Digital Disciplines: Attaining Market Leadership via the Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobile, and the Internet of Things

Chapter 18Human Behavior and Gamification

We have discussed the four digital disciplines at length, but even the best strategies are meaningless without successful execution, which is impossible without motivated, engaged people: employees, partners, customers, end users, and communities. But the conventional wisdom regarding human behavior, cognition, and motivation—which espouses concepts such as rational decision making, pay for performance, and providing negative feedback through areas for development—turns out often to be incorrect and counterproductive.

Behavioral anomalies, cognitive biases, and motivational drivers have different impacts on each digital discipline. For example, accelerated innovation through contests benefits from competition among solvers, due to people's need for status and their innate enjoyment from solving puzzles; solution leadership benefits from extending the product to a community, due to a need for social connection.

The management techniques that dominated the twentieth century were largely mechanistic, simplistic, and often, antagonistic. Employees were viewed as machines, which could be subject to scientific management. Time and motion studies could be used to analyze an exact sequence of motions (e.g., those involved in assembling an automobile transmission). This analysis could be used to define a new sequence, perhaps shaving a second or two off of the procedure. Relationships were fundamentally antagonistic: companies would like the ...