>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I’m pleased to welcome
Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. They’re here to
discuss their book, “Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures.” Neel and
Lindsay have a passion for transforming human potential at scale. They came to the culture
conversation with a wide range of experiences with Fortune 500 companies, startups, Universities,
nonprofits, and more. They cofounded Vega Factor which focuses on engineering high-performing
cultures. Please join me in giving them a very warm welcome. [applause]
>> Lindsay McGregor: Alright. Good Afternoon. Thank you for having us. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m
Lindsay, and…
>> Neel Doshi: I’m Neel.
>> Lindsay McGregor: You want to kick it off?
>> Neel Doshi: Our journey on this topic—how do we build a high performing culture—it started a while
ago, it started about twenty years ago when, of all things, I was a software developer. I was working at
this mega institution, gigantic company. This company was so big that there was another Neel Doshi at
this company, to give you a sense of scale. [laughter] I’d get his pay stubs every now and then; he got
paid a lot more than I did. [laughter] And this was around the mid-nineties; the internet was starting to
come online. This company thought this was a great opportunity to do something innovative and
disruptive. So it went all in. There was a lot of money, a lot of resource put into digitally innovating
being disruptive. In the course of a couple of years we spent about a billion dollars, and if I was being
honest about the impact of our work after those two years, I think I could say safely that we produced
pretty much nothing. That’s impressive. That is not easy to do. Now, at the time, we thought we were
doing all the right things when it came to innovation, disruption, development, and the chairman of this
institution asked me at the time to help explain what happened, what went wrong? It was a serious
question so I spent a good six months studying that question. Was it our tools? Was it our ideas? Was
it our people? Was it our processes? And what I ultimately concluded was that there was something
wrong with our culture. I played this back to him. To his credit he said, “I think you’re right. I think
there’s something wrong with our culture. I don’t know what to do about it.” I didn’t know what to do
about it either. The best we can do at the time was copy somebody else. The company that you copied
back then was GE. So we tried to copy GE’s culture and it didn’t work. If anything, if you look at this
institution today, it’s a bit of a shadow of what it once was. I left frustrated; started my own company. I
thought having studied culture with a blank sheet of paper I should be able to build a great culture. If I
were to describe the culture I built with one word, it would be, “meh.” It was just okay. It wasn’t great,
it wasn’t legendary, it wasn’t toxic; it was just okay. And so now the engineer in me was totally peaked
because we have this thing that we call culture. Almost every executive would say, “It is the number
one or number two most important thing to our organization.” And almost every executive would also
say, “I have no idea how to build one.” So Lindsay and I set out to solve that problem once and for all:
how do we build a high performing culture?
>> Lindsay McGregor: But before we answer this question of what creates a high-performing culture we
have to start with what creates a high-performing individual. So I’m gonna ask if any of you have
children eighteen months old or older? Any children? Alright who can describe to me what an eighteen
month old is like? Somebody raise their hand who can describe a toddler. Can they walk? Can they
talk? I’m gonna… yep?
>>: Go, go, go, all the time. Walk, run, sometimes they can talk, sometimes they can’t. In to everything.
>> Lindsay McGregor: In to everything. Do they follow all of your directions all the time?
>>: They follow none of your directions.
>> Lindsay McGregor: [laughter] Follow none of your directions. So a group of researchers studied
toddlers to think about could they increase a certain type of performance in those toddlers? This type
of performance was citizenship—how much you help other people. Now think about citizenship as
something you highly value in most organizations. You want somebody that will help out a neighbor
who needs it; you want somebody who’s going to think about the well-being of the team, not just about
themselves. So these toddlers were a great experiment because they had not been highly influenced by
corporate culture yet. So they set up an experiment. It was in a room about from me to the podium,
and in the middle of the room was a toddler on the floor playing with a toy. This toy lit up, it played
music; it was extremely engaging. Over here on this side behind a table was a researcher. The research
assistant was a complete stranger to the toddler. They had not met. And the research assistant was
playing with some papers, folding it, when all of a sudden she drops her paper, or something, over the
edge of the table and wanted to see if the toddler would leave the highly engaging toy and come and
help the stranger on the other side of the room. So I’m gonna take a vote. How many of you think more
than fifty percent of these toddlers help? How many think less than fifty percent help? Alright, more
child haters than child lovers in this room. So let’s see what actually, actually happens. Here’s the
experiment:
>> Video: [indiscernible] [music], [indiscernible], huh, ooh, ooh… [music] [indiscernible]… Yeah.
>> Lindsay McGregor: It’s adorable.
>> Video: [sound effects], [indiscernible].
>> Lindsay McGregor: The toddler just gets up and goes and helps this research assistant. Now, most of
you in this room were wrong. Ninety-two percent of toddlers actually got up and helped that research
assistant. Ninety-two… I know, it’s amazing, right?
>>: Maybe they still listen to parents. [laughter]
>>: Yeah, [indiscernible] the parent that dropped the thing.
>> Lindsay McGregor: I know. But here’s what they did with those toddler, they put them through
training. The point of the experiment was to see if we could make those toddlers more helpful. How do
you make a toddler more helpful? One group, the control group, just went through the same exercise
again and again. One group was praised, so that you could reinforce the helpful behavior through
praise. And the third group was rewarded with a toy. The reward was the way that you really showed
that you valued that helpfulness to create more helpfulness in the future. So take a moment to think in
your head how much more helpful is that praise group going to be, and how much more helpful is that
reward group going to be? Take a guess. Here’s the results: the control group, eighty-nine percent of
them continued to help again and again and again when a researcher dropped her pen. The praise
group, eighty-one percent of them kept helping—less than before. The reward group, fifty-three
percent of them kept helping—far less. Now, this is the opposite of what most of us expect. Most of us
are taught that when you want somebody to do something you should praise them or reward them. We
do this with our families. We definitely do this in our organizations encouraging the behaviors we want
to see.
>> Neel Doshi: As you guys can see, that instinct, the instinct that drives how we build organizations,
isn’t working. In fact, just for kicks, we’re gonna show you a video of what a kid looked like after they
went through reward-based training to be more helpful.
>> Video: [music] Yeah… [sound effect] Huh... ooh… ooh… [sound effect] [indiscernible]… [sound
effect].
>> Neel Doshi: What I love is he just stares at her.
>> Video: Ohh, [sound effect] [indiscernible] Ohh [sound effect]...
>> Neel Doshi: It goes on for an awkwardly long period of time, this kid just staring at her.
>> Video: Ooh [indiscernible] [sound effect] ooh [indiscernible] ooh [indiscernible] [sound effect]…
>> Neel Doshi: And then back to his toy.
