PROGRESS trumps all forms of motivation (and here's 5 ways to hack it).

It’s not your beliefs, goals, plans, visions or ideas that drive you to do the work required to make things happen – it’s progress. And games are all about progress. 

In 2010, some fascinating research was published in the Harvard Business Review, prompting a good rethink about the way we go about building and sustaining the elements that support motivation at work. Originally, researchers Amabile and Kramer surveyed over 600 managers from dozens of diverse companies, asking them to rank workplace factors commonly considered to be significant to motivation. “Recognition of good work” was the clear winner. 

While this is still quite a good answer, it was far from the best. The most significant motivating factor – identified from a multi-year study of over 12,000 employee diary entries along with ratings of motivation and activity – was a sense of progress. And, ironically, this is what the 600+ managers ranked dead last.

This has been known to science for some time, but as Dan Pink would say, “there’s a big gap between what science knows and what business does.” And so many businesses continue to unquestioningly subscribe to the conventional nonsense like:

• “Failing to plan is planning to fail” – which is, of course, rubbish. Google’s business strategy is to have no business strategy, and too often, planning gets in the way of action, or locks you into a redundant pathway.
•  “You can achieve anything, all you need to do is believe”– self-efficacy is important, but you’re kidding yourself if you believe you can achieve positive change simply by thinking about it.
•  “All it takes is one big idea” – wrong, on so many levels. I’ll talk about this in another post.

I could go on. Regardless, the above elements are indeed each an important component of any good goal, strategy or game-plan. But even if you’ve got an idea, a goal, a vision, a plan and the belief to execute it, you’ve still got a heck of work to do. It’s easy to gloss over this fact, and make a disproportionate investment into your goals/ideas/plans/etc. Even if a “motivational” speaker parachutes in, gets your people hyped up, then jetpacks off into the sunset… you’ll still have a lot of work to do to make your ideas happen.

But that’s fine, because work can be awesome if you get the progress dynamics right. It’s why World of Warcraft still has millions of people paying money each month for the opportunity to engage in challenging, repetitive work. It’s why the Nike+ system for recording your running progress was a huge success. It’s also why we procrastinate by writing lists, making cups of coffee or cleaning the house – because these activities provide an easier way to see (and mark off) the progress we make.

We are most happy when we can see that our efforts directly contribute to something meaningful.

So, here are the five critical design elements that are used sustain motivation and effort in good games – and they are totally available for you to adapt into your work projects: 

1. Track it
Of all online communities and social networks, LinkedIn has one of the highest levels of profile completion. This is largely due to a nifty little (and quite simple) progress bar, which indicates your percentage of profile completion. Coupled with this are suggestions on the direct actions you can take to progress the level of profile completion.
 

2. Reduce feedback latency
Motivation declines when there is a long delay between effort and useful feedback – which makes sense, because if it is unclear whether our efforts are contributing to progress, we are more likely to conserve our energy (ie, do nothing) or invest it into an area where we can make progress (like checking emails). The quicker we have access to meaningful feedback, the sooner we can calibrate our efforts to make progress.

3. Balance gratification
You’ve probably heard of the marshmallow study, which has cute videos associated with it. The basic premise is that delayed gratification leads to success – and while the evidence is only a weak correlation, at some level we can all see the reason in this. If we were simply run by short-term gratification, it’d be beer and skittles, all the time (which probably isn’t healthy). So, we’re told to instead word hard, save money, stick at it and delay gratification. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this – you can actually blend both forms of gratification. Games do this very well – as you are leveling up and progressing your characters, you’ll receive small acknowledgements and little token rewards. You’ll progress the narrative, and this will continue to fuel your motivation and effort.

Tim Ferris – the author of The Four Hour Workweek – has given some people an idea about how they can build in mini-rewards into their life. Rather than living what he calls the “delayed life plan” – he advocates for frequent, mini-retirements instead.
 

The key here is to not think in terms of either short-term or long-term gratification, rather, to think about how short-term gratification (points, mini-rewards, hat-tips) can be used to reinforce your progress toward bigger gratification.
 

4. Celebrate wins
Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up relentlessly focussing on the to-do list, without celebrating the wins in your “have-done” list. For managers, stretching targets and autocratically changing goals will eliminate the ability for your team to celebrate wins and achievements, which in turn will diminish the motivation to do work.

Of course, when you’re playing a good video game, you’ll know what level you’re at, and it’s easy to mark out your previous wins, achievements and all the stages you’ve progressed through. But we can build this into our real world work too.

Behance – a creative agency based in New York – has a wonderful “DONE! wall". It’s a physical wall where they post up all the completed action steps they’ve taken. As they describe it, they have literally surrounded themselves with progress.

5. Maintain agility
The path to innovation rarely follows a straight line, and your ability to make progress will be dependant upon your ability to adapt to changes along the way. Many software developers are very used to this, and they employ agile project methods to keep their people making progress. For some, this includes 12-minute stand up meetings each morning, where team members will report on yesterday's wins and today’s goals (which also creates an ecology of open accountability, and the ability for team members to work collaboratively and eliminate fires early).

Meaningful progress is the heart and core of all motivation (and the whole point for doing work). If you’re serious about building and sustaining the motivation to unlock massive productivity in your team, make work work by making it work more like a game.