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CHAMPFROGS... The 10 Intrinsic Desires

In Management 3.0 classes I let participants play an exercise called Moving Motivators, which uses the CHAMPFROGS model for intrinsic motivation. This model is loosely based on the book The 16 Basic Desires by Steven Reiss.

I simplified Reiss’ model by removing some very basic desires, such as family, romance, and vengeance, which I considered somewhat less desirable within the context of a team. (Though this simplification makes the model less applicable to the crew of Battlestar Galactica, and other teams on TV.)

By renaming a few of the key terms I came up with this list of 10 intrinsic desires…

CHAMPFROGS

Curiosity: I have plenty of things to investigate and to think about.

Honor: I feel proud that my personal values are reflected in how I work.

Acceptance: The people around me approve of what I do and who I am.

Mastery: My work challenges my competence but it is still within my abilities.

Power: There’s enough room for me to influence what happens around me.

Freedom: I am independent of others with my work and my responsibilities.

Relatedness: I have good social contacts with the people in my work.

Order: There are enough rules and policies for a stable environment.

Goal: My purpose in life is reflected in the work that I do.

Status: My position is good, and recognized by the people who work with me.

I told many people that I have no idea what champfrogs means. But it’s a nice mnemonic that enables me to remember the 10 intrinsic motivators for team members.

Sometimes people point out to me that there are other models for intrinsic motivation available:

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with his famous theory in 1943:

Self-actualization: similar to Curiosity, Mastery, Freedom

Esteem: similar to Honor, Power, Goal, Status

Love/belonging: similar to Relatedness, Acceptance

Safety: similar to Order

Physiological: similar to a few that I deleted.

I simply made a best guess of the correlation with Maslow’s model and Champfrogs, so please don’t interpret my mapping as a law. Also note that scientists have dismissed the hierarchical nature of Maslow’s model as unscientific. Personally, I find the 10 motivators easier to discuss than Maslow’s hierarchy, which is why I prefer the Champfrogs model.

SCARF by David Rock

Dr. David Rock, the founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, came up with this model:

Status: same as in Champfrogs

Certainty: equivalent to Order

Autonomy: equivalent to Freedom

Relatedness: same as in Champfrogs

Fairness: similar to Honor (not sure about this one)

It seems to me that SCARF is simply half of CHAMPFROGS. The motivators that are missing are Curiosity, Acceptance, Mastery, Power, and Goal. Personally I find those too important to ignore, which is why I prefer Champfrogs over Scarf when discussing motivation in a team.

Self-Determination Theory by Deci & Ryan

Professor in psychology Edward L. Deci, together with Richard M. Ryan, proposed the following model:

Competence: equivalent to Mastery

Relatedness: same as in Champfrogs

Autonomy: equivalent to Freedom

This model lists even fewer intrinsic motivators for people. I’m sure it is a fine model, but I find it too limited for practical exploration in teams.

Note that Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, popularized Self-Determination Theory and actually changed it to Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. I am not the only one to point out that Daniel Pink replaced Relatedness with Purpose, but they’re all in the Champfrogs model anyway, so who cares?

Moving Motivators

Regardless of all the small differences I mentioned above, there's one that is obviously the most important...

CHAMPFROGS has pictures on cards! :-)

If you’re interested in playing with the CHAMPFROGS model, you may want to download the free PDF or order the “official” cards. Your team would not be the first to have a bit of fun with them.

 

I Made a Lot of Money, and It Made Me Very Happy

The year 2012 was (financially) my best year ever. The sum of revenue on courses, workshops, presentations, royalties, product sales, licenses, and house rental, was never before so big. And that makes me feel good.

Yes, I confess!

Money Makes Me Happy

Unfortunately, writing (and publishing) the preceding sentences also generates a storm of other feelings in my head…

I feel shame because many coaches and consultants insist that money doesn’t motivate knowledge workers in a good way. But yes, I like to peek at my bank account every now and then, just for the joy of seeing a number of digits I’ve never seen earlier in my life. And realizing I’m not supposed to be motivated this way can make me feel ashamed.

I feel guilt because I now have more money than most other people I know. And in my (Dutch) culture I’m not supposed to feel better or more successful than anyone else. In Scandinavia they call it the Law of Jante: nobody should break out of the social group. But yes, I enjoy the fact that I’ve achieved something special. And feeling unique also makes me feel guilty.

