0:14

are motivations art unbelievably interesting i mean it i’d find and i’ve

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been working on this for a few years and i just find a topic still so amazingly

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engaging

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and an interesting so i want to tell you about that

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scientists really surprising

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the site is a little bit freaky

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we are not as endlessly manipulative or and as predictable as you would think

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there’s a whole set of unbelievably interesting stories i want to give you

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two

0:39

the call into question this idea that if you reward something

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you get more than behavior you want

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if you punish something you get less celeste talk

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let’s go from

0:49

london to the mean streets of cambridge massachusetts

0:52

in northeastern party united states let’s talk about a study done at m_i_t_

0:56

massachusetts institute of technology

0:57

here’s what they did a typical whole group of students and they gave me a set

1:00

of challenges

1:01

things like gun

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memorizing strings of digits

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sobbing word puzzles other kinds of spatial puzzles even physical tasks like

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throwing a ball through

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at the given these challenges and they said

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to incentivize their performance

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they gave me three levels of rewards

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so if you did pretty well got a small monetary reward if you didn’t medium

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well you get a media monetary reward

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and if you did really well if you were one of the top reformers you’ve got a

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large cash

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we’ve seen this movie before this is centrally typical motivation scheme

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within organizations right

1:35

we were worth the very

1:37

top reformers we nor the local formers and other old folks come in the middle

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up here

1:42

it a little bit

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so what happens

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they detest they have these incentives here’s what they found out

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as long as the captain about only mechanical steel

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bonuses workers they would be expected to hire to pay the vendor performance

1:58

fit that make sense

1:59

but here’s what happens

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but once

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the task offer even rudimentary cognitive skill

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a larger reward led to poorer performance

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now this is strange right on larger reward but the poor performance how can

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that possibly be

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those interesting about this

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is that these folks here who were group who did this

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are all economist at that to at m_i_t_ one of university cargo

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what at carnegie mellon okayed top-tier be economics profession

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and they’re reaching this conclusion that seems

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contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics

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which is uh… which is that the higher the reward the better performance and

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they are saying

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that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill

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it’s the other way around

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which seems like this kind of the idea that these awards don’t work that way

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seems vaguely left-wing and socialist doesn’t it

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it’s kind of this kind of weird socialist conspiracy

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for those of you have those conspiracy theories i want to point out the so

2:56

notoriously left-wing socialist group that finance the research

2:59

the federal reserve bank

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today was the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that’s

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quite

3:06

surprising seems to defy the laws of vehicle physics

3:09

so this is strangest race funny so what do they do they said lets this is that

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this is freaky

3:13

let’s go test it somewhere else maybe that

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fifty dollars a sixty dollar prize is insufficiently motivated for m_i_t_’s

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right

3:20

so let’s go to a place for fifty dollars is actually

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more significant relatively silico fake experiment going to go to moderate india

3:27

throw india where fifty dollars sixty dollars whatever the number was is

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actually significant sum of money silly replicated experiment india roughly as

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follows

3:36

tomorrow ward

3:37

equivalent to reach salary

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allosaurus small performance low performance tui salary media performance

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about a month salary

3:46

uh…

3:48

high performance but two months aller

3:50

they so there’s a real

3:51

good incentives but this year to get a different

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result here

3:55

wat happen though was that

3:56

the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the

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small reward

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but this time around the people offered proper work

4:04

they did worst of all

4:05

higher incentives what the worst performance

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with interesting about this is that it actually isn’t all that anomalous this

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has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologist

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by sums

4:16

six and by sociologist

4:17

uh… and bike on a mess over and over and over again

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for simple straightforward tasks

4:22

those kinds of incentives if you do this when you get that

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they’re great

4:26

first task that are algorithmic

4:28

set of rules we have to just follow along and get a right answer

4:32

if then we wards carrots and sticks

4:35

outstanding

4:37

but when

4:37

the task gets more complicated when it requires some conceptual creative

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thinking those kinds of motivators demonstrably

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that money is a motivator

4:48

that work but in the slightly strange way if you don’t pay people enough

4:52

they won’t be motivated with cherries but there’s another paradox here which

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is of the best use of money is a motivator

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is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table

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pay people enough to the not thinking about money the thinking about the work

5:05

out what to do that turns out there three factors that the sideshows lied to

5:10

better performance

5:11

uh… not to mention personal satisfaction

5:14

economy mastery purpose

5:17

economy is our desire to be self-directed

5:19

director own lives

5:20

now in many ways traditional notions of management run afoul of that

5:24

management is great if you want compliance but if you want engagement

5:27

which is what we want to work force today as people are doing more

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complicated sophisticated things

5:32

self direction is better

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let me give you some examples of this of

