Guide to Building Data-Driven Organizations in the Public Sector

Motivating People

Team 7 Lorna & Julie

Topic Overview

Chapter Summaries

Daniel Pink (2010) What Motivates Us? Harvard Business Review

Pink is interviewed by Katherine Bell on “What motivates us?” based on his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Pink states that based on 40-50 years of behavioral science research, people are not motivated by the common belief of the carrot/stick concept. Meaning, if you reward someone that person will display more of the desired behavior, and if you punish someone that person will display less of the undesired behavior. This concept is known as the punishment/reward drive. A second drive is the biological drive, meaning we eat when we are hungry. Pink states the biological and punishment/reward drives do not work well in the business world. He states people are motivated based on a third drive, which is contribution.

The carrot/stick motivator can actually be a de-motivator in business. For example, studies show that when people are given a high-stake reward for achieving a short-term goal, people will actually finagle the system or flat out cheat. A high-stake reward, used as a motivator, can narrow one’s vision due to focusing on the reward. Pink states that these rewards are less effective for creative workers.

Managers should motivate creative individuals by giving their people a “sense of making progress.” This can be done by helping people see their progress, by recognizing it, celebrating it, and keeping people on a path towards making more progress.

However, Pink states, that although people are motivated in business when they feel like they are contributing and making progress, people must be paid enough money for them to focus on work and not worry about money.

Pink discusses an Australian company who established “FedEx” days where employees could do whatever they wanted with whomever they chose, and then produced their work at the end of 24 hours. FedEx days produced amazing results, including software fixes and new product ideas. He believes people were motivated due to “a greater sense of autonomy, allowing people to make progress, and animate what the people are doing with a greater sense of purpose.”

It’s important for people to understand the source of their de-motivation. Popular reasons people are demotivated is the perception or reality of being underpaid, not making progress, or the feeling of being micromanaged. Once the source is discovered, it’s an opportunity to “re-sculpt” your job or possibly find a new workplace.

Pink said the writing and research he did for his new book has changed his work habits by establishing helpful measures to make progress. He developed a “do it yourself performance review.” At the beginning of each month, he writes down what he wants to learn, performance goals, and learning goals. He then reviews himself at the end of each month. He also asks himself every night if he was better today than yesterday. He said the answer is usually “no.” However, it’s rare that he answers “no” two days in a row. Pink said this book has changed his personal life too. He now believes allowances for children should not be given based on the completion of chores. He believes chores are a moral obligation and shouldn’t be compensated through economic transactions.

Chapter 4 Social Physics- Engagement

Alex Pentland discusses how best to get individuals to work together. According to the text, “working together requires more than shared habits; it requires habits that result in cooperation.” But how do you actually get people to work in a group effectively? Many of these patterns can be witnessed in animals and primates. Examples include signaling mechanism such as body postures and vocalization are aspects of the decision-making process within groups.

In Bob Kelly’s Bell Stars study, Kelly analyzed the difference between average and star performers. He found that star performers encouraged and pushed everyone in their group toward “joint ownership” of the goal, strategy, activities, etc. The average performers just did their part of the group work.

But how do you translate this type of engagement from face-to-face interaction to the digital space? One example Pentland points out is a Facebook experiment in the 2010 election cycle. A group of scientists launched a “Get Out the Vote” message to 61 million Facebook users and analyzed the impact of the different types of messages.

One group of Facebook users received a ‘Get out and vote” message, while others received a “Vote” message and saw the faces of friends who has already voted. The experiment revealed that those who received the “Vote” message with faces of their friends had a higher rate of mobilization. It turned out, close friends “exerted about four times more influence on the total number of voters” than the message itself.

Why did this impact behavior? Pentland argues that it is Social Pressure. Seeing our peers adopt certain habits and behavior is motivation to join in. This is because these are trusted sources. So how do you use social network incentives (an incentive to alter interaction between people) to change behavior and increase cooperation?

Pentland states that by creating social pressure and “increasing the amount of interaction around specific, targeted ideas” creates an environment where people are more likely to adopt these habits. One example used to show social network incentives is “FunFit” which encouraged friends and family members to remain active. Everyone was assigned to two buddies, some were people they interacted with a lot, others were acquaintances. They created clusters that centered around one target person and they were given a small cash reward based on the behavior change of the main person, thus creating social pressure to be more active. For those who had more direct interaction with their target, the social network incentive worked nearly 8 times better than the standard market approach. Also, those who received social network incentives maintained high levels of activity after the incentives went away.

