Cerebyte talks with Dan Pink about autonomy, mastery, and purpose

By Rick Grbavac In a conversation we had with Daniel Pink, the author of Drive : The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, we proposed that Dan had assigned an order to his three things necessary to motivate knowledge workers: autonomy, mastery and purpose.  He told us that no particular order was intended. We replied that there actually is an order for the processes to work best.  Our belief is that you must first establish a sense of vision and purpose in your people.  With that sense of purpose, they can then work on their mastery with a fresh set of eyes and a focus on becoming great.  When people are on their path to becoming great, management will have a much easier time at granting the autonomy that people need to be motivated. In setting the bar with the positive deviants we capture the way they conceive of the job, their higher purpose, and the ways they discovered how to be great. In our motivation stage, we get people to embrace the positive deviant vision and adapt that higher purpose to their own jobs. In the sustaining change phase we watch people develop the skills and knowledge of the positive deviants and build their mastery.  Autonomy comes with people accepting the responsibility and accountability of continuing their development using the persuasive technology to stay the course and create positive habits.]]>