How are people motivated to be innovative and creative and energized to come up with breakthrough ideas?

From that simple but deeply resonant question, bestselling author and former White House speechwriter Daniel Pink moved delegates at the 2011 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees, to step outside the corporate hierarchy and business texts and consider what social scientists have learned about what motivates people.

As developed as today's companies and economies have become, however, today's employers remain bound by what Pink termed "the physics of behavior." It's very simple, he said. "If you reward behavior, you typically get more of it, and if you punish behavior, you get less of it," he said. It's the old carrot and stick routine.

Pink cited academic and government research that suggested so-called "If/Then Motivators" actually work pretty well, because they get people to focus, help to eliminate workplace distractions, and get people moving and creating organizational inertia, whether the direction of their work is in line with business objectives or not.

However, in today's global economy, many of the answers that knowledge workers seek are complex, hard to find or simply don't exist on the bookshelf or in cyberspace. Business leaders may only scratch the surface of a problem with what they could possibly find out with today's tools, knowledge and technologies, yet decisions must be made and resources mobilized to address them.

When confronting some challenges, business leaders' best odds for innovating ground-breaking solutions lay in adding new perspectives and new views of the problem to the data they may already have at hand. Inviting artists to have a look may be one path to a potential solution.

"What artists do is give the world something they didn't know that they were missing," Pink said. And when the work of artists and engineers is combined, its influence on markets and consumers can be profound. "How many of you have an iPad?" Pink asked the audience. "How many of you knew 16 months ago you needed an iPad?"

To advance his point about sparking innovation, Pink cited a Harvard study that put the work of 23 artists in front of a panel of art experts. Each of the artists was told to pick 10 of their commissioned works and 10 of their non-commissioned works to present to the panel. The results, Pink said, "were quite startling."

Although the artists had been paid to put their very best efforts into the commissioned works, the panel found that, "The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality."

How does this lesson apply in the workplace? Pink said one of the big hurdles to organizational development and innovation is the fact that everything people do at work is commissioned. "There is no non-commissioned work going on." If you really want creative outcomes, he added, you have to give employees the room to explore their interests and curiosities. Giving them the autonomy to find their own mastery and link it with the organization’s purpose is critical. "This is the seed of a big idea," Pink opined.

Sure, money is a motivator, he added, but "we need engagement." Giving employees more influence over the time, tasks, techniques and teams they collaborate with professionally will spur them to innovate. Tapping into employees' interest in "getting better at stuff" can be especially powerful. "If you want to be innovative, you must carve out time for non-commissioned work."

Just consider that the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 was awarded to two scientists whose breakthrough came through one of their "Friday evening experiments" and not the specific work and accountabilities for which they were hired. This kind of unofficial, unsanctioned and sometimes off-hours work is what really makes all the difference for the organization willing to endorse it.

Pink concluded: "When people have more sovereignty over their work and how they do it, they often produce more innovative results."

Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.

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