David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Recipe

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We all like feeling rewarded for work that makes things better. Many of us are finding this kind of satisfaction in social benefit games. At the same time, we’re also learning how to bring transformative change into the world by getting some practice first.

Your rewards include feeling good about yourself because of all you’re accomplishing and the abilities you’re developing while doing so. In social games like WeTopia, you reap other rewards too. There is pride in the growing productivity of your community, empowerment from your ability to support those in need, and your own increasing prosperity.

Games like this also bring the best ingredients of the for-profit and non-profit worlds together.

They give you the virtual experience of work where you can do well by doing good. They stir your imagination, and get you thinking about new kinds of work that you could be doing right now in the real world.

On the other hand, it’s disquieting to feel that someone is “behind our screens” watching us and gaining insights about human behavior because of how you, me (and millions like us) are playing these games. These social scientists and marketers are looking at how we respond to different sounds, colors and kinds of movement. They are even changing the variables we encounter in these games while we’re playing them to see if we do things differently or faster or better.

What’s going on here, and where is the upside for us in this kind of scrutiny?

Kristian Segerstrale is an economist and co-founder of a company called Playfish that makes on-line games. In an interview, he described the difficulty social scientists have traditionally had gaining reliable information from behavioral experiments because they can’t control the variables that exist in the real world. By contrast, in virtual worlds:

the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything.

Segerstrale gave the following by way of example. If your on-line experience requires buying something, what happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? “You can conduct any experiment you want,” he says. “You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that’s just not possible to discover in the real world.”

What this means is that people who want to sell you things or motivate you to do something are now able to learn more than they have ever been able to learn before about what is likely to influence your behavior.

Being treated like ingredients to be “sliced and diced” has risks for us, but also possibilities.

None of us want to relinquish our freedom and become automatons, manipulated into doing what others want us to do. We do well to remember national experiments in social engineering, like the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in China and the choreographed death spiral in North Korea.

 

But we also need to recognize the potential in this brave new world for good.

The behavior of millions of men and women whose voices had never been heard before was changed by lessons learned on-line, ultimately producing the Arab Spring.

The behavior of individuals facing repression every day in places like Iran and Syria is fortified by the virtual support of those who are struggling with them.

Your behavior, and the behavior of millions of people who are playing these social games, is being shaped and reinforced in similar ways. It is a training ground for changing the real world with new and better kinds of work.

Social benefit games are giving us a recipe for transformation—and the ingredients are getting better all the time.

Playground, Imaginarium, Laboratory

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You really want to know what it feels like to be rewarded for work that makes the world a better place.

Where’s the job that will pay me “a living wage” for producing social benefits?
Where’s the job that will leave me feeling proud of what I’ve accomplished—both for myself and for others—when my workday is over? 

There’s nowhere you can think of where you can bring your energy and talent to a job and get these kinds of returns.

Sure, there are plenty of opportunities “to give your time away.” Places to volunteer. Worthy causes. You can knock on doors. Call strangers up at dinnertime for donations. Play your guitar in a hospital room. There are many things good people do “after work” in your community.

That is, after they do what they have to do.

Because they’ve got to put food on the table, pay the bills, keep the wolf at the door. They want, and you want your work to have an impact, but how do you “make a living” and also accomplish something worthwhile?

Can you really afford to do work that makes a difference?

You never thought it was possible that your work in the store or office, in your car, on the phone or behind a counter could be about healing the world and, just like any other job, that you’d be paid well for your time, your effort and your talent.

You always thought it was “either/or.”

There was charity and there was business, but not the business of doing good.

The world you can preview in a social benefit game like WeTopia is neither a non-profit nor a for-profit world. It’s a mixture of both.

It’s surprising how fulfilling it can be to see your work combine with your friends’ work to help not just one child, but a whole school full of children. You’re surprised at how satisfying it can be—even in a game—when work that’s this fulfilling also comes with a paycheck, a home, and a happy community.

It’s the virtual experience of a business model for a better world.

As such, social benefits games like WeTopia give you a glimpse of something that may be difficult to find where you live and work. Games like this fire up your imagination with new possibilities, and get you thinking about blueprints for different and better kinds of work. Work you can do solving real problems that are crying out for solutions right now, all around you, where you live.

