Purpose is the P in RAMPS. Purpose as motivator is about the sense an individual has that she’s contributing to a greater mission shared by many. Both attributes matter: mission must be of a higher order than any individual’s whim, & it must be felt to be shared by the whole team. Purpose is really […]
Purpose As Motivator: The P in RAMPS Read More »
Rhythm is the R in RAMPS. Let’s take a look. Rhythm is about tension & release. It is the sense one has of readying, girding, coiling, then taking that stored energy & sending it out. We’ll get to music in a second, tho maybe in a way that will surprise you. But let’s start with
Rhythm as Urgency: The R in RAMPS Read More »
Let’s do Safety, the S in the recent RAMPS as motivational force series. Safety is hard to get at in one summary sentence, but i’ll try. Safety is the sense we have that we belong: that we’re trusted, valued-in-spite-of, inside a team that welcomes our strange unruly selves. At its simplest, this sense manifests as
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Let’s talk about the A from RAMPS today: Autonomy. Autonomy is "simple not easy," just like the rest of the motivating forces. Autonomy is the sense of an individual that she is free to work the best way she knows how to achieve the tasks in front of her. We call self-driving cars "autonomous". We
Autonomy: How Freedom Correlates To Urgency Read More »
Let’s talk a little about mastery today, in the sense of the RAMPS conversation from yesterday. What is mastery-as-motivator, and what can we do about increasing its motivational force? As I said before, the motivational force called mastery is about how humans value their own growth. All of us carry around an idea, implicit or
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A very common question: managers turn to me and say, "My team lacks a sense of urgency, how can I give them one?" After I get over the snarky replies — I come from a long line of "the managed" — I do have what I think is an answer: "Study the idea of RAMPS,
A Sense Of Urgency: RAMPS As A Motivation Model Read More »
So, a friend asked me to say more about "not pairing". As so often, it triggered me to muse. Sometimes I need to not pair. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pairing. I love it for three reasons. It makes me a better geek. That is, I learn from pairing. Pairing makes two geeks
When I Need to Not Pair Read More »
I am done with "technical debt" as a useful concept. As so often happens, an appealing idea happened, one with useful connections to the concrete, and we took it and ran with it. Unfortunately, that idea has more appeal than it does decision-making value. Folks justify the most ridiculous nonsense and put it under the
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There’s a lot of internet out there about meetings. Sturgeon’s law applies here. There’s some good advice, tho, too. Where I come from’s different. What I see, as with so many other topics, is how hard we try to fix problems our assumptions created. There are a lot different ends to which folks want to
Optimize Collaboration, Not Meetings Read More »
I find 4 major failings in both how & what we teach in geekery. We mostly don’t. That is, actual teaching of actual geekery-for-a-living is almost non-existent. We suffer in attitude & content & structure from the trivially flawed “information transfer” view of what teaching & learning is. We purport to more knowledge than we
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