Daniel Pink's TED Presentation Analysis and Elaboration

Speaking and Presenting Techniques

Daniel Pink, compared to the other TED talks I have watched, has used much more humor than the others and uses this to get his point across to the audience. He even started out his TED talk in a humorous manner, making fun of his law school past. Then to present the rest of the speech he pretended like it was a court case and he was making his case about motivation to the audience. He then engages the audience with a mental puzzle about a candle. He uses this audience interaction to demonstrate how an incentive narrows their field of view and dulls their creativity.

Summary

Daniel Pink was trying to explain to businesses all over the United States and all over the world that current motivation tactics are simply ineffective now. According to multiple tests and studies that Pink used to prove his motivation science theories, motivation needs to transition from external to internal. He refers to these motivation techniques as the carrot and stick method. In short, good behavior is rewarded with a payoff/reward (the carrot) and undesirable behavior is met with a punishment (the stick). Pink argued that this was an outdated motivational strategy and supported it with study results. He proposed a motivation system that allowed employees to reach the goal however they felt fitting and this would create internal motivation as opposed to external motivation.

Take Away

What I take away from this TED talk (and article we read) is that Motivation 2.0 just isn’t going to cut it if society wants to keep improving economically and culturally. Motivation 2.0 refers to the "carrot and stick" method of motivation. People need to be a bit more open to the fact that what worked a few years ago won’t necessarily work today and will almost certainly not be close to satisfactory in the future. I also got quite clearly how the carrot/stick motivation focuses the mind well, which is great for single dynamic tasks where steps are apparent, but hinders in more complicated tasks. Internal motivation instead leaves the blinders off and allows people to see the bigger picture and not be so focused on completing the steps. This difference is most noticable when the steps are not quite as apparent, here the internal motivation has a huge advantage. Daniel Pink highlighted that internal motivation in the workplace was expressed by enjoyment of the job and doing the job because of that enjoyment rather than for the salary.

Application to Education

Many of the ideas presented in Daniel Pink’s speech can be easily applied to education. Since business and education are similar, both have a management figure (teachers/boss) and then the working class (students/workers). The current system for grading for example closely follows the carrot/stick theory; students do what the teacher tells them and if they do it right they receive good grades and if they don’t, they receive bad grades. If the internal motivation system were to be implemented into the classroom I have a feeling it would look more like an open exchange of centered ideas rather than a lecture. This would also prepare High School students for college better because in college a person needs their own motivation to follow through with their plans. Even further down the road this motivation would help former students find jobs because they will search based on what they would enjoy doing as opposed to which one has the best “benefits”.

How do we apply it to Education?

There are two main approaches to tackling entwining this type of motivation into schools: remove the “carrot” but still put specific guidelines on the students, or put basic parameters on the schoolwork and grade the students on how far out of the box they take it. Both of these will require self-motivation. With specific guidelines the student needs to find a way to finish what they start since there is no external reward for finishing. Basic parameters require internal motivation because they need to come up with the subject and what they will do with it and they will enjoy their subject because they picked it. I am going to ask for people opinions in the comments section and I will keep a running vote of who thinks to incorporate internal motivation there should be specific rules but no reward, and who thinks there should be just basic parameters with no reward. There is no right or wrong answer so any comments are welcome.