The Power of Purpose: How ‘Start with Why’ Drives Agile Success
In the world of Agile and Scrum, the concept of starting with ‘why’ is pivotal. Simon Sinek’s insightful exploration of this idea demonstrates its crucial role in motivating people and driving success.
But, what does it mean for an Agile team or a Scrum Master? Let’s dive into this compelling approach to understanding motivation and its impact on Agile practices.
Understanding Motivation: Beyond the ‘Why’
🧭 Exploring ‘Drive’ by Dan Pink: Dan Pink’s ‘Drive’ delves into the intrinsic motivators that spur people into action. It goes beyond the external incentives like salaries or bonuses, focusing on deeper, more personal drivers.
💡 The Trio of Intrinsic Motivators:
Autonomy: The desire to direct our own lives.
Mastery: The urge to improve skills and become proficient.
Purpose: The need to do what we feel is meaningful.
The Pitfalls of Extrinsic Motivation
💲 The Limitations of Money as a Motivator: While financial incentives can be immediate motivators, they often lose their effectiveness over time, especially when basic needs are met.
🚀 Shifting Focus to Mastery and Autonomy: Encouraging personal growth and self-direction can lead to more sustained and meaningful engagement in work.
Integrating Purpose into Agile Practices
🎯 Vision and Goals in Agile: Aligning the daily tasks of Agile teams with a broader vision ensures that everyone is moving in the same direction towards a shared purpose.
🌟 The Role of Vision, Value, and Validation: These three elements replace traditional project management metrics, focusing instead on the overarching goal and the steps needed to achieve it.
The Role of Leadership in Cultivating Purpose
🌱 Creating a Culture of Purpose: Leaders in Agile environments must foster a culture where the ‘why’ is clear and every team member can connect their work to it.
🔄 Feedback and Adaptation: Regularly revisiting and adapting the team’s approach based on feedback ensures alignment with the overall purpose.
Case Studies: Apple’s Visionary Approach
- 🍏 Apple’s Success with Purpose: Apple’s alignment of its entire organization towards a common vision and purpose has not only driven internal success but also created a loyal customer base that believes in their journey.
Conclusion: Embracing ‘Why’ in Agile
📈 The Agile Advantage of Purpose: In Agile environments, understanding and embracing the ‘why’ leads to more engaged teams, better products, and satisfied customers.
💬 The Ongoing Journey: The process of defining and following a purpose is an ongoing journey, requiring constant reassessment and realignment.
Simon Sinek talks about starting with why. It’s a whole book on that topic, and the question is, does it really matter? Like, who gives a crap? I think the big piece here we need for us to understand is we need to bring in something else. Start with why is great, but I think the underlying reasons are a little bit different, and that’s that what motivates people.
So now we’re talking about if you want to look at Drive by Dan Pink. What Drive talks about is what are the underlying things that motivate people. Now, we all know the extrinsic, the outside motivators of people. You know, you want more money, you want that cool new PlayStation game. So, stuff, money stuff, a roof over your head, food, right? Kids’ education. These are all things that are extrinsic motivators. They come in from the outside, and they’re the most important thing if they’re a problem, right? If you’re worried about putting food on the table, then money is going to be your most important thing. If you’re worried about putting a roof over your kid’s head or your head, then money is going to be your most important thing to get that problem solved.
So that’s my focus. But once people are earning enough that those things are dealt with, right? They’re resolved. We’ve resolved all of those extrinsic, or generally resolved all of those extrinsic motivators. Then more money is not something that motivates people. If it is, right? Because in some organizations, they have that culture where money’s the motivator. Think of, you know, I’m thinking of stocks and shares or sales or whatever. They’ve turned it into a game, right? They’ve turned being the best salesperson or making the most money or beating the quota. It’s not actually about the money anymore; it’s about the points. It’s about the game.
But if you take all of those things off the table and you don’t have that weird dysfunctional game culture, which probably works quite well in sales, right? But is still dysfunctional game culture, then the underlying intrinsic motivators, the stuff that comes from the inside of you, is three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Right? Autonomy. We want to feel like we’re in control of our destiny, right? We choose how we do things. We choose where we go. We choose who we work for, right? All of those types of things.
