“If all you have is a hammer, all you will see is a nail.” This is a pretty well-known saying, and it’s also an introduction to the ideas of frame, worldview, and culture. (The saying is usually attributed to Abraham Maslow, so often it’s sometimes called Maslow’s Hammer. As far as we can make out, […]
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Safety — the sense of being valued and accepted, of belonging — is a powerful motivator for many individuals. A lack of safety often seems like a simple switch, instantly shutting down talented and capable people. (This topic of safety is a minefield right now. The absence of a safe place to stand today seems,
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A respondent asks, "Are you always able to practice what you preach? I don’t mean intentionally dropping but unintentionally as your mind is sloppy. I have great difficulties in applying 100% of my "knowledge" 100% of the time." Sometimes questions open up huge areas with lots of issues and subtexts and angles, and this is
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RAMPS: Affecting Purpose Raising a sense of purpose — service to a "greater" — in someone who’s sensitive to it, involves offering purposes and then connecting to them. I try not to frame these muses as mere critique. This one’s hard for me to pull off. Clumsy ham-handed misleading efforts at motivating people via purpose
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RAMPS: P is for Purpose, the sense one is serving a valued "greater". Those who rate this band of the motivational spectrum highly can be go-to workhorses, but only if we keep them connected to their valued greater. If rhythm is largely focused on the distribution of "feels good" through one’s working life, purpose works
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RAMPS: Affecting mastery, the sense an individual has that she is growing in a way she values, means first jiggling our ideas about efficiency & relevance in work, then jumping in to the opportunities that jiggling will reveal. We talked about the widespread pernicious conceptual cluster we call "finish-line efficiency": the idea that software development
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RAMPS: M is for Mastery, the sense that my work is actively helping me grow, along some dimension I value. When my motivational spectrum calls for a high degree of mastery, I do my best work when it is just a little over my head. People sometimes confuse the drive for mastery with a drive
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