Expectancy theory is a valuable way of thinking about motivation. It's not the only lens I saw. I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about a different perspective on how we're motivated. To do this, I've got a quick question for you. Do any of you remember taxis? That idea that if you want to be driven somewhere, you stand out in the street, hold out your hand someone would stop. Couple of years ago I tried to hail one outside school. One of my students came up to me shout out, "Professor Bidwell, you can't do that. We do Uber these days." We used to have these taxis, and it turned out on days when it was raining, it was really quite hard to get a taxi. Why is that? Well, think about it. Why would it be hard to get a taxi when it's raining? Well, the obvious reason is that demand goes up. More people want a taxi, they don't want to walk, they don't want to take the bus because they are going to get wet, so they're all trying to get taxis, and because of that, there are lots more competition for taxis. It's going to be hard to get. Demand is definitely going to go up. Then like good economists, we might ask, well, what's going to happen to supply? A reasonable answer would be, it doesn't change because there are only a fixed number of medallions, so supply is inelastic. You might believe that supply would go up a bit, but even those are fixed number of medallions people can't be really driving a little bit longer because, "Hey, it's easy money." It's a lot easier to get a fair when everybody wants a taxi, and if I've get to keep driving around desperately trying to find anybody who wants a cab. Maybe supply is up. Turns out in fact supply would go down. In fact, there's evidence that generally on days when it's easier to get a taxi, there's a lot of tourists around, there's a show in town, it's raining, anything like that. When the demand was high, supply would tend to go down. There are actually be fewer taxis around, which is weird. Why would that be? The answer is generally given. This is about how taxi drivers are motivated to. Then how many of you have driven taxis? I mentioned it's tough work. You're fighting the traffic, people are yelling at you, you're trying to find customers, some of them are going to be nice to you, some of them are frankly going to be less nice to you. It's stressful, much easier, just go home or sit in a cafe, read a newspaper, or something like that. How do you motivate yourself? What we think most times drivers do is set themselves targets. Maybe something like I need to go out and I need to earn double my cab rental. I'm going to keep working until I get double my cab rental, and then I'm going to stop. Well, on days when it's easy to make money, on days when there are a lot of people looking for taxis, going to make my cab rental pretty quickly. Then I'm going to stop. On days when nobody wants a taxi, it's a lovely day. I'm just going to walk. On those days, I've got a drive for a lot longer. Now in some ways this makes no sense. To an economist, it's like you got to work a certain number of hours in the week. It will make more sense to work a lot of hours on days when you're making a lot of money per hour. Not so many hours on days when it's hard to make money. Taxi drives are ending up doing the opposite. They're working more hours and days when it's hard to make money because that's what it takes in order to meet that goal. May not be rational. But I think it says an awful lot about how we motivate ourselves. That we do it with targets, we do it with goals, we do with aspirations. I don't know about you. Certainly for me, everyday when I start work, I have a clear idea of what it is I need to get done that day. By mid afternoon, if I'm pretty much done what I'm going to do that day, find a couple of other things to occupy myself, but let's be honest with us all, I'm probably not going to work with a great deal of intensity because I'm satisfied, I feel I've done what I needed to. On the other hand, if it hits three o'clock and really I haven't got very much done, you'll see me picking up the pace, working harder and harder, pushing further and further and you see me trying to get it done. Because I have an idea of what I need to do and I'm going to hit it. That ultimately is what happens with a lot of us and a lot of our motivation is not particularly calculative, is like, "Here's my goal and here's what I want to hit. I will work hard until I reach that goal." Then frankly, I work less hard. This suggests that different approach to motivating people, which is less about concrete rewards, but more about understanding what their aspirations are, what their goals are, what it is they think they ought to achieve in a given day. Making sure that's challenging enough, that it's going to stretch them. The canonical experiments on this. Where that you would take a bunch of people, have a control group and a treatment group. The control group you would say, got a bunch of puzzles to do. Just do your best. We trust you. We know you're going to work hard. Just do your best and see how many you can do. The treatment group, you come in and say 22. I want you to get 22 of these puzzles done in the next half hour. What the experiments found uniformly was that the group that were given specific goals tend to outperform the group that was just told do your best consistently when those goals were specific and difficult. You've probably heard a bit about goal-setting. People often talk about smart goals. They can never agree on what smart goals stands for. Something like probably Specific, M measurable, A maybe achievable, maybe accurate, R is maybe realistic, it could be relevant. T is time, there are lots of nice acronyms. But the two key ones are specific and difficult. Specific. I'm motivated to [inaudible] to hit this target because I can