And then we’ve got mastery. I don’t know anybody who gets up every morning and thinks they want to do a worse job today than they did yesterday. Most people want to get better at their job. They want to learn more about the thing they’re doing. Again, remember we’ve taken that purely financial motivation off the table. We’ve got enough money to not worry about those things. So then our motivation becomes mastery, right?
A way that money still sits on the table is that Taylor and Gantt, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Gantt, came up with this ideology around paying people less than they need to survive, and then they have to work really hard to get the bonus in order to go above that survival line, right? That’s, you’re maintaining, your organization is deliberately and explicitly maintaining people below that line in order to artificially make money the motivating factor.
So that’s what the focus is: money, money, money, money, money. Because maybe we’ve got lots of money; we’re a bank, right? So we can throw money at people and get more stuff. All the other stuff’s hard. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose is hard, right? Money’s easy. So let’s make money the point by paying them less, right? That’s quite a common strategy. I worked at a company a while ago where they paid about 10% below industry standard for wages, but there was a 50% bonus scheme, right? Or was it 20% below? So you felt the pinch on the base wages. You could just make things meet, but only barely. But then at the end of the year, you got that 50% bonus if the company did well.
That might be called golden handcuffs. There are all kinds of things around that. But if we take that off the table, mastery, doing the best job you possibly can, becomes more of a motivator than money. Would you rather have people looking for their next paycheck or being motivated to be the best they can possibly be at that job? Right? So we’ve got autonomy and mastery, and the last one is purpose.
And that’s where we jump into this start with why, right? Purpose is, do you understand how your work contributes to some greater goal that you care about? Right? The greater goal is also a book on this topic, Start With Why. Why are we doing the thing we’re doing? What am I then doing right now to help visualise this why? And when you start focusing on that why, right? Why we’re doing the thing we’re doing, what is it we’re trying to achieve? The outcome of that is visions and goals.
And when you move from traditional project-based model towards a product-based model, we start to remove certain things from that process, right? We start removing milestones and deliverables, and those things, those Gantt charts, those things that enshrine that traditional project management process. But what the mistake lots of organizations make is they don’t replace it with anything. They have no why, they have no motivation, they have no goals, they have no outcomes that the team’s trying to achieve.
So if you look up team, right? For example, if you look up team in the dictionary, it says a group of people working together towards a common goal. So if you don’t have any why, if you don’t have any goal, if you don’t have any outcome that the team is trying to achieve, or even the organization is trying to achieve, how do we have teams? How could we possibly have teams? How do they, what are they working together towards, right? What are they collaborating on towards? So they have no purpose, right?
Does this knock-on effect? And we talk about this in the product owner, the PSM P product owner class, and we talk about replacing these traditional elements with vision, value, and validation, right? Vision: where are we going? What are we trying to achieve? That you’ll get that from your why, right? So the why is at the top. Why are we doing what we do? Create a vision. That’s how we’re going to get to this why. If we enact this vision, we should get to this why we’re here.
And then what’s the value we’re trying to achieve? And that should inform your goals, right? What’s the next big goal we’re trying to achieve? And perhaps you’ve got a set of goals or hierarchies or OKRs or SMART or whatever it is you’re using to figure those out. But the way we know we’ve got the right thing is that the people doing the work can feel a connection from the work that they’re doing every day through those, however you’re defining your goals towards the vision and the why we’re here.
Why are we a company? Why do we exist? And in fact, if you do that, you engage your customers as well because they see your purpose. They see every employee working towards that common purpose, and that common purpose becomes that thing that makes customers look at your organization, “Wow, they’re doing great things. They’re going in this direction.”
And that’s fundamentally what Apple has achieved or did achieve many years ago. They were able to achieve this almost godlike status that customers believed in their journey, right? They believed in their journey, and it wasn’t because they had some vision that the customers liked. It’s because the whole organisation, every employee of the organisation, every manager in the organisation, every leader in the organisation are working together towards this common goal.
So make sure you understand why. Why is your company there? Why are you doing this work? What do you get out of it? Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else, Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
