January 2018 – John Yorke

I am continually fascinated by the notion of self-organising teams, how they motivate themselves and how you can create an environment that is conducive to self-motivation.

Unfortunately my experience is that self-management works for the minority and is highly rewarding and highly effective, but it does not work for all. Bystander Syndrome is prevalent and too often the plants do not get watered. Why don’t developers water the plants?

So, recently I ran an experiment and discussion on the general low involvement and engagement of extra-curricular activities. In particular events that are considered to be core to the effective working of the company but are not explicitly part of your core objectives.

The premise of the experiment is that we have become more focused on benefit to ourselves or benefit to our local teams, rather than the benefit to the wider organisation.

For those out there ready to point out that an experiment requiring voluntary attendance already excludes those that are more focused on themselves – you got me!
I stacked the deck in favour of the more social minded of the organisation.

Some examples:

Our organisation is very much built around self-organisation and we are expected to manage our own time and priorities.  However, we have a number of activities that are ‘global’ in scope: some where the time spent is voluntary and expected to be worked above and around billable time.  Or facilitating other team’s retrospectives which is billable time but can conflict with your primary team priorities. Even our Guilds, which are groups of people based around a single focus or competency have an implied ongoing commitment to attend regularly.  Finally, “Lunch and Learns” or bookclubs where there is opportunity to share ideas and learn from colleagues, which is a core cultural goal of the organisation but is done as part of your personal development and on your own time.

All of these activities could be considered to be valuable to the organisation and in most cases to you personally (directly or indirectly), but all require an investment of time and effort. My observation is that in many cases the involvement is diminishing either proportionally or absolutely as we grow. Attendance at lunchtime events seems to be diminishing, involvement in volunteer groups like guilds is a challenge to the organisers and maintaining membership is probably the number one challenge.

The goal of the discussion was to identify ideas for how we maintain or stimulate these activities and how to involve a wider audience, preferably without putting a greater burden on a few (and often the same few people), and without directing people to attend, which is counter to our culture.

We played a game loosely based on the ‘Public Good Game’ We set up two relatively large groups. All participants were given $10 each and the game is played in rounds. Each round players can contribute as much or as little as they like to ‘a pot’ but the total contributions will be combined and then a pre-determined bonus would be added to it. One team got a 30% bonus the other team a 40% bonus.