ExploringMotivationNotes

This is the output of the "Exploring Motivation" workshop held at Agile Development Conference 2003

Presented by: JohnNolan & RachelDavies Participants: Helen Sharp, Hugh Robinson, JohnDaniels?, Laura Hill and WardCunningham

Topic: Many organisations attempt to increase their productivity by the use of employee reward schemes. Over the years, an increasing body of research has grown suggesting that the use of rewards to move individuals to action may have negative effects on their team working and the quality of their work products in the long term. This research is presented by Alfie Kohn in the book "Punished by Rewards". Kohn suggests that reward schemes and management by objectives should be rejected and instead suggests ways to create the conditions for authentic motivation to flourish in collaborative teams.

Agile methods rely on individuals working in highly collaborative teams. For example, the XP practices of PairedProgramming and CollectiveOwnership?. Where individuals are required to work so closely with others it becomes harder to measure indivdual contribution. When anyone in the team can rewrite your code, does this decrease your motivation?

Giving team members more control over the way they work, maintaining high quality standards and allowing "slack" time for exploration and research may increase sustainable intrinsic motivation. For example, the use of "GoldCards".

Output from workshop:

Impedance to Motivation and Collaboration

• Tedious time consuming work (that could be automated)
• Pointless work (poor requirements)
• Fear of failure
• Too much safety (no one cares about the output)
• Future prospects
• Contribution invisible in large group - "indirect benefit to me"
• Pride (unwilling to work with inexperienced)
• Skill
• Lack of choice in approach

Alternatives to incentive schemes

• Group assessment
• Self assessment
• Non-gameable rewards
• • Ward told us a story about a past employer who encouraged patents by holding an "inventors dinner"
  • • interesting speaker
    • networking opportunity
    • zero bozos
• exploit peer recognition
• • "train group to recognise your value"

Aspects of Positive Recognition

• value matching (self - others)
• self recognition
• acclaim
• • by peers
  • by management
  • by outside group
• visibility
• unprovoked spontaneous
• giving time and attention

We drew an influence chart containing the following circles:

Motivation increases Effort increases Self Recognition Fear increases Cynicism and that decreases Motivation Positive Recognition, Attention and Degree of Empowerment decrease Cynicism

Further notes from OOPSLA panel on "Is AgileProjectManagement an oxymoron?" (Ward,Beck,...)

• avoid treating people in a transactional way (do this, to get that)
• avoid gaming situations
• set vision
• play fair
• focus on similarities not differences
• internal commitment

Discussion area This is all great stuff, but any team in which people get paid different amounts and have different financial status (ie any XP team that exists today) is being individually incentivised. That is the same problem as individual rewards, bonuses etc. All members of the team should share profits or hold equal numbers of shares or all get paid the same. Which is absurd, unless all members have similar experience and skills, in which case one of the core values (continuous learning) pretty much goes out of the window. This is one of the problems of tight teamwork in general, not just XP, except XP turns problems up to the max as well as benefits and practices. What do people think? If I am wrong, why is your salary a secret?