The Game Changer

How to Use the Science of Motivation With the Power of Game Design to Shift Behaviour, Shape Culture and Make Clever Happen

Jason Fox

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780730307648
• eBook ISBN: 9780730307662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Use the science of motivation with the power of game design to unlock motivation and drive progress in your organisation.

There are two conventional ways to approach motivation: set goals and try to change attitudes and beliefs (which takes a lot of personalised effort); or develop incentives and rewards to inspire effort (which takes a lot of money).

This book shows you how to take a third new approach – designing the work itself to be inherently motivating.

Combining the best elements of three distinct fields—motivational science, game design, and agile management—this book shows you how to positively influence behaviour through better work and project design.

This game changing book:

• Gives you a refreshing science-based approach to the classic challenge of motivation in the workplace
• Is ideal for any leader or manager looking to take their workplace culture in a new direction
• Includes practical advice for creating highly productive, motivated and innovative teams
• Is written by a motivation strategy and design expert who consults on leadership and change management to a wide range of clients – from the executives of multinational organisations, through to the directors of switched-on startups.

The Game Changer will show you how to unlock creative, productive and collaborative work. Itis theperfect resource for forward-thinking leaders in organisations and teams focused oncrafting a work culture that gets the best out of their people.

PART I

THE MOTIVATION SAVVY-UP

1

A MOST ALLURING MOTIVATIONAL FOLKLORE

Too many organisations still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.

— Daniel Pink

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's make sure we embark upon this quest cleansed of the many misconceptions that plague motivation. The land of motivation is rife with delightful stories and well-intended advice. But much of what we know, and a lot of what makes up conventional wisdom in this space, is warped.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not about to say that Everything You Know About Motivation Is Wrong (that comes later). But most of us have a warped sense of how motivation works. The science gets distorted and bent out of shape.

Stuff gets warped

This happens in science all the time. Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD Comics (brilliant), once wrote a comic on ‘The Science News Cycle’. (I get a lot of my research from comics, by the way, #credibilityftw.) It went something like this:

Scientists will discover a weak correlation between A and B, assuming C under D conditions. The university PR office will then post something for immediate release: ‘Scientists Find Potential Link Between A and B (under certain conditions)’. News organisations will pick it up and publish, ‘A causes B, say scientists’, which will then be read by The Internets and turned into ‘A Causes B — ALL THE TIME!’ Which will then be picked up by TV shows that run stories like ‘A … A Killer Among Us??’ All of this eventually leads to your grandma getting all weird about A.

You may have heard about the Yale Goal Study — a perfect example of warped science.

In 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale's graduating year, asking them if they had written down specific goals that they wanted to achieve in their career and life. Only 3 per cent of the students had.

Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and discovered that the 3 per cent of graduates who had written down specific goals all that while ago, well, they had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97 per cent of their cohort. Combined.

It's a great story, frequently cited in self-help books and seminars to illustrate the power of goal setting. And back when I was a young researcher in motivation science and goal setting it was a story I loved to share with my students.

Except there's just one small problem. Richard Wiseman, a scientist renowned for dispelling myths, points out: ‘As far as anyone can tell, the [Yale Goal] experiment never actually took place'.

No one could produce any evidence that the research had ever been conducted, prompting journalist Lawrence Tabuk to publish an article in Fast Company in 2007 titled, ‘If Your Goal is Success, Don’t Consult the Gurus'. The motivational speakers and gurus, myself included, had been happy to share this story without checking the facts.

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How did we become so deluded?

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Because, like all good myths, there are seeds of truth to it.

Yes, goal setting is more powerful when it is written down, and yes, it is more effective when it is framed in specific, rather than vague, terms. There are plenty of studies to support this. But more effective for what?

Productivity? Yes, maybe; a lot of research into goal setting comes from the factories and shows it works well for formulaic tasks with predictable outcomes over a set period of time, as well as other tasks that require narrow focus.

But for creative aspiration, innovation and change? Maybe not; often, specific goal setting can lead to narrow thinking, hobbled creativity and purpose-defeating shortcuts. We'll talk about this more in chapter 3.

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‘But no one told the bumblebee!’

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I once heard a motivational speaker attempt to instil a positive attitude with this story: ‘Did you know that according to the laws of aerodynamics the bumblebee can’t fly? But guess what — no one told the bumblebee … People are going to tell you that you can't fly either. Ignore them, and let your wings shine!'

I can't stand warped fluff like that. And nor should you.

A scientist would simply explain that this assumes small amplitude oscillations without flow separation, ignoring the effect of dynamic stall, which causes an airflow separation inducing a large vortex above the wing. This vortex briefly produces several times the lift of the aerofoil in regular flight. The bumblebee flies because its wings encounter dynamic stall on every down stroke. And when you consider that bees beat their wings approximately 200 times a second, it's no wonder they can fly. Bam. That's science.

