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