saw coming.
In the mid-1990s, he said, Microsoft started Encarta, paying professionals to write thousands of articles, with managers overseeing the work to keep it on schedule and on budget. A few years later, Wikipedia started with a different model: volunteers contributing for fun, with no one paid. Ten years ago, Pink said, "you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model."
Pink called it a "titanic battle" between intrinsic motivators and extrinsic motivators, and said intrinsic motivation won "in a knockout." In his words, the winning approach revolves around three elements: "autonomy, mastery and purpose."
By autonomy, he meant "the urge to direct our own lives." By mastery, he meant "the desire to get better and better at something that matters." By purpose, he meant "the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves."
Pink said traditional management is good at producing compliance, but self-direction works better when the goal is engagement. Management itself, he argued, is not something found in nature but something people invented. He added that older-style rewards work, but only in a limited set of situations.
He saw the same pattern at Atlassian, an Australian software company. A few times a year, engineers get 24 hours to work on anything they want outside their regular job, then show colleagues what they made. "That one day of intense autonomy," Pink said, produced software fixes that "might never have existed."
For Pink, the volunteers did not beat the professionals because they were managed harder. They won because intrinsic motivation beat carrots and sticks.
Questions people ask
Do bonuses and other if-then rewards ever work?
Yes, for simple, routine work with clear rules and a clear finish line. Pink points to research showing that for mechanical tasks, higher pay brought better results. The problem starts when even basic thinking or creativity is required, because the reward narrows attention.
What does autonomy look like in an ordinary job?
It means choosing what to work on, when to do it, how to do it, and whom to do it with. In practice that can be flexible hours, picking projects, or deciding methods, rather than following a strict script set by a manager.
How do Atlassian's FedEx Days work in practice?
In one 24-hour event, engineers set aside regular duties, build a fix or improvement they care about, and present it to colleagues. Because people choose problems they notice themselves, the company gets ideas managers would never have assigned.