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Tag: Newton Laws vs motivational laws

  • Flaws in Newtonian physics vis-a-vis flaws in behavioral physics

    Let us look at Newton’s first law:

    “An object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted by an outside force.”

    Newtonian physics runs into problem when mass no longer remains constant i.e. at the subatomic level.Down there things get freaky.

    Similar let us look at the Motivational mechanism existing in the era of Industrial Revolution.

    “Rewarding an activity will get you more of it.

    Punishing an activity will get you less of it.”

    This motivational technique holds good for mundane , routine bound work but fails for “right brain” oriented created and innovation based work.

    Thus like we need to tweak Newton’s laws to cover all scenarios similarly to covering motivational aspects of the modern day we need to move from Motivation 2.0 to 3.0

    Adopted from Daniel Pink’s book Drive

  • If Newton’s Laws can have limitations why not Motivational principles?

    Newton’s Laws have the limitation of constant mass and tend to be less applicable when the mass approaches infinity.

    Newton’s Laws have been regarded a bible since time immemorial and hence due to these limitation need to be tweaked to cover all possible scenarios.

    Similar to this behavioral physics motivated by Carrot And Sticks rule of motivation has survived the entire Industrial Revolution era but fall flat in modern day of the knowledge worker.

    For left brain oriented and factory model related work the motivational law still holds good but when it comes to heuristics and aspects where more and more right brain oriented conceptual work is needed , the motivational aspects need a different treatment leveraging aspects of intrinsic motivation.

    These aspects have been very beautifully highlighted by Dan Pink in his book titled Drive.