A few weeks ago I happened to talk to a couple of University
students who were conducting a survey in different companies about the impacts
on people motivation from moving to Agile SW development. What they told me could
appear surprising to many of you: a consistent percentage of
people answering their survey claimed that they feel extremely frustrated and demotivated with Agile. Are you hit by this? I want to elaborate in this post why I
was not.
What is motivating for knowledge workers in
21st century?
In his extraordinary book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About
What Motivates Us”, Dan Pink sketches what he calls Motivation 3.0.
Based on scientific
evidence over decades of research, he explains that, once basic living needs (like
food or safety) are satisfied (Motivation 1.0), the factors that are still
nowadays commonly considered as motivating (carrot and stick, e.g, money and punishment) are actually
working only for simple and repetitive tasks.
These “extrinsic” motivators (Motivation
2.0) are not only useless, but even counterproductive, as soon as tasks require cognitive
effort: in that case “intrinsic” motivators are the only ones which really
work. Motivation 3.0 is based on three pillars:
- Autonomy - over
- Time – when to do the
work
- Technique – how to do the
work
- Team – whom to do the
work with
- Task – what work to do
- Mastery – ability to
become better at something that matters for you
- Purpose – natural desire
to contribute to something greater than yourself
You might want to have a look at Dan Pink’s TED talk, The puzzle of motivation
or to a nice visual depiction
of the 3rd Drive theory on YouTube to get some more insights. Or
simply read the bookJ.
After having reflected around what is motivating, let’s touch a
bit what Agile is.
Well, if we want to explore the subject from the perspective
of the relationship with motivation, the first thing that comes
to my mind is the 5th Agile principle:
Build projects around motivated individual. Give them the environment
and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
Motivation looks like being somehow embedded in Agile: so how can we explain the result from the survey?
Well I will not give an answer based on a well-defined and exposed theory of what Agile is.
On the other hand, if I look at the three intrinsic factors
in Motivation 3.0, I can say from empirical evidence what Agile is definitely not.
Agile is not:
- Artificial deadlines
pushed on teams for lack of trust
- Commitments taken by
people not actually doing the work or, alternatively, commitment games
(people pushed to commit and then it’s their business to keep the
commitment)
- Processes pushed from the
top (sometimes by people with not enough understanding of the work at
hand)
- Developers not allowed to
choose what they consider the best tools for them to work
- A lot of gate checks before
being allowed to change any line of code
- Teams with not enough
skills or support to succeed
- Bossy team leaders called
Scrum Masters who do the planning and assign tasks to developers
- Senior technical people
just playing the role of “checkers” instead of teaching people how to do a
better job
- Accumulating technical debt and not promoting pride for well crafted code
- No Product Vision or lack
of understanding why to develop a certain feature
So, if anyone, who finds herself in a similar reality, names
all the stuff above as Agile, maybe just because she’s using post-its and white
boards, I cannot agree more with her: Agile is demotivating.
I would then like to hear less Agile talks and more lived up
Agile values and principles (and more knowledge, and more practice).
I subscribe to what I heard James Grenning saying to managers in
his closing keynote at Scrum Gathering London 2011: Stop motivating people, but
stop demotivating them!
What is your thinking?
