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 like rats a maze — that all people care about is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you think mountain climbing 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 that there’s kinds of other things that motivate us to work behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very 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 boss him back 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 was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But that nobody would ever watch it made him 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 little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one after another. After they finished every one of them, put them under the table. And we told them that the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the would roll 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 sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill 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 for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, gave them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time 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 them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out 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 the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as am describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And would speculate that the people who love Legos would build Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the 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 in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This a group within the software company that was put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things 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 have asked them to present the whole company about their journey over the last two years and they decided to do. He could have asked them to think which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, 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 directing 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 getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. 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 it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did 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, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere the middle? It turns out it was almost like shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that 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 adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of 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. called IKEA. And IKEA is a with kind 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 me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I things 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 like IKEA pieces of furniture more 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 they would put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could 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 like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and 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 you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just at it as external observers. And what we found was the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — 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 the not only loved the origami more, they thought that 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 more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, just 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 same — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the was 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 reality, it was even 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 would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this 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 your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t things our way.
Let me say one last comment. you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and one person to step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But 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 that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people 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 and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think we get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.