Intrinsically or extrinsically motivated - that is the question

I just took this test that Daniel Pink has made to see if you are more intrinsically (Type I) motivated or extrinsically (Type X) motivated. To my surpise I was mostly Type X. I have never seen myself as extrinsically motivated as I have always had a focus on having fun doing my job and helping others..

The definitions of the behaviors are:

Type I behavior: A way of thinking and an approach to life built around intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivators. It is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Type X behavior: Behavior that is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones and that concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which that activity leads.

However I had answered truthfully on all the questions including the questions that concerned the work I have been doing until a month ago. And it struck me, that the answers to these questions where not all as I wanted them, but was dictated by the job and the company I worked at. So I took the test again, answering all questions as if the job I had now was my dream job and everything was as I wanted it. And even though I only changed my answers to about a thrid of the questions, it now deemed me a Type I.

I recommend to take the test – but remember that if you get another result than you expext it might be because of things you do not control at the moment or in your current job.

Are you an agile robot?

I had this sort of revelation when I read Neil Strauss's ”The Game” last week. The book is about the community that exist on the net that relates to pick-up artists and how to seduce women. The particular thing that caught in my mind was a short post he had made called ”Are you social robots?” on a seduction forum  (step 8: chapter 10 in the book). It describes how some people becomes social robots – defined as someone who knows all the theory and has the rotines and methods trained to perfection, but uses all their time solely on this – the routines and methods – they have no other interests and therefore often fail when they run out of material (hence social robots – if they have no program for it they do not know how to react).

This made me think because both from personal experience, from talking to people at conferences and reading about how to introduce agile methods in a company and how it oftens fails, I think that it is because systems thinking leads people to become agile robots instead og agile humans. People get caught up in this athing and says: ”OK - how do you do it? Where is the checklist?”, and then get caught up in the thousands of different agile methods out there and tries to implement them all or try to find the best practices out there and then introduce them.

This in itself is not bad – but it can become bad if you concentrate to much on the methods and routines and forget the first statement in the agile manifesto: ”Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. And there you have to remember that any method or tools – even if it is an agile method or tool – is just that – a tool – something that you can use to faciliate interaction, but holds no value in itself – you need to add something yourself be it creativity, mastery of analysis and design or just plain old common sense to create value. If you can only follow the agile methods, run the routines, then you are an agile robot. And you are likely to fail if your project hit something unexpected that there are no routines for.

I have tried below to ask a couple of questions that you should ask yourself to find out if you are an agile robot. If you answer yes to all or most of these questions, you are most likely an agile robot. This is by no measure a complete list so feel free to add more questions in the comments, if you have observed other signs of people becoming agile robots. I will myself try to revise and update the list in the coming months.

1. Have you stopped reading books and articles that are not about agile methods?
2. Is your reaction to something unexpected to search the net for a new method that handles it?
3. Are you unable to talk about a story without first asking how many story points it is?
4. Is your backlog your bible where everything holds true now and forever?
5. Do you always use an estimation technique (e.g. planningpoker) to get estimates?
6. Is producing and updating your burndown chart the most important thing?

Don't become an agile robots - remember that there is more to mastering development and delivering value to customers than mastering agile methods and techniques.

By the way – Neils book is in itself a good book and well worth a read. Allthough it describes the rise and fall of a particular subculure, the questions it raises can be used on other subcultures and my claim is that the agile community is sort of a subculcure. And much of todays society is riddled with different subcultures of which most of us are members og at least 1 or 2 if not more.

2 for the price of 1!

Looking for a new job has made me think a lot about what motivates me and how I can motivate other people and how I like to be motivated myself. So being a person that likes to read, I of course read a couple of books about it. And although they are written more than 25 years apart I find that they have very much the same message at their root. Since I find the two books very good I thought I'd share them with you and write a short review of them.

The first book I had actually read before – several times. I originally found it on my parents bookshelf about 10 years ago when I had just started abakion with a 6 former co-workers and was looking for information about how to lead a company. I found it so inspiring I tend to reread it every 3-5 years just to remind myself of how easy leadership can be if done right. It is called “the one minute manager”.

The thing about the book is that although it is about management and leadership It is not a traditional textbook on how to become a good manager. Instead it is a tale of a young man looking to become a good manager and how he discovers what it means as he speaks to a manager and the people that he manages. As it turns out you just need to understand and do 3 things to be a good (1-minute) manager:

1. Give 1 minute Goals
2. Give 1 minute Praisings
3. Give 1 Minute Reprimands

The basic idea is to give your employees simple but clear goals – they must not be more than 250 words and be able to be explained in a minute. Then try to catch them doing something right (i.e. getting closer to the goal), and then immediately praise them and give them feedback. Only if they are clearly not doing the right thing – i.e. getting closer to the goal do you reprimand them and then

your reprimand is targeted clearly at the work they do and not the person, again with clear feedback.

The book is so good because it promotes very simple ideas and do it in a way that lets you discover them and why they are good along with the storyteller – it becomes your own personal discovery. It also give you a very simple (you could even say a 1 minute) check-list of how to be a good manager so it is very easy to act on in the real world.

Probably the best thing about the book is that is is very positive – I love this quote they have: “Everyone is a potential winner – Some people are disguised as losers – Don't let their appearances fool you”.

The second book I read is “Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates us”. I read this because almost all the speakers that talked about agile development at the GOTO conference in May in Copenhagen recommended it and cited it as an inspiration. Furthermore I had seen this very good animated short version of the book and found that it resonated well with how I think. But 10 minutes of video is just an appetizer so I wanted to read the whole book to get deeper into the material.