I feel anxiety because writing (and publishing) this analysis of my feelings may lead to unexpected consequences. Some readers might not like it. Some people might hate me for it. Honesty is rarely appreciated by people who prefer consensus, equality, predictability and cohesion. From the moment I click Publish on this post I will feel anxious about the replies.

But I can live with that.

The 10 Reasons I’m Happy

I feel happy, because…

The neverending quest to discover how I can successfully make more money, satisfies my need for curiosity.

The fact that the business world wants to pay for my ideas and services satisfies my need for acceptance.

I earned the money through voluntary, legal, and free trade relationships, which addresses a need for honor.

After a long time I’m finally getting the hang of marketing and networking, which satisfies my need for mastery.

Money makes the world go round, and it thus it can help me reach more people, addressing a need for power.

The more money I have the more I am free to pursue the activities I enjoy most, which is crucial for my freedom.

I am already using the money to support some friends, family, and charity, which helps my social relationships.

More money helps me acquire better tools and services, which is very beneficial for my need for security and order.

The more I earn the closer I can get to my real purpose in life, which is to be a full-time writer, or in other words, my goal.

And finally, I enjoy it when my years of hard work culminate in some recognition. In other words, my need for status.

So you see, for me money is a motivator.

From Separation to Unification

I understand, when people separate work from their life, then a focus on money (work) will probably deteriorate their quality of life. But for me, my work is part of my life. For me, doing better work means having a better life!

Therefore, money is an easy-to-measure proxy variable for all my intrinsic motivators. (There are other proxies too.) I even dare to say, when your work is your life, money is a metric that covers the whole champfrogs scale!

If you stop separating work from life, and instead see the first as an implementation of the second, you can stop separating money from motivation, and instead see one as a metric for the other.

It’s not a perfect metric, of course. You’ll need some other metrics too. Just stop blaming money for the misery of people. Instead, figure out how to integrate your work and your life. It could help you feel happy.

And the shame, guilt, and anxiety?

I suppose, during my valiant efforts to gain another digit on my bank account, I will just have to learn how to live with them.

 

Moving Motivators (Free Exercise)

I invented a new exercise which allows people to reflect on their motivation, and how this is being affected by organizational change. Check out the following description, and see if you like it…

Ten Intrinsic Desires

The Moving Motivators exercise is based on the 10 intrinsic desires which I derived from the works of Daniel Pink, Steven Reiss, and Deci/Ryan. In order to play the Moving Motivators exercise you need to download this PDF, print the results on sturdy paper, and cut out the cards.

1st Step: Important to You

In the first part of the exercise you determine which motivators are most important to you. You do this by ordering the cards from the left (least important) to the right (most important).

It appears that the results vary strongly among players. For example, Freedom turns out to be the most important motivator for me, and Order is the least important. But for my friends the results turned out to be quite different.

2nd Step: Effects of Change

In the second part of the exercise you consider a change in your work life, such as an Agile transformation, a relocation, a new project, or a new job. You then determine how that change affects your motivators. If the change is positive, you move the card up. If the change is negative, you move the card down.

You will probably see that organizational changes have a different impact on different motivators. Perhaps the Agile transformation of your team makes your Curiosity card go up, but your Competence card may (temporarily) go down. Or the new job you applied for will increase your Status while at the same time it may decrease your Relatedness.

3rd Step: Reflection on Motivation

The Moving Motivators exercise reveals the effect of an organizational change on your motivators. When most of the important motivators go down, or when only the least important ones go up, you may realize that you have some work to do on your own motivation.

The exercise is particularly interesting for team managers (possibly to be performed with people in private one-on-one situations). It allows managers to find out what motivates their team members, and how an organizational change is affecting them. The exercise may give better insights than a regular conversation.

And it’s more fun too!

p.s. The Moving Motivators exercise is new. Please report your findings and possible improvements!

People Motivation: Target Intrinsic Desires

In some earlier blog posts I wrote that intrinsic motivation is preferred over extrinsic motivation. Nothing new there, I’m sure. But what is intrinsic motivation? Well, let’s investigate, starting with Self-determination theory.

