Every once in a while, I get delusions of grandeur and think I can understand the world.
Given the latest major pieces of news about Twitter, I get the impression it’s that time again.
The other day, I was studying “Inside the Tornado” once again. (See Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets
With that fresh in my mind, latest news about Twitter seem to ring a bell…
The other day, a friend of mine recommended another TED-Video to me: “Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation” (~18 Minutes). I think everybody who’s into management and/or leadership should have seen it.
It’s clearly worth watching, because Daniel is a truly gifted speaker. Still, for the hurried reader, here are the core points as I picked them up. The main theme is
There’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.
What he’s referring to is the “candle problem“: A cognitive performance test dating back to 1945. This test and a range of other examples Daniel quotes clearly shows that “sticks and carrots” (aka incentive plans etc.) actually reduce performance in cognitive tasks.
Incentives do work for mechanical tasks (which were predominant through much of the 20th century). They do not work for cognitive tasks, which dominate the 21st century. That’s the gap Daniel is talking about, and I’d like to add that this especially applies to the business of software
While science knows for more than 60 years that a bonus plan, say, for managers, reduces effectiveness, businesses reach out to higher and higher incentives in the areas where they are known to work least. One could say: They don’t know better. How else to motivate people?
And Daniel has an answer to that question: Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery.
In the video, he goes on to explain purpose – the topic in its entirety is covered in Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Since then, I keep asking myself: Do you create a sense of purpose in the people you are working with?
For questions like, “What’s going on in the project,” we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff that you don’t anticipate.
(Ward Cunningham, founder of the first Wiki)
Found at artima developer: “Exploring with Wiki” – A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, by Bill Venners;
October 20, 2003
I think everybody knows the following story. Still, it has turned out both fun and useful for me. Regularly. 🙂
This is a story about four people: Everybody,
Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was this
important job to be done and everybody was asked
to do it. Everybody was sure that somebody would
do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did
it. Somebody got angry about that because it was
everybody’s job. Everybody thought that anybody
could do it, but nobody realized that everybody
wouldn’t do it. It ended up that everybody blamed
somebody when actually nobody asked anybody.
Image: Flickr / нσвσ
It is interesting to note that the literature on management, spends little to no attention on the accuracy of the measurement, while the literature on leadership barely mentions such KPIs at all. When discussing topics that are easy to measure, like manufacturing, taking the accuracy of KPI measurements for granted may make sense – however, the business of software is so far largely resisting meaningful, repeatable measurement. KPIs are so important because, often, KPIs are tied to people’s bonuses, which immediately invites, encourages … tuning of KPI actuals.
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