The amount of direct interaction between people predicts shared trust, effectiveness of peer pressure and influence to create behavior change.

In an energy conservation experiment mentioned in the book, homeowners received feedback on how much energy they consumed in comparison to the average person. The result, no changed behavior. When the comparison was between a homeowner and people in their neighborhood, behavior changed. Pentland explains that this is the “social network effect” because identifying with a group of people increases trust and the social pressure and influence of the group. This strategy can be adopted to digital networks as long as there is trust among peers.

Pentland cautions that just as the prior experiments showed cooperative interactions, if the majority of interaction within a social network is combative and negative it will destroy trust. He gives the example that some people dislike politicians and lawyers as a group but may enjoy specific individuals. This type of behavior creates a “don’t trust them” mentality which can create discrimination between groups.

Sutherland, J.J. (2014) Scrum: the art of doing twice the work in half the time. CH1

The FBI had one goal and one goal only when trying to develop a new data system, prevent another 9/11. The inability of the department to track and share information failed to show Al Qaeda terrorists entering the country because there was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont told the media: “We had information that could have stopped 9/11… was not acted upon… I haven’t seen them correct the problems.” In 2005 the FBI announced a new program, Sentinel, costing $451 million, to be operational by 2009. By 2010 the program, being built by Lockheed Martin, needed an additional 350 million. That’s when to project was terminated and the group decided to go in a different direction.

The problem wasn’t resources or the intelligence of the people working on the project, it was the “way” people were working together. When a plan doesn’t work, people need to be flexible and modify, not pretend as though the plan is working.

They were using Henry Gantt charts which looked good with colors and graphs. Gantt invented his charts in 1910 which were used in World War I by General William Crozier. The trouble was, managers hired people “to make it look as if the plan is working. Essentially, they’re paying people to lie to them. Johnson felt that they had smart people in place, but the systems were failing due to the way people were working. He wanted to remove all impediments. Ohno’s Toyota Production System formed many of the ideas behind SCRUM. Ohno states “production should flow swiftly and calmly throughout the process, and one of management’s key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow.” Johnston implemented SCRUM to complete the development of the Sentinel system.

The framework of the approach is simple: looking at “how” people work, rather than how they “say” they work. The term scrum comes from the game of Rugby and refers to the way a team works together to move the ball down the field: alignment, unity and clarity of goal. Traditional management operates in a world of control and predictability. But the best scenario rarely unfolds, and this approach restricts people to the “plan”.

Scrum asks questions, and embraces creativity and uncertainty. It focuses on the learning process and gives people the tools to self-organize and rapidly improve speed and quality of work.

How SCRUM Works: It begins with an “Inspect and Adapt” cycle, a “Honey do List”, setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time usually 2 weeks.
This step involves:

At the beginning of each cycle there is a meeting to plan the “Sprint”. Each member decides how much work they can get done in two weeks. The items on their priority lists are all tallied and documented with sticky notes. Members begin to have a baseline of how much they can complete in two weeks – their velocity. The team gets faster and faster by eliminating impediments.

With this strategy, the FBI was able to create Sentinel in 20 months total. They joked that they were able to create something with 5% of the budget that Lockheed had and couldn’t develop in over 10 years. The system is used for everything, sorting evidence, paying informant, case files, meetings, etc. By using the SCRUM approach they measured progress, demonstrated the product throughout the process and were transparent about their progress.

SCRUM has made a dramatic difference for the FBI and the ability to communicate and share information has changed how the Bureau operates. Due to SCRUM, a million-dollar transfer to another country, bank approved, was stopped.

Duhigg, C. (2016) “What we learned from Google’s Efforts to Build a Perfect Team.” The New York Times Magazine, Feb 25, 2016

Before Julie Rozovsky was hired by Google to study people’s habits and tendencies, she attended Harvard where she was associated with two groups of people; a study group and a case team. Although the study group was comprised of intelligent, productive, and competitive members, she found the daily group meetings to be very draining and stressful. Her case team members had a variety of professional careers, but they “clicked” well and talked with each other in a non-formal, casual way on a personal level. Although studies have proven working in teams or groups results in faster innovation, better results, and reports of higher job satisfaction, Rozovsky was bewildered why the study group and case team experiences were so different.

