The Value of Innovation

Chapter 8Measuring Learning

When the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was still working on his graduate degree at Princeton, he was asked to oversee a group of engineers who were tasked, without much context, to perform an endless series of tedious calculations. The math wasn’t especially difficult for an engineer, but the work was very slow and full of errors. Growing more frustrated with the team’s performance, Feynman made a critical discovery that would dramatically alter the course of events. He realized that the problem wasn’t the math but that the engineers were totally disengaged. So he convinced his superiors to let the engineers in on what he already knew - why they were performing the calculations, and why they were sweating their tails off in the New Mexico desert (specifically in Los Alamos, New Mexico).

It was at that time that Feynman’s boss, Robert Oppenheimer, pierced the veil of secrecy that had surrounded the work and let the engineers in on the enormity of what they were doing. There weren’t simply doing routine math for some inconsequential lab exercise. They were performing calculations that would enable them to complete the race to build the atomic bomb before the Germans did.

Their work would win the war.

The workplace, the work, and the workers’ performance completely transformed once the task was imbued with meaning. From that point forward, Feynman reported that the scientists worked ten times faster than before, with fewer mistakes, and ...