>> Video: Ooh [indiscernible] [sound effect] [indiscernible].
>> Neel Doshi: What this experiment and many others demonstrate to us is to help explain what drives
a high performing culture we actually have to answer three different questions that we hope to answer
today. The first question is: what is performance? Sounds like a silly question to ask. It took us many
years, actually, of research before we started to say to ourselves, “In order to define what a high
performing culture is don’t we have to first explain what performance is?” In this case they looked at
citizenship, something that very few organizations would have put in the category of performance.
That’s the first question we’re gonna ask today. The second question is: what actually drives the highest
levels of performance? What is that psychology of the highest levels of performance? So for instance
you saw this… you saw the reaction this toddler had to rewards. Well, if that’s not working, what will?
And lastly, what is culture? What is the role culture plays when driving the highest levels of
performance?
Now, let’s start with the first question: what is performance? Let me ask you guys a question. Any of
you ever feel like you have a day like this? Day like this: you wake up, weather looks great, clear skies,
smooth seas; you have a plan for what you want to get done that day. You’re thinking about it on your
commute to work; then ten thirty rolls around, some wrench is thrown into your plan; all of a sudden
you have to do something totally different. Does this ever happen to you? No?
>>: Yeah.
>>: Of course.
>> Neel Doshi: All the time? [laughter] All the time? What’s an example of this in your world, that
wrench thrown into your day? Yeah?
>>: I’m in operations, so we’re working on a new tool, developing it, and all of a sudden we have an
incident. Something goes wrong, everyone has to drop everything and figure out what broke.
>> Neel Doshi: There you go. Yeah?
>>: Or a sick kid.
>> Neel Doshi: Or a sick kid. Yeah, absolutely. I was having this conversation at a retail organization
once. A woman stands up, she was a manager of a bunch of different stores, and she said, “Just last
week, I woke up, ten o’clock came around, I found out one of my store’s was held up at gunpoint, and it
totally, not just changed my day, it changed my week.” This sort of thing happens actually more often
than we want to believe. The military studied situations like this. They’re trying to understand why is it
that our best strategies sometimes succeed or fail despite themselves? Put all this energy into planning,
it… those plans don’t necessarily always work. What they realized is there’s something called VUCA.
The V in VUCA stands for volatility. Things change. The context changes; our environments change. If
you think about the best strategies, there’s only so much they can actually predict the change because
of the U, the uncertainty. Much of what we try do is actually unpredictable. Think about how much
energy, how much bandwidth is put into trying to predict the weather, stock market, interest rates, and
how bad we are at actually predicting things like this. C is a complexity; that there’s way too many
inputs, those inputs interact with each other, to actually really try to predict what’s going to happen.
And the A is ambiguity. We don’t really know all the inputs. Frankly, we don’t even know all the
outputs. What the military concluded was that VUCA is real. It exists everywhere, it exists at every level
of that organization, and as a result strategy is an incomplete tool to drive performance.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Studying VUCA, we realize that there’s actually two types of performance. The
first is tactical performance and this is how well you execute the plan. This is driven by strategy. So
imagine if we were all starting a customer service center, a call center. What we would probably do is
think about the tactics. We would estimate the volume, we would hire a whole bunch of folks, and then
we would predict. We would say, “This is how many phone calls you should be taking every day; this is
how long you should spend on each phone call.” We might even script out exactly what we want them
to say. We would have metrics all over the room tracking what was happening and what wasn’t
happening. We’d have QA/QC quality control people on the phones listening to them to see if they
messed up. Individual performance compensation, performance reviews; if you messed up and didn’t
follow the script maybe you’d be punished, maybe you’d be fired. That’s a call center with extreme
tactical performance.
Think about a CEO or an executive team under extreme tactical performance. That’s the executive team
whose board members think… whose board is expecting them to produce predictable quarterly returns.
They want that company to run like clockwork. But tactical performance is only half of performance.
When that ships starts to keel over you need adaptive performance. If tactical performance is your
ability to stick to the plan, adaptive performance is your ability to diverge from the plan. One is how
well you do it; the other is how well you don’t do it. They’re opposites. And what you find is that if you
double down too much on one you lose the other. So a call center that I just described that was really
doubling down on tactical performance, was not allowing that call center person to adapt if they got a
unique person on the phone, for example, with a unique problem. The CEO with a really strict tactical
performance system wouldn’t be able to adapt when a new opportunity came up or a new competitor
came online or the supply chains broke.
Now, adaptive and tactical performance are opposites of each other, but you need both; you need to
keep them in balance. A great illustration of this came from boxing actually, Muhammed Ali, who said,
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Alright? Sting like a bee. If you’re a boxer, you need good
tactics. To actually throw a punch you need to put both feet on the floor, gather all of your strength to
hit hard. That’s a company with a good strategy. They’re marshalling all their resources towards a good
plan, capturing a consistency, economies of scale. But if your feet are always planted you can’t adapt,
you can’t “Float like a butterfly,” you can’t change when the world changes when it’s full of VUCA.
>> Neel Doshi: If the processes that most organizations know how to build are the systems of tactical
performance, my guess is all of us in this room can actually build systems of tactical performance pretty
easily. The dogma of management is mostly focused on the systems of tactical performance. However,
as Lindsay described, if we build those systems and use them too much—you know, think about that call
center rep that’s afraid of deviating from that script—we lose the adaptive performance. If that’s true
then what drives adaptive performance? That’s what we’re going to spend the rest of this conversation
on. We know you can drive the tactical performance; we want to talk about what drives adaptive
performance.
After studying research like those toddlers, thousands of experiments, we’ve studied this in hundreds of
companies, across tens of thousands of different people in the workforce; we were able to draw a really
simple conclusion: why we work determines how well we work. A person’s reason for working is the
driver of their adaptive performance. Now, I’m not gonna ask you to believe this, I’m gonna prove it to
you. But before I prove it to you, I’ve got to give you a language to explain the different reasons why
people work. With that language we can actually talk about real case examples and real companies.
This framework—we call it the motive spectrum—it is meant to explain the different reasons why
people do anything, but we’ve applied it this to the workplace. There are three sources where
somebody’s motives can come from. First is the work itself; second is your own identity, your own
values, your own beliefs; third is external forces, like your mother-in-law. If I combine these three—no
seriously—if I combine these three motives or these three reasons, I get to the six motives of the
spectrum. The first one we call Play. So if you look at this blue circle, blue circle is now squarely the
work itself because the Play motive is when you do something simply because you enjoy doing it. The
work is its own reward. So imagine a teacher, for instance. A teacher that actually enjoys writing lesson
plans, tending to the classroom, thinking about how to engage with each student, grading exams,
coming up with homework assignments. If they actually enjoyed the work itself, the activity itself,
that’s the play motive.
