Imagine two people who work at the same company.
Jennifer, who has worked at the organisation for about fifteen years, has been promoted every two or three years, starting out as one of the most junior members of the team and working her way up to one of the most senior roles in the organisation. She has a good salary and a large team of people to manage.
How do you think Jennifer feels about her progress? Pretty good, right?
The second employee, Laura, has also worked at the organisation for exactly the same amount of time (fifteen years). In the earlier years, she was promoted several times in quick succession, becoming one of the most senior members of the organisation. In fact, she holds the same level of seniority as Jennifer, enjoying the same high salary and managing a large team. However, for several years now, Laura has stood still – stuck in her current position. She even recently lost out on finally being promoted.
How do you think Laura feels when she reflects on her progress? Perhaps a little less happy than Jennifer?
While the first employee experienced a continued sense of career progression, being promoted on a regular basis, the second probably did not experience the same sense of progress, which was likely stifled by the later years in which she remained in the same position.
At CogCo, we’ve been reflecting on the fact that in all walks of life, we normally think about the importance of the destination: the goals or objectives we might have in our work or personal lives. But we sometimes forget that the journey we take plays an important role in shaping how we ultimately feel about reaching that destination, whatever it might be.
To test this idea we devised an experiment to investigate what we call ‘the Sense of Progress Effect’. Drawing heavily from our experiences as football fans experiencing the ebb and flow of a league campaign, we wanted to know whether fellow football fans might judge their team’s performance based on the journey as much as the destination.
In order to remove fans’ personal biases from the study, we created a fictitious 20-team football league - the Lions Premier Division - and told 450 football fan participants that they would be following a club called Ambleton Athletic.
We immersed these fans in a hypothetical season that unfolded over a series of four game streaks. At the end of each one of these streaks (at five points across the season), our fans were shown where Ambleton sat in the Lions Premier Division, and asked to give their views on how satisfied they were with their team’s performance.
What they did not know was that there were three different versions of the season, each designed to create a different sense of progression. They were:
A ‘Steady Rise’ condition, which was similar to Jennifer’s steady progression in the example we gave above. For Ambleton Athletic, this saw the team steadily rise from 14th to 2nd in the league throughout the course of the season.
A ‘Rapid Rise’ condition, in which they performed less well for the first half of the season, but then started to win nearly all of their matches, such that they also finished 2nd.
A ‘Bottled It’ condition. This one’s akin to Laura’s progression in the workplace promotion example we gave above. In this condition, Ambleton were winning the league for much of the season, but then dropped off in the last few weeks, finishing in 2nd place.
In other words, in all three conditions, the destination was the same: 2nd place. But the journey to 2nd place was very different. And it turned out that this journey significantly altered our participants’ levels of satisfaction with their team’s performance (see the chart below which shows the crossover in satisfaction over the final couple of months of the season).
We found that the steady risers (and to a lesser extent, the rapid risers), ended up being the most satisfied overall. In contrast, while our Bottled It fans were understandably the most satisfied while they were top of the league, their satisfaction levels plummeted as soon as their form dropped off. Even though they ultimately finished in the same place as the Steady and Rapid Risers.
These findings are consistent with findings from the wider behavioural research. In particular, three consistent findings pertaining to the relative nature of our judgements; the importance of our expectations; and the pain of a loss versus a relative gain.
The Bottled It fans through the season have a growing sense of expectation that they will win the league. When their performance tails off, they experience this as a relative loss, not as something to be celebrated. When prompted to give a view on the performance of Ambleton, one of our fan participants put it like this: “It's bittersweet. We were so close to winning the league and have played some brilliant football this year, we just fell short at the final hurdle.”
By contrast, our Steady Risers’ expectations are ultimately fulfilled. Their consistent progress means that throughout the season they are always seeing relative improvement. As one of our fan participants put it: “Ambleton Athletic proved themselves, they went from the bottom and didn’t let that discourage them but to strive harder even more. In conclusion, don't give up just because you failed once but to let it motivate you to work harder.”
We might have expected our Rapid Risers to be happiest of all. But they too experience a form of ‘loss aversion’, through a realisation that they could have done much better if only they hadn’t left their stellar performance to the end of the season. “Overall a great season. We started poorly, but won 14 games in a row to end the season. Brilliant. We would have won the league had we just performed a bit better in our first 20 or so games.”
While this study focuses on a fictitious football season, we believe it has significant implications for any situation in which performance plays out over an extended period of time. Whether it is promotions at work, the performance of your investments over time, or how well your sports team is performing, we should give more focus to the journey as well as destination, and consider how it might be framing our perceptions.