Top executives used to believe that teams should be made up of like-minded individuals, i.e. introverts working together, members should be friends outside of work, etc. Many firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers, a practice known as “employee performance optimization,” is just the beginning of increasing productivity. Researchers found the most productive teams possess:

Members of a team are most comfortable being themselves, which fosters creativity, when members show mutual respect and trust with one another. People who scored high on a social sensitivity exam were most successful working on a team. The social sensitivity exam comprised of how people interpreted pictures of sets of eyes.

Julie was assigned to Google’s Project Aristotle to review how teams work. “Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams”. Teams operate best when the following are present:

Another Google employee, Matt Sakaguchi formerly from Silicon Valley, linked psychological safety to emotional conversations. He states a bond between team members is needed to establish psychological safety, conversation turn-taking, and empathy. The key is to “figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better, and in more productive ways.” Project Aristotle is now encouraging emotional conversations and discussions of norms to create effective teams.

The Book Smarter Faster Better-The secretes of being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, Chapter 5 Managing Others

This is the story of Frank Janssen who was kidnapped because his daughter prosecuted a high ranking gang member, Kevin Melton. This case demonstrates how people being empowered and people working together, combined with the FBI’s Sentinel system, and led to success.

Key Takeaways:

Building a culture of commitment and trust is key when a great idea comes along. “The biggest mistake is when there is never an opportunity for an employee to make a mistake.”

Key Take-Aways (for Yellowdig)

What Motivates Us:

This article is an interview with Daniel Pink regarding his book titled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He says the carrot & stick motivation concept doesn’t work for business. He states managers should motivate their members by giving them a “sense of making progress.” This can be done by helping members see their progress, by recognizing it, celebrating it, and keeping people on a path towards making more progress. He also says it’s a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors that keeps people motivated. He firmly believes members should be paid enough so that one can entirely focus on work and not worry about money. Pink said the writing and research he did for his new book has changed his work habits by establishing helpful measures to making progress for himself. He developed daily work habits such as a monthly “do it yourself performance review” and he also asks himself every night if he was better today than yesterday. His answer is usually “no”. He says he doesn’t answer “no” two nights in a row because he subconsciously wants a better day after the next day, so this daily questioning of himself improves his life.

Social Physics Engagement

According to the text, “working together requires more than shared habits; it requires habits that result in cooperation.” Pentland argues that “social pressure” is a key tool to change behavior and help people work together. Seeing our peers adopt certain habits and behavior is motivation to join in. This is because these are trusted sources.

Rules of Engagement: Three key things to remember

SCRUM:

This is the story of Jeff Johnson, Assistant Director of the IT Engineering Division for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He initially worked on a system, which was very outdated, antiquated and porous, called the Automated Case Support System. When the FBI tried to upgrade to a Virtual Case File (VCF) system, it fell apart at the expense of $170 million in taxpayer money. Johnson felt that they had smart people in place but the systems were failing due to the way people were working. He wanted to remove all impediments. Ohno’s Toyota Production System formed many of the ideas behind SCRUM. Ohno states “Production should flow swiftly and calmly throughout the process, and one of management’s key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow.” Johnston implemented SCRUM to complete the development of the Sentinel system.

Key Takeaways:

In regards to the Sentinel project - what was projected to take up 90% of the budget and ten years only took 5% of the budget and 20 months. SCRUM has made a dramatic difference for the FBI, the ability to communicate and share information has changed how the Bureau operates.

“What we learned from Google’s Efforts to Build a Perfect Team”:

This article is about Julie Rozovsky she was hired by Google to study people’s habits and tendencies. Julie was assigned to Google’s Project Aristotle to review how teams work. Her team concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams (and motivating team members to participate). Teams operate best when the following are present:

Based on these findings, Project Aristotle encourages emotional conversations and discussions of norms between team members. Getting to know members on a personal basis increase team compatibility.

Discussion Questions

  1. Have you ever found yourself buried in a project, knowing it wouldn’t come to fruition, but because of the pressure from other team members you continued the course?

  2. Do you feel like “chitchat” before a meeting is a waste of time, or do you think it’s important to understand your team members on a personal level?

  3. Have you had a situation where social pressure changed your habits or behavior?

  4. What are the potential downsides to social pressure, especially in the digital space?

References