Almost 30 years ago, the organisational theorist Karl Weick made an observation that campaigners on everything from global warming to homelessness have been ignoring ever since. Sometimes, he pointed out, convincing the world that you're fighting a Very Serious Problem actually makes it harder to solve. In a paper entitled Small Wins: Redefining The Scale Of Social Problems, Weick argued that perceiving challenges as huge made people seize up – disabling "the very resources of thought and action needed to change them". The history of gay rights, feminism and environmentalism, he claimed, showed that pursuing little victories was the better plan. They delivered quick motivation boosts, triggering a snowball effect. Want to change the world? First, stop trying to change the world.
It's the sad fate of all such insights to be turned into peppy American business books on "how to motivate your workers" (all of which I intend to test, cackling like a cartoon evil scientist, should I ever obtain any workers). Hence the new book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins To Ignite Joy, Engagement And Creativity At Work, by the wife-and-husband team of psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. Like all such works, it made this moderately leftwing British grump feel vaguely icky, since persuading people to find transcendent fulfilment in generating bigger profits for your mop-manufacturing firm – one of their examples – strikes me mainly as a nifty way to avoid paying them more. Unlike most such works, however, it's based on a mountain of evidence, and its conclusions matter, even if you've no intention of becoming a manager.
By collecting diary entries from 238 people at seven companies, the authors generated 12,000 person-days of data on moods and activities at work. The striking conclusion is that a sense of incremental progress is vastly more important to happiness than either a grand mission or financial incentives – though 95% of the bosses didn't realise it. Small wins "had a surprisingly strong positive effect, and small losses a surprisingly strong negative one." Which chimes with recent research among US entrepreneurs by the business scholar Saras Sarasvathy: whatever they tell you on TV's Dragons' Den, the successful ones rarely made long-range business plans, and scorned market research. They went for quick wins – a few sales, then a few more – instead. Their philosophy was "ready, fire, aim".
Breaking big challenges down into chunks isn't original advice, of course. What Amabile and Kramer's findings emphasise is how disproportionate the relationship is between the size of an achievement and the happiness it delivers. A breakthrough accomplishment that's a thousand times bigger than a "small win" doesn't make you feel a thousand times better, or happier for a thousand times longer – and won't outweigh the effects of countless small setbacks you'll encounter en route.
The challenge, on a personal level, is remembering to notice the smaller things you've achieved. Keeping a "done" list, as well as or instead of a to-do list, is one remarkably effective idea. The ungrammatically named website IDoneThis.com automates the process, sending you a daily email asking, "What'd you get done today?" Replying to it gradually accumulates a calendar of your victories. Try it: you'll be smugly impressed at what a high achiever you are. A high achiever with low standards for what counts as an achievement, admittedly. But still.
oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk; twitter.com/oliverburkeman
