Daniel Pink Module 2: Building a Resilient Culture

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The first step to dealing with regret is to first acknowledge that it’s there, says New York Times bestselling author Daniel Pink.

“Gather your team and talk about a regret that you have,” Pink says. “But don’t leave it there. Talk about a regret that you have, tell people a regret that you have, tell them what you learned from it, tell them what you’re going to do about it.”

Organizations tell Pink that these kinds of conversations are among the most productive and richest they have. “It humanizes the leader,” he says, “but it also offers psychological safety for the people there to do the same thing themselves.”

Acknowledging and processing regret is one way to build a culture that’s resilient.

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Introduce the pre-mortem

Pink acknowledges that businesses could benefit from conducting post-mortems. Like an after-action report in the military or watching game films in sports, a post-mortem can identify things that went wrong to avoid in the future.

A different perspective that is equally as beneficial is leveraging our ability to time travel to the future to identify challenges that could hamper a big project. Pink calls this a “pre-mortem.”

A pre-mortem imagines the project as an “abject failure” and allows teams to work backward to uncover potential pitfalls.

“Gather your team and say, ‘What went wrong?’” he says. “People almost always [say] ‘We didn’t have enough budget, we had too much budget, we had the wrong people, we had too few people. Identify those things that went wrong prospectively, and then you come back to the present and avoid doing those things.”

Motivation is more than if-then rewards 

Pink acknowledges rewards are an effective means for simple tasks. In particular, Pink calls this a “controlling contingent” or “if-then” reward.

“If you do this, then you get that,” Pink says. “50 years of science tells us that if-then rewards are very good [and] quite effective for simple tasks for short time horizons.”

But rewards like that don’t work for employees dealing with more complicated tasks, Pink says.

“For complex tasks where you don’t know what the right answer is, you don’t even know what exactly the problem is, you need to sustain motivation over time,” he says. “You need to be able to take something from here, and something from here and put it together. You want to look at it expansively. And so, for more creative tasks with longer time horizons, those if-then rewards aren’t very effective.”

Instead, Pink recommends giving those workers the autonomy and ability to improve and master their duties. You’re effectively giving those workers a greater sense of ownership of their work, Pink says. “And that leads to sustained and enduring motivation over time.”

The right recipe

Autonomy and mastery are parts of a greater “recipe” for keeping workers satisfied and not looking for a new job, Pink says.

“[People] leave jobs for two reasons. One, they have a terrible boss, or two, they don’t have an opportunity to grow,” he says. “Those are the two big things. I think that those are related to autonomy and to mastery.”

By hiring well, making employees accountable, fashioning reasonable goals, offering psychological safety, and cheering them on, you’re creating a workforce that feels well supported, Pink says.

“That seems to be a pretty good recipe,” he says. “It’s hard to do.”

Purpose comes in all shapes and sizes

But perhaps the most significant motivator to consider is purpose. When he first started writing about motivation, Pink focused on the idea of a larger purpose as a key element. Certainly, a well-articulated purpose is an important part of a strong culture.

“There’s evidence of that, that if you can connect what you’re doing to some big transcendent purpose, you do better,” he says. “But I think that the short version of it is that I now think that purpose is not one thing, but it’s two things.”

Think of it as having a “Big P” purpose versus a “Little P” purpose. Having a purpose like combating climate change or hunger can still be a great performance enhancer, Pink says. But purpose can also be found in smaller, quieter, more personable ways. Today Pink believes “the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work.”

“This is [a] purpose that’s like, ‘I helped my teammate get a project out the door. I helped this customer solve his problem. I am a cook, and I made a cheese omelet that somebody enjoyed, and it brightened their day,’” Pink says. “It’s not changing the world. It’s just making a contribution to one other person in that moment. And we have a lot of good evidence that that’s a great performance enhancer too.”

Related Resources 

Daniel Pink on ‘Beyond Resilience’

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