Self-determination theory is a general model of intrinsic motivation that differentiates between three main intrinsic needs. These needs are universal, innate, and psychological:

• Competence: This is the need for a person to experience oneself as capable in coping with the environment;
• Autonomy: This is the need for someone to actively participate in determining ones own behavior, with autonomous choice of actions;
• Relatedness: This is the need to care for and be related to others, and to be involved in the social world.

Another theory was proposed by Professor Steven Reiss. He found that 16 basic desires guide nearly all human behaviors:

Acceptance, the need for approval	Physical Activity, or exercise
Curiosity, the need to think	Power, the need for influence of will
Eating, the need for food	Romance, the need for love and sex
Family, the need to raise children	Saving, the need to collect
Honor, being loyal to a group	Social Contact, the need for friends
Idealism, the need for social justice	Status, the need for social standing
Independence, being an individual	Tranquility, the need to be safe
Order, or stable environments	Vengeance, the need to strike back

I know that some businesses are quite adept at providing opportunities for eating, sex, and vengeance, but I would prefer to focus on some of the other innate human desires. I believe a number of these can be directly targeted by managers:

1. Make sure that people feel competent at what they are doing. Give them work that challenges their abilities, but that is still within their grasp.
2. Make people feel accepted by you and the group. Compliment them on their achievements.
3. Make sure that their curiosity is being addressed. Even though some activities can be boring, there should always be something new for them to investigate.
4. Give people a chance at satisfying their honor. You must allow teams to make their own rules, which team members will follow happily (or sometimes grudgingly).
5. Infuse the business with some idealism. You’re not just there to make money. You’re also making a (small) contribution to the world as a better place to live in.
6. Foster people’s independence (autonomy). Allow them to be different from other people, with their own tasks and responsibilities. And compliment them on their very original and interesting hair style.
7. Make sure that some level of order is maintained in the organization. People work better when they can rely on some (minimal) company rules and policies.
8. Make sure that people have some power or influence over what’s happening around them. Listen to what they have to say and help them in making those things happen.
9. Create the right environment for social contacts (relatedness) to emerge. There’s usually no need to venture into the romance area, but friendships can easily arise, provided that managers take care of a fertile context.
10. Finally, it is important for people to feel that they have some status in the organization. They shouldn’t feel like dangling somewhere at the bottom of a big hierarchy.

You can make it a regular activity to review all ten items on this list, and remind yourself that you need to do something about one thing or another. Such tasks typically fall in the important-but-not-urgent range, meaning that it is easy to forget about them.

Also, when there is a need to improve people's motivation, review this list and try to come up with things that address some of their basic desires. In the long run it will help you much more than a salary raise.

(images by woodleywonderworks and whatmegsaid)

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The Open Space Policy for Managers

One of the management concepts I dislike the most, is the Open Door Policy. The idea of this policy is that every manager’s door is open to all employees, and each of them is encouraged to have open discussions with any manager; and not just at the next management level, but at all management levels.

I dislike this policy, for three reasons.

The first thing it communicates is that managers have a door, and ordinary employees don’t. Have you ever heard of an Open Door Policy for ordinary workers? I haven’t. Apparently, top management thinks that normal employees have less need for privacy than managers do. A door emphasizes a separation, even when it is open.

The second thing it communicates is that it is OK for employees to ignore their own manager, and to discuss and negotiate matters with the superiors of their superiors. The policy encourages people to skip nodes in the line of command (both upwards and downwards). They can circumvent people with a strong opinion, and deal with the ones who are more pliable, and who often lack the context to make proper decisions.

The third thing it communicates is that, at any time, employees can peek in the top manager’s private room, and see his personal secretary, mahogany desk, private Nespresso coffee machine, and titanium golf clubs.

I think the Open Door Policy communicates and emphasizes distance, while organizations are better off emphasizing closeness and togetherness.

We need a different policy, one that emphasizes that managers should not be separated from other kinds of employees.

I prefer to have a desk somewhere among our teams. It is the same kind of desk that they have, with the same kind of stone-age-workstation. And I drink the same miserable goo that is being passed off as coffee. I appreciate that important decisions (like architecture and interface choices) are shared with me before people make them final. Which is why I do the same: I ask people for feedback on stuff like brand names, logo designs, company rules, and tool selection, before I make the decisions.

