What Can We Learn About Motivation from a Tornado?

I spent the last four days scheduling volunteers for an organization supporting the disaster relief after last week’s tornado in Colorado. When I came home each evening, I would find another installment of a lively discussion about motivation on the mailing list for the Society for Technical Communication’s (STC) Management Special Interest Group (SIG). It wasn’t until the fourth day that I realized that my “day job” as a volunteer was also a lesson on motivation.

So, what did I learn?

• For the right cause, people will do pretty much anything.

  For example, I found out at 6pm on Friday night that I needed to assemble a crew of 10 to unload a supply truck at 5am the next morning. Hard work at an insane hour, but I got commitments from everyone I needed within 3 hours. And, for every activity I needed to schedule, we had more volunteers than we needed. This response didn’t happen because I have some magical skill as a motivator; it happened because the need was critical.

  Most business objectives are not as clearly “right” as feeding disaster victims, but if your objectives make sense, are clearly communicated, and can be seen as productive for the organization, you’ve got a much better chance of having motivated people.

• A strong group helps keep people motivated.

  Nearly everyone who volunteered came as part of a group, and not just groups like Red Cross and Salvation Army that exist specifically for disaster relief. Churches and other community groups were a big part of the effort. While there were a few stalwart folks who volunteered independently, they were in the minority. The reason is pretty clear; if you’re a member of a strong group, you have a motive to serve the group as well as a motive to serve the group’s objectives. The two reinforce each other.

  Given today’s highly outsourced, geographically diverse projects, most of which operate in an environment where downsizing is the flavor of the decade, it’s difficult to build a strong team, but if you can pull it off, it becomes really difficult for team members to remain unmotivated. They either get with the program or leave.

All of that said, motivation is internal. You can identify clear objectives, communicate them vigorously, create a strong team, and build a supportive environment, but they have to drink the Kool Aid, you can’t do it for them.

I believe that most people will be motivated if you do these things, but some won’t; they may be in the wrong place, be going through problems outside of work, or simply be one of those folks who never gets motivated by anything. When that happens, you can coerce them and get some results, but almost always the best thing you can do is find them a better job fit or get them out of the environment.

Article: Seven Tips for Living with Technology

I’ve just published a new article, titled Seven Tips for Living with Technology, on The Content Wrangler.

The article looks at some basic strategies for keeping your sanity as you acquire and work with technology. It is a significant re-write of a draft section of my book. That draft section can be found at: Living With Technology.

If you’re visiting this site for the first time after reading one of my articles, welcome. Stay for a while and check out other draft sections of the book. The place to start is the Note to Participants, which describes what I’m up to and how best to view the site.

If you haven’t visited The Content Wrangler, it’s worth a look. It’s frequently updated, has a lot of good information, and has a large and growing community of people interested in content management and content management systems.

Article: Choosing an XML Schema

Scott Abel, who runs The Content Wrangler, a website that focuses on content management, has posted an article of mine titled, Choosing an XML Schema: Docbook or DITA.

The article talks about how to choose the right XML schema for your needs, and despite my DocBook bias, I think it gives a “fair and balanced” treatment of the subject. While you’re over at the site, you may want to consider joining The Content Wrangler Community, which calls itself, “The social network for content professionals.” It has subgroups for everything from Blogging to Wikis. Certainly worth checking out.

Off Topic: Steve Fossett Search

I’ve been away from this blog for a week because I had the opportunity to participate in the Steve Fossett search in Nevada. I’ve been a member of the Civil Air Patrol for 5 years, and this has been the largest search I’ve been part of. I was impressed by the professionalism and skill exhibited by the CAP members participating in the search, and it made me proud to be a member.

What prompted me to go off topic, besides making an excuse for being absent from the site for way too long, was something I noted while checking out Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” (http://www.mturk.com), and the effort to locate Mr. Fossett. This effort lets anyone participate by looking at satellite photographs of sections of the search and saying whether or not they think the section they’re looking at contains something that warrants further investigation. Each section is shown to many people, and any image that is flagged consistently is reviewed by experts and possibly passed on to search teams.

I think the idea of pursuing the search with many eyes is fantastic, and I hope it turns up useful leads. However, I was surprised to see this activity compared with the techniques outlined in James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds.” According to Surowiecki, as quoted in Wikipedia (The Wisdom of Crowds), for a crowd to be wise, it needs to have the following characteristics:

• Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
• Independence: People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.
• Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
• Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

The MTurk process is independent and diverse, but it doesn’t provide a way to turn a private judgment into a collective decision, and it isn’t really decentralized, at least in the sense that localized knowledge can be applied by individuals. It really is asking for people’s observations, not their wisdom. In fairness, I don’t see any claim by Amazon that this is the technique in use, but references pop up repeatedly in other sources.

I’m not saying that what Amazon is doing is flawed; on the contrary, it is valid and important. However, I think it could be supplemented by using the ideas in the Wisdom of Crowds.

Suppose everyone was given a description of the situation (i.e., basic facts like the capability of the plane, maps of the area, confirmed and possible sightings of the plane in flight, etc.), and asked to make his or her best independent estimate of where the plane will be found. Then, take that information and aggregate it to identify a potential search area. This would be similar to the search for a Navy submarine that is described in Surowiecki’s book. In that case, even though some guesses were way off, the aggregate was very close to the actual location.

I suspect the toughest thing about using this method would be to keep participants from being influenced by the potential hits that have been reported by people participating in Amazon’s visual effort. That said, such an activity might yield useful results that certainly wouldn’t be any worse than the leads coming from people who claim to be psychics.

Your New Audience

This is the second posting in a group of commentaries that may or may not end up in the book, but which I thought might be of interest.

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Shall I crack any of those old jokes, master,
At which the audience never fail to laugh?
– Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC) Frogs, 405 B.C.

Getting a promotion, especially your first promotion to management, is a great ego boost. Even though it is de rigueur to feign modesty and pretend it’s not a big change, it really is. You will no doubt feel unsure about some aspects of the new job, but combined with that will be an awareness that you have been chosen as someone worthy of the challenge.