Scrum & Influencing Part 4 - Engage All Sources of Influence - Social & Structural Levels
Post date: Aug 25, 2013 10:42:16 AM
Social and structural aspects of influencing refer to two dimensions: motivation and ability and constitute the last two key points in exercising influence at psychological level. This entry will explore these in detail.
Social motivation is all about harnessing peer pressure by encouraging people to perform the vital behaviors leading to change and by discouraging inappropriate behavior by making it socially disapproved. It is important to walk the talk by sacrificing time, money, ego and past priorities and by engaging formal and informal (opinion) leaders in order to demonstrate credibility. Another important step is to create new norms by making the un-discussable discussable and by taking 200 percent accountability. If we look at Scrum, the whole culture and philosophy behind it sustain this behavior at social level by using the team at its core and by flattening hierarchies and increasing transparency in facts and communication. Formal leaders give up their power in favor of all others. Opinion leaders have their power increased and should be regarded as the most important and first milestone in exercising influence. Leadership is lived in real time changing leaders from one subject domain to another. Accountability is encouraged through the power of opinion leaders which extends mentoring and through practices such as pair programming through which two people are responsible for the same code and by applying different combinations of it, collective code ownership is achieved. The team is accountable for the code and the team takes the decisions. The power of the team expresses the pure kernel of Scrum's principles.
Social ability is about finding strengths in numbers and is strongly connected to the social motivation described above. Leveraging the power of groups and giving real time feedback from experts are important means of achieving influence in groups. Social capital and collective intelligence versus individual intelligence are encouraged by Scrum through the Team concept.
Structural motivation consists of designing rewards and demanding accountability. Commitment is in the middle of Scrum practices and it drives the whole social capital having the most influence for the success of the project/endeavor to which Scrum is applied.It is very important to encourage vital behaviors and to focus on them when designing rewards and not on the results themselves. Rewards are effective for activities that people already like. It is also important to facilitate rewards progressively along the way and not at the end of it. Reward the behavior, not the final result. Scrum does not specify explicitly rewards designing but sketches a frame of it via energizing workspace. From here creativity may be applied in order to design rewards and punishments (should these ever be needed). If punishments are to be applied, it is better to first announce them and not applying them directly without notice.
Structural ability is about changing the environment. The environment, in both its physical and temporal dimensions has a great influence on people relationships. The central idea is to design space and time spent in a way that vital behaviors are encouraged and wrong ones are discouraged. Scrum focuses on colocation of teams and on the intervals for the different Scrum Meetings, releases and sprints. All these drive team interaction which can be directed to a targeted evolution in order to function in an optimal manner. Another important aspects is the transparency advocated by Scrum which makes the invisible visible and delivers fresh and complete data regularly, updating cognitive maps and this way influencing decisions.
We can conclude that Scrum through its practices represents a receipt for influencing people behavior in order to deliver projects successfully by applying all underlying psychological mechanisms defining influence:focus and measure, identify top vital behaviors and by engaging all six sources of influence.
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