Daniel Pink, the renowned author of A Whole New Mind, starts off his presentation like most of the other TED Talks, with a joke. He made a mistake while he was still young and impulsive, “I went to law school”. He makes his presentation unique by making his TED Talk into a “hard headed, evidence-based, dare I even say, lawyerly, court case”.
His first point references to “The Candle Problem”, created by Karl Duncker, a psychologist in behavioral science. There is a candle, some matches, and a box of tacks and you have to tack the candle to the wall without having any wax drip on the table. Some people will try to tack the candle to the wall, others would try to melt the candle and adhere it onto the wall, but neither worked. The solution turned out to be simply tacking the box onto the wall and putting the candle inside. There was a test recorded the average time to get the problem done. Then there is a second group the top times will get money for if they are in the top 25%. Normally a reward or incentive makes people work harder, yet they took on average, 3 ½ minutes longer than the 1st control group. How can this be? When there is an incentive, a person’s mind narrows down on the task at hand, and can miss the answer right in front of them. Yet, when the tacks were out of the box, it took no time at all to solve the problem. So rewards work best when there is no mechanical skill required for the task at hand, and the larger the reward, the more efficiently the job is done. If the task requires any thinking at all, the exact opposite happens. Everyone has candle problems in their life, in the world, and yet we’re all going about it wrong. If-then rewards worked in the 20th century, but not in the 21st century. All in all, we used to be a left-brained thinking world, and these old techniques worked just fine, but now we are changing into a conceptual age, and we need to look at how we learn, work, and go about our lives.
The world needs to focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose. They are described as wanting to direct our own lives, the desire to get better at the things that matter, and yearning to do what we do. These three things combined with equal pay, no rewards, will allow the world to become a better place, a Utopia. There have been many examples for companies that these types styles have worked for. Wikipedia, Google’s 20 percent time, FedEx, and Rowe.
Daniel Pink used humor to draw in and keep the crowd interested. He also came up with all the “what if’s” and “so what’s” making his presentation much more believable and backing itself up. He put the presentation into his style of a court case, and made everything fit into the style he created. I enjoyed listening to Pink's unique style of teaching and what he had to say. I would definitely recommend watching the whole video to discover more about the world, what it is now, what could be, how it effects the types of people in it, and even how your children's lives will be.
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