Agile Otter Blog

The Whole Idea Is A Little Insulting Scholtes' /The Leader's Handbook/ says that motivation through reward is insulting -- it assumes that you have been withholding effort all this time, waiting for someone to offer you an incentive to actually do your work. Hadn't really thought much about it before. But yes, it does assume you have effort on tap that you're not applying to your work. And yes, it is a little insulting. And yes, you could intentionally hold back until offered another bribe (but just enough not to be punished). Everyone wants a little more money, but P. Scholtes notes that it's out of alignment with the idea of humanitarian management who realize that the employees are their greatest asset. Not Only That, But It Doesn't Work Likewise, Daniel Pink reports that rewards for knowledge workers tend to have the opposite effect of that intended. It might not be a good idea for programmers and managers in non-manual-labor fields. Pink...

One day, a fish came to visit some kangaroos. He saw right away that the kangaroos spent all their time hopping on the dusty ground and browsing among the shrubs. Their habits would never work, and surely lead to their deaths, if they were to come to the ocean reefs even for a single month! "Foolish kangaroos," he called to them, "heed my words and live! This hopping and browsing is pointless madness! You must learn to paddle and snatch live prey from among the rocks! The ocean is no place for hopping air-breathing creatures, so come follow me and learn the better way!" The kangaroos, amazingly well-adapted to their un-ocean-ly environment, dutifully ignored the fish. They looked for common ground for conversation, but somehow the topic always turned to the futility of hopping and the unpleasantness of a dry environment. Sometimes they asked polite questions, and the patient among them tried to explain that their way of life was forever on solid ground whe...

My biggest problem with American culture is the concept of "the locker room speech that wins the game". I don't doubt that people get down and can use encouragement. A little validation can go a long way, and mistreatment breeds dysfunction. If you treat a winner like a loser, expect to see some losing. I get all of that (sparing you the painful personal history). My problem is with the absurdist version of the story: the mythical team that is filled with execution issues, poor teamwork, low degree of individual skill, and an enemy with both superior skill and a history of success. In this story, it is one stirring talk from the tough-but-beloved coach that turns the team around. They charge the field and play like a commando team, each overcoming all personal skill issues and all of them meshing into a perfect winning machine. In the real world, it is unlikely that the problems a technical team faces are motivational in nature. Maybe a team is struggling with ...

Here's where I suspect things go wrong. I see a combination of two ideas at the core of a lot of corporate dysfunction. I can want things faster than you can build them. I believe that you can always do more if you really try. The former is obviously true. Wanting is cheap, instantaneous, and unencumbered. I want a car with a 500K mile all-inclusive warranty, Maserati looks and performance, moped operating costs, and a Hot Wheels sticker price. And I want it to drive itself. I am betting that the average reader had at least three improvements they would make to my wish list. None of us expect to see such a thing, of course. The engineering and design costs and material costs make this impossible. Wanting is cheap, but invention and production are expensive. There are material costs, costs of design, costs of errors and rework, costs of research, time and materials. There are human beings who do design, and they like to be paid. It takes them longer to work out the requir...

I'm becoming an Esther Derby fan, partly because of her statements about employee motivation and demotivators. . I became acquainted with her work through an agile toolkit podcast in which she was originally invited to discuss retrospectives and making them stick. The conversation turned toward motivation and demotivators, and now I have to go buy some books. Better yet, I need to make some changes.