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