RAMPS

Mastery As Motivator: The M of RAMPS

This entry is part 14 of 15 in the series RAMPS

Let’s talk a little about mastery today, in the sense of the RAMPS conversation from yesterday. What is mastery-as-motivator, and what can we do about increasing its motivational force? As I said before, the motivational force called mastery is about how humans value their own growth. All of us carry around an idea, implicit or explicit, of how as individuals we could be "better". Mastery as motivator is the sense we have that we’re stepping towards that "better" as we …

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RAMPS – Autonomy is Freedom to Move

This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series RAMPS

Autonomy is a powerful factor in motivation, and the more creative & technical the work, the more likely autonomy is to figure largely in the maker’s motivational spectrum. Here are three different ways I work when I am geeking out. Each of these is about equal in probability to be the one I use for any particular problem. I will write a long essay in slack, driving my colleagues to comical exasperation at times, rubberducking in prose until I get …

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Rhythm as Urgency: The R in RAMPS

This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series RAMPS

Rhythm is the R in RAMPS. Let’s take a look. Rhythm is about tension & release. It is the sense one has of readying, girding, coiling, then taking that stored energy & sending it out. We’ll get to music in a second, tho maybe in a way that will surprise you. But let’s start with some non-musical kinds of tension & release. A spring is stretched, creating tension, then let go of, creating release. Your movement is your muscle cells …

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Safety as Motivator: The S in RAMPS

This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series RAMPS

Let’s do Safety, the S in the recent RAMPS as motivational force series. Safety is hard to get at in one summary sentence, but i’ll try. Safety is the sense we have that we belong: that we’re trusted, valued-in-spite-of, inside a team that welcomes our strange unruly selves. At its simplest, this sense manifests as the belief i’m allowed, even encouraged. Allowed to be different. Allowed to be mistaken. Allowed. You can see how hard that is to summarize! It …

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A Sense Of Urgency: RAMPS As A Motivation Model

This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series RAMPS

A very common question: managers turn to me and say, "My team lacks a sense of urgency, how can I give them one?" After I get over the snarky replies — I come from a long line of "the managed" — I do have what I think is an answer: "Study the idea of RAMPS, find the missing or depleted elements, move to restore them. And friend, don’t expect you can do it using words." RAMPS is my acronym for …

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Autonomy: How Freedom Correlates To Urgency

This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Let’s talk about the A from RAMPS today: Autonomy. Autonomy is "simple not easy," just like the rest of the motivating forces. Autonomy is the sense of an individual that she is free to work the best way she knows how to achieve the tasks in front of her. We call self-driving cars "autonomous". We do that to contrast them with cars that are controlled by humans: machines. If I say an individual doesn’t feel he has autonomy, I’m saying …

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Purpose As Motivator: The P in RAMPS

This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Purpose is the P in RAMPS. Purpose as motivator is about the sense an individual has that she’s contributing to a greater mission shared by many. Both attributes matter: mission must be of a higher order than any individual’s whim, & it must be felt to be shared by the whole team. Purpose is really always purposes. Seen "from above", it resembles a sloppily drawn cross-section of a stem, a larger (sloppy) boundary, decomposed into smaller (sloppy) circles, some nearly …

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RAMPS – A Way I Approach Motivational Puzzles

This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Motivational Puzzles Rhythm, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose, and Safety are important bands in my own motivational spectrum, so I often use them when I’m thinking about other people’s motivational spectroscopy. I’ll give you snapshots of the meaning behind those bands in a minute, but I want to start with that base metaphor, of spectrums, spectroscopy, and signature. When you bombard an element with electromagnetic radiation — for the sake of shorthand, when you make it glow — it gives off visible …

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RAMPS – Rhythm is Tension and Release

This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Rhythm is about sequences of alternating tension and release. Noticing, orchestrating, and managing the levels and timing of those sequences is one way I can affect the motivation of myself and others. Take a second right now give yourself a nice full-bodied stretch, complete with a yawn. Feels good, yeah? Some of you are at the end of your day, others the middle, and to be honest I’ve only been up for a couple of hours. But it still feels …

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RAMPS – Ways to Affect Rhythm

This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Achieving good Rhythm, a well-tuned distribution of "feels good" across time, is at once the most visceral of sensations and the most difficult to reliably prescribe. Affecting rhythm, therefore, is a fundamentally experimental effort. There are three broad levels to think about, and each has its own possibilities and limits. There is the individual maker, a team of makers, and an organization that hosts, funds, plans, and manages that (or those) teams. At the outer circumference, the org has the …

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