Now moving a little further from Play, moving towards the right, is the Purpose motive. We move the
circle to the right because the Purpose motive is about you believing in or identifying with the outcome
of the work. Play is the activity itself; Purpose is you believe in the outcome of the activity. So that
teacher may not enjoy any aspect of that job, but they believe it’s important to educate children, right?
That’s a teacher with a Purpose motive, not the Play motive.
The next one we call the Potential motive. Potential is when you’ve found that the work actually
enhances your own potential. So for instance, that teacher may not feel Play or Purpose but they feel
like this job is a good stepping stone to what they do want to do. Maybe they want to be a school
principle, right? That’s not what the work was designed for, that’s not the outcome of the work, but it’s
an indirect outcome that enhances that teacher’s potential.
These three motives are what we call the direct motives because in some way they’re still connected to
the work itself, albeit to lesser degrees. However, the next one, Emotional Pressure, is no longer
connected to the work itself. So imagine if you were to do an activity because of guilt, fear, shame, peer
pressure—you’re in the zone of Emotional Pressure. So imagine if, for instance, my wife asked me to
clean up the living room and I… you’d use guilt to get me to do it. By the way, you’ve never done that,
right? No one here’s ever used guilt to convince a loved one to do something. Well, I might do the
activity, I might clean the living room, but I’m doing it out of guilt. I’m not doing it for any reason
connected to the activity itself. So you’re starting to see how the motive is now separate from the work
itself.
Moving even further away is Economic Pressure. It’s when you do something to gain a reward or avoid
a punishment. If you think about a job, that reward and punishment layer is bolted on top of the work
itself. It’s not the work itself. It’s completely separate from both the work and now your own identity.
And lastly is Inertia, which is quite possibly my favorite. It’s when you ask somebody why are they doing
what they’re doing and they say, “I have no idea. I’m doing it because I did it yesterday, because I did it
the day before, because I did it the day before that.” And Inertia is surprisingly common in the work
place. Lindsay and I were doing a talk just two days ago and a gentleman came up to us and he said,
“After I read your book I quit my job because I realized it was entirely Inertia.” These three are what we
call the indirect motives because they’re no longer connected to the work itself.
There are two things that we were able to conclude as we studied performance through this lens. The
first thing we were able to conclude is that the direct motives increase adaptive performance and the
indirect ones decrease adaptive performance. Again, we’ll prove that to you guys in a second. The
second thing we were able to conclude is the closer the motive is to the work itself, the more powerful it
is. Play is the strongest driver of performance, then Purpose, then Potential; Inertia’s the most
destructive, then Economic Pressure, then Emotional Pressure. Because these two conclusions are quite
consistent we can actually boil it all down to a single concept that we call Total Motivation or ToMo for
short. This is all to make it very easy to communicate this stuff. ToMo is when an organization or a
culture creates as much Play, Purpose, and Potential as possible and as little Emotional Pressure,
Economic Pressure, or Inertia as possible. That’s a high ToMo culture.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Alright. To demonstrate ToMo in reality I need a volunteer. Has anybody studied
math, any math people? Engineering, any engineering people in the room? Alright, so we’ve got
volunteers here, so I’m going to ask the five of you to stand up.
>>: I didn’t volunteer; I just answered your question. [laughter] [indiscernible].
>> Lindsay McGregor: Stand up. We’ve got volunteers in quotes on this power point slide for a reason.
Alright, now, this group is gonna solve a math problem. You’re gonna get a grid of numbers and you’re
gonna have to find the two that add up to ten and I want everybody else in the room to stare at them.
Look at their facial expressions. Are they turning red? Are they getting uncomfortable? And when you
guys find the answer I want you to sit down. We’re gonna see who’s the last one standing. So make
sure that you’re not finding the wrong answer. Can you please pull out a phone and send us the right
answer because I don’t want you to sit down just because you’re uncomfortable. Microsoft’s full of
smart people, right? This should be really easy.
>> Neel Doshi: This is probably a room full of the smartest people we’ve interacted with.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Mmhm.
>> Neel Doshi: So this should be totally easy for this group.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Are you ready to judge whether they’re actually have the right answer?
>> Neel Doshi: I’m ready to judge. Are they ready?
>>: Still stressin’. [laughter] Yeah, this takes a while; I’m on a Windows phone.
>>: Oops. [laughter]
>> Neel Doshi: Wow.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Alright. You ready? Alright everybody, you’re gonna be tempted to look up here
but watch your peers to see their reactions. Who’s sitting down first? On your marks—the two
numbers that add to ten—on your marks, get set, go.
>> Neel Doshi: I’ve never seen the half-sit before. [laughter]
>>: Typed it.
>> Neel Doshi: Well, one colleague sat down… and she’s back up. [laughter]
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Lindsay McGregor: [indiscernible].
>> Neel Doshi: Yeah, you can end the misery.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Alright, I’m gonna release you from your torture. You can all sit down.
>>: Oh god, not [indiscernible].
>> Lindsay McGregor: [laughter] You can all sit down. Now I’m guessing that most of you in this room
like math, right? You actually usually enjoy it. But what I did right here was completely shift your
motives from something that you probably would find fun—maybe you do Sudokus on your airplane
ride, you find them fun—to something that is filled with Emotional and Economic Pressure. What did
this feel like? Was it pleasant?
>>: It was fun. [laughter]
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah?
>>: It was a lot of fun. Thank you.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah? [laughter]
>>: It’s a masochist in the room.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep.
>> Neel Doshi: Yeah, exactly.
>> Lindsay McGregor: So when…
>>: Let’s do another one. [laughter]
>> Lindsay McGregor: When we do this we normally have the audience all do one just for fun in their
seats and people have the answer within about ten seconds.
>> Neel Doshi: Anyone in the audience find the numbers? So look at how many people in the audience
found it with no pressure put on them…
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep.
>> Neel Doshi: … versus the colleagues of yours that were standing up.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Alright, this is why people choke when they’re giving speeches, because the
pressure just rises dramatically. Here’s what we did. Normally when you’re doing a math problem you
might find it quite fun, feel a lot of Play, if you’re doing a Sudoku on the airplane, for example. But what
we did here was shift your motive profile, put in a lot of Emotional Pressure—everybody in the room
was able to judge you—and Economic Pressure when you’re doing something for the reward or the
punishment. I forced you guys to do this, right? I didn’t let you volunteer really ‘cause you were forced.
I shifted your motive profile, dramatically changes your ability to solve problems.