I want to suggest that we call this approach the Open Space Policy. In an open space you share the same air, and the same rules. It doesn’t mean there needs to be a physical open space (though it can help). But it communicates that everyone is in it together. We’re the same kind of people. We just have different jobs, with different responsibilities. And I would leave my Nespresso coffee machine at home. If I had one.

(picture by basykes)

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The Do-It-Yourself Team Values Kit

Agile principles, Lean principles, Scrum values, XP values…

Anyone who wants to guide and motivate a software development team seems to come up with his own set of standard values or principles. But I believe that every project is different, and every team need its own customized value system.

I hereby give you the Do-It-Yourself Team Values Kit. Now you can create your own set of values. The idea is simple, and it works like this:

1. Print the Big List of 50 Virtues (see below) and give a copy to each of your development team members. (Note: the “standard” agile/lean/Scrum/XP values are printed in bold letters.)
2. Tell your team that, together, they must select five virtues from this list. These must be the virtues that they consider to be the most important, given their current project, situation, and personalities. They can be five standard agile values, but they can also select some other ones.
3. Do exactly the same with the stakeholders outside the team (functional managers, users, etc.). Get a representative number of them together and select five items that the stakeholders think would be the most important values for the project.
4. Then get together with the team and compare the two lists, which must have been created independently. You should now have a list of values selected by the system (the team), and a list of values selected by the environment (the stakeholders).
5. Most selected virtues will probably be different, but some choices could be the same, or very similar. It is likely that the environment and the system itself have different views on what’s important. Talk about the mutual expectations, until you reach consensus on a merged list of five to nine values (“seven plus or minus two”).
6. You now have agreed on the final team values. Make them clear to all team members and stakeholders, by displaying them on posters, mugs, task boards, coffee machines, screen savers, and lunch menus.

The Big List of 50 Virtues (seven traditional agile values are printed bold)

Accuracy	Creativity	Honesty	Persistence	Simplicity
Assertiveness	Curiosity	Humor	Pragmatism	Skill
Aesthetics	Decisiveness	Industriousness	Purposefulness	Stewardship
Balance	Determination	Initiative	Rationality	Tactfulness
Caution	Endurance	Integrity	Reliability	Thoroughness
Cleanliness	Enthusiasm	Joyfulness	Resilience	Tolerance
Commitment	Excellence	Knowledge	Respect	Trust
Confidence	Flexibility	Mindfulness	Responsibility	Trustworthiness
Cooperation	Focus	Openness	Self-discipline	Unity
Courage	Helpfulness	Orderliness	Service	Vision

The Big List of 50 Virtues was extracted from the Wisdom Commons web site, where you can find many more virtues, applicable to everyday work and life. Of course, teams are free to augment the list with other virtues that they consider essential.

A good list of team values originates from the team and its environment. Many initiatives for “company values” fail because they are devised by top management and imposed on the work floor, and because they do not take into account that different teams may need different values. For example: a creative team may need some more decisiveness, while a pragmatic team could be in need of a bit more cleanliness.

The Big List of 50 Virtues also gives people a chance to introduce some items that are often forgotten by the standard agile value lists, like the values for craftsmanship (excellence, skill, and self-discipline).

Each team must practice their self-organizing capability by devising their own method to reach consensus on their five values. As a manager you should not tell them how to do it. Only communicate that you expect them to agree on their final set of five virtues. Then close the door, and wait…

And consensus with management (the environment) on the merged list is vital. The team is embedded in an organization, and therefore it much reach consensus with the organization on the final set of team values.

Finally, teams change, projects change, and organizations change. This could necessitate that you re-do this exercise once in a while. Teams cannot focus on too many team values at the same time. After having practiced certain values for some time, it might be wise to re-focus on other ones.

Note: When you’ve tried this approach and came up with your own value system, please share the results with the readers of this blog. Tell us about your experiences!

(picture by Foxtongue)

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Only People Are Qualified for Control

In any software project only people are capable of accumulating knowledge and exhibiting creativity, and only people have the ability to initiate interaction.

But there is a third reason for people being the center of attention in agile software development. It has to do with the Law of Requisite Variety:

If a system is to be stable the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.