And I was not disappointed. What I found good about this book, is that it seems to make explicit all the tacit knowledge that I have myself accumulated our the past 10-15 years working as a consultant and product owner on what motivates me and what I have seen work when I have tried to motivate others.

The books basic tenet is that command and control oriented way with extrinsic rewards as the prime motivators that has been the standard for managing businesses the last couple of hundred years is out of date. In a work environment where problem solving and creativity is the norm, extrinsic motivators actually is detrimental to good performance. And the book backs it up with solid scientific studies.

If you want to get good performance from your employees in the creative and constantly changing environment most businesses find themselves in these days, the best way to do it is if they are intrinsically motivated – i.e. they want to do a good job themselves. And the way to that is to let them solve tasks they way they want to, allow them to get better at it, and make it clear why the tasks is important. He sums it up in these three words:

• Autonomy – the desire to direct tour own lives
• Mastery – the urge to get better at something that matters
• Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in service of something large than ourselves

The book is packed with references to studies that prove what it says. And at the end there is a couple of chapters with a tool-kit, that helps you transform yourself and your business to use intrinsic motivators to get better results.

In the start of this blog post I wrote that I find both books have the same message at their root. And that is that at the core of good leadership is the fact that I is all about people and caring for people. If you trust in people to get things done they rarely let you down if you can convey that you trust them to do it themselves.

By giving people a 1 minute goal you give them both ample autonomy to solve it and at the same time give them the purpose of the tasks because 1 minutes goals are something that is agreed on between the employee and the manager. And because both minute praisings and minute reprimands concerns feedback on how well or how bad the job is done it does not comprise autonomy and helps the employee towards mastery.

If there is only one thing I could change it the “Drive” book, it would be to add “the one minute manager” to the fifteen essential books list it contains. Apart form that both books are both easy to read and have a very important message for everybody. I highly recommend both of them to any manager that wants to know how to become a leader and improve the results of both his own work and that of the company he works for.

Getting there the Columbus way

As noted in my earlier post I want to use this blog to talk about different themes in a essay like format. And since I am very interested in agile development, I want to explore the 4 statements of the agile manifesto, and talk about what each of the statements mean to me and my view on software development.

The agile manifesto goes like this:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on 

the right, we value the items on the left more.

The one I want to talk about today is the last one – Responding to change over following a plan. There are two reasons that:

Firstly I think responding to changes is what makes agile methods agile in the original sense of the word agile – i.e. someone that can move quickly and well-coordinated. The other 3 statements are enablers that allow us to reach the goal of being able to respond quickly to changes – changes that experience has taught will always be there in any software development project.

The second reason is much more simple – it is the easiest one to write about and I have a couple of good ideas of how to explain my view on it. So in the agile spirit I choose to get something out there fast, so I can get feedback early.

I called this post: “Getting there the Columbus way” because when thinking of planning I always remember a little story, that a speaker told at an AIESEC meeting many years ago. I cannot remember his name, but I think it in a very simple way explains why responding to change over following a plan is a good thing.

To get somewhere in a ship there are essentially three ways to navigate – they are

• The Viking way
• The Titanic way
• The Columbus way

The Viking way of navigating is to drop 40 vikings and a priest in a boat, and pray that you get where you want to go and that there is something to loot when you get there.

The Titanic way of navigating is to have so much certainty that nothing can go wrong, that you will lay your course in a straight line to the target and not deviate from it, since you KNOW it is the fastest way to get to the target.

The Columbus way of navigating is to have a clear goal of where you are going, but knowing that the way is uncharted and may have hidden dangers, you prepare well and bring 3 ships. And you are smart enough to realise that when you miss your original goal of finding a new way to India, there is probably a buck or two to be made from this new continent you found.

I also find that the Columbus way fits well with another of my favourite quotes about planning:

“Plans are nothing. Planning is everything”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The core of this quote is that once the plan is made, it holds no value in itself. The value lies in the planning that has been done. In the planning phase you have explored the goals you want to reach, and the capabilities you have at hand to reach them. And you have tried to come up with the best solutions to reach the goal given the capabilities you have. Knowing where we want to go and what capabilities we have is exactly what we need when something changes and we have to respond fast.

If the goals changes you know your capabilities and can quickly assess if the new goals can be reached with the assets at hand. If your capabilities change you can quickly determine if it is still possible to reach your goals with your current assets.

So in an agile world planning is performed so you know your capabilities, which in turn allows you to act fast when facing new situations. This is very much in line with the statement in the agile manifesto, that we value responding to change over following a plan. Note that it is the following a plan that is not valued in the agile manifesto - not planning itself.

And planing itself is indeed an important part of most agile methods. In most agile methods planning is something you do every iteration because you know the world has changed since yesterday, and will probably change again tomorrow, so in order to be prepared, to be able to be agile, good planning is essential. If find the backlog in SCRUM (link) a prime example of that as it is ever changing and improving, yet at any given time you are aware what is the most important goal.

This is in contrast to older methods, particularly the waterfall method, and which I based on my little story to start with will call the Titanic methods. Titanic methods tries to eliminate risk while Columbus methods tries to take them into account and navigate around them.

To sum up my view on planning and responding to change is that you have to remember:

Plans do not give you certainty, but planning allows you to act faster and more decisively in an uncertain world.

So when you are going to start a project next time which way do you want to go – the Viking, the Titanic or the Columbus way? For me there is no doubt – I'll take the Columbus way.