Anatomy, Mastery and Purpose (Pink part 2) (2011)

 Originally posted as a Facebook Note June 13, 2011.

            Part 2 of Drive describes three core motivations that business managers often overlook—autonomy, mastery of a skill, and a sense of higher purpose—and discusses cases of successful businesses that have incorporated them into their management practices. That all of his examples come from fields dominated by what Robert Reich calls “knowledge workers” suggest that these accomplishments will be difficult to translate into most employment settings. That is, however, the problem of visionary business owners and managers.

             My challenge is to apply them to my motivational areas: my students, my own children, and myself. Here, I think, Pink’s ideas are suggestive and intriguing, but don’t (yet) provide clear directional lines.

             In contrast to part 1, I strongly identify with his three elemental motivations, especially sense of purpose. I do what I do because I think it matters to explain the workings of American democracy to young adults, and to teach them to think critically about political ideas. (A sense of purpose doesn’t have to be so serious. I remember what Cubs’ radio announcer Pat Hughes said when baseball resumed a week after the 9/11 attacks. Sometimes people just need to hear a ball game.) Autonomy is also important to me. I like being able to design my classes, and being personally accountable for their success or failure. I hated teaching in our common syllabus core course pre-1992, because it was badly designed and students hated it, and there was nothing I could do about it.  I’d rank mastery third for me. Ask me if I’d rather teach or play guitar badly to attentive audiences, or do them well alone.

             My political theory classes come closest to the ROWE (results-only work environment) concept Pink discusses in chapter 4. There are no examinations, classes are discussion-based, and students can decide when they want to write their ten assigned short papers. These are my favorite courses to teach, but the classes have produced a wide variety of experiences. When enough students are motivated by a sense of purpose, they thrive on the autonomy, and class sessions are electric. However, a number of students have difficulty with the autonomy: they don’t get the work done at all, or do it carelessly and badly. Do they require an imposed structure? Do they lack motivation? When such students comprise the larger part of a class, it is a painful struggle for all concerned. Pink urges patience: students that have lived all their lives in a Type X world aren't going to suddenly become Type I just because I give them a bit of autonomy.

             Sometimes an institution’s sense of purpose differs from a student’s. That was, I think, the problem with our “open curriculum,” which we had at Coe before I arrived. Students were motivated to seek certain courses and ignore others, so they left with an education but often not anything that could be called liberal arts.

             Those quibbles aside, it would be interesting to pursue discussion of how classes might be framed to give students more autonomy, and connect better with their purpose and mastery goals. As I also struggle today with departmental assessment, I wonder if such methods “assess” well. Ideally we should be able to track outcomes of any pedagogical approach, but some methods lend themselves more easily to statistical measures than others, and assessment seems to me to carry a bias toward the objective and statistical. We’ll see.