Management is for compliance, not innovation of creativity

HT to Johnnie for this. The problem with incentives

Dan Pink gives a punchy TED talk about the adverse impact of incentives. He reports studies that show that offering incentives will increase performance for routine tasks. But for activities that require creativity or problem solving, the bigger the reward, the worse the performance.

Here's the TED Talk from Dan

The biggest problem with business these days, especially big business, and with Government, is that it has been captured by the managerial class and they KNOW this stuff already. But like every ruling class in history, they cannot afford to admit the problem because that involves their own career and livelihood being cancelled.

The only process by which management is finally unseated is the failure of the company.

BTW, Dan talks about the candle problem but he hints at something even more difficult; the problems that we face now are so complex that we cannot even define them properly. Even the big, apparently simple ones like peak oil can't adequately be described at any scale in which most people can take action.

You can tell that because, for most people, especially decision-makers, the problem itself is invisible, it is outside the scale of their competence and all their training comes down to, "if it can't be measured, it can't be managed" because management can do only those things that are susceptible of management. Because they have captured the organisation, only management can occur.

And around we go in the drain.

Comments

[RobiNZ]

I just finished watching Dan, then found your blog about it, and it was a fascinating presentation.

I was recently discussing this after struggling to think of a valid measure for a system that demands it. When I couldn't asked the creator of the system and their response was "We don't know but you can figure it out".

How to measure, and predict, creative chaos where the only certainty is change... ?