I want to talk a little bit about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we direct them to work another way. This is why give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student came visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. was working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. the day before it was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, will put them back in the boxes, and we will it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods push the same rock up a hill, and when he got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And can think about this as the essence of doing work. You can imagine that if he pushed the on different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about this cyclical version of doing something over and over over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we another version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People were just given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t you who they were, but they were a big in Seattle. This was a group within the software company was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the big product for this company. And the week before I up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked to present to the whole company about their journey the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s important to spend some time, energy and effort in people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and the people did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried make it more difficult. So for some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one you went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of who are, but because of us, because they are so connected us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let say one last comment. If you think about Adam versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one person do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection to what they are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about on the way to work, and in the shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that we added all of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.