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