As a Guide at Acton Academy Columbus, I share information with parents on a regular basis - through daily pictures, weekly reflections, and through other insights. The following is a note I sent to parents about a book I recently completed reading - Drive by Daniel Pink.

Hello parents!

I just got done reading a book about motivation and there's so much great information about what motivates people (children and adults). I just wanted to share with you some information from the book - Drive by Daniel Pink.

At the studio, as you're now aware, a big portion of my role is to be a game maker. In general, a game maker sets up the environment, creates the rules for the game / activity and steps aside to let the participants play. As a game maker, what I'm trying to do is motivate / nudge the eagles through the game / environment that's set up.

So it's a really important question for me - what motivates us? Pink lays out what we've historically believed and how that's evolved. 

• Motivation 1.0 - We were motivated by our survival needs.

• Motivation 2.0 - We are motivated by rewards and punishments.

• Motivation 3.0 - A desire to learn, to create, to better the world.

In the earliest days, Motivation 1.0 made sense. Think back to how the earliest days would have been - The premise is that we are motivated by surviving to get food and not being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.

For the longest time, everyone has been operating under the belief that Motivation 2.0 works. You're given a reward if you do well, a punishment if you don't. It's built into every organization from the day-to-day activities to compensation plans to bonuses. Hit your sales target and you'll get X bonus. Complete this work and we'll leave early for the day. The premise is that people are motivated by the rewards they are given... and from the fear of the punishment. They'll do exactly what they need to do get the reward and not the punishment. 

But what the science and Motivation 3.0 are telling us is that so much of our assumptions about what motivates us (motivation 2.0) are completely wrong.

But wait... they do work. If we tell our children that we'll go watch a movie if they clean their room, we'll probably get that desired outcome.

Yes, that's true....

So here's the critical detail. Tasks we do at work (or home or school) can be broken into 1 of 2 categories.     

• Algorithmic: An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. That is, there’s an algorithm for solving it.

• Heuristic: A heuristic task is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.

Working on the line at a factory is mostly algorithmic. You do pretty much the same thing over and over in a certain way. Creating an ad campaign is mostly heuristic. You have to come up with something new

For algorithmic tasks, extrinsic rewards work. For heuristic tasks, rewards may not just be not helpful.... they can actually be harmful.

Simple example. Imagine it's 1995 and I tell you about 2 companies making an encyclopedia.

• Encyclopedia 1: One of the biggest companies in the world will put its massive resources to hire 100s of employees and spend millions of dollars to build the encyclopedia that they'll sell.

• Encyclopedia 2: No one will be paid. We'll ask hobbyists to spend their time creating it for us. They'll have to volunteer their time. And then we'll put it online for everyone to get it for free.

Which one will survive?

We know the answer now but back then it would have been ludicrous to think that Encyclopedia 2 (Wikipedia) would survive. No economist (or anyone) would have guessed Encyclopedia 1 (Microsoft's MSN Encarta) wouldn't make it.

What happened? The heuristic task of making an encyclopedia brought out an army of volunteers and enthusiasts that had intrinsic reasons for putting in 20-30 hours + a week. Microsoft's rewards system had no chance.

What happens when you add rewards to an activity that preschoolers find intrinsic joy in? A blurb about the risk of the "If-Then" reward.

“Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they determined. “When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.

Another quick example: Through an experiment, we saw the red cross would actually get FEWER donors if they started paying for blood donations. By paying people, you take out the altruistic act of doing good and people are less motivated to donate.

So what's the problem with the rewards / "Carrot and Stick" approach? Pink lays out seven flaws.

There's so much more. The book focuses on business but there is a section about education.

Our traditional school system relies on Motivation 2.0 (rewards system). Exhibit this behavior (study) and you'll get the reward / carrot (good grades). It works in the short term and for algorithmic tasks. But for heuristic tasks / ones that require creativity, problem solving, and us to use our right brains), using motivation 2.0 tactics may "impair performance".

The Acton system is built around Motivation 3.0 and the belief that the love of learning is intrinsic. There is a reason why we don't do grades. They don't motivate on heuristic tasks. Students at schools try to get the right answer (or the ones teachers like) rather than just being their creative selves (flaw #3 in the graphic above). 

Our Eagles are growing up in a world where they need to use their right-brain and the 4 C's (Creativity, Collaboration, Critical thinking, and Communication). The algorithmic tasks are now being done by computers. You have machines taking over factories, robots completing basic (and ever more complex) tasks, and machine learning software being built at every major company.

The world has changed so much since the industrial revolution. How we look at motivation has to as well.

We're no longer in the industrial revolution where rewards / punishment are important to help churn more stuff out of a factory. The information age is a heuristic one and we need to focus on intrinsic rewards.

Now bringing it back to our Eagles.....

In the studio, I largely stay away from extrinsic rewards though I've used it a couple (2-3?) times to motivate the Eagles (e.g., The winning team will get Motts). The couple times I've used it, it has been effective for the short term but that can start to backfire if they begin to expect it. I know they find joy in learning - it's intrinsic. I don't need to use extrinsic rewards. It's good to know that extrinsic rewards can be used for algorithmic tasks and not have a negative impact.

One more note from the book. Rewards are not bad but they should be used as a "Now that" versus "If then". For example, I may surprise them after the completion of a week long project with Motts versus making it a "If you finish the project, I'll give you Motts".

There is so much more to this book. I have a lot more screenshots but it would take way too long to type it all out. If you've actually read this far into the email.... I love that!🙂 If you're really interested, the book is great and filled with way more information than I can type out here.