Challenge 3: The obsolescence of the carrot and the stick

Some of the more profound and important discoveries of “behavioral economics” have been around the motivation of creativity. Traditionally, we have believed that there is a direct relationship between reward, punishment and productivity. Reward high productivity (the carrot) while punishing low productivity (the stick) and you can consistently expect to motivate high productivity. Indeed, as we’ve discussed, this is a core premise upon which our current system is founded.

For the kind of work that occupied humanity for the vast majority of our history, this works. When what society needs is largely rote labor such as planting and harvesting food, constructing pyramids or putting bottle caps on bottles, the carrot and stick approach is a good choice. But, when it comes to creative work, design and innovation, the results are profoundly different.

Rather than motivating improved creativity, it has been shown that the carrot and the stick actively inhibit creative and innovative work. Instead, optimal innovation occurs under entirely different conditions:

Autonomy: people are at their most creative when they have agency over what they spend their time on, where they do it, and with whom and how they work. Purposeful and Fulfilling: people are at their most creative when they feel like their efforts are connected to a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. Masterful: people are at their most creative when they are riding the edge of mastery; challenging themselves in ways that make them grow and become more capable.

The history of the technology sector has largely been a slow march in this direction. From GE to IBM to HP to Google, we have seen a consistent move from agricultural/industrial models of carrot and stick to the “information economy” model that has more in common with play than with work.

The abundance economy is the fulfillment of this evolution. It recognizes that when people are freed from the fear-based necessity of contributing their time to unfulfilling and increasingly needless tasks, they can focus on doing what interests and has meaning for them. What they love. And when they do this, they are perfectly positioned to be more creative and more innovative. To put it very simply: creative people create. If all we do is make it easy for them and get out of the way, they need no motivation other than their own passion and curiosity.

Moreover, when you get rid of a fear-based mentality and a desire to hoard resources and information, the benefits explode. Information, the anti-rivalrous, has a tremendous feature: you only have to invent something once. Unlike a rivalrous good like food or oil, which has to constantly be replenished in order to satisfy demand, anti-rivalrous goods can be very hard to create (ask Einstein) but once they are created, they can last forever and are relatively easy to share. This is that magic that enables people like Newton and Einstein to see further than others.

There are more than seven billion of us girdling this globe. How much of that total potential is really contributing vitally to the free market of ideas? Take, for example, the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Born to modest means in late 19th Century India, Ramnujan was a self-taught mathematical genius of the first order. For much of his youth and adult life, he lived on the edge of poverty, unknown and struggling. It was only by fortune that his efforts to become a state bureaucrat opened a circuitous path that finally led him and his work into the larger mathematical community (and history). How many Ramnujans are living in the obscurity of our current model? How many good ideas are living behind paywalls or patent applications? When you come to understand the consequences of structuring a system that fundamentally optimizes for connecting the right people to the right ideas in a space designed for creative collaboration, you are on the other side of the looking-glass and understand how and why the abundance transition is happening.

Our current model does not promote creativity, it inhibits it in dozens of ways. We are now at a point where billions can connect and collaborate. If we provide an environment where they can do so safely and without fear, where they can discover and share with each other, where they can freely follow their genius where they find meaning and mastery — we will benefit from a level of creativity and innovation that staggers the imagination. For an excellent illustration, take a look at the second half of Marshall Brain’s excellent Manna.

What I am discussing here is neither wishful thinking nor far future fantasy. We are in the middle of it right now. Those individuals and groups who best understand the abundance mentality and move themselves and their organizations through the looking glass are already out competing their antediluvian rivals. The network-effects of truly enlightened self-interest ensure that this will continue so long as it is allowed to persist.

But change is never easy, and the childbirth of an abundance society will likely be as messy as any other. Many of the right ideas for how we architect around abundance are out there. But a complete system that is adequate to transition us through from an addiction to scarcity is only faintly on the horizon.

Over the next few months, I invite you to join me in exploring many of the interesting challenges we are facing and collaborating on what will hopefully become an increasingly self-aware, empowered and active global community to construct the solutions of an abundant future.