Motivation…

Okay – it is gonna be a long one. I want to write up a bit about the “Secrets of Agile Teamwork” class I went to last week and thought maybe it should go into twiki, but I might want to refer to it (and I might digress onto baby stuff…but maybe that should be another post anyway…) and everyone on our team is on mingle, so this is good enough.

First, I hardly slept in the class. Which is pretty impressive. I slept for maybe 20 minutes total over the three days. It was pretty interactive which helped keep me awake. Plus, I listed “staying awake (no offense)” as one of the things I’d like from class, so I think the instructors gave me a little extra attention.

Overall, the class was alright. There is a general Kumbaya feeling in the group. Which is the problem with these self-signup courses. The people in the course don’t need much convincing cause they are already there. The people that need help are the ones not yet willing to admit it or willing to goto the class. (Side note: Brat Camp is a reality show on ABC that Marco referred to me. Saw a bit last night. Not enough drama. I prefer Surreal Life this season with Janice Dickenson – who has one of the best book titles I think; if only it was a joke instead of so real – making Omarosa look like a pussycat.)

So given that background, you know that the class would be successful and warm fuzzies would be rampant as we left. I spent the last 20 minutes talking about the challenges of teams that we didn’t really discuss or address and got back that the way to address them are just good, constructive feedback and patience. In truckloads. Which I kind of knew beforehand – and maybe was looking for tricks for patience, but I also knew there aren’t really any.? Just have to step up and be the bigger person.

Which made me wish I had performed differently in one of our exercises. It was the first “team” exercise, where we (class of like 12 or so) got about 15 different decks of cards (poker decks, normal decks, gimmick decks, Magic decks, XP decks, some deck of cards that had rock types on it, etc.) and we were given by the “customer” a set of requirements for the “product”. Each deck sorted a specific way, then all the decks stacked into a tower in a specific way.

The exercise was to show how a “leaderless” group can “self-organize” and become efficient. And some of the more aggressive types took on roles of getting better specs and getting an understanding of terms within the spec. And others got into bossy roles of sorting. And it is surprising how much control people wanted. Or maybe not if you really think about it. But I was struck at first at how urgent people were taking the task. “The dog deck needs to be over here!” When in reality it didn’t need to be over there now. We had a table and an half of cards – you could sort in to several piles of dog decks across the area and then at the end combine the dog piles. At least, that was a bit of a discussion I had a few times.

Only after I had some other people sorting into a separate pile of cards did the person saying “one pile” give in to having many piles that will eventually become one pile. My motivation started low and was getting lower.

Anyway – all the decks got sorted. Another few people are running around getting spec questions answered, shouting out questions that should be asked, shouting out for more questions that we need asked, being answered by shouts of questions that need to be asked. No one really listening for answers. We had the question of a “poker” deck. One guy felt that any deck with Jokers couldn’t be a poker deck, so look for all the decks with no jokers. I mentioned you could play poker with jokers and it’s more the style of card that I’d go by. But I didn’t mention it loud enough or enough times or with enough panic in my voice and so it had to goto the customer. I didn’t care. It wasn’t a big enough deal. Motivation lower…

It was at that point that I wanted to go on a vacation. Most of the grunt work was done. There were just some final stacking issues to be resolved and some Magic card sorting to be done. Why were they surprised that me, as an engineer, wasn’t familiar with Magic cards? Anyway, I asked one of the instructors if I should sneak away for a little vacation and see if anyone noticed. She didn’t seem to think that was a fabulous idea. So I sat around. And dreamed of knocking down the stack that already been built and remixing up the cards.

In hindsight, I really should have. It was all role playing anyway. It would have really tested the team’s “teamwork” mentality – I wonder how much good feedback (well, good, negative feedback that is) I would have gotten versus how much bad, non-constructive feedback. It would have helped highlight some non-kumbaya aspects to the team. As the exercise ended, I knew I had done the wrong thing by just accepting the worker-bee role. It was good for the imaginary team, getting this imaginary project done, but bad for the exercise. Bad for me learning more about teamwork.

So – after this we had a homework assignment of what types of leadership attributes we like and exhibit and what types are a stretch for us. And I went through the list and with my enormous ego, I figured I could do any of the types and that none would be a stretch for me. My leadership style I decided was to just plug in the holes. To fill the gaps, to strengthen any weaknesses on the team. I figured that had a good sound to it. But what would my stretch be?

Now – I don’t know if it is because my ego is not so big that I am comfortable thinking nothing is a stretch or that my ego is SO big that I’m confident enough to make up a stretch and know that it’s not really a stretch but it sounds good and makes me look like my ego isn’t as big as it really is. I’m confusing that way. So my stretch was to maintain my leadership role in cases where there is a leader taking us down a path that I really disagree with. (Yeah, there are some relevant points right now in my life that helped me come up with that…) To which the instructors recommended a book called “Getting things done when you’re not in charge“. I have big hopes for that book. Sounds like it could be useful.

Onto the second exercise. 4 100-piece puzzles. 4 teams. Each team giving estimates of how long it’d take to build their puzzle. I convinced my team that we should go the under promise, over deliver route. So while other teams got their chests puffed up and chugging water for the pissing contest with quotes of 20 and 15 minutes, we gave an hour. I wanted to give an hour and half, but the team wasn’t on board with my idea that much.

