The Fridge Effect

Meaning, Legos, and Getting the Best Out of Those Around You

When I was a kid, the kitchen refrigerator served two important purposes for my family. Obviously, it kept food cold to delay spoiling. However, the front door of the fridge, with the aid of an assortment of magnets, was even more important to family life: it served as a sort of parent-managed altar to the accomplishments my siblings and I had made. School assignments with noteworthily good grades or specific praise from a teacher, creative art projects, drawings, or sketches, report cards, and school pictures were all enshrined on the front of the fridge for the entire family – and any visitors to the family kitchen – to see.

Unbeknownst to me at the time – and possibly, unbeknownst to my parents – they were leveraging a core psychological principle of motivation to reinforce our childhood positive behaviors. The placement of a drawing or report card on the family fridge was a visible indication that, at least to my parents, the things we had made or done mattered. In turn, the belief that things we had done had an impact, and more broadly meaning, helped to motivate us to repeat or continue the behaviors that led to each enshrined accomplishment.

Can we as leaders (or even parents) use lessons of the family fridge and its function as a container not just for food, but for *meaning*, to improve our relationships, our team’s performance, and the motivations of all the people around us?

In a 2007 Harvard experiment, a group of people were asked to build simple Lego sculptures for a small payment. They were divided into two groups:

A “meaningful” group, in which their completed sculptures were placed on a shelf where they could see them accumulate, giving a sense of progress and recognition, and
A “Sisyphus” group (named after the mythological Sisyphus, who was condemned to an eternally repetitive, pointless task), in which the experimenters disassembled each sculpture as soon as it was completed and immediately gave the participant the same pieces to start over.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “meaningful” group performed much better in the experiment than the “Sisyphus” group. Those whose accomplishments were recognized and displayed — even without any other clear indication of relative value — kept building much longer than those who accomplishments were destroyed. It’s not a refrigerator, but it seems like the same principle was at play here: what we recognize as having meaning creates motivation, and motivation helps others create more things with meaning.

What are you putting up on your fridge, or on a metaphorical shelf of lego masterpieces? What are we *not* putting on the fridge? Where might we be creating “Sisyphus” conditions?

At the very least, at home, our fridge is over-burdened with a combination of report cards and art projects, but I also notice that my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter’s writings and works of art are statistically over-represented as compared to her siblings’.

Have I been discarding good work from my older kids and accidentally damaging their sense of motivation? Perhaps I need to use a rubric other than “relative cuteness” to decide what we enshrine on the family fridge, and what we don’t. Although I recognize that there are other ways to acknowledge and show the meaning of my older kids’ work and accomplishments, I don’t think it will hurt to reserve some literal (and certainly metaphorical) fridge space for their important (albeit less adorable) accomplishments. Aside from making my kitchen look a little more cluttered, I don’t think it can hurt.

But what about the professional context?

Is there a useful equivalent for the family fridge — or the shelf of Lego sculptures — for your organization?

A few weeks ago I was working with a client whose organization’s primary deliverables are formal, informational reports destined for executives in other departments. Unfortunately, assessments of the reports’ value, impact, and meaning to the reader are infrequent and typically ad hoc. If the reports are used to inform important decisions, the connection between the client’s work and the resulting action is usually unclear at best.

As a result, many in the organization, including the department heads, had simply stopped paying attention to external feedback on the work’s importance and meaning. Instead, they would regularly substitute their own evaluations of value, often wildly disconnected from the customer’s needs, when reporting up to their own superiors. Even when feedback was received by department leadership, it was rarely recognized or formally shared with the teams that did the underlying work. It was, in essence, creating a Sisyphus condition for most of my client’s team. According to the client, even though they were ignoring the meaning of what had been done, and they found themselves surprised when the pace and quality of the department’s work began to decline.

As we talked through this, we came up with a plan: my client did have a communal kitchen, with a refrigerator of its own, right in their office. They had a printer, they had magnets, and they had access to some of the external feedback their teams’ work had received. Would printing out the feedback and displaying on the fridge help restore some flagging motivation?

Early reports are good, but only time will tell.