Now, an MIT professor did an experiment very much like this. MIT students, twenty-five percent of
them have perfect SAT scores on the math section. Very smart math students, but when he shifted their
motive profile like this their problem solving ability went down over thirty percent, right? Big
differences in your problem solving ability just by changing your motives when you’re doing an activity.
Neel Doshi: What this experiment is example of is what we call a Distraction Effect. If you take any job,
really just about any job you can imagine, there’s a component that requires tactical performance, a
component that requires adaptive performance. You have somebody with high ToMo you get both.
However, in this particular case, for your poor colleagues we systematically lowered their ToMo in fairly
brutal way. And as a result what happened is they’re still trying to solve the problem. In fact, when
we’ve done this to many, many people they say things like, “I was trying even harder to solve the
problem.” But their ability to actually do something that requires adaptive performance problem
solving decreases considerably. That’s the Distraction Effect. The funny thing is we can actually do
worse than the Distraction Effect. Don’t worry; I’m not gonna do worse to you guys.
>> Lindsay McGregor: All torture is done.
>> Neel Doshi: Maybe you actually. You seem into it. [laughter]
>> Lindsay McGregor: There’s no more torture here tonight. [laughter]
>> Neel Doshi: Worse than The Distraction Effect, I’ll give you an example. A professor at Harvard, she’s
doing an experiment, she got a group of professional poets to come into her lab. These professional
poets were asked to write a short poem—a haiku—all on the topic of laughter. So they got the exact
same word count, exact same topic, but before they wrote their poems she split them into two groups.
One group read a list of indirect reasons for why they’re a poet. Things like, “I’m a poet because I’d be…
I’d disappoint a former mentor of mine if I didn’t continue to write poetry.” Or, “I’m a poet because I
once heard of another poet who made a lot of money after publishing a book of poems.” She had the
other group read a list of direct reasons. Things like, “I enjoy playing with words,” like Play. After
reading their own lists for a couple of minutes she had them write their poems. Those poems were then
independently judged for their creativity. This is what she found: for the group that read the indirect list
versus the group that read the direct list, thirty percent difference in their creativity. What happens is if
I take ToMo down even further we get to what we call The Cancellation Effect where you’re still trying
the tactical performance, you’re still doing the activity, but you’ve more or less shut off your adaptive
performance. So think about the toddlers that you saw in the beginning. What the toddlers went
through is The Cancellation Effect; they essentially stopped being helpful. You ever see a colleague, or
maybe you feel this of yourself, you say, “Wow, that person’s just checking the boxes,” right? We might
describe somebody’s performance as, “That guy is just checking the boxes.” What that really is is the
Cancellation Effect. He’s checking the boxes; he’s doing all the stuff that’s asked of him, that’s
measured, that’s managed, but nothing beyond that. What you’re looking at is somebody whose ToMo
has been reduced so low that they’re cancelled out.
>> Lindsay McGregor: We can do even worse. Get to something called The Cobra Effect. Now, in the
eighteen hundreds in the city of Delhi the British government had a problem. There were far too many
cobras in the city, right? When a snake can stand up, that’s a whole ‘nother level of snake. So what did
they do to get rid of cobras? The put a bounty on the cobras. Every time you brought in a dead cobra
you get some money. Cobras were coming in by the bucket full; it was a huge success until they learned
that some enterprising locals had started cobra farms. They were actually breeding cobras for the
bounty. Now reportedly, when the British government cancelled the bounty it wasn’t even worth these
farmers time to kill the snakes. They just released them into the city and Delhi had more snakes at the
end of it than in the beginning. This is where the term Cobra Effect comes from.
Now in a Cobra Effect, you’re still getting really high tactical performance, you’re still getting cobras
coming in by the bucket load, but you’re not getting adaptive performance. You’re getting a whole new
type of performance: Maladaptive Performance. People are taking short cuts to get to the target that
you set for them. This happens in business all the time. There’s a famous story from about twenty years
ago of a company shipping bricks instead of disc drives to customers to meet their shipping numbers.
There’s VW recently and how a group of engineers—right—programmed software to fool the EPA. They
probably weren’t sitting there saying, “You know what would be fun…?” That’s probably not why they
started this. [laughter]
>> Neel Doshi: That’s exactly right.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah, exactly. Yep.
>> Neel Doshi: That’s exactly right.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah.
>> Neel Doshi: It’s the Cobra Effect caused by the environment that they’re in.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep. The Cobra Effect happens in businesses all the time when you reduce total
motivation enough.
>> Neel Doshi: What’s interesting at this point, even if we stop the talk at this point—which we’re not—
you guys in the room have a tool that very few managers have, because most people, most managers in
business only know this column, tactical performance. So to drive performance they usually result in
tactics that squeeze their people harder and harder and harder. They think that’s great because they’re
look at this column, tactical performance is high all the way through, right? This is the easier to measure
of the two. What they don’t see is the resulting Distraction, Cancellation, and Cobra Effects that that
causes. You guys can see that. So let’s do a quick case study: public education in the U.S. Unhappy with
how teacher performance looks, without knowing this full matrix, we double down on tactical
performance. What does that look like? Teach to the test or to give you standardized tests to teach to.
The grades of those tests are gonna determine your bonus and determine how much resources you
have for your children. You might actually even up the pressure by comparing performance, either
across teachers or across schools. Logically, that sounds good if all you know is tactical performance.
But now that we know about ToMo, now that we know about adaptive performance, you should know
that a system like that is going to eventually cause Distraction, Cancellation, and Cobra Effects. Let’s see
what it does in Education. The Distraction Effect: since 1985 stress levels in teachers have gone up
seventy percent. That’s a massive increase in stress. You stress that much it’s very difficult to actually
put your best into work as your colleagues demonstrated by doing simple math while everyone was
judging them. Cancellation Effect: I’m just gonna teach to the test, right? Rather than actually problem
solve and think about how to teach beyond that, I’m just gonna teach to the test. Cobra Effect:
cheating. In Atlanta, for instance, hundreds of teachers were implicated in a cheating scandal where
they were erasing wrong answers on student papers and putting right ones. District Attorney Atlanta
interviewed these teachers and said, “These weren’t bad people.” This is a predictable consequence of
a system that only focuses on tactical performance. You see this anywhere. You see this any
organization. We see this in many, many companies. Systems that drive performance only through
tactical performance, only through lowering ToMo result in Distraction, Cancellation, Cobra Effects.
