Author Daniel Pink asserts that autonomy is the essential ingredient to successfully tackle “creative, complex, conceptual challenges.” Mr. Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind and, his latest, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Mr. Pink makes the case that to achieve more than mediocre results people must have autonomy over “the four most important aspects of their work:
Task – What they do
Time – When they do it
Technique – How they do it
Team – Whom they do it with.”
Few people have this degree of autonomy in an institution centric society. Institutional leaders allow people freedom over technique – sometimes – but seldom over task, time or team. Institutional conventions, consumer and regulatory mandates and logistical constraints dictate strict controls over autonomy. At the end of the day, too many institutions are in the business of compliance not results.
Indeed, many institutions are not producing the results we want or need. It’s not because the institutions failed in a historical sense. Many succeeded wildly. Public schools are a great example. These locally controlled institutions helped elevate the United States to unimaginable heights.
Many of our institutions were invented to solve problems that are forty, fifty or one hundred years old. They were not designed to solve the challenges we face today. That’s why they aren’t able to produce the results we want. Public schools, again, are a great example.
Public leaders respond by imposing accountability measures on institutions, which only reinforces the culture of compliance that exists within so many institutions. Federal and state legislatures can’t seem to resist micromanaging local schools. It is one thing to set high expectations. It is another thing altogether to prescribe behavior.
I wrote just before the New Year that I am excited about 2010 and beyond because a new “Era of Personal Proprietorship” is coming into full bloom. A proprietor is defined as someone who has the exclusive title to something. We are entering an era in which each of us will have exclusive title to the inputs that most affect our lives. We will own the inputs of our work, leisure, arts, education and production. These tasks won’t be controlled exclusively by large institutions.
Existing platforms enable people to publish their own books, record their own music, produce their own movie, and even design and manufacture their own products. We are moving toward a do-it-yourself marketplace. We have just begun to scratch the surface of possibilities when such platforms do exist.
The role of institutions will return to a more reasonable place as we come to embrace the Era of Personal Proprietorship. We have come to place too much responsibility upon institutions. David Brooks suggests Americans have developed adolescent expectations for our public institutions. Too often, we approach our institutions with a consumer mindset – “the customers always right.” We place sole blame on institutions when we experience less than desirable outcomes.
This will and is changing as people reclaim proprietorship for their lives. In this emerging era, we once again will look toward institutions to assist us in reaching our goals rather than to do everything. We will begin to consistently produce the results we want in education, health care, or you name the issue when we return institutions to this more reasonable assisting role.
Mr. Pink provides public leaders with important food for thought. Public leaders, me included, must become more disciplined about considering questions of autonomy. The first question public leaders might ask themselves is, “Do I really believe autonomy is important?”
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Picture credit: Daniel Pink Website.