Is it too much to ask that people show up to meetings on time? Is it too much to ask that software developers care about craft? Is it too much to ask for an honest politician? Is it too much to ask that drivers drive as if they were sharing the road? Is it too much to ask that immigrants learn how to speak English?
Here’s how to tell whether you’re asking too much: How do you feel when you don’t get it?
CommentsYou can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. This proverb has always puzzled me. People say it as a lament, as if it’s frustrating that you can’t make a horse drink water.
CommentsI’ve been invited to be a guest presenter at this year’s Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference (AYE). I’m honored to join the AYE hosts and the other guest presenters, all of whom I’ve known and admired for years.
CommentsI’d like your help to help guide my energy as I write during October. I’m more motivated when I know I’m writing about something that real people care about. So I’d like to know What questions do you have about resistance?
CommentsRead my latest article “Rewriting the Story of Resistance” on the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference web site.
Also check out the articles by the other presenters, and the AYE wiki that hosts an ongoing conversation for AYE enthusiasts.
CommentsMotivation consists of three elements:
When we’re deciding whether to do an action, we evaluate all three of these elements, often intuitively or unconsciously. The end result—our motivation for or against the action—comes from a combination of these elements. I will do anything if:
Each factors is important. If I am certain that I will not be able to do a given action, I will be less likely to try, even though I would enjoy succeeding. If I have no idea what might happen, I will be less likely to try, even if I believe I am able. If I don’t want the results I expect, I will be less likely to do the action, even if I believe I am able. Motivation combines these factors in a manner akin to multiplication:
Motivation = Ability × Results × Preferences
Don’t take this “equation” seriously as being mathematically precise. I use it only as a handy summary of my Motivation Model. Each factor (confidence in ability, certainty about what will happen, strength of preference) can be high or low. If any factor is near zero, motivation will be low. And preferences have not only magnitude but also valence (or sign)—we may be attracted to a given result (positive valence) or averse to it (negative valence).
This model may seem at first blush to oversimplify the complex concept of motivation. In describing the model, I’m not ignoring that complexity so much as summarizing it. To explore the hidden richness of the model, pick one of the factors and expand it. What factors influence a person’s expectations about whether they are able to do a given action? What factors influence a person’s cause-and-effect expectations about the results of a given action? What factors affect a person’s preferences? (For my partial answer to the question about preferences, see my article “The Structure of Values.”)
I’ve found this model very helpful in a number of ways. The most important is that it helps me to explore my own motivation. If I find myself avoiding some task that I wish I would do, I can quickly check which element is missing. Am I able to do the task? What would happen if I tried? Which of those results do I want? Which do I not want? My answers usually give me a hint about how I can motivate myself. Sometimes my answers tell me that I really don’t want to do the task after all. In those cases, I stop trying to motivate myself (which is a perfectly fine result).
I also use this Motivation Model as I try to understand other people’s reasons for their actions (or inactions). The model is one of the foundations of my work on resistance. For details, see my article “Resistance as a Resource,” especially the section called “The First Factor: Expectations”. (If I were writing the article today, I would call that section “The First Factor: Motivation.”)
I developed this Motivation Model about 10 years ago, as I began to study resistence in earnest. Not long after I first formulated the model, I discovered that many other people had already described very similar models. You can read about some of those models in Edward Lawler’s book Motivation in Work Organizations.
CommentsHere’s a new game I’ve invented, called
The Resistance as a Resource Game.
Objective. To create, learn, remember, and express ideas about how to respond to resistance.
Where to Play. The game can be played anywhere that ideas can be posted, such as mailing lists, electronic forums, and conference rooms with walls, white boards, or flip charts.
Players. Any number of players can play.
Turns. It is always your turn.
Moves. There are four kinds of moves:
Virginia Satir once said, “People prefer familiarity to comfort.”
In a recent conversation on the Extreme Programming mailing list, that phrase came up. Alistair Cockburn, an influential change agent in the software development industry, said, “I don’t know about you, but that phrase, besides ringing true, frightens the bejeebers out of me.”
My initial reaction was that it doesn’t frighten me at all. But given how frequently I advocate one change or another, I wasn’t sure why it didn’t frighten me. So I pondered.
I think it doesn’t frighten me because my persuasion style includes ways to make change familiar to people. I never thought about the things I do in those terms until I read Alistair’s message, but as I look at how I encourage change, much of it is about making the unfamiliar familiar.
For example, an HR executive named Susan once sought my help with some resistance she was encountering. I asked her a few simple questions, and that was all she needed from me. Though I wasn’t advocating any particular change in that situation, my questions had the effect of framing Susan’s problem so that it was suddenly very familiar to her. And once the problem became familiar, she knew exactly how to solve it.
Another example: Paul, an executive at a company that builds people’s dream houses, wanted my help with a customer relations problem. As I talked with Paul about the situation, he suddenly realized how he could solve the problem. As I look at that story now, I see that Paul’s epiphany was largely a result of casting his customer relations issue in a familiar light. Once the problem was familiar, he knew what to do.
In those examples, though I wasn’t advocating any particular change, familiarity played a key role in the changes my clients made.
When I’m promoting change, I do a number of things that have the effect of making change familiar. For example, I often work hard to find safe ways for people to try whatever I’m advocating. A small demonstration, maybe, or a “toy” situation to practice on, where failure doesn’t matter. Making it safe for people to try the new idea in a small way invites them to get a teeny tiny bit of experience, from which the new idea becomes a teeny tiny bit more familiar.