Beyond the learning-by-doing discussed in my last post, this is an additional promise of a game like WeTopia.

To imagine your work differently.

It’s a promise that the sponsoring advertisers, the sellers hocking virtual goods, and those IPO-hungry Facebook investors are all helping to bring to your interactive screen. And in the final analysis, that’s not such a bad thing. Because when all is said and done, the merchandising is really pretty benign. It won’t impair your enjoyment or diminish the game’s virtuous effects, and it’s easy to navigate around (if you want to) on your way to having fun.

No, all the selling and buying is not where we’ll find the greatest danger, or the greatest promise for that matter, in this brave new world.

Think for a minute of that showstopper in The Wizard of Oz where (of all things) it’s Dorothy’s little dog Toto who triggers an at-first thundering but-then almost conversational:

“Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”


(That’s Toto down there in the lower right. Yes it required lots of dog biscuits, but it produced his biggest scene.)

And just like it was in Emerald City, there is a man behind the curtain in most of these social benefit games.

Of course there is. We couldn’t live in this age and not suspect. But who is he exactly, and what is he doing there?

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.

Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t. What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.

There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

(“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”)

So what could possibly be in it for you, for me, for any of the lab rats?

It’s certainly not the thrill of being analyzed when we’re at our most unsuspecting.

At play and under a microscope.

(“Run Toto, run!”)

(Well not just yet.)

We’ll take a brief look at the downside, and then try to find the real upside together—next time around.

Game Changer?

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I spent a morning this weekend in a virtual world that promised to teach me (along with each of my 440,000 fellow players) how to become a more productive and generous person.

The experience percolated my thinking about how to change good inclinations into good behaviors, and then make those good behaviors a more natural part of my life through repeated use.

But wait, there was more! Somewhere in the sweaty little palms of all these players, the unremittingly sunny experience also gave me a glimpse of what might be a whole new way “to get ready for” the kind of work where your personal rewards are bound up with the benefits that you bring to the world.

The repetitive activities in this virtual world didn’t feel like rote learning because the over-and-over-again was embedded in the diversions of what was, at least at the front end, only a game. Playing it came with surprises (blinking “opportunities” and “limited time offers”), cheerful reminders (to water my “giving tree” or harvest my carrots), and rewardsfrom all of the “work” I was doing (the “energy,” “experience,” and “good will” credits I kept racking up by remembering to restock Almanzo’s store or to grow my soccer-playing community of friends).

The social benefits game I was playing was WeTopia.

Where once we had to practice our altruism in the real world, it now seems possible for us to do so with a couple of mouse clicks.

(Yes, every one of those yellow, smiley-faced balloons is really a benefit you’ve earned, or are about to earn at your home, farm or factory!)

Can this kind of playful learning really help us to become more productive for ourselves, and more productive for others, in the real world?

That’s certainly WeTopia’s back-end—where the obligations I’d met, and the yields I’d obtained, were taken from this virtual world of chubby multicultural tikes and lite-calypso music and delivered to what looked a lot like their equivalents in the real one.

For example, watering my “giving tree” produces a “special seed” that (once planted) promises to “grow into a hot meal that I can send to the real world to help kids!” The credits I’ve earned from harvesting fields, building houses, or replenishing the bakery all are conglomerated into “Joy!” that is exchanged, by virtual magic, for real dollars and cents when I send it in a hot air balloon to real world charities. Whitney Food Pantry or Haiti Hot Meals 2 for hungry kids!, something called Homeless Children’s Care for kids needing a place to stay!: these were three of the places where I could share my Joy!—that is, after I’d “earned” enough of it to share.

(The exclamation points embedded in the total experience, along with endearing faces like these, help to ensure that it would be difficult for anyone to miss the relentlessly positive, and not entirely unpleasant, rush of generosity in all of this.)

Knowing that nearly 2 billion dollars of virtual goods are purchased on-line in the U.S each year, and that advertising is more tied up than ever with my Facebook experience, put me on the lookout for the funding sources that were helping me to convert all this Joy! into food and shelter for smiling, needy kids.

I didn’t have to look very hard.

