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