- The Law of Requisite Variety (W. Ross Ashby)

Simply put, this law states that a system can only be controlled by another system when the other system is just as complex as, or more complex than, the first one.

People are the most complex elements in any software project. This makes them best qualified to directly control their own projects, as people are the only systems with sufficient complexity to deal with the variety of states that they are confronted with.

Neither documented processes, nor code generators, nor company rules, nor project management tools, nor the most exquisite up-front designs, can ever hope to have the amount of complexity that any ordinary software project possesses. Processes, tools and designs cannot outperform their masters. Without people, they are useless.

The Law of Requisite Variety makes it quite clear that, if some level of control is needed in a project (Mike Cohn called it micromanagement by the team), then you better select people as the control mechanisms. They are the only ones complex enough to actually pull it off.

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Innovation is the Key to Survival

In the western world, and in any other competitive environment, innovation is the key to survival. It is a matter of life and death for companies around the world. Knowledge-creating organizations (including software development organizations) should be focused primarily on innovation, wrote Professor Ikujiro Nonaka in The Knowledge Creating Company.

Well, isn’t that a coincidence…

Innovation happens to be a concept that finds itself at the very heart of my favorite topic: complexity science. Researchers found that complex adaptive systems actively seek a position between order and chaos, because innovation and adaptation are maximized when systems find themselves at “the edge of chaos”.

The world’s biosphere came up with innovations like the White-faced Saki Monkey, the Star-nosed Mole, the Pinky Fairy Armadillo, the Aye-Aye, the Frill-necked Lizard, and the Dumbo Octopus. And of course, poodles (which proves that complexity has a crazy sense of humor). They say that complexity --that interesting state between order and chaos-- is the root of all innovation, in physics, biology, psychology, and beyond. Only that which is complex can innovate and adapt.

Innovation is a typical bottom-up phenomenon. Publications like Complexity and Innovation in Organizations, and Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change emphasize that innovation is doomed to fail when launched by upper management as top-down programs of "special" people, assigned with the difficult task of inventing something new. This approach reflects a causal deterministic view of trying to take charge of what’s going to happen in the future. It usually doesn’t work.

The complex systems approach says that innovation is not a planned result, but an emergent result. Innovation just happens in self-organizing teams. But, for things to emerge there has to be something to emerge out of. And the key ingredients for innovation are: knowledge, creativity, motivation, diversity, and personality.

More about this in future blog posts...

(image by spigoo)

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The Three Phases of Creativity

A little background reading on creativity made me find the article Definitions of Creativity, by Arthur J. Cropley, which provides interesting material on this topic.

Cropley writes that there are three phases of creativity:

• Preconventional creativity is the kind of creativity commonly exhibited by children younger than 6-8 years old. It is mainly formed using visual perception, and it involves spontaneity, emotional involvement, and sometimes the repainting of a child’s bedroom walls.
• Conventional creativity is the second phase of creativity. It is often found in children between 6-8 and 10-12 years old, and it involves actual thinking, but this is dominated by constraints and conventions that are imposed by the child’s skills that are being developed.
• Postconventional creativity is the third and last phase, and it is found in children older than 10-12 years, and in adults. In this phase people are able to produce new things despite knowing what the constraints and conventional approaches are. It often involves novelty, and angry responses from other people.

The important difference between preconventional and postconventional creativity is that small children produce novelty because they are ignorant of the constraints, while adults can produce novelty despite knowing the constraints. For example: my first printed publication as a 4-year old child was a marriage card I designed for my kindergarten teacher:

drawing made when I was 4 years old

My preconventional creativity made me depict my teacher about five times as big as her new husband (maybe because, in my mind, she was about five times more important). Later, in my conventional creative phase, I learned to draw humans in more reasonable shapes and sizes:

drawing made when I was 7 years old

But much later, when I was a student, my talents had entered the postconventional phase, and my drawings reverted to the same distortions I had unknowingly experimented with when I was four years old. Only this time it was intentional:

drawing made when I was 19 years old

(Yes, there is something about me and big women, or thin men. I'm sure some psychologist can explain it to me.)

