Scrum & Influencing Part 3 - Engage All Sources of Influence - Personal Level

Post date: Aug 18, 2013 10:55:10 AM

From a psychological point of view, there are six sources of influence that can be exercised in order to achieve better results. They can be grouped in three areas: personal, social and structural and each such area can be viewed in two dimensions: motivation and ability.

Motivation is the essential inner trigger that drives people actions and an understanding of it is pretty important as a first step to change something. Ability is the source of competent action and is a trait that constraints us to continuous improvement in order to achieve better results in any domain of activity.

This entry focuses on the personal area and explores the motivation and ability dimensions from the Scrum point of view.

Personal motivation when regarding it as an important aspect of a change endeavor is all about making the undesirable desirable. Most often than not changing behaviors is all about achieving desired results and this change, in order to be successful, is to be applied equally at person and at group levels.

In order to establish personal motivation, Scrum uses the underlying psychological techniques that sustain it by allowing for choice (practices from a command & control environment are discouraged and gradually removed), by creating direct experiences (direct contact to customer representatives is facilitated throughout release planning and demos), by telling meaningful stories (user stories are the central point for requirements specification bringing focus on the person that benefits from the software developed), by making it a game and keeping score (throughout usage of story points, velocity and business value measurement in general), by allowing competition especially with oneself (comparing sprint performance measurements in time), by enabling continuous improvement and enabling people having control of their progress (through velocity and business value tracking).

Personal ability is all about surpassing your own limits. On a psychological level the classical exercise of delaying benefits, by exercising personal training with guided practice and obtaining feedback from the best( (through Scrum trainers and coaches, agile training and conferences), through concentration and focused mini goals for short term (release goals translated into sprint goals) and not at least, through an efficient emotional management by transforming boring tasks into interesting ones thereby enabling the dominance of a brain know system versus the brain go system or amygdala (here extreme programming practices such as pair programming come into play).

The personal level dimension is the first step in influencing, a precondition of exercising influence at social level and without it driving targeted change is impossible.