The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Last Friday afternoon I watched a really cool video illustration of Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Dan Pink is a former speechwriter for Al Gore and aide to Labor Secretary Robert Reich who has become a best-selling writer on, as he puts it, “the changing world of work.”

The idea behind Drive is that workers are more motivated by Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose than by performance-based financial incentives. What's interesting is not so much the general idea, but rather the counter-intuitive evidence Pink uses to suggest that in some cases, incentives actually have the opposite effect you would imagine.

I found this video as I was psychologically girding myself for a phone conference, via this tweet from @LEVELStudios: RT @bigspaceship: WOW: The surprising truth about what motivates us http://post.ly/jCz0.

Which led me to the blog of Michael Lebowitz, of Brooklyn digital agency Big Spaceship. You can see the video there, or at Dan Pink’s blog, although the easiest thing for you to do is to just watch it here, and then by all means visit the other blogs I mention.

For students of effective tweeting, I think it was the WOW that hooked me. I guess I’m a sucker for WOW. And then, of course, “surprising” is a compelling word choice. “The surprising truth about what motivates us” seemed a worthwhile thing to look into.

So I clicked on the link, and about 30 seconds into the video I thought, “WOW. This is really cool.” I’m a big fan of well-done info-graphics – and this video is an excellent example of info-graphics in motion.

This whiteboard animation is set against a portion of a talk given by Pink at the RSA (Royal Society for the Arts), who commissioned British visual communication agency Cognitive Media to capture it in cartoon images.  Cognitive Media has done a number of these for the RSA.

Now, here’s the funny thing. I first watched Dan Pink present his ideas on a YouTube clip of his TED Talk that Garr Reynolds posted on Presentation Zen, and then sort of forgot about it. So I went back to Garr’s blog to check out the original live presentation (which you can see below) and I actually found it more persuasive than the animated video. That may have been because it was now the third time I’d absorbed the message (and typically a person needs to see a message three times before it really sinks in), or because the live presentation is more complete, or simply because a live presentation delivered well is more effective. It’s worth watching both videos a few times, and visiting the post on Presentation Zen will provide some additional perspective.

I think what it comes down to is that great info-graphics can play a powerful role in sparking interest and giving us a panoramic view of complex ideas, but that inevitably we need to go to the source.

Comments

[nike shox monster]

Growth and change would be the regulation however life. Yesterday's solutions are inadequate for today's issues ----just provided how the solutions of in today will not complete the desires of tomorrow. (Franklin Roosevelt, Averican president)