- SAFe lean agile principle number eight.
Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers.
This is a bit of a teaser
'cause I'm gonna revisit this in lesson nine,
this is really a leadership understanding
and a leadership principle
but it starts back in the late 1940's
with an experiment done
at the University of Wisconsin if I remember right.
This comes from the book Drive
and there are other references in that as well.
This experiment to figure out the intrinsic motivation,
the motivation of, in this case, primates.
So they put together eight rhesus monkeys in a lab
for a two week experiment on motivation and learning
and as part of the experiment
they decided we're gonna teach the monkeys to solve puzzles.
So they built these little puzzles
and they flopped them out into the cages
and they went away to think about the experiment.
So thinking about
carrots and stick and incentives and et cetera et cetera,
they come back and all the puzzles have been solved.
So they're stunned by this.
We put a puzzle in a monkey's cage and they solved it.
We don't get this phenomenon.
So we can figure this out,
let's go in and take the puzzles out, put in new puzzles,
we'll add a reward, we'll add raisins.
The first monkey that solves a puzzle gets a raisin.
The result was the monkeys made more errors
and solved the problems less frequently.
They could not understand this.
So I think the research was largely buried
'cause they could not understand
why an external motivating factor, in this case raisins,
food, one of the basic, the bottom of the needs pyramid,
why that element didn't increase problem solving,
as a matter of fact, it interfered with problem solving
so I'll make you a promise.
I'm gonna come back to this
and unlock our piece of this puzzle
in lesson number nine, leadership.