While you can power the exchange between virtual to real giving by your hard work and growing skill at the game, you can also do so by buying “building blocks” or other virtual things with your (or your parent’s) credit card. Even when you decline to do so, I noticed that upon delivering my Joy! to the pictures of those smiling kids in Haiti, my currency visually merged with the contributions of the game’s sponsoring advertisers to put actual food on actual tables.

Whether “my” charitable giving came from my hard work, my credit card or one of my advertising partners, I received new goodwill and energy tokens “to do more good later on” in the increasingly complex and engrossing cycle of working and harvesting, giving and receiving.

WeTopia’s platform was interactive across my network. (Sending “gifts” to my Facebook friends would build my inventory of credits, while hopefully turning my connections into good-deed-doers as well.) Its format also tantalized by promising future fun, full of expectancy. (When you pick your strawberries in only 7.3 minutes, or 3.1 hours from now when your fountain starts spouting, all of these additional benefits will be yours!)

What I’m wondering is whether this kind of immersive on-line experience can change real world behavior.

We assume that the proverbial rat in this maze will learn how to press the buzzer with his little paw when the pellets keep coming.

Will he (or she) become even more motivated if he can see that a fellow rat, outside his maze, also gets pellets every time he presses his buzzer?

And what happens when he leaves the maze?

Is this really a way to prepare the shock troops needed to change the world?

Two Cents

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On the heels of my last post, some additional observations about finding a job that will make a difference. . . .

What’s Right for You

Finding fulfillment in our lives and in our work requires deliberate choices. It includes looking critically at the easy choices that often present themselves so we are reasonably confident that the choices we make are determined by our priorities, not someone else’s.

We often pursue the path somebody else lays out for us after convincing ourselves that it will improve our options, make it more likely that right doors will open for us down the road. But too often this is just putting off a hard decision in the misguided hope that somehow we will manage to find the right door on the wrong road. Figure out what you need and what your world needs today, and then pursue whatever lifetime of work lies ahead of you because of who you are and the factors that make your life worth living.

In her Yale Daily News article, Marina Keegan correctly notes that finding your vocation is “not exactly a field with an application form”—and certainly not one that someone else will be handing you. It is an opportunity that you have to give yourself. Deciding to pursue the job of your life includes being level-headed about the choices you do have—even when those choices are limited—and learning how to say “no” to work that can never provide you with the right kinds of returns.

Some thoughtful students at Stanford felt strongly enough about resisting the “siren call” of certain kinds of high-paying work that they started Stop the Brain Drain, a national organization with the following mission statement:

Three years after the Great Recession, we are still experiencing a jobless recovery and need our most innovative and creative minds to build new companies, technologies, and industries.
Every year, however, up to 25% of graduates from top universities are hired to work for financial institutions – reducing our nation’s supply of job-creating entrepreneurs, scientists, and public servants, and weakening America’s economic dynamism.
Enough is enough: it’s time for America to stop the Wall Street brain drain.

Of course, it is not just about financial institutions recruiting on elite campuses. It is about the work that needs to be done today, and that you need to be doing—whatever it is.

Envisioning What Your Work Will Look Like

In my last post, when Philadelphia’s newest Rhodes scholars talked about realizing their ideals through politics, what both wanted to learn was how to make a difference through public service. To do so, they will (among other things) be studying the lives of individuals who have broken through the political log-jams of their own times in an effort to give their principles staying power.

Politics isn’t for everybody. But there is wisdom we can all gain from the lives of extraordinary public servants whose values were in creative tension with the decisions and compromises they were called upon to make every working day.

Whether you are trying to find the right job after years of work or are just starting out, other’s life stories can often provide “both shape and form” to what your own working life might look like. Two such working-life stories, involving principled engagement in political worlds very much like our own, are told by Marcus Tullius Cicero and Edmund Burke.

Cicero and Burke each wrote extensively about how their ideals served as both catalysts for change and constant reminders of how little they had actually achieved after the political dust had settled. What this kind of “push and pull” might look like as a career is suggested in Mary Ann Glendon’s “Cicero and Burke on Politics as Vocation.”

In her essay, Glendon’s most telling observation is that while Cicero and Burke both saw themselves primarily as political actors, neither of them could have achieved nearly as much if they had not also been men of ideas. In fact, their ideas were like a compass that kept them on track. Her quote from one of Burke’s biographers applies with equal force to both of them:

No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy.

