By Daniel H. Pink
Riverhead Books 260 pages
To think of it as the candle problem is to risk missing its point entirely. Worse, it’s to miss why the newest book from bestselling U.S. business writer Dan Pink might offer some of the insights that many farmers are looking for as they wrestle with career decisions for themselves and their families.
Here’s the first half of the problem, invented in the 1930s by psychologist Karl Dunker. Students are taken one at a time into a bare office. The only furniture is a table that butts up against the wall, as in the illustration. On the table are a candle, a book of matches, and a box holding some tacks.
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The experiment leader asks the students to attach the candle to the wall so they can light it. Then the leader starts a stopwatch.
According to Pink, most students eventually figure it out. They may start by trying to tack the candle to the wall, or they might try using melted wax to weld it there, but neither of those strategies actually works.
Instead, they need to tack the box to the wall, converting the box into a candle holder.
That, however, is the less interesting half of the problem. Now, let’s say you are asked to find a way to get the students to solve the problem faster. With your farm business background, you know exactly how to do it. So did Princeton University psychologist Sam Glucksberg when he tried it in the 1960s. He sent half his students into the office per usual, but promised the other half an extra $5 (remember, this is the ’60s) if their times were in the fastest 25 per cent for solving the problem, and $20 if they were the fastest of all.
So, how much faster did the incentivized subjects solve the problem?
They didn’t. In fact, while it took the first group an average five minutes to tack the box to the wall, the incentivized subject took 3-1/2 minutes longer. Nor was it a fluke. The results have proved remarkably consistent across scores of repeats.
The message is, getting the motivation wrong means everybody loses.
If you didn’t see that coming — very, very few business people do — it means a bit of time reading Pink’s Drive could be a wise use of your own time.
“There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” Pink says. Nowhere is that more clear than in how you manage yourself and your employees.
In the candle case, what science knows is that if you have an automatic job — let’s say you need somebody to thread hundreds of nuts onto hundreds of bolts — they will do it faster if you give them a cash incentive.
They do it faster because that’s what performance incentives are good at doing. They help you zoom your focus onto the task at hand. However, if your job involves imagination or mental dexterity — like converting a tack box into a candle holder — you need to have as wide a focus as you can, which means incentives are exactly the wrong way to go.
Instead, as Pink argues, you’ll get the best results from a manager (or a son or daughter who takes over the farm) if you ensure they are compensated well, so money is effectively taken off the table. That then leaves them open to be motivated by the factors that really do create top results.
In other words, if you think the rosy predictions for commodity prices are all that it will take to get top performance from your children, or even that income is just the most important among a series of important things, it’s time to have another think.
Pink is clear. Whatever business you’re in, we’re all fundamentally the same. The conceptual thinkers who can function well in the evolving world of business are all driven by three basic career needs: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Autonomy doesn’t mean independence. It means setting your own path, which often means working at least part of the time as a member of one or more teams. Team interaction provides motivation, and the ability to achieve more than you can on your own.
Mastery speaks for itself. Farmers have always succeeded based on their skills, but for tomorrow, it is most important to want to master and take pride in the skills that are most essential for the growth of the farm. Increasingly, those are financial and management skills.
Last comes purpose. We might want to dismiss it, but Pink won’t let us. We need to be part of something that is bigger than ourselves. In agriculture, that has meant taking pride in the land, being committed to the ideas family and community heritage, and producing healthy food. Tomorrow, it will mean ongoing motivation to build and create beyond the limits of what you can imagine today.
Some time with Pink’s book may help you understand whether farming will tick these three boxes for your son or daughter. If it will, you may just have learned something valuable.CG
