GOLDILOCKS ON A CARGO SHIP

After all, Motivation 2.0 has little room fora concept like flow. The Type X operating system doesn’t oppose people taking on optimal challenges on the job, but it suggests that such moments are happy accidents rather than necessary conditions for people to do great work.
But ever so slowly the ground might be shifting. As the data on worker disengagement earlier in the chapter reveal, the costs—in both human satisfaction and organizational health—are high when a workplace is a no-flow zone. That’s why a few enterprises are trying to do things differently. As
Fast Company magazine has noted, a number of companies, including Microsoft, Patagonia, and Toyota, have realized that creating flow-friendly environments that help people move toward mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.
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For example, Stefan Falk, a vice president at Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications concern, used the principles of flow to smooth a merger of the company’s business units. He persuaded managers to configure work assignments so that employees had clear objectives and away to get quick feedback. And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-year performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward mastery. The flow-centered strategy worked well enough that Ericsson began using it in offices around the world. After that, Falk moved to Green Cargo, an enormous logistics and shipping company in Sweden.
There, he developed a method of training managers in how flow worked. Then he required them to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work—and to adjust assignments to help them find flow. After two years of managerial revamping,
state-owned Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years—and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity as a key reason.
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In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge—that is, the urge to master something new and engaging—was the best predictor of productivity. Scientists motivated by this intrinsic desire filed significantly more patents than those whose main motivation was money, even controlling for the amount of effort each group expended.
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(That is, the extrinsically motivated group worked as long and as hard as their more Type I colleagues. They just accomplished less—perhaps because they spent less of their work time in flow.)
And then there’s Jenova Chen, a young game designer who, in 2006, wrote his MFA thesis on Csikszentmihalyi’s theory. Chen believed that video games held the promise to deliver quintessential flow experiences, but that too many games required an almost obsessive level of commitment. Why not,
he thought, design a game to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers? Using his thesis project as his laboratory, Chen created a game in which players use a computer mouse to guide an onscreen amoeba-like organism through a surreal ocean landscape as it gobblies other creatures and slowly evolves into a higher form. While most games require players to proceed through a fixed and predetermined series of skill levels, Chen’s allows them to advance and explore anyway they desire. And unlike games in which failure ends the session, in Chen’s game failure merely pushes the player to a level better matched to her ability. Chen calls his game flOw. And it’s been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. (You can find it at http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/
). The paid version, designed for the PlayStation game console, has generated more than 350,000 downloads and collected a shelf full of awards. Chen used the game to launch his own firm, thatgamecompany, built around both flow and flOw, that quickly won a three-game development deal from Sony, something almost unheard of for an unknown startup run by a couple of twenty-six- year-old California game designers.
Green Cargo, thatgamecompany, and the companies employing the patent-cranking scientists typically use two tactics that their less savvy competitors do not. First, they provide employees with what I call Goldilocks tasks”—challenges that are not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple. One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. (Indeed,
Csikszentmihalyi titled his first book on autotelic experiences Beyond Boredom and Anxiety.) But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious.
This is the essence of flow. Goldilocks tasks offer us the powerful experience of inhabiting the zone, of living on the knife’s edge between order and disorder, of—as painter Fritz Scholder once described it—“walking the tightrope between accident and discipline.”
The second tactic that smart organizations use to increase their flow-friendliness and their employees opportunities for mastery is to trigger the positive side of the Sawyer Effect. Recall from Chapter 2 that extrinsic rewards can turn play into work. But it’s also possible to run the current in the other direction—and turn work into play. Some tasks at work don’t automatically provide surges of flow, yet still need to get done. So the shrewdest enterprises afford employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties. Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton,
two business school professors, have studied this phenomenon among hospital cleaners, nurses, and hairdressers. They found, for instance, that some members of the cleaning staff at hospitals, instead of doing the minimum the job required, took on new tasks—from chatting with patients to helping make nurses jobs go more smoothly. Adding these more absorbing challenges increased these cleaners satisfaction and boosted their own views of their skills. By reframing aspects of their duties, they helped make work more playful and more fully their own. Even in low-autonomy jobs Wrzesniewski and
Dutton write, employees can create new domains for mastery.”
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