Assume Nothing, Expect Everything

In the early autumn of 1900, Orville and Wilbur Wright left their home and bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, for Kitty Hawk where they would try out the experimental gliders that eventually led to the world's first successful airplane.

They were hoping to test one of history's greatest assumptions: that human flight wasn't possible. Three years later, the Wright brothers proved that it was.

"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true," Orville said, "there would be little hope of advance."

This is precisely the philosophy espoused by best-selling author Dan Pink in his new book about the dynamics of work, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink, an Ohio native like the Wright brothers, argues that long held truisms about motivation are creating a self-defeating cycle of low creativity and low production in the workplace. Our assumptions about what makes people tick are sending us down the wrong path, he says.

"In many ways, we are the prisoners of our assumptions," says Pink. "The assumptions we make about who people are and how the world works send us off in a particular direction where our options are pretty narrow. The same thing is true of any kind of management policy."

In his book, Pink specifically critiques the traditional carrot-and-stick theory that positive and negative reinforcement improve worker productivity. Before we think about ways to optimize the existing motivational system, he says, we have to consider that it might be the wrong system in the first place.

Pink agrees that carrot-and-stick motivators may be effective for simple, algorithmic or mechanical tasks, things that require "turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line." But most jobs that demand such skills, he points out, have been outsourced overseas.

More complicated, right brain work—the kind that entails artistic, empathic, and creative ability—is difficult to outsource or automate. And the greater complexity of the work calls for motivational techniques that are a bit more subtle, more enduring.

It's no longer enough to simply "dangle money out before people" to drive them to action, Pink says. "Money matters a lot, but it matters in a different way than people might think." First and foremost, he notes, employees must be compensated adequately and fairly. Taking the issue of compensation off the table leaves the door wide open for experimenting with other workplace forces that might make the most of what Pink describes as our natural inclination to be curious and self-directed.

One of the ideas Pink promotes in Drive is that companies should set aside days when nothing routine is scheduled. Instead, employees bring in their own experimental designs and devote the open time provided by their employers to developing pet projects. Pink points out that free-wheeling workdays like these have resulted in creations like Gmail and the Post-it note.

But for such serendipity to occur, employers have to believe that their employees have the capacity and the ambition to invent something new and exciting without supervision. "If you're running a company and you feel like you have to monitor the people who work for you, then you've hired the wrong people," Pink says.

Most of the passive and inert behavior infiltrating the workplace is learned behavior derived from years of schooling that teaches risk aversion and compliance, according to Pink. Although he thinks these behaviors can be unlearned, he insists that it won't happen in a carrot-and-stick workplace. Employers must provide a fertile and edgy work environment that gives "individual talent the chance to be amplified and to be communicated."

But Pink acknowledges that creating such an atmosphere is everyone's responsibility. He is a big believer in a little thing called grit, the dogged perseverance of a single person to master a task or make the impossible possible. Even to prove the naysayers wrong and invent an outlandish reality called human flight.

In making his case for rethinking our approach to work, Pink calls out persuasively to employers, but his confidence rests most securely on the dignity and potential of the employee. "I try to look at the world through the lens of the individual rather than through the organization," he says. "My approach is the experience of one."

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