Also, I often tell stories, like the ones I linked to above, which can help to make new ideas more familiar.
I suspect that much of my persuasion style is about familiarity, though I never thought about it that way until recently. This gives me an idea for becoming a more effective change artist: What if I attend purposefully to familiarity, and the ways in which familiarity influences the way people respond to change? What new ideas does that give me for how to encourage change, and how to respond to resistance?
CommentsHere are some of the ways I may gain value from any given activity:
Any activity that I choose to do is probably providing one or more of these kinds of value. Any activity that other people are doing is probably providing one or more of these kinds of value. If I want to persuade people to change what they’re doing, I will probably need to take those sources of value into account:
I often see project teams, as they define the requirements for the project, use the words “want” and “need” to sort essential requirements from nonessential. The needs are the essential requirements, critical to project success, and the wants are non-essential. If we find out that we can’t satisfy all of the requirements, we’ll jettison some of the wants and focus on the needs.
This simple distinction between wants and needs has the advantage of allowing speedy triage. We gain that speed by trusting the unexamined and risky assumption that needs are more important than wants.
But hold on… The risky assumption that needs are more important than wants? Needs are more important than wants. Aren’t they?
Sort of. Most of the time. Often enough to lull us into believing that “needs versus wants” is a good way to sort requirements.
Labeling requirements simply as wants or needs hides at least as much information as it expresses. Each requirement, whether we call it a need or a want, is a value. Like any value, a requirement gains its importance through a rich web of beliefs and values called a Value Hierarchy. When we quickly label requirements as wants or needs, and quickly sort the requirements under the assumption that needs are obviously more important than wants, we leave unexplored the rich web of beliefs and values that motivates the requirements in the first place. If we act on requirements without testing the underlying beliefs and values, we increase our danger of solving the wrong problem, and of wasting precious time, money, and attention.
What leads us to think of needs as more important than wants? To explain that, I’ll need to describe how I think about wants and needs.
In their noun forms, the words want and value mean the same thing: a condition that we desire. Wants, then, are organized into Value Hierarchies — each want becomes a want precisely because we believe it leads to some other condition that we desire even more. Each want is a means to an end.
I see needs as special kinds of desired conditions — that is, as special kinds of wants. Like other wants, each need is a means to some more important end. What distinguishes needs from other wants is that a need implies necessity, our belief that the means is necessary if we are to achieve the end. If I want to attend a conference in Boston, I need to go to Boston. Given my desire to attend the conference, going to Boston becomes a need.
Not all wants are needs. If I want to go to Boston, I might choose buy an airplane ticket. But I don’t need to buy a plane ticket. I could instead travel to Boston by car or by train. Buying a ticket is a possible means to the end, but not a necessary means. So buying a plane ticket is a want, but not a need.
A need, then, is made up of three elements:
It’s the third element, the element of necessity, that distinguishes needs from other wants. And it’s that additional element that leads us to consider needs more important than other wants.
So now I’ve shown that needs are more important than wants, right? Well, yes, with important conditions: A need is more important than a want if the value underlying the need is more important than the value underlying the want, and if the beliefs underlying the need are reliable. Those conditions are important. If we lull ourselves into believing that all needs are (obviously) more important than wants, we forget to test the underlying values and beliefs. And sometimes those values and beliefs don’t hold up under scrutiny.
If we’re going to claim that this requirement is more important than that one, we owe it to ourselves to explicitly test the values and beliefs by which we assign the requirements their importance.
What can happen if we choose to leave those beliefs and values tacit? Here’s an example of a time when I focused so much on something I thought I needed that I didn’t bother to ask myself what problem I was solving.
I was writing a conference paper about resistance, and I kept referring to “the person you are asking to change.” I got tired of writing that, and it seemed like an awkward phrase to repeat so often. I tried the word “client,” but that didn’t seem quite right. So I wrote to a group of writer friends, and said, “I need a better word.” They offered lots of ideas, but I wasn’t entirely happy with any of them. (I was happy that nobody suggested the word “target,” a metaphor that I do not want to promote.)
Finally, Jerry Weinberg said, “What’s wrong with ‘person’?”
I tried “person,” and it fit nicely in some places, and awkwardly in others. I was stumped. So I asked myself, “What is wrong with ‘person’? What am I trying to do here? What problem am I trying to solve with a better word?”
As I looked closer at what I was writing, I noticed that the reason I was repeating “the person you are asking to change” so often was that I was trying to avoid the awkward “him or her.” Aha! My real goal was to find words that were both gender-inclusive and graceful. By focusing so intently on my “need” for a better word, I had distracted myself from discovering my real goal, the deeper value. Once I realized that my real goal was to find graceful gender-inclusive terms, I solve the problem easily.
I think you’ll agree that this example is relatively harmless. I wasted a few hours of my time, and perhaps a few hours of my friends’ time. Not a major disaster.
But what if something similar happens on your projects, on your requirements? What if the deeper need behind some “critical” requirement turns out not to be very important after all? What if the requirement will not really satisfy the underlying need? What if there are better ways to satisfy the underlying need? What if you discover these problems only after you spend precious time, money, and attention to implement the requirement?
Don’t let your need to quickly sort requirements distract you from understanding the requirements more fully. Take the time — especially for the requirements that you are sure are “needs” — to test your underlying beliefs and values. What underlying value motivates this requirement? Will implementing this requirement really satisfy the underlying value? What makes us think so? Is this requirement necessary, or might there be simpler, less costly ways to satisfy the underlying need?
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