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Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort.
This book, then, explores the eight ideas that seem most important in expanding productivity. One chapter, for example, examines how a feeling of control can generate motivation, and how the military turns directionless teenagers into marines by teaching them choices that are “biased toward action.”
Another chapter looks at why we can maintain focus by constructing mental models—and how one group of pilots told themselves stories that prevented 440 passengers from falling out of the sky.
All the apathetic individuals had tiny pinpricks of burst vessels in their striatum, the same place where Robert had a small shadow inside his skull.
Delgado, monitoring the activity inside of their heads, saw that people’s striata—that central dispatch—lit up with activity whenever participants played, regardless of the outcome.
There was “robust activity in the caudate nucleus only when subjects” were permitted to guess, Delgado and his colleagues later wrote. “The anticipation of choice itself was associated with increased activity in corticostriatal regions, particularly the ventral striatum, involved in affective and motivational processes.”
But, somehow, allowing people to make choices transformed the game. Instead of being a chore, the experiment became a challenge. Participants were more motivated to play simply because they believed they were in control.
But scientists say motivation is more complicated than that. Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination.
This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control.
“We were seeing much weaker applicants,” he told me. “A lot of these kids didn’t just need discipline, they needed a mental makeover. They’d never belonged to a sports team, they’d never had a real job, they’d never done anything. They didn’t even have the vocabulary for ambition. They’d followed instructions their whole life.”23
Krulak began reviewing studies on how to teach self-motivation, and became particularly intrigued by research, conducted by the Corps years earlier, showing that the most successful marines were those with a strong “internal locus of control”—a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.
Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s.26 Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.
“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me.28 “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives.
“We never tell anyone they’re a natural-born leader. ‘Natural born’ means it’s outside your control,” Krulak said. “Instead, we teach them that leadership is learned, it’s the product of effort. We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge. Once we get them addicted to that, they’re hooked.”
“I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
Surveys indicate that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training.32
Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals.
This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.
Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.
When a team comes to an unspoken consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate, that’s a norm asserting itself.
And some norms, the data indicated, consistently correlated with high team effectiveness. One engineer, for instance, told the researchers that his team leader “is direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks…. She also takes the time to ask how we are, figure out how she can help you and support you.” That was one of the most effective groups inside Google.
Group norms, the researchers on Project Aristotle concluded, were the answer to improving Google’s teams. “The data finally started making sense,” said Dubey. “We had to manage the how of teams, not the who.”
The wards with the strongest team cohesion had far more errors. She checked the data again. It didn’t make any sense. Why would strong teams make more mistakes?
In fact, while some strong teams emboldened people to admit their mistakes, other, equally strong teams made it hard for nurses to speak up. What made the difference wasn’t team cohesion—rather, it was the culture each team established.
As Edmondson’s list of good norms grew, she began to notice that everything shared a common attribute: They were all behaviors that created a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.
“We call it ‘psychological safety,’” she said. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” It is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,” Edmondson wrote in a 1999 paper.17 “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”
In other words, how do you convince people to feel safe while also encouraging them to be willing to disagree?
Rather, the SNL team clicked because, surprisingly, they all felt safe enough around one another to keep pitching new jokes and ideas. The writers and actors worked amid norms that made everyone feel like they could take risks and be honest with one another, even as they were shooting down ideas, undermining one another, and competing for airtime.
The researchers eventually concluded that the good teams had succeeded not because of innate qualities of team members, but because of how they treated one another. Put differently, the most successful teams had norms that caused everyone to mesh particularly well.
“We find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks,” the researchers wrote in their Science article. “This kind of collective intelligence is a property of the group itself, not just the individuals in it.”29 It was the norms, not the people, that made teams so smart. The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers. The wrong norms could hobble a group made up of people who, on their own, were all exceptionally bright.
First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.
Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
Onstage, Bock brought up a series of slides. “What matters are five key norms,” he told the audience. Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety. To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish
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Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.
But as automation becomes more common, the risks that our attention spans will fail have risen. Studies from Yale, UCLA, Harvard, Berkeley, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere show errors are particularly likely when people are forced to toggle between automaticity and focus, and are unusually dangerous as automatic systems infiltrate airplanes, cars, and other environments where a misstep can be tragic.12, 13 In the age of automation, knowing how to manage your focus is more critical than ever before.14
There is significant evidence, however, that Bonin was in the grip of what’s known as “cognitive tunneling”—a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention.15
But when we allow automated systems, such as computers or autopilots, to pay attention for us, our brains dim that spotlight and allow it to swing wherever it wants.
“So the brain’s instinct is to force it as bright as possible on the most obvious stimuli, whatever’s right in front of you, even if that’s not the best choice. That’s when cognitive tunneling happens.”
As Bonin pulled back on his stick, the front of the aircraft rose higher. Then, another instance of cognitive tunneling occurred—this time, inside the head of Bonin’s copilot.
Bonin fell back on a reaction he had practiced repeatedly, a sequence of moves he had learned to associate with emergencies. He fell into what psychologists call “reactive thinking.”
“I have a problem,” Bonin said, the panic audible in his voice. “I have no more displays.” This was not correct. The displays—the screens on his instrument panel—were providing accurate information and were clearly visible. But Bonin was too overwhelmed to focus.
In the late 1980s, a group of psychologists at a consulting firm named Klein Associates began exploring why some people seem to stay calm and focused amid chaotic environments while others become overwhelmed.
Darlene explained that she carried around a picture in her mind of what a healthy baby ought to look like—and the infant in the crib, when she glanced at her, hadn’t matched that image.
People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see.
These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do.
Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.”26 Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology.27 All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves s...
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Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.