5:36

almost radical forms of self direction in the workplace that lead to good

5:40

results but start with this company right here at lafayette

5:42

an australian company at the software company and they do something really

5:46

cool

5:47

once a quarter on for thursday afternoon they say they’re developers

5:51

for the next twenty-four hour who can work on anything you want

5:54

you can work out the way you want you can work out with whomever you want

5:57

always ask is that you show the results of the company at the end of the twenty

6:00

four hours in this fun at a meeting not a star chamber session but is fun

6:04

meeting with peer in taken fun in

6:07

other things like that

6:08

it turns out that one day

6:11

appear undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing

6:15

software a whole array of ideas for new products

6:19

but otherwise we’ll never marched

6:20

one day

6:21

now this is not if that in senate this is not the sort of thing that i would

6:24

have done three years ago before i knew this research

6:26

i would have said you want people to be

6:29

creative and innovative

6:30

given the furqan innovation bonus

6:32

if you do something cool i’ll give you twenty five hundred dollars

6:34

they’re not doing this at all essentially saying you probably want to

6:37

do something interesting let me just get out anyway

6:41

one day have autonomy produces things that never merch

6:44

so if i got mastery

6:46

masters are urged to get better at stuff we’d like to get better at stuff

6:49

this is why people play musical instruments on the weekend

6:52

yet always people acting in ways that scene

6:55

irrational economically

6:56

they play musical instruments on weekends why it’s not going to get them

6:59

to make its not gonna make them any money while you’re doing it

7:03

because it’s fun

7:04

because you get better at it and that’s satisfying

7:06

go back in time a little bit imagine imagine this if i went to my first

7:10

economics professor

7:11

woman named mary alice shoma

7:13

and i went to her in nineteen eighty three

7:15

and said

7:17

british illegally talked after class for a moment

7:21

epa’s inkling i got this idea for business model is one of run past you

7:25

here’s how it would work

7:27

you get a bunch of people around the world

7:30

we’re doing highly skilled work

7:33

but they’re willing to do it for free

7:35

and volunteer their time twenty sometimes thirty hours a week

7:40

as you look at some of skeptically

7:42

overlap but i’m not done

7:43

and then what they create

7:46

they give it away a rather than salad

7:49

it’s going to be huge

7:51

the shortest should sleep with what i was insane

7:54

rating to fly in the face of so many things what do you have you have lyrics

7:57

how ring

7:58

one out of four corporate servers and four to five hundred companies

8:01

apache powering

8:03

more than the majority of web servers

8:06

wikipedia what’s going on why or why are people doing this why are they why are

8:10

these people many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled

8:12

people who backdrops

8:15

they have jobs

8:16

they’re working at jobs for pay doing challenging xx doing sophisticated

8:21

techno technological work

8:22

and yet

8:23

during their limited discretionary time

8:26

they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work not for their

8:30

employer

8:31

but for someone else for free

8:34

that’s a stranger

8:35

economic behavior

8:36

economies that look into it why are you doing this

8:39

overwhelmingly clear

8:41

challenge in mastery

8:42

along with making a contribution that’s it

8:44

what you see more and more is a rise of what you might call

8:47

purpose mode

8:48

is that more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent

8:52

purpose

8:53

partly because it makes coming to work better

8:55

partly because that’s the way to get better talent

8:58

or seeing now is

9:00

in some ways when the profit motive becomes un moored from the purpose

9:04

motive

9:04

up bad things happen

9:06

that things ethically sometimes but also bad things just like

9:10

not good stuff

9:12

crappy products

9:14

lane services

9:16

uninspiring places to work

9:17

that when the profit motive his is

9:19

is paramount or when it becomes completely unfit for the purpose motive

9:25

people do great things

9:26

more and more organizations are or realized and sort of disturbing the

9:30

categories between what’s profit and what’s

9:31

and what’s purpose and

9:32

and i think that actually heralds

9:35

something interesting i think that the companies that organizations are

9:37

flourishing whether profit for proper somewhere in between

9:40

far art bar animated by this purpose we’re going to get a couple of examples

9:44

here’s the bad respect

9:47

this is our goal to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better

9:50

place

9:52

pretty good purpose

9:53

here steve jobs

9:55

when one of the being in the universe

9:58

that’s a kind of thing that might get you up in the morning rate racing to go

10:00

to work

10:01

so i think that um…

10:02

we are

10:03

purpose

10:05

maximizes not only profit maximizes

10:07

i think the signed shows that we care about mastering very very deeply

10:11

unassigned shows that we want to be self-directed

10:13

and i think that the big take away here is that

10:16

if we start treating people like people

10:18

and not assuming that they’re simply

10:21

spear slower smaller better smelling courses

10:24

if we get past this kind of ideology of carrots and sticks and look at the

10:27

science

10:28

i think we can actually build