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