Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [68]
Companies call these tangible rewards “bonuses” or “perks” and firmly believe they motivate people.
One famous Silicon Valley company that hires thousands of bright, enthusiastic young techies was known for providing great free food for all, including visitors. The young techies would wax lyrical in the blogosphere about how they enjoyed their work—and the great free food. Then business slowed down and a big boss wrote a memo to all that the free food was being abused by some and that measures of economy would now have to be taken. That—unsurprisingly to psychologists but surprisingly to the management—sent shivers of disappointment up and down the blogosphere. Paradoxically, as soon as a perk becomes established, it loses its motivating power and becomes a potential liability.
Besides the tangible rewards given independent of specific activity engagement—such as a salary—or unanticipated rewards—such as an unexpected bonus—all other forms of tangible rewards significantly undermine people’s willingness to engage in an activity for its own sake. This, arguably, does not pose a challenge to “how” companies.7 There, tangible rewards are one more system to make people do what they are told to do. But it posed a big difficulty to the liberating leaders. Bob Davids expressed this unequivocally: “It’s absolutely impossible for one human being to motivate another.”8 Yet, they continued to seek ways to get people to join the liberation campaign instead of resist it. The breakthrough came when they adopted a creative approach of trying to solve a different—redefined—problem.
GETTING CREATIVE
Creativity research is a burgeoning multidisciplinary field, of which the major focus is how creative insight, the “Eureka!” phenomenon, occurs: the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, Alexander Fleming spotting mold killing the bacteria in the petri dish, Spence Silver of 3M intrigued by a weak adhesive leading to the invention of Post-it notes. To untangle this puzzle, researchers view the phenomenon of creative insight as a pair: problem + solution. Ultimately, insight is an original and useful solution. But quite often, a lot of creativity goes into finding the right problem or in redefining the one at hand. As the early twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey said, “A problem well put is half-solved.”9 Thus, the “Eureka!” of creative insight often occurs by redefining the problem one is desperately trying to solve, in particular when one is under time pressure.10 Consider the following true story reported by two leading creativity scholars, Todd Lubart and Robert Sternberg.
A high-level executive in one of the Big Three automobile firms in the United States was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand he loved his job and the money he made doing it. After all, high-level executives in Detroit are well paid, whether or not their cars are selling. On the other hand he absolutely detested his boss. He had put up with this would-be ogre for a number of years and now found that he just couldn’t stand it anymore. After carefully considering his options, he decided to visit a head-hunter—a specialist in finding high-level executives new jobs. So the executive made an appointment, not knowing exactly what to expect. Fortunately the head-hunter indicated that there would be no problem in placing him somewhere else.
The executive told his wife how the appointment had gone and that he was confident he would find another job. After he described his day, his wife described hers. At the time she happened to be teaching Intelligence Applied,11 a program for teaching thinking skills to high school and college students. She described the particular technique she had gone over that day—redefining a problem. The basic idea is that you take a problem you are facing and turn it on its head. In other words, you look at the problem in a totally new way—one that is different not