measure them, because I can see at any point how close am I to the target and I can adjust my effort to make sure I meet it, and difficult because ultimately these goals, they pull us up to that level. They're an aspiration. We want to make sure we achieve that much but there may be a bit of a ceiling on our achievement as well. Once we reach that goal, we're going to work less hard. We want goals that are going to be difficult enough to stretch us to really put our full selves into actually achieving them. What does this mean in practice? To give you an idea of one of the classic studies, this comes from the forestry product industry. I don't know how many of you who work or have worked in the forestry product industry, but think about it. The way it works, you cut down trees, you saw them up into lots of little bits that you'll use for all sorts of useful products. Well, generally the cutting down the trees and the sewing them up happens in different places. So you cut up your trees somewhere up on the mountainside and then you have to get them down to your sawmill. So you need a bunch of truckers to do that. There's some studies that looked at those trucks. How do we get them to work harder? With these crews, the time they were unionized and so they couldn't use pay for performance, so what they tried instead was just setting them goals. They said, "Okay, every day we're going to set a goal for the number of daily trips we want you to achieve. Again, it's going to be difficult, but we think you can achieve it. Would you try for us?'' There was a control group that just continued to be managed in the normal way. What they found was that the group that got the specific difficult goals had a 15 percent increase in the number of trips per day, saved $2.7 million in less than four months. Just this one intervention of persuading people to challenge themselves to work that bit harder really got more out of people. It's interesting to know why as well. In this case, partly, they're working harder. But also because now they're more focused on what they're achieving, they end up working smarter as well. In particular, like I say, we're trying to pick up trees from where they're being felled and then take them to the sawmill. When I don't care too much how many trips I'm making in a given day, I'm not that fast if I get there, the trees aren't ready, I have to sit around and wait for them. But if I'm really trying to meet my target, that's annoying. One thing that happened was the crews would saw, the truckers would start radioing ahead to the different crews trying to find out are the logs ready yet, should I go, should I go somewhere else? If they call ahead to the site and the logs aren't ready, they'd go somewhere different. So just focusing people on these tasks, we work harder, we work smarter as well. It gives us more of an incentive to make sure we're performing well. This goal setting can be a valuable mechanism when it comes to motivating people on an individual level. There's also evidence on organizational levels. If we want to get everybody aligned around doing something that's challenging, goal setting can also be useful. My favorite example of this comes from something called the 100,000 Lives initiative. This comes out of a truly horrifying study that was done at the end of the 1990s that suggested in the US, every year, 98,000 people were dying. So 98,000 people dying a year of preventable medical errors. It's just a staggering number. Clearly, it's not a good number, and so a lot of people in the profession got together and said, "What should we do?" They had some ideas or a bunch of best practices that people can use, checklists and the like that really helped to drive down medical errors. But the big question is how do we actually persuade people to adopt them? One program run by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement aimed to really drive adoption through hospitals and they tried to motivate people through a goal. I love this phrase that the guy used when he was launching the company. He said, "Here's what I think we should do. I think we should save 100,000 lives and I think we should do that by June 14th, 2006, 18 months from today." It's [inaudible]. "Some is not a number, soon is not a time. Here's the number: 100,000, here's the time: June 14th, 2006, 9:00 AM." I guess somebody clearly spoke to him about value of specific and difficult goals. This is great. There's just one challenge with this. I mentioned that what makes goal-setting effective is that measurability, the idea that we can track where we are relative to the goal and we can see are we nearly there or do we need to speed up in order to hit our target. Problem is, we don't generally know who we didn't kill. It's not like hospitals are saying, "Congratulations, we would have killed you, but this year we didn't, so we're ahead with our results." How do you actually know if you're on target or not? What they actually did was they calculated. In order for this to work, they needed to get 400,000 hospital beds signed up to the campaign, so 400,000 hospital beds actually using these best practices and if they could do so, they would reach their goal. That was the number they focused on. So every day they're coming into the office tracking how many hospital beds do we have signed up, how many more do we need, what are our leads, what are the steps we could take to get us to that? Again with specific goal, difficult goal, it's energizing, and that ability to track our progress towards it is what's really critical to making sure that we get there, and so expectancy theory, making sure we link beliefs about effort, the outcomes to rewards is valuable, but so is really setting people's aspirations high, making sure we're giving them specific and difficult goals to really get the most out of them.
