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CONSEQUENCES

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences.
-- R.G. Ingersoll

If you've ever tried to train a dog to do something he's not used to doing - whether it's rolling over, or hopping on his back legs, or refraining from biting the mailman - you know that you never get anywhere until you link up the desired new Behavior to clearly defined rewards and punishments. No dog in his right mind is going to get up on his back legs unless he knows there's a bone or a pat on the head waiting for him at the end of the trick. The only time your snapping Doberman is going to stop looking at the mailman as if he were a T-bone steak is when he gets a snootful of Mace. The lesson is the oldest one in behaviorist psychology, and it's the one I stressed from the beginning: to change a given Behavior, you've got to start with its Consequences. In talking about Consequences before, I said that there were basically three ways that you as a manager could impact the performance of the people with whom you work. You could give them positive reinforcement by making the Consequences of their Behavior attractive. You could give them negative reinforcement by making the Consequences unattractive. Or you could give them neutral reinforcement - that is, no reinforcement - by simply asking for a new Behavior without tying it in to Consequences. In this chapter I'm going to be talking a little more about these three choices, and I'm going to start with the last one - the virtual ignoring of Consequences that leads to what we call the Extinction Effect.

THE EXTINCTION EFFECT

Because most managers are not familiar or comfortable with the idea of "giving Consequences" for Behavior, it's very common in industry for a worker to be asked to do something, to do it, and then to get no reinforcement for having done it. I know you've seen this pattern in your place of business. A plant supervisor, for example, will ask a line manager who has been absent from work a good deal to increase his attendance rate. Asking him that is what I've been calling an "Antecedent": it precedes the desired Behavior of higher attendance. For the next three or four weeks the manager never misses a day of work: he performs exactly the Behavior that the supervisor has asked for. But instead of complimenting him on his newly learned diligence, the supervisor says nothing because coming to work every day is something the manager ought to want to do, something he shouldn't have to be told about. So there is no reinforcement - no Consequences either positive or negative - for the operator's obvious improvement. And he quickly regresses: five or six weeks after the initial reprimand, he's back to his old pattern of skipping work - and the supervisor can't figure out what happened. "He was doing so good for a while there," he says to himself. "I wonder why he's backsliding?"

The reason is simple. Unless you reinforce good Behavior, that Behavior will inevitably decrease. By failing to supply desirable Consequences for the manager's efforts, the supervisor extinguishes those efforts. He sets up the Extinction Effect.
And it's no good for a supervisor in this kind of situation to say, "Look, all I asked for was a return to normal. Why should I give him strokes for that?" Because in this kind of situation 100 percent attendance is obviously not "normal." "Normal" for this particular person was skipping work three or four times a month, and so when the supervisor asked him to come in every day he was requiring a Behavior that, for him, was much better than normal. Naturally, when he performed it and nobody said boo about his effort, he thought to himself, "What am I knocking myself out for? He doesn't care if I come in or not." And so he reverted to his "normal."

You know the expression "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." That expression is demonstrated all the time in business, with predictably lousy results. Managers are plenty willing to give out negative Consequences when somebody is screwing up his job, but they're not interested in applying the grease unless and until the wheel is really making a racket. That's like waiting until the bicycle just won't pump any more before you reach for the oilcan. Intelligent management today has to do not only with "fixing" the bad spots when they show up, but also with "preventive maintenance" on the good spots, so they never turn into problems. If you don't apply the grease to the bike parts that evidently don't "need" it yet, eventually you'll be pedaling a pile of scrap.

Another transportation analogy. In our productivity seminars we sometimes talk about the "55 mile-per-hour ratchet." It illustrates very well what I'm saying about Behavior reverting to "subnormal" if it isn't constantly reinforced.

You know that in most of the United States there's a 55 mile-per-hour speed limit. To the people who "manage" our highways - police officers, legislators, other public officials - the link between Consequences and Behavior here is very clear. But it's not always clearly enforced - or consistently enforced - and that can lead to problems. The "ideal" Behavior would be for every motorist to drive at no faster than the legal 55 mph limit. But every motorist knows that, unless he drives significantly higher than 55, he is probably not going to be ticketed. The average rate of speed on our highways is not 55 or 57 or 58, but something like 62 or 63. Why? Because people know from experience that, when they drive at 65, they are going to be stopped. But they can drive at 63 or 64 without incurring any negative Consequences - and, therefore, that's where they drive. They perform at exactly that subnormal level that will keep them from getting pulled over.

It's different on big holiday weekends, when motorists understand that the cops are out in force, and that they are taking the 55 mph limit more seriously than at other times. In other words, on holiday weekends, the Consequences for driving at 62 are probably going to be more severe than they would be at other times. As a result, people drive slower. They change their driving Behaviors to more closely approximate the ideal, because the boys in blue have made it clear that it will make a difference to them to do so. Once the weekend is over, though, most drivers revert to type: their good Behavior gets extinguished because it's no longer linked to real Consequences.

This doesn't mean that everybody starts driving at 125. Just that performance drops to a level just better than the level that will earn negative Consequences. That's a basic rule of the Extinction Effect in business, too: In the absence of positive reinforcement, performance will stay just above the level where punishment occurs. Anything better than that will be extinguished. This means that, unless you bring out the grease gun frequently - and even when it's not needed - the best you can possibly hope for is a universal "Muddle in the Middle," where every one of your people is motivated just to get by, because there's nothing in it for him to do better.

Because of this universal human tendency to backslide, to do just what you can get away with and no more, managers eager to motivate their people have got to pay stricter attention to reinforcement of the middle - not just throwing flowers at the performance superstars and rotten apples at the fumblers.

John D. Rockefeller put it well. "Good management," he said, "consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people." This means learning to balance negative and positive so that the general level of achievement in the middle is raised. Next week we'll start with the down side of that balancing act: the problems and potential advantages of using constructive criticism.

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