I figured, it was 2:30 and the class was supposed to end at 4 and we have 30 minutes of discussion and the way that the teacher described how often she wanted updates made it seem to me like she was willing to use the rest of the class for the exercise.

And also, there were rules. That teams couldn’t communicate verball with each other. Internally we could, but we had to pass notes to other teams for communication. The fact that we had to communicate made me think that well, we might have 100 pieces, but they aren’t all for the same puzzle. So communication had to add time. And the devil in me also made me realize that those guys saying 20 minutes could be held back by us holding on to their pieces until we were ready to deliver. I was ready to challenge the teamwork exercises a bit.

As it turns out, I went a more constructive route. Some teams would come over and offer us a trade of a few pieces. But it really was hard to tell what the pieces were and whether they’d be useful or not. I mean, we still had to try and decide which puzzle we wanted to build. Did I mention no boxes for the puzzles were given? Just ziplock bags with pieces in them.

So my communication notes out to all the other teams took the form of – “Do you want to be acquired?” We took their pieces and their resources and combined them at our table and worked on all the puzzles together. (Yes – I did not want to merge – but acquire.) This was great, cause it also made the table so crowded that there wasn’t room for me (unfair for me to take up so much space, when two smaller people could fit in and be more efficient solving the puzzle).? So I was leading by watching. I was pretty pleased with myself.

The instructors said that next time, they’ll fix the rules to insure no more “acquisitions” happen. Tickled me. But then, their next part of the exercise was to readjust our estimates (30 minutes had passed) and that they were going to get rid of their rules and allow us to make up our own rules. Perfect – makes the task a lot easier I thought. Each group got to contribute one rule.

My rules that I suggested to my group were things like:

• There are no rules.
• If in doubt, refer to [the rule that says there are no rules].
• We can’t use moon dust to help us.
• You can communicate with anyone you like in any way you like.

Why would we want to limit ourselves with any rules?? Well, some group did. Saying that a group can only work on the puzzle section that they are assigned to.? Man, that steamed me. First, we still hadn’t decided what the puzzles actually were (no box tops still…they did come later, but at the time we didn’t have them) so how could people get assigned a puzzle or puzzle section? I chided them for the rule – and convinced the other two groups to make useless rules that wouldn’t effect us at all.

My leadership style includes a bit of bullying sometimes too I suppose.

When I asked “why would you want to make rules that limit us?” someone pointed out that I was in a room full of managers. Bingo.

The puzzles were finished sometime around 24 hours later. We all missed our target times…

The next day we had exercises that made us focus on what the good teams we have been on were like. I’ve been fortunate to work with some very good people over the years. And that’s really what makes the difference. In describing the aspects of a good team to another classmate during an “interview” exercise, we got in a bit of an argument over motivation. I believe there is nothing but self-motivation. I cannot motivate anyone else. Motivation comes from within. I can manipulate or force you to do something. But not motivate you.

The environment motivates you. Your own interests motivate you. And some people need more to be movitvated than others. Money is only part of the equation. There’s a threshold, where if you’re making enough money, then more money isn’t as strong a motivating factor as say, coworkers, or the actual work you’re doing, or the environment that you’re working in (does it look like Easter happening all year round?)

Anyway, this young pup wanted to argue with me about that. How he could motivate me. And that’s where I realized I still really am grumpy and old and don’t like listening to people who use phrases like “well, in business school, this is what we’re taught…” and blah blah blah. Anyway…

Good people in a variety of methodologies will find a way to make it work.

Good methodology with a variety of people will increase your odds of making it work tos ome degree, but nothing is really guaranteed.

It’s even part of the Agile Manifesto – that people and interactions are valued over process and methods. Which they are quick to point out doesn’t mean that they don’t value process and methodology, but just that people are valued more. I agree completely. Still doesn’t answer the real world question of – what do you do when your team isn’t composed of just great people. Except for patience and such…

We had to come up with a “provocative statement” about what good teams are like. An example given was “Organizational sweetness”.? Our group had three ideas thrown out – but I can only remember two right now – “leaderless leadership” and “balanced chaos”. We went with “balanced chaos” and drew the analogy around how the team is in an ever changing environment yet manages to adapt and overcome all the challenges it faces.

And I was pleased, not only because that was the term I threw out, but because I feel that is how the best teams I’ve worked with have been. From the outside, it might look like a mess of activity and things might not come together, but from the inside, people are confident and trust each other and they do know what is going on and it makes sense. And if it doesn’t make sense, there’s that trust that someone will point it out.

I lost people though when we were told to visualize it. I wanted to go with a biological analogy – our cells are the best team we could imagine – distributed, no leader, in an ever changing environment, all working to a common goal though no single cell knows the goal or is capable of achieving the goal, etc – but the team felt a windmill would be a better visualization. And it was pretty good. Winds of change. Each strut on the windmill a component – communication, people, etc. And the base of the windmill was “common vision” and the output was productive energy.

I figured I was just still in awe with how many changes Catherine’s body has been through lately and how all the systems came together and worked and well, built another crazy ass system whose complexity is still way beyond human comprehension.

I mean, that’s some teamwork. And its motivation only comes from within…