>> Lindsay McGregor: So this brings us to our third question: what is culture? Now we’ve looked at
tactical and adaptive performance; we’ve looked at total motivation, but we haven’t proven to you yet
that total motivation is what is driving high performing cultures. We haven’t shown you if it works in
real organizations. We’re gonna take a look at that. To do it, it will be helpful to just define ToMo
quantitatively for you. We’ve talked about it qualitatively, but quantitatively it’s when you take Play,
add Purpose, add Potential, subtract Emotional Pressure, Economic Pressure, and Inertia. Now, there’s
different weights because these have different effects on performance. Alright? So that’s ToMo. We’re
gonna talk about it in a bit.
So ToMo, we looked at how does ToMo compare to one type of adaptive behavior: customer
experience. Think about customer experience. To be great you have to adapt to each individual
customer’s needs. So here’s a chart: customer satisfaction on the y axis, ToMo on the x axis. ToMo is
why the employees of this company come to work. It’s not how happy they are, it’s not how satisfied
they say they are; it’s why they come to work. And we’re gonna look at the relationship between these
two things in an industry that’s known for customer experience: the airline industry. Any guesses who’s
on the to… who has the highest ToMo in the airline industry?
>>: Southwest.
>>: Alaska.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Southwest. Alright. Bottom left, lowest ToMo: United. That’s how I got here.
American, Delta, Southwest. It’s almost a straight line connection between ToMo and customer
satisfaction.
>> Neel Doshi: What’s interesting is you knew there was something special about Southwest and a lot
of leaders emulate, they want to try to be that, but they don’t know what it is. They don’t know what
it’s actually doing and how it even connects to performance. Well the answer is ToMo.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Southwest is not at the high-end luxury player either. In fact, most of these
organizations have similar planes, similar terminals, and yet still, why their people are coming to work
every day is different.
Let’s take a look at the grocery industry. Who has the highest ToMo among grocers? Guesses?
>>: Whole Foods.
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Lindsay McGregor: Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s.
>>: [indiscernible]
>>: Lindsay McGregor: Albertson’s.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Lindsay McGregor: Safeway, Walgreens, Kroger, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s. Yep. Again, you all
know intuitively who has a high performing culture. This is what came out.
Alright. Last one: retail stores. Who’s the highest?
>>: REI.
>>: REI.
>>: Nordstrom?
>> Lindsay McGregor: Oh, we didn’t test REI.
>>: Nordstrom.
>> Neel Doshi: I heard Nordstrom
>> Lindsay McGregor: Nordstrom.
>>: It’s all the Seattle ones. [laughter]
>> Lindsay McGregor: Something in Seattle. Yep, again, total motivation, incredibly connected to
customer satisfaction.
>>: Costco, Nordstrom, REI.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep.
>>: Neel Doshi: Now, if customer satisfaction, customer experience benefits greatly from adaptive
performance, I’d actually argue that so does salesmanship. I think about a great sales person, adapts
themselves around their customer, their customer’s need. Imagine a lousy sales person, tactical only,
“I’m just gonna read the script to you,” right? So if sales at the highest level benefits from adaptive
performance, if this theory is correct, you should see a connection between sales performance and
ToMo. Let’s take a look. Here we went to a branch based financial institution, divided sales people into
two groups: the ones that had negative ToMo and the ones that had positive ToMo, and then we
measured their sales performance. What we saw was a thirty percent difference between sales people
with positive ToMo, sales people with negative ToMo. All from a factor that this company didn’t know
existed, all from a fact that this company was in the process of actively destroying. A thirty percent
difference in sales performance.
I’ll give you another example.
>>: Hey, sorry, I know I failed the math quiz, [laughter] when you say thirty, you actually mean twentyeight.
>> Neel Doshi: I actually mean twenty-eight. Sorry.
>>: Okay.
>> Neel Doshi: Yeah. I’m just rounding.
>>: Interesting. Why do you say thirty?
>> Neel Doshi: Just rounding. [laughter]
>>: Okay, good.
>> Neel Doshi: Just rounding. I will stop rounding.
>>: Good. No wonder we missed the math, guys? We could have rounded. [laughter]
>> Neel Doshi: That would’ve been interesting. [laughter] But yes, I will stop rounding. Twenty-eight
percent.
>>: You’re at Microsoft, Mac. Be accurate.
>> Neel Doshi: I noticed [indiscernible].
Another example. This is branch based sales so in person let’s look at telesales, so you’re on the phone
now. This is research that was done by an academic. What this person did was he went to an outbound
telesales call center and measured the ToMo of the people of this organization, essentially divided them
into four groups. Low ToMo, so folks with low direct but high indirect motives; medium, so low, low; the
other medium, high, high—you gotta remember, they cancel each other out; and then lastly, high ToMo,
so lots of Play, Purpose, Potential, very little Emotional Pressure, Economic Pressure, and Inertia. Now,
what we’re gonna look at is sales performance, essentially revenue produced per hour, so two hundred
and thirty four dollars for the low ToMo segment. At this stage you guys should be able to predict
what’s gonna happen here, all from factors that very few organizations know about. Medium ToMo:
slightly more, as you guessed. The other medium ToMo: also a little bit more. By the way, it’s not
always clear that this one’s gonna produce more than this one; sometimes it goes back and forth.
However high ToMo, a sixty percent—this time exactly sixty—difference be… no problem… between low
ToMo and the high ToMo group. Again, all from factors that few organizations even think exist. Yeah,
please?
>>: So if this all counts in you being able to measure ToMo, how do you do that?
>> Neel Doshi: The measurement of ToMo is actually relatively easy. The… there’s… we use a survey,
six questions, one for each motive. The questions are of the ilk of, “I continue to do this job because I
find the work itself fun to do.” That would measure Play. And then that math that Lindsay showed
earlier, essentially we take the average of each of those, run it through that very simple math to
calculate ToMo. The calculation of ToMo, by the way, is not critical to managing your culture. It’s useful
because it allows you to figure out what direction to go in. But even understanding the concept and
starting to think about how has our culture increased or decreased this, is really the first step.
Now, with this we can actually define culture. Most organizations would say culture is something like
our shared set of values and beliefs, or something along those lines. It’s hard to engineer that. In fact, if
you worked out that definition you would never get to Southwest, Nordstrom, Trader Joe’s. Instead, we
would argue that culture is quite simply the set of processes that maximize the ToMo of an organization.
>> Lindsay McGregor: So what are all of those processes in an organization that affect total motivation?
