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