A lot of organizations I’ve worked with have said that they think adopting agile practices requires a tremendous amount of discipline for teams to be successful. I’ve thought about that a lot and I’m not sure I agree. Actually, it’s more that I don’t like the word discipline. Usually, when people refer to discipline in terms of successfully implementing agile practices, they mean the self-discipline of team members. Looking up self-discipline on Wikipedia, here’s what I found:

Self-discipline refers to the training that one gives one’s self to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behaviour, even though one would really rather be doing something else.

Now, I don’t know about you, but applying that type of discipline to anything, be it agile practices or riding your bike, doesn’t seem like a way to ensure long-term success.

Actually, what I think makes agile teams successful in the long-term is motivation. Motivation is very different from discipline. Organizations try so many different tactics to motivate others and themselves and continually fail. I think it’s because they overcomplicate what motivation is. I think if you boil it down to it’s essentials, in order to truly motivate yourself or others, you can do two simple things:

1. Make it enjoyable
2. Use positive public pressure

I believe that at its core, agile practices embrace and promote both of these tactics. First, make it enjoyable. In life, and in agile, find the enjoyable parts of what you are doing and focus on those. If you’re on an agile team doing iteration planning, agile encourages you to select your own tasking for the next iteration. People will naturally gravitate toward tasks they enjoy. Take advantage of this natural tendency to ensure that your entire team is enjoying what they are doing over the next iteration…and the next…and the next. Continuous enjoyment. When was the last time you thought about your work that way. You can make it happen.

Second, use positive public pressure. Many people see pressure as a bad thing, and it is when used incorrectly. Positive public pressure is a good thing. It’s committing publicly to achieve a goal. But this public pressure of commitment has to be tempered so as not to become harmful to the team or the individuals. The pressure and commitment has to be kept at a high enough intensity level to motivate but low enough not to burn anyone out. In addition to inviting public pressure, regularly reporting on your progress toward your public commitment keeps others updated on your progress and keeps your commitment at the top of your thinking. These practices enforce positive public pressure and really help motivate. Agile embraces this concept wholeheartedly. Teams publicly commit to each other and their organizations and stakeholders to complete a set amount of work in a short iteration. Then, on a daily basis, they report to each other on their progress. They also have the additional public pressure of having to demonstrate their completed work to their organization and stakeholders at the completion of each iteration.

I believe that when used together, enjoyment and positive public pressure can be used to motivate teams into becoming highly productive. People are enjoying their work and making their own public commitments that they can sustain iteration over iteration. They are not relegating themselves to someone else’s tasking or commitments, and that, I think, is the key to this motivational strategy. The result is happier, more productive teams with a very low burnout rate.

One of the books I’ve been reading and re-reading over the past few weeks is The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam. It’s an amazing book about solving problems and selling ideas with pictures…SIMPLE pictures. I love it, because really, you don’t need to know how to draw to communicate or think visually with the kinds of pictures Dan Roam is writing about. I’ve been trying to find a good way of using the simple ideas presented in this book for classroom training and presentations.

Then, I came across a story I heard on America Public Media’s Marketplace on NPR during my drive home about the current economic crisis and collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s). In the segment, Paddy Hirsch described what CDO’s are and how they are playing a key role in the current economic meltdown. I went to the Marketplace website to see his “presentation” and had an a-ha moment. I think that this is possibly one of the best presentations I’ve seen in a long time…completely analog, built on the fly, and with super simple pictures to illustrate the point. No PowerPoint…just a whiteboard. Check out the video:

If you liked that presentation, Marketplace posted a new video today of Paddy untangling credit default swaps (CDS). Really great stuff, an amazing, simple way of presenting complex financial babble that most of us (including myself) have never understood. So, here’s Part Deux of the Crisis Explainer:

So, your company is trying to decide whether or not it needs a presence in the social media space. But you’re really not sure if your customers (or potential customers) want you or need you to be involved in the social media arena. Well, maybe the results of a recent survey from The 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study will help you decide what to do. The study presents the findings of an online survey conducted September 11-12, 2008 by Opinion Research Corporation among 1,092 adults comprising 525 men and 567 women 18 years of age and older. The survey focussed on how Americans use or expect to use social media to interact with businesses. Here are some of the key results:

• 60% of those surveyed interact with companies using social media

Of those 60%:

• 93% say a company should have a presence in social media
• 85% say a company should not only be present but also interact with its customers via social media
• 56% say they feel a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment
• 43% say companies should use social networks to solve customers’ problems
• 41% say companies should use social media to solicit feedback about products and services

Now, granted, this is an online survey, so the results may be a bit skewed. There is probably still a large population out there who have no idea what Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn even is (much less participate in online surveys). In fact, here’s a great post from Chris Brogan about keeping it real with real people (who aren’t geeks like us). But for those of your customers who are connected, you can’t afford to ignore the numbers uncovered by Cone in their study.

And, if you’re looking to start using social media in your marketing and PR efforts, HubSpot has a free webinar this week on How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR. Here are the details:

Date: Friday, October 10, 2008

Time: 2PM EDT (GMT-4)

Duration: 1 Hour

Register here

I just don’t understand what’s going these days with the Microsoft marketing team. Their latest ad “I’m a PC” is looking desperate. Let’s face it, Apple played the Cool Mac user card very well. Their ads Mac vs. PC went over really well and have made a definite impact. Now, Microsoft has decided to play the “We’re cool too” game. It doesn’t make sense. Instead of saying we’re not Mac, we’re better, we’re different, we’re unique, you want to be a Windows user, they’re going out their way to say “We’re just like a Mac, we’re cool too”.

It’s playing catch up and it’s getting annoying. I mean really, Apple users thought Apple was cool before the Mac ads played. The ads reinforced their own beliefs and those of PC users. Windows was never seen as cool, or dare I say the maverick word. No matter how loud they scream “We’re cool”, people still see them as the mainstream, the norm, the establishment. Why not embrace what they are and talk about that? We’re the best, we’re here and we’re great. I don’t get it. Sorry for the rant today, but I saw the ad yesterday and it just hit me as odd.

I’ve been reading a great book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. It’s not a book about business, agile, marketing, scrum, branding or anything else that I usually write about. Instead, it’s a memoir written by a great novelist about running and training for marathons. But, there was an interesting passage that I think really applies to agile teams (or anyone for that matter). It’s about finding and setting the right pace for sustainability. Here’s Murakami on sustainable pace:

"Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write no more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemmingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed - and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage."