# Case Studies: Motivation Science in Practice

Six real-world cases where motivation science -- applied or violated -- produced measurable outcomes. Each follows the same structure: context, motivation challenge, AMP application (or failure), results, and transferable lessons. The final section identifies cross-cutting patterns and common failure modes.

## Case Study 1: Atlassian ShipIt Days (Autonomy)

**Organization:** Atlassian, Australian enterprise software company (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket). Founded 2002. Over 10,000 employees.

**Motivation Challenge:** Atlassian wanted to foster innovation without top-down mandates or innovation committees. Traditional hackathons at other companies felt forced, had narrow scopes defined by management, and produced ideas that never shipped.

**AMP Application -- Primary lever: Autonomy (Task)**

Atlassian created "ShipIt" (originally called FedEx Days because you had to "deliver" overnight).

| Element | Design Choice | AMP Principle |
|---------|--------------|---------------|
| Project selection | Employees choose anything they want to build | Task autonomy |
| Team formation | Self-selected teams, any combination of roles | Team autonomy |
| Timeline | 24 hours, start Thursday afternoon, present Friday | Time constraint creates flow conditions |
| Presentation | All projects demoed to entire company | Purpose (sharing with community) |
| Judging | Peer voting, not management selection | Autonomy (community decides) |
| Implementation | Winning projects often get development time | Mastery (see your idea become real) |
| Frequency | Quarterly | Regular enough to sustain engagement |

**What Atlassian did NOT do:** No cash prizes. No restriction to business priorities. No manager approval required. No mandatory participation.

**Results:** Dozens of customer-facing features originated from ShipIt. Employee engagement consistently high, with ShipIt cited as a top cultural element. Candidates mention ShipIt as a reason they want to join. Serves as a low-cost R&D pipeline with zero bureaucracy.

**Lessons:**
1. **Autonomy without prizes works.** Intrinsic satisfaction of building, presenting, and potentially shipping is more motivating than cash.
2. **Constraints enable creativity.** The 24-hour limit created urgency and flow conditions.
3. **Regularity matters.** Quarterly events build cultural expectation without losing novelty.
4. **Peer judgment > management judgment.** Community voting creates shared ownership.

## Case Study 2: 3M's 15% Time (Autonomy to Mastery)

**Organization:** 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing). Global science and manufacturing company. Over 90,000 employees. Founded 1902.

**Motivation Challenge:** 3M needed continuous new product innovations. Their business model required that 30% of revenue come from products introduced in the last four years. Traditional R&D management was too slow and too narrow.

**AMP Application -- Primary lever: Autonomy (Task + Technique)**

Starting in the 1950s, 3M let technical employees spend 15% of work time on self-chosen projects.

| Element | Design Choice | AMP Principle |
|---------|--------------|---------------|
| Time allocation | 15% of work hours for self-directed exploration | Time and task autonomy |
| Approval required | None for exploration phase | Technique autonomy |
| Funding | Small grants through informal channels | Removes barriers to experimentation |
| Failure tolerance | "Thou shalt not kill ideas" as cultural principle | Mastery mindset (failure = learning) |
| Knowledge sharing | Internal technical forums, cross-divisional sharing | Purpose (advancing collective knowledge) |

**Results:** Post-it Notes emerged from Spencer Silver's "failed" adhesive combined with Art Fry's 15% project -- now a multi-billion dollar product line. Numerous medical and industrial innovations came from self-directed exploration. 3M sustained 30%+ revenue from new products for decades.

**Lessons:**
1. **Autonomy produces serendipity.** Directed R&D would never have assigned "invent a weak adhesive."
2. **Time autonomy requires organizational patience.** 15% time produces results in years, not quarters.
3. **Cross-pollination needs autonomy.** Silver's adhesive only became Post-it Notes because Fry had freedom to explore an unrelated application.
4. **Cultural norms matter more than formal policies.** The policy only works because 3M genuinely tolerates failure.

## Case Study 3: Duolingo (Mastery + Purpose, with Extrinsic Tension)

**Organization:** Duolingo, language learning platform. Founded 2011. Over 500 million registered users.

**Motivation Challenge:** Language learning has one of the highest dropout rates of any self-improvement activity. Most people quit within weeks. Duolingo needed daily engagement for months or years.

**AMP Application -- Primary levers: Mastery + Purpose**

| Element | Design Choice | AMP Principle |
|---------|--------------|---------------|
| Adaptive difficulty | AI adjusts question difficulty based on performance | Mastery (flow channel maintenance) |
| Skill tree | Visual map of language competencies | Mastery (progress visibility) |
| Immediate feedback | Instant correction with explanation | Mastery (deliberate practice) |
| Course choice | Users choose language and topics | Autonomy (task) |
| Mission framing | "Free language education for the world" | Purpose (democratization) |
| Stories feature | Narrative-based learning with cultural context | Purpose (human connection) |

**The extrinsic tension:** Duolingo also uses streaks (can become anxiety-driven), leaderboards (discourages non-competitive users), gems/lingots (extrinsic currency), and streak freezes (monetizes the anxiety the streak created).

**Results:** 500M+ registered users, 30M+ daily active users, higher retention than most educational apps. Research shows effectiveness for basic proficiency. Over $500M annual revenue.

**Lessons:**
1. **Mastery design is the core engine.** Adaptive difficulty and immediate feedback keep learning effective.
2. **Streaks are a double-edged sword.** They drive daily habits but risk shifting motivation from "I want to learn" to "I can't break my streak."
3. **Extrinsic and intrinsic can coexist, carefully.** Success comes from a strong intrinsic core wrapped with extrinsic elements. The risk is the extrinsic layer overwhelming the intrinsic core.

## Case Study 4: Best Buy ROWE (Autonomy)

**Organization:** Best Buy, American consumer electronics retailer. Corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota.

**Motivation Challenge:** High turnover, low morale, and presenteeism (employees physically present but disengaged) despite competitive compensation.

**AMP Application -- Primary lever: Autonomy (Time + Technique)**

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson developed ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) and piloted it at Best Buy headquarters starting in 2003.

| ROWE Principle | Traditional Approach | ROWE Approach |
|---------------|---------------------|---------------|
| Work hours | 9-5, Monday-Friday | Work whenever you want |
| Work location | At your desk | Work wherever you want |
| Meetings | Mandatory attendance | Every meeting is optional |
| Vacation | Request and approval needed | Take time off when you want |
| Measurement | Hours worked, face time | Results delivered |

**Results:** Productivity increased 35% across participating departments. Voluntary turnover dropped 90%. Employee satisfaction increased significantly. Reduced stress and fewer sick days. In 2013, new CEO Hubert Joly reversed ROWE, requiring return to office.

**Lessons:**
1. **Autonomy produces measurable results.** 35% productivity increase and 90% turnover reduction are among the most compelling data points for workplace autonomy.
2. **ROWE requires cultural commitment.** When leadership changed, the program was reversed. Autonomy initiatives depending on a single champion are fragile.
3. **Results measurement must precede autonomy.** ROWE only works when "results" are clearly defined. Departments with ambiguous outputs struggled.
4. **Taking away autonomy is worse than never granting it.** Employees who experienced ROWE and lost it reported higher dissatisfaction than those who never had it.

## Case Study 5: Wikipedia (Purpose-Driven Contribution)

**Organization:** Wikipedia, free online encyclopedia. Founded 2001. Over 60 million articles in 300+ languages. Entirely community-written and edited.

**Motivation Challenge:** Create and maintain the largest encyclopedia in history using entirely unpaid volunteer labor. No salary, no equity, no commissions.

**AMP Application -- Primary lever: Purpose, supported by Autonomy and Mastery**

| Element | Design Choice | AMP Principle |
|---------|--------------|---------------|
| Mission | "Free access to the sum of all human knowledge" | Purpose (profound and specific) |
| Contribution model | Anyone can edit any article | Autonomy (total task/technique freedom) |
| Recognition | Edit history, contribution page, barnstars | Mastery (visible growth) |
| Governance | Community-developed policies, elected administrators | Autonomy (self-governance) |
| Revenue model | Donations only, no advertising | Purpose (mission integrity) |

**Results:** 60M+ articles across 300+ languages. ~300,000 monthly active editors. Accuracy rivaling traditional encyclopedias. Top-10 global website. 20+ years of operation on ~$170M annual budget.

**Lessons:**
1. **Purpose can replace payment entirely.** Hundreds of thousands contribute billions of hours because they believe in the mission.
2. **Autonomy is the mechanism.** Anyone can edit anything -- no gatekeeper, no approval process.
3. **Mission integrity matters.** Refusing advertising maintains credibility and editor trust. Ads would erode volunteer motivation.
4. **Scale requires governance, not management.** Community-developed policies provide alignment without hierarchy.

## Case Study 6: The Motivation Destroyer -- A Cautionary Tale

**Organization:** Composite case based on documented patterns at multiple organizations (Sears, Yahoo, Microsoft under stack-ranking) that implemented aggressive performance-based incentives.

**What They Did (Motivation 2.0 Playbook):**
- Stack-ranked engineers (bottom 10% on performance improvement plans)
- Set escalating quarterly sales targets with escalating bonuses
- Required cross-team collaboration metrics for bonus eligibility
- Displayed real-time individual performance leaderboards
- Tied up to 40% of compensation to individual metrics

**What Actually Happened:**

| Initiative | Actual Outcome | AMP Violation |
|-----------|---------------|---------------|
| Stack ranking | Engineers avoided hard projects, hoarded knowledge | Killed mastery pursuit |
| Quarterly targets | Sales front-loaded easy deals, gamed timing | Short-term thinking (Flaw 7) |
| Forced collaboration | Fake cross-team meetings, checkbox compliance | Killed autonomy, encouraged cheating |
| Leaderboards | Top performers territorial; bottom demoralized | Crushed intrinsic motivation |
| Performance bonuses | Optimized measurable metrics, ignored unmeasured work | Narrowed focus (Flaw 2) |

**The cascade:** Aggressive incentives led to metric gaming, which led to more metrics, which led to more gaming and less trust, which led to surveillance, which collapsed autonomy, which killed intrinsic motivation. Only extrinsic motivation remained, requiring bigger incentives. The cycle repeated until talent left.

**Results:** Short-term revenue briefly increased. Innovation declined significantly. Collaboration decreased despite metrics. Voluntary turnover among top performers rose 25%+. Long-term revenue declined.

**Lessons:**
1. **Incentives that measure everything motivate nothing.** People optimize the measurement system, not the actual work.
2. **Stack ranking destroys collaboration.** Microsoft famously abandoned it in 2013 after years of internal damage.
3. **The best people leave first.** Top performers have the most options and the lowest tolerance for controlling environments.
4. **Recovery is slow.** Once intrinsic motivation culture is destroyed, rebuilding takes years.

## Cross-Cutting Patterns

### What Separates Intrinsic from Extrinsic Motivation Design

| Dimension | Extrinsic Design | Intrinsic Design |
|-----------|-----------------|-----------------|
| **Starting question** | "How do we get people to do X?" | "How do we create conditions where people want to do X?" |
| **Control locus** | Organization controls behavior | Individual controls behavior; organization provides context |
| **Feedback purpose** | Judgment and ranking | Growth and improvement |
| **Failure treatment** | Punishment or consequence | Learning opportunity |
| **Time horizon** | Quarterly or shorter | Years or longer |
| **Sustainability** | Requires escalation | Self-renewing through growth |

### Common Motivation Design Failures

| Failure | Root Cause | Prevention |
|---------|-----------|------------|
| Gamification that doesn't engage | Extrinsic mechanics on uninteresting core | Fix the core experience first |
| Innovation programs producing nothing | Too many controls and approval gates | Give genuine autonomy; accept most experiments fail |
| Engagement spikes then crashes | Extrinsic triggers that don't build habit | Build intrinsic value first |
| Retention efforts that fail | Trying to retain with money, not meaning | Ensure AMP is present |
| Culture initiatives that feel hollow | Values don't match policies | Align actions with words |

### The AMP Test: Five Questions for Any Motivation System

| Question | Healthy Answer | Unhealthy Answer |
|----------|---------------|------------------|
| Would people do this without the reward? | "Yes, many would" | "No, the reward is the only reason" |
| Does the system trust people by default? | "Yes, we assume good intent" | "No, we monitor and verify" |
| Can individuals shape their experience? | "Yes, there's meaningful choice" | "No, the path is predetermined" |
| Is failure treated as learning? | "Yes, we analyze and adjust" | "No, failure has consequences" |
| Can people articulate why it matters? | "Yes, they connect to the mission" | "No, they just know the metrics" |
