I want to talk a little bit about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is people are like rats in a maze — that people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work 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, what 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 mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if were just trying 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, let me sit on beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of things that motivate us to work or behave in kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a came to visit me. This was one of my 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 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 at night every day. And the day before was 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 was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a 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 pay you three dollars it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, 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, until some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they every one of them, we put them under the table. And we them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we 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 condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished 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 to 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 would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the that they built and we broke. So this was endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not right magnitude. People 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 don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people don’t. And you 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 less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically 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. I can’t tell you who they were, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And week before I showed up, the CEO of this software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?” And everybody their 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 now add not-so-kosher things to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of 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 one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how meaning is, then you would 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 a sheet of paper with random letters, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, simply put it on the pile of pages. So take a piece, you just put it on the side. In third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate stopped. So low numbers 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 page, they basically stopped these 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 point out, by the way, that in shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole out there. The good news is that by simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in 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 me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy 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 about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take powder and they would 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 had cake. But it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if 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, it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And were all novices, and they built something that was quite ugly — 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 to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And measured how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not build it, just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they willing to pay five times more for them than the people who evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do think [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?” one of those two is correct? Turns out the not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We to make it more difficult. So for some people, gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders it more, evaluators loved 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 this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, 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 is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they so connected 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 are tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, is very low. But if you get one person do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when think about labor, we usually think about motivation and as the same thing, but the reality is that should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if added all of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and the employees — I think we could get people to be more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.