I’m gonna take a look. I’m gonna put processes down the left hand side and show you how much they
affect somebody’s total motivation. Across the top is the total motivation. It goes from negative one
hundred to a hundred; we’ve got part of the scale at the top. Most people tell us that the number one
thing that must drive somebody’s motivation and their culture is their leadership. That’s gotta make the
biggest difference. Turns out, it’s not true. Look, he knows, he knows. First one is how your role is
designed. When you have a badly designed role or a well-designed role it can swing somebody’s total
motivation by eighty-seven points. Next, how your organizational identity is. Not just the mission and
values written on your wall, but do you live and breathe those values each and every day? Next, your
career ladders. Many companies, a career ladder is determined like a fight to the death, right? Your
neighbor has to fail for you to win. That can create a pretty toxic culture. Your sense of community
comes next. Workforce planning: do you have the time and resources and manpower to get what you
need to get done done? Leadership, still a huge swing, fifty points of total motivation. Compensation,
governance processes, and performance reviews all can have a significant difference on what your
culture is like.
So let’s take an example of one process in an organization and how it can change why people work.
Sales commissions. Before this talk you might have thought that sales commissions were a bad thing.
At this point you might think… sorry... before this talk you might have thought sales commissions were a
good thing, at this point you might be thinking they’re a bad thing, but the answer is a little bit more
nuanced. We’re gonna look at the total motivation factor, the ToMo of people with no sales
commission versus sales commission. No sales commission, average of negative nine; sales commission,
negative thirty-three. ToMo goes down a lot. That’s what we expected. Here’s the wrinkle. This is for
people who believe their company does not care about doing the right thing for customers. Their
company does not care. When we look at people who think their company does do the right thing for
customers with no sales commission, they have a ToMo of forty-four—much higher. When they have
sales commissions and believe the company does the right thing it goes up to fifty—might be the
reverse of what we expected. Now here’s what’s happening. If you think about it it makes sense.
When you don’t think your company is doing the right things for customers your reason for selling that
product is the commission. Your reason is the Economic Pressure. When you think that your company
does care about doing the right thing, that these products help, your reason for working is helping your
customers—it’s Purpose—and the sales commission is just gravy. In fact, the sales commission can
actually increase your sense of Play because it is a way for you to track your progress and how well
you’re improving at your work. So when you design a process in an organization you have to think
about, “In my ecosystem, how is this process going to change why people work?”
>> Neel Doshi: So we’ll leave you with a couple of last thoughts because I think many of these processes
that Lindsay described, only some people in an organization actually have control over them. But we all
have control over our own ability as a leader, a leader of the people that we work with. And so I’ll share
with you one last bit of analysis because if you think about a leader and you think about that leadership
behavior through the lens of ToMo, a leader can use direct motivators—Play, Purpose, and Potential—
with their team, and they can use indirect motivators. Let’s take a look at what the effect that has on
average on subordinates ToMo. First type of leader, a leader that doesn’t really focus on direct motives
at all, really focus on the indirect ones. We see this a lot, by the way. Transactional leaders. We
actually call them quid pro quo because you do something for something. So one retail chain we
worked with, store managers would routinely trade good shifts, like work shifts, for favors. That’s
actually transactional behavior; it’s low ToMo. The average ToMo of that subordinate in our data set is
about negative one.
The next type of leader, we call it a hands-off because they’re not really doing any of the direct or
indirect. If I’m being honest with myself, before we studied this, this is the kind of leader I was. Like my
mental model was I knew I shouldn’t be this, I knew enough to know this was bad. So what I started to
do was this, which was I gave my people tons and tons of space, I never really interacted with them, I
thought they valued that autonomy and only when things were bad did I actually step in. That really is
this profile, and what that does in terms of ToMo of the subordinate is not much; takes it from negative
one to eleven. This is why my own company before this was a “meh” culture.
Now, you can have the person that does both, direct and indirect. They’re essentially trying just about
every motivator they can possibly come up with. Sometimes they’re transactional, sometimes using
guilt, sometimes they’re using Emotional Pressure, sometimes they are thinking about Play, Purpose,
Potential. But as you guys know by now, the combination of the two isn’t good, it’s actually… they
cancel each other out, and so you get to a ToMo not much higher than the eleven, fourteen.
Finally, you get to what we call a Fire starter. This is the leader that only uses the direct motives,
doesn’t use the indirect ones. Very much focused on, “How do I make this more Play? How do I make
this more Purpose? How do I make this more Potential?” And the average ToMo of that subordinate
goes up quite a lot, to about thirty-eight. So you can see that the theory itself predicts how leadership
behaviors manifest in terms of peoples motives.
And so we’ll leave you with three things that you guys can start to do right away even if you don’t have
control over the rest of your culture’s ecosystem. The first thing is quite simply, ask yourself which of
these do you think you are and see if you can force yourself to the top row here. Really try to focus on
how do you make that work Play? How do you make that work Purpose? How do you make that work
Potential? The second thing is, we find that if people simply share the language that we just shared with
you—if they understand what ToMo is, if they understand what the motives are, if they understand the
difference between tactical and adaptive performance—you can actually talk about this stuff. In so
many organizations they just don’t have a language to describe any of what we just talked about, so you
don’t talk about it. Step one is: encourage your team to just learn this language. That’s it.
Thing number two is: you can actually measure your teams ToMo. As a simple tool we have a free
survey on our website if you wanted to use it that actually not just measures your team’s ToMo, but
actually facilitates a conversation. The goal of measurement isn’t actually a report card ‘cause that
would be low ToMo. The goal of measurement is to diagnose what to do and actually have a
conversation around it.
The last thing is a very simple tip. It’s a step that we do in our own organization where we have a
weekly reflection huddle. In that huddle we ask our people three questions: what did you learn this
week? Which really is focused on Play. How did you create impact this week? Which is focused on
Purpose. And what do you want to learn next week? And we just… within each team we go around, we
just answer those three questions for that week. It does a couple of things: it reminds us of the Play and
Purpose of our work. Secondly, it actually allows us to scale what we’ve learned; it actually scales up
our adaptive performance.
Three simple things. There’s obviously more that one can do when you really are thinking about the
whole of an organization, but these are easy things that we can start doing right away. I think with that
we can open it up to questions. There’s actually plenty more that you can learn about this stuff, but
let’s kind of leave it at that and see what you guys have on your minds. Yeah?
>>: So at the beginning talking about doing nothing, praise, or reward, do you see anything that show
any difference between praise and demonstrating appreciation or whether that counts as the same
thing or if it’s a different…?
>> Neel Doshi: That’s such a good question.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah.
>> Neel Doshi: You want to handle it or you want me to let….?
>> Lindsay McGregor: Sure. I… it’s all…
>>: Can you repeat the question?
>>: Could you repeat the question? We didn’t hear it.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Sure. So the question was, “Have you seen research in which there’s a difference
between praise and showing appreciation?” Right? [indiscernible] And so when you look at all these
experiments you have to look at if they’re shifting why somebody is doing something. So in the
experiments when somebody starts to do it for the praise it tends to reduce adaptive performance. But
when the praise is not shifting your reason for working, it’s just a… for example, a nice indicator that
what you’re doing is working; it doesn’t tend to reduce adaptive performance.