I believe the three phases of creative thinking are a useful tool, but I don’t believe they have anything to do with the minds of children. Let me explain this with another example: In the old days of Windows 3.1, before the Internet and the availability of huge amounts of design information, I once showed a friend of mine some printed pages of text I had created using a cool font. I told him I had somehow lost the font and was unable to find it. My friend, who was blissfully ignorant of anything related to computers, looked strangely at the printed text, and he said he didn’t understand my problem. “But you have the font on paper here,” he said. “Yes,” I answered, “but it’s not in my computer.” At this he replied with a puzzled look: “But yesterday you showed me your new scanner. Why don’t you scan the font back into the computer?”

The three-phase approach to creativity applies to everyone, adult or not, who is not familiar with the constraints of a certain problem domain. Anyone of us can be naïve and ignorant, and all of us are able to come up with ideas that are too far-fetched to be considered by experienced people whose creative thinking takes place in the conventional phase. The idea of scanning a font from printed paper into a computer was a very original and creative solution, for someone who is too ignorant to understand that it is also a ridiculous idea. As a software developer, locked in the conventional phase, I couldn’t have imagined this even if I wanted to.

The problem with knowledge is that, at first, it constrains people’s views of the world. They lose their childlike and uninhibited talent to make ridiculous connections between unrelated things. The challenge is to regain that talent by moving to the phase of postconventional creativity, which enables a person to be as imaginative as a child, but with the knowledge of what the real constraints are. Only then can they achieve the highest levels of creativity, and make drawings that are even more bizarre than mine.

In many organizations employees get stuck in the conventional creative phase. They aren’t being challenged to get to the next level. It is a manager’s job to make sure that employees advance to the level of postconventional creativity, for the sake of innovation, and organizational survival.

(photo by benimoto)

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Rehire Every Employee, Every Day

Two years ago my partner and I bought three small (but expensive) olive trees for our roof terrace. We carefully planted the trees in very big (and even more expensive) steel bowls, and we gave them the best soil and nutrients our money could buy.

Each of the bloody trees died within a year.

As a gardener, you need to make sure that plants and trees you select for a garden match the environment they need to grow in. It turned out our olive trees (and the steel bowls we planted them in) were not able to cope with the extensive rain showers in our country. The trees simply drowned.

In his book Good to Great Jim Collins listed The Right People First as one of the main principles for growing great companies. Not every tree is a good match for a roof terrace in Holland. And not every person is a good match for your business environment. When selecting people for your organization you carefully need to pick the right ones. Giving people the best office space, proper tools, cool projects, and a weekly massage, is not enough. If they're not the right people the environment will drown them. And when their performance is bad, it doesn't mean they are bad employees. It means the match just didn't work out, and they are probably better off elsewhere.

But what if the match was good, and the environment changes?

What if there's a financial crisis, and the business environment changes dramatically? What if customers suddenly require small economical cars, instead of big expensive ones? What if customers suddenly require small projects with fixed price contracts, instead of big projects on a time/material basis? What if customers reduce the size of the carrot, while enlarging the size of the stick? When the business changes, the organization needs to change, and the people in it too.

And some people might not be able to...

The principle of selecting the right people already gets sufficient attention in your recruitment efforts. Right? But have you also implemented the principle of retaining the right people? The people you hired yesterday, may not be the ones you would hire today. Yes, you have to educate and train them, and give them the opportunity to change. But that might not be enough when trying to match people with a changed business environment. As a manager, you must think as if you are rehiring every employee, every day.

Growing a business means the right people first, and the right people next.

Re-organizing teams and departments, changing accountability, and changing job descriptions, will have an effect on employees. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Some people can decide to leave the organization, making room for others with a better match. Other people may have to be fired, when they don't change and don't leave. Performance that was OK yesterday, may not be acceptable tomorrow. It is even possible that, while firing some people, you have to hire others, only because they offer a better match in the new environment. (And that won't make it any easier for the ones that are leaving...)

Did I ever tell you management is fun?

I never liked management. And I never liked gardening. The big expensive steel bowls on our roof terrace are now empty. Some climate reports on global warming say that our country will have more of a Mediterranean climate in the near future. Environmental change is on the way. I'm looking forward to it. One day we will buy ourselves three new olive trees.

(pictures by C'est moi and coda)

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