The unintended consequences of gamification
These days, the world is making things a game, reading the most books, completing the most certifications etc… it is such an attractive offer that we often complete the content, but don’t embed the learnings.
This gamified modern world we live in often has us acting like human sized hamsters, running in wheels looking for the next dopamine hit.
This could be social media, notifications, likes etc, it could be the number of steps you’ve taken in your day, carioles consumer etc. or more recently the number of certificates / courses one has completed.
I’ve explored the waste associated with not embedding new information when you are learning (see my previous article).
We know from Alfie Kohn in his book ‘Punished by rewards’ that even with the best of intentions, things can go wrong when it comes to trying to reward people. Without applying a thoughtful approach, you risk doing more harm than good.
We know from Ivan Pavlov and classical conditioning that you can incentivize people to behave certain ways often without them knowing why (in the experiments case, a dog). This often borderlines on manipulation if people are not careful. This is often a technique used by game designers and app designers to create a sense of Dopamine rush when using their games / apps.
We know from Dan Pink, that human motivation comes from autonomy, master, and purpose. If you are rewarding or punishing someone through extrinsic rewards you run the risk of teaching people how to get more rewards, rather than finding motivation in the reward of completing the work itself. This means, that if the rewards stop, so too does the behavior.
From Jane McGonigal, games follow these four essential elements:
- Goals
- Rules (aka “constraints”)
- A way to track progress
- Opt-in participation
We also know that stressing people in a negative manner impacts your motivation and productivity. So, when you are having trouble with a challenging task and your boss is breathing down your neck to complete it you are likely to perform well and feel terrible at the same time.
If you are trying to build a learning organization, and enable teams to have more autonomy, these are crucial aspects you need to consider. This is even more pronounced when your organization's corporate incentives are not aligned to your cultural and behavioral incentives.
Here’s a scenario
- Your organization is establishing cross-functional teams, where the team has no boss, you are promoting the idea of teams being empowered.
- The end goal is for teams to self-manage and take accountability because that is how you create a culture of continuous improvement and empowerment.
- Your organization continues to use its legacy performance management process for ratings, promotions, pay raises and bonuses.
- This process is geared towards individual performance and leads to a culture of competition which means prioritizing oneself over others or the team.
If you want to reduce handovers and broaden skills amongst the team, how likely are the team if the incentives are not setup to encourage and support that behavior.
As organizations go through change in ways of working with the emphasis on business agility, the organization needs to be able to collaborate and align towards common goals and strategy. This becomes harder to do when your performance and incentives approach haven’t changed to match the desired behaviors and outcomes.
This is also where OKRs can cause a lot of danger, specifically where OKRs occur at every level of the organization, and they cascade down form up on high and cascade all the way to the individual.
Unless people in teams align to a common goal / direction, the chances of them changing their behavior and effectively collaborating are quite low.
Is it all bad news?
To be clear I don’t think gamification is bad, I just think that it can be dangerous if not carefully thought through.
Gamification in a company is example where if not thought through, runs a very real risk of people focusing more on the rewards than the outcomes themselves. In the worst cases it can lead to unhealthy competition between peers that can lead to unruly behavior just to get the reward.
e.g. having a leaderboard where points / ranking are based on completion of activities (such as complete a course, take a test) vs. an outcome (such as improving performance in a team, improving customer feedback)
We know in extreme cases where incentives have had material impact on companies who have tried to optimize for the wrong thing. (Refer to the Wells Fargo example below).
Summary
Some of this may come off as doom and gloom, it is more of a cautionary tale of ensuring that anyone in your company looking at incentives, performance management, gamification platforms and systems, having leaderboards for metrics etc really need to be careful and study the impacts carefully for unintended consequences.
Supporting resources
Books (big thankyou to Chris Matts for some of these)
- Drive by Dan Pink
- Punished by rewards by Alfie Kohn
- The Culture Game by Daniel Mezick
- Reality is broken by Jane McGonigal
- Gamify by Jane McGonigal
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
Articles
- https://www.wired.com/story/power-and-pitfalls-gamification/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal
- https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/gamification-at-work-can-go-very-wrong.aspx
