[Music]
well about two years ago I stumbled on a
piece of neuroscience that just stunned
me as a psychologist I wish somebody had
told me more about this but what I
learned is that there appears to be a
part of our brain called the ventral
striatum that's the technical term or
you also could call it the seeking
system and that this system is urging us
to explore the boundaries of what we
know it's urging us to be curious and by
the way I mean innately I mean children
six months old three months old if you
give them some toy they love it for a
little while as they get used to it your
car keys become more interesting it's
the new and it's the desire to learn and
evolutionarily this system was developed
to help us to keep us learning and so
when I learned about this seeking system
it really turned me on because it
started to give me an insight into why
disengagement from boring work that may
not be a bug that might be a feature in
the 2015-2016 Gallup polls the evidence
is that about 70 percent of people are
not engaged in what they do all day long
and about 18 percent of people are
repulsed they're actively disengaged
from what they do and I think that the
reason why I say this is a problem and
it could even be called an epidemic is
because work is mostly what we do we
spend so much more time at work than
with our families and then there's
things called hobbies and so I think
that the pervasiveness of people feeling
like workers a thing that we have to
shut off from a thing that we can't be
our best selves a thing that we have to
get through on the weight of the weekend
I think that that is a sort of
humanistic sickness and while it is bad
for people that's the humanistic bit it
also is really bad for organizations who
get lackluster performance I think that
it's interesting to think about when
this all started happening and you know
I didn't live back in the 1850s but all
the records suggest that you could buy
shoes
and their shoes would be sold by some
store some cobbler and maybe there'd be
three people that work there rarely
would there be five people that work
there and while that probably wasn't the
best work in the world each of the
people in the store would watch the
customer walk in and then they'd make a
shoe for that customer and they take
leather and they'd sew it and then
they'd give it and around 1890 we got
this different idea as a species where
we should not sell two pairs of shoes
each day but two million and this idea
of scaling up had certain implications
for how work felt and part of that was
because it was decided that the way to
do this would have extreme efficiency by
breaking the work into really small
tasks where most of the people don't
meet the customer most of the people
don't invent the shoe most of the people
don't actually see the shoe made from
beginning to end and this idea of
removing the meaning from the work was
intentional and the idea of removing the
curiosity from the job was intentional
for Henry Ford curiosity was a bug it
was a problem and he needed to stamp it
out in the name of reliability and
quality now I'm not saying we're still
acting just like the 1900s but I am
saying that that's when we cut our teeth
on management practices and the way we
use control systems and punishments and
extrinsic rewards to kind of call people
out into doing really repeated and
sometimes tedious tasks again and again
and again without having a sense of the
bigger picture or who uses the final
product I think that that's part of
where it came from so a small
organization in any industry selling
toner cartridges selling fruit selling
shoes if you're just starting up and
you've only got 30 or 50 people working
there everybody is curious everybody is
doing everything there aren't really
tight role descriptions the job titles
are not burned into your flesh
the frame of your job is not sacred and
so you could be a delivery person but
then if you see the competitor doing
something then you can be corporate
espionage and you can take back to
information and then you can get into
strategy and help reinvent a response to
what you saw and that's actually not
only acceptable it's desirable the CEO
loved you for doing this when you get to
have 50,000 people in an organization
you're supposed to stay in your lane you
know the expectation is there are a set
of KPIs key performance indices and this
is the way that we measure you and your
job and yeah might be the you have ideas
about competitive advantage and and what
the competitors are doing but there's no
time for that because we need you to do
these things that we've already set
aside for you again so I think it's in
my own opinion a lot less about which
industry and a lot more about the
culture and the expectations for what
different employees can bring to the
party
[Music]
you