We learn from the lives of Cicero and Burke that while the public person must be engaged today, the private person needs to be thoughtful about his actions tomorrow.

None of us has to be either a politician or a philosopher, but if you want to make a genuine difference in your world, it is probably not enough to simply be engaged. Those committed to changing the world also bring their ideas to their engagement.

Best wishes for the New Year.

Yale Student Blues

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It was like ice-water-in-the-face when I recently read a hundred, mostly negative responses to Yale student Marina Keegan’s thoughtful New York Times piece called “Another View: the Science and Strategy of College Recruiting.”

Ostensibly, her article was about how sad she felt that her classmates had come to New Haven with dreams about changing the world but, 3 ½ years later, had found themselves with something far less than that, like jobs in “consulting” or the banking sector.

What her article was really about was how difficult it is for Keegan and many of her peers to find their way to work with meaning and purpose.

It was the ostensible part of the article that garnered Keegan most of her negative responses. Comments ran the gamut from how spoiled and naïve she is after prep school and now Yale (so take off your rosy glasses), how many students have no job prospects, let alone high-paying ones (so quit your whining), and what great “real world” skills you can build by working in jobs like banking (so seize the day you’ve been given and stop finding fault with it).
But most of the venting missed the truly provocative question Keegan was asking: for those in her generation who want to make a difference in the world, how can you get a job that will enable you to start doing so?

Keegan had done an informal survey of her fellow students before putting her ideas out there, findings she had reported earlier in the Yale Daily News. Later in the Times piece, she said:

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think most young, ambitious people want to have a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s through art or activism or advances in science, almost every student I spoke to had some kind of larger, altruistic goal in life. But what I heard again and again was that working at J P Morgan or Bain or Morgan Stanley was the best way to prepare oneself for a future doing public good.

Keegan also was effective at describing the basic challenge (how to go about finding a job, any job) and how easy it is to get diverted from finding the right one.

What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important.

I know what she means because it was much the same when I was finishing law school, and only the big corporate law firms came to recruit. Both the professional success they seemed to embody and the attention they were paying to me triggered a range of reactions: I was flattered, relieved at how simplified my job search had suddenly become, and how approving “the world” would be if I took the high-paying road that was opening up before me. I was attracted, and then hooked.

In 1981, it required deliberation, first to counter the lure of easy choices, and then to find alternative roads, particularly meaningful ones. It is much the same for new workers 30 years later.

Keegan’s hopes for meaningful work belong to many, if not most in her generation. Unlike mine, squarely confronting the challenge may produce more positive results.

This past week, there was an article about two local kids who had been awarded Rhodes scholarships, a high honor conferred on only 32 American college graduates each year. In talking about what he hoped to make of this opportunity, Zachary Crippen, who is in his last year at the Air Force Academy, said he hoped to study the place in our society where ethics, politics and the law come together and use that information to build a career. Nina Cohen, at Bryn Mawr College, said almost the same thing. Her plans are to study political theory, in particular, how ethical beliefs can be reconciled within a liberal democratic framework

After spending a couple of years in England thinking about these issues, will Crippen and Cohen gain for themselves more information than Keegan seems to have now about how to find the work of their lives?

Others at Yale have thought about the quality of the information we need when making the most important choices in our lives. One is Anthony Kronman, who makes a persuasive argument about developments in higher education that contribute to the deep-seated uncertainty graduates feel today, and what needs to be done about it. He presents that argument in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007).

In the past 50 years, Kronman argues that our institutions of higher learning have largely abandoned their role providing students with “the accumulated wisdom of our civilization.” College students no longer study the West’s great minds who, throughout the centuries, have thought long and hard about lots of things that all educated people should know something about, including how to live a meaningful life. I whole-heartedly agree with his case for the return of a core “humanistic” curriculum, and will talk some more about why in a later post. I also think that our newest Rhodes scholars are on to something by deciding to take a closer look at both their ideals and how they can play themselves out in the rough and tumble of a political culture.

What I’m afraid of is that they may be the lucky few. For the rest: A weak economy. A need to pay the bills and gain some personal independence. An unfocused, scattershot education. Unhelpful college career services. And will more education and better information to base decisions upon be enough, even for them?

How does a generation that wants to make a difference find itself the right kind of work?

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