>> Neel Doshi: The thing about appreciation, appreciation if you’re not using appreciation as a way to
subtly manipulate your people…
>>: Yeah.
>> Neel Doshi: … right? This is a very interesting thing that… have you… to think about the lens and the
motives. Some people will use appreciation to manipulate their people, withhold it from some, give it to
others, all in the spirit of manipulation, then it becomes Emotional Pressure. But if you’re actually
showing somebody that you value them, that you care about them, and you’re not trying to use it to
make them do something for you, that appreciation can actually reduce their Emotional Pressure which
increases their ToMo. Yeah?
>>: I would like this question about this toddlers experiment. So basically to not go farther it started
with some of them been already doing and it was not to stop them from doing it, right? It’s not to make
them. I guess first part it would be a problem different if they started something they were not doing
and incite them to do it, right? And the second part of this is, it looks to me that, well, I’m not sure,
maybe you’ve done this. It really relates to what happens in the head for the subject, right? Did the
toddlers like those games… the toys that they’ve been given, right? Did the toddlers like those praise?
‘Cause for example, for me, like I worked pretty much to Google and for the stable company. My
manager was praising me but I wasn’t doing anything—you know—really useful, just regular. So I really
hated this praise, or you know if you’re given something that… some toy that’s you don’t want, you
don’t like, it’s worse than not being given anything at all.
>> Lindsay McGregor: So the first part of the question was, “Is it different when the toddlers started out
helpful and then became unhelpful, would it be different if it was the reverse, if you wanted to have
them do a behavior that they had never done before? “
It’s a really good question. What we find is that Economic Pressure and rewards can be a good
activator. Like it can be the reason you do something for the first time or it can be the reason that you
pick one job over another or the reason that you decide to go into one industry versus another. But
when you look at who is highest performing once they get there, it’s the people that are finding Play and
Purpose and Potential in their work. So for example, investment bankers, maybe you ask… we haven’t
done this, but if you ask them why they went into investment banking, some of… many of them might
say, “I went into investment banking partially for the financial rewards.” But when you look at the
highest performers once they’re there, it’s the ones that are actually finding Play and Purpose in the
work itself. Do you want to answer the second part?
>> Neel Doshi: The… you know, there’s a couple of things… I’m trying to unpack your question a little
bit. Like you were phrasing, “Well, what if the toy itself wasn’t fun?” Let’s say a person has an option of
a bunch of things that they can do and they actually have a full understanding of what those options are.
You actually have to compare the relative ToMo of those options, right? What you described between
the toy not being fun versus the toy being fun or this previous company you worked at versus now was
you went from an environment where you didn’t feel Play and Purpose, it sounded like, to one where
you might. That’s a good thing, right? Increases your ToMo, you feel happier, you drive better
performance, lots of things improve. Now Lindsay’s right, like, the motives… if you think about what we
landed on, the direct motives increase adaptive performance. I can use all of these to increase tactical
performance including Inertia, right? All of these can actually drive tactical performance, but the goal is
how do we actually create an organization that balances tactical and adaptive, and that can only really
be done with the direct motives. Now, going back to this thing, the toddlers: if the toddlers didn’t find
ToMo in the toy, they might have actually found higher ToMo in helping even with the reward, right?
>>: Yeah. So what I’m saying is, you know, you kind of turning something that they just did anyway and
they’ve been given something they don’t want, they see it as a negative reinforcement.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yes. So in this case the toys that they used had been tested to see if toddlers
actually liked them, so this was a standard way of offering a reward. But you’re right, you could… you
would have want to test that before setting up the experiment to make sure you’re not actually giving
them something that they don’t actually want.
>> Neel Doshi: Like, gave the toddlers, like, vegetables.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah.
>> Neel Doshi: Yeah?
>>: So, I know it sounds like you guys were looking at this through the lens of what impacts
performance, did you… has there been any study or research done on individuals health and wellbeing
depending on whether they’re on more indirect side versus direct side?
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep. So there’s fascinating research on, for example, how this affects burnout
and stress, even heart attacks. If you don’t have the ability to Play in your work you’re more likely to
have a heart attack. Very sad. So when we discu… were doing this research that was one of the really
encouraging things for us was you don’t have to make a trade-off between happiness and health and
performance. There’s actually an answer that combines the two.
>>: So just to follow up then, if you find yourself more on the indirect side…
>> Lindsay McGregor: Mmhmm.
>>: … is there a way to move to the direct without changing, like, a job or doing something different?
>> Neel Doshi: So you have to ask yourself a few questions. I think one is—I’m gonna give you an
average piece of data, but this is an average, it isn’t… you know, every individual’s different—when we
look at the ToMo of people in an organization we find that more than seventy-five percent of it is
accounted for by the organization, not the individual. That I could take… you know, think about your
colleagues, they could’ve solved that math problem in their sleep; stand up, different situation, all of a
sudden ToMo shifts radically. So the context that you’re in, the environment you’re in has a dramatic
effect on your ToMo. There might be things that you can do, like one of the things that we argue is that
people can take… if they really think about what drives their own ToMo they can reshape their jobs. You
know, little things that you can do, like if you wanted to increase your sense of Play you can start to try
to find a way to increase your own degrees of freedom in your job, the time that you’re spending
learning, the time that you’re spending experimenting, the time that you’re spending driving your own
curiosity. You can increase your own Purpose spending more time with the people, for instance, that
benefit from your work.
Let’s talk about the indirect motives. Let’s say you feel a lot of Emotional Pressure or Economic Pressure
in your work. Emotional Pressure, you have to really think about what’s causing that. Is that being… is
that driven by your environment, people around you? If that’s the case you might have to try something
different, you might actually have to shift out of that context. If you think it’s self-imposed, if you really
think your Emotional Pressure is self-imposed, that’s where you have to actually ask yourself a hard
question around, “What is it about your own identity, values and beliefs that’s causing it?” Yeah?
>>: Yeah, so I was just wondering that in your universe, do rewards and recognitions, they don’t have a
place?
>> Lindsay McGregor: It’s complicated. It’s—you know—like that sales commission experiment showed,
when the rewards or the recognition are gravy on top—right—or when they help you track your
progress, this can be a good thing. When it becomes your reason for working, it can be a bad thing. So
it tends to be very nuanced based on the environment that you’re in. You can’t take the reward
separate from the rest of the organization.
>> Neel Doshi: There’s two things that we really learned about Economic Pressure in our research. The
first is: the punishment creates far more Economic Pressure than the reward. So for instance, fear of
losing your job as far more potent than the desire for the bonus. That’s kinda… that’s the kind of thing
that we learned, number one, when it came to, how do rewards and punishments drive Economic
Pressure?