Positive thinking and the danger of belief

‘Just believe in yourself.’ It's a great piece of advice that can easily get warped out of proportion, along with ‘You need to dream big!’

The trouble with this fluff is that it's a bunch of meaningless words that are so much easier to say than to actually do. Arousing people by telling them of the potential you see in them serves only to widen the gap of discontent between where they are and where they think they should be. This discontent can be constructive, but if there are no structures to bridge this gap, all you are left with is a more acute sense of discontent.

Imagine this: Little Johnny is told he can achieve anything he wants to — all he needs to do is believe. And he really does believe it! He is inspired! He's visualising his success, and keeping himself motivated with positive affirmations. Every negative thought is countered with a positive one.

Except … as time goes on, the evidence he is collecting does not support this new belief in what can be achieved. There's a big mismatch. And positive thinking just reinforces the negative thoughts that trigger it. Eventually, the rational part of Johnny's brain wins, and he gives up pursuing his goal. His sense of self-belief collapses, and his enthusiasm for aspiration and pursuit of worthy projects is less than it was before.

And understandably so. Big goals, blind optimism and unfounded self-belief can lead to apathy and depression. And depression is a bitch.

But there is a school of thought that depression is a natural mechanism to keep our goals in check. Randolph Nesse, a professor of evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, suggests that depression may be an adaptive mechanism to protect us from falling victim to blind optimism. It's to our evolutionary advantage to avoid wasting energy on goals that we can't realistically achieve. And so when we are faced with no clear way to make progress, depression kicks in, triggering a lower state of energy.

Modern society encourages us to aspire to fame, glory and fortune. If these goals are beyond us or literally unattainable, we can become disenchanted. Nesse argues that this could be a contributing factor to the depression epidemic in countries like the United States.

Philosopher Alain de Botton also suggests that our pursuit of higher ‘status’ is the source of much anxiety and angst in modern society. ‘Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition’, he argues. Many people avoid setting big, well-structured goals for fear of what a failure to achieve them might mean in their social ecology, at work or at home:

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

Thus the easiest way to avoid judgement is to avoid placing yourself in situations in which you are judged. To not set goals, and to not play games.

Obviously, this is not good for progress.

So how do we generate and sustain the motivation to achieve big dreams and audacious goals (without falling into the traps and pitfalls along the way)?

Getting strategic with optimism

As we know, blind optimism — the automatic ‘yes’ to any idea — can be dangerous. And of course, pessimism — the automatic ‘no’ to any idea — also sucks.

What we need to be is sceptically optimistic. This is way more strategic. Where your default optimists and pessimists prejudge things to be positive or negative, a sceptical optimist will reserve judgement until they have the evidence (all the while maintaining an optimistic outlook).

‘But without prejudging things as right or wrong, where do we get our sense of belief from?’ I hear you ask.

‘The evidence!’ I say. You build optimism and literally make believe by doing the work that contributes to progress.

But if we don't have evidence to start with … hmm, this is the tricky predicament. Like the chicken and the egg, which comes first, the belief or the evidence?

This is where we need to suspend disbelief

Suspended disbelief was a term coined in 1817 by the philosopher and poet Samuel Coleridge. It's what we usually experience when we're reading a good book, or immersed in a movie. Emotions and crazy stuff seems real in the moment, and the combination of the images you see and the sounds you hear can trigger emotional and physiological reactions — even though the rational part of your mind knows it's not real.

This is why we work with useful hypotheses. In science, nothing is true or untrue — there are merely hypotheses waiting to be tested. So, in essence it's not just disbelief that needs suspending; it's belief too.

Peter Cook, a good friend of mine and the author of The New Rules of Management, has a good perspective on this. Before becoming a global business thought leader, Pete was a physicist. This has grounded him with pragmatic insight into how theories work:

The problem is that just about every theory we've ever had to explain the universe, while it may have been useful, has turned out to be wrong. The Earth was flat … then it was round. It was at the centre of the solar system … until it wasn't. Then Newton described how things moved … until Einstein came along and explained why he was wrong. And recently some pretty smart people have worked out how Einstein was wrong too.

If history is anything to go by, all the current theories will be superseded by more useful theories that better describe the universe at some time in the future.

I think our beliefs are similar. None of them are true. If all these Nobel-winning physicists, some of the smartest people in history, were wrong about the most objective discipline we have, isn't it a bit arrogant, even ludicrous, for me to think ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Game Changer
• About The Author
• Acknowledgements
• The Big Question: How do you Motivate People to do Great Work?
• How to use this book
• PART I: THE MOTIVATION SAVVY-UP
• PART II: GETTING YOUR GAME ON
• PART III: CHANGING THE GAME
• Index
• Game over? Nay — game on!
• Learn More with Practical Advice from our Experts