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{{a|book review| | {{a|book review| | ||
[[File:Candle donut.jpg|450px|thumb|center|A [[candle problem]] and a [[donut]], yesterday.]] | [[File:Candle donut.jpg|450px|thumb|center|A [[candle problem]] and a [[donut]], yesterday.]] | ||
}}Despite the burgeoning suspicion of popular psych books that are subtitled “''The Surprising ~ ''”,<ref>For example, since you ask, {{br|Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us}}, {{br|Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that | }}Despite the burgeoning suspicion of popular psych books that are subtitled “''The Surprising ~ ''”,<ref>For example, since you ask, {{br|Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us}}, {{br|Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense}}, {{br|The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor}}, {{br|The Surprising Science of Meetings}}, to name but four.</ref> and despite the truth about what motivates us ''not'' being that surprising — I mean, who ''doesn’t'' want “[[autonomy]], [[mastery]], and [[purpose]]” in love, life and vocation? — {{author|Daniel Pink}}’s {{br|Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us}} is a timely and rewarding book — especially now, in this mad COVID inflexion point, where the world is up-ended, research programmes are in crisis, all bets are off and — who knows? — perhaps this time [[This time is different|it might really be different]]<ref>It won’t be.</ref> and we might finally be moving to some new sunlit upland [[paradigm]] of enlightened employment. | ||
As he does in his TED talk, in Drive, Pink frames his narrative around the psychological experiment: the [[candle problem]] challenges participants to figure out how to attach a lighted candle to a wall so that no wax gets on the floor, using only matches and a tray of tacks. Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker correctly predicted the participants would, through “functional fixedness”, regard the cardboard tray as only a container for the thumbtacks and not otherwise relevant to the problem and would struggler to see a simple solution: tack the tray to the wall, and put the candle on the tray. Solving the problem requires a small amount of lateral thinking, to overcome the “functional fixedness”. | As he does in his TED talk, in Drive, Pink frames his narrative around the psychological experiment: the [[candle problem]] challenges participants to figure out how to attach a lighted candle to a wall so that no wax gets on the floor, using only matches and a tray of tacks. Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker correctly predicted the participants would, through “functional fixedness”, regard the cardboard tray as only a container for the thumbtacks and not otherwise relevant to the problem and would struggler to see a simple solution: tack the tray to the wall, and put the candle on the tray. Solving the problem requires a small amount of lateral thinking, to overcome the “functional fixedness”. | ||
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Now, this really ought not to need a Ted Talk to point out. The incentives are all wrong: they discourage collaboration of the sort which obviously will help in solving the problem. | Now, this really ought not to need a Ted Talk to point out. The incentives are all wrong: they discourage collaboration of the sort which obviously will help in solving the problem. | ||
But the puzzle isn’t understanding that | But the puzzle isn’t understanding that “[[autonomy]], [[mastery]], and [[purpose]]” motivate people more than a bit of extra cash — who didn’t, instinctively, know that? — but why our corporate overlords who, in their reflective moments, surely know it as well, ignore this plain, ''[[a priori]]'' fact. | ||
As ever, the [[JC]] has a theory: it is all about personal incentives. In the same way that the average wage-slave’s major motivator during her career is ''[[fear]]'' — and her primal instinct is the covering of her own behind, what propels the captains of our industry — being those who have overcome [[fear]], hubris, a lack of absolute conviction in ones own value etc. — is ''personal glory'', and seeing as, like all complicated and beautiful things, it is hard to convey the idea of “glory” in the abstract to the uncomprehending masses who will never have it, that faithful old [[second-order derivative|stand-in]] for glory, ''enrichment'', will have to do. | As ever, the [[JC]] has a theory: it is all about personal incentives. In the same way that the average wage-slave’s major motivator during her career is ''[[fear]]'' — and her primal instinct is the covering of her own behind, what propels the captains of our industry — being those who have overcome [[fear]], hubris, a lack of absolute conviction in ones own value etc. — is ''personal glory'', and seeing as, like all complicated and beautiful things, it is hard to convey the idea of “glory” in the abstract to the uncomprehending masses who will never have it, that faithful old [[second-order derivative|stand-in]] for glory, ''enrichment'', will have to do. | ||