The other thing we noticed is when we started to do this work in large organizations, Economic Pressure
peaks with the people who are paid the least and people who are paid the most. It was a U shape. So
people who are paid the most had golden handcuffs; they felt like they were doing that job just for the
money. People who paid the least were constantly feeling the pressure of not having enough money.
And so when we think about how to think… how to drive that, we try to minimize the punishment, like
in our ideal world we try to structure companies that minimize the risk of layoff to try to drive down that
form of punishment. We try to minimize the risk of a tournament based career ladder, like Lindsay
described earlier, and we try to make sure that on both ends of the spectrum we’re not constructing a
reward situation that’s gonna drive up golden handcuffs or drive up pressure. Yeah?
>>: So I’m a game dev and in our industry the cycle of our project gets very intense near the end. I’m
assuming that ToMo shifts on… when project cycles create their own pressure. Are you advocating
changing the motivational style for leaders or for managers as that cycle continues? Like when you
know it’s a predictable project cycle and most of the external pressure is coming from the project
deadlines and the stress of the game not working. Is… have you done studies just within the project
cycle itself?
>> Neel Doshi: So I’ll give you… I… we did a study that’s similar, but not exactly like that. We’ve seen
ToMo shift as people approach promotions. So you end up in your career, you kind of get points where
you’re about to get to a promotion—you could get it or not—you see ToMo drop right to that point,
then you get it and it kind of rebounds back up because you’re feeling greater and greater and greater
amounts of pressure. I think the same sounds to be true in how you’re describing this project cycle
where the pressure’s increasing as you get to the end. As a leader you have to be mindful of that.
‘Cause think about what’s happening. Let’s say your ToMo is dropping towards the end of a project.
You’re ToMo’s dropping, so is your adaptive performance, which means your cognitive ability, your
ability to spot problems, your ability to actually raise issues, your ability to actually float doing the right
thing versus putting a shortcut in place and hoping that nobody notices. As a leader you actually want
to understand that because you’re creating a lot of risk for yourself if you actually don’t manage that.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep?
>> Neel Doshi: Yeah? I’m sorry. Go ahead.
>>: Oh, did you have a view or in your research did you take a look at how ToMo and basically the effect
of all these variables changes across, like, industries or type of job and maybe not so much a, like tech
versus finance versus consulting or that sort of thing, but say, more drastically different areas, like say,
tech versus agriculture or that kind of thing?
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yep. On… So we’ve got about twelve or fifteen different industries in here. The
lowest was the quick serve industry, fast food. I think that was lowest or second lowest. The highest
was teaching, although in teaching there tends to be a lot of Purpose but a big var… a lot of variance in
Play among teachers. And I’m guessing that you would be able to fairly accurately predict the industries
over time. So we do look at how is your company performing against others in your industry, and if you
can create sort of a ten or twenty point gap that’s a really noticeable difference for your company. But
it is gonna be hard for companies in some industries to reach the level of companies in others.
>> Neel Doshi: So for instance, Starbucks has a ToMo of seventeen, which if you were to compare them
to, say, teaching, is incredibly low, but if you compare them to the average of the rest of the fast food
industry, the rest of the fast food industry averages in the low negatives. And so when we think about
working with an organization and driving up the ToMo, we first primarily care about daylight between
them and their industry, not kind of an absolute level, because the daylight between them and their
industry’s what customers feel.
>>: So in the tech industry, who do you… where do you see throughout the ranking?
>> Neel Doshi: We haven’t measured the whole tech industry, so it’s hard to actually say. We don’t
actually have data like what you saw in some of these other organizations on the whole tech industry.
What we’ve seen incredibly wide spread. There are some organizations that actually… we work a lot of
startups. And so even in the startups, smaller organizations, you see an incredibly wide spread between
some that actually have incredibly high ToMo and some that are relatively small with incredibly low
ToMo.
>>: Sure.
>> Neel Doshi: What do you think? [laughter] It sounds like a loaded question.
>>: I was curious as to, like, I mean there’s some big names in tech and I was just wondering if we could
do search and compare them and where they rank? I mean, just like Southwest versus [indiscernible]
and how do you view that?
>> Neel Doshi: You know, we don’t like to speculate without the data.
>>: Yeah, we’re not competitors [indiscernible]. [laughter]
>>: I would imagine that in a big company that you’d have a huge range just between different divisions
or even different smaller orgs teams.
>> Neel Doshi: Sure. Absolutely true.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah, that’s very true. Very, very true.
>> Neel Doshi: So one organization we’re working with, essentially a financial institution, their front
office had a ToMo of about fifty; their Ops group had a ToMo of about zero. So even inside an
organization you can see dramatic shifts. Yeah?
>>: I just think…
>> Amy Draves: We’re actually at last question I’m afraid ‘cause I’ve got to cut it off at some point, so.
[laughter] So, it’s you.
>>: Okay.
>>: It’s you.
>>: I’ve seen startups, you just mentioned, really orient towards the fun aspect and Play, almost to the
point of feeling a little artificial. You know, crazy sweater day and sort of a lot of that kind of thing
where they hype their culture that they put out is that “we have fun.” And it just… I wonder about that
in alignment with Purpose and how that affect… a true… like a true purpose, you know, a deeper sense
of purpose and how… if you’ve seen that and if it has an impact on ToMo or if that satisfies the Play or if
it doesn’t?
>> Lindsay McGregor: Yeah, that does not satisfy the Play. So when we’re measuring Play we are not
talking about the ping pong tables or the foosball tables and what you do during your break time. We’re
actually asking you how fun you find the work itself, like your day to day work. And a lot of people do
confuse the two; they think that the extracurricular activities are Play. But when we look at Play, Play is
really that source of… that feeling of curiosity, of experimentation, the enjoy of coming up with a
hypothesis and testing it, and for Play to improve your adaptive performance at work it has to be Play in
the work itself.
>> Neel Doshi: It’s such a common misconception. One company we worked with, a larger organization
they said, “Wow, we need to be much more like these tech companies.” And so they got ping pong
tables. And they’re like, “Well, this isn’t working. Why isn’t this working?” [laughter]
>>: And I would imagine it backfires at some point because you… then it’s almost… it would feel even
more out of alignment at some point, but…
>> Lindsay McGregor: Doesn’t feel authentic.
>> Neel Doshi: Yeah, that’s absolutely right.
>> Lindsay McGregor: Well, thank you all
>> Neel Doshi: Thanks you guys.
>>: Thank you.
>>: Thank you. [applause]