One point which the discussion brought home: to me, the term “motivator” (in the context of intrinsic/extrinsic) is more useful than the term “motivation”. And the reason for that is that motivation is internal: so it’s hard to know what really motivates somebody else, it’s too easy to even be unsure of your own motivation and/or to recast that motivation after the fact. Whereas motivator is external, and in particular suggests something that I have more direct control over as a teacher: I can choose from a set of possible behaviors towards my students, and I think it’s not as hard to label some of those as extrinsic motivators. (Though admittedly the boundary between extrinsic motivators and non-extrinsically-motivational feedback is extremely blurry.)

Even that isn’t why I like Punished by Rewards, though: I like that book because it steps back one further level from the concept of intrinsic / extrinsic motivation. It grounds itself instead with studies that divide test subjects into two groups, has the experimenters behave towards test subjects in two different ways, and measures how the test subjects act along dimensions that the experimenters are interested in. That’s much more concrete; if a specific such experiment is replicable, it’s valuable data, and if multiple experiments following similar protocols lead to similar results, then it starts to make sense to come up with a label for the common aspects of the behavior in those protocols. (In this specific case, the label is “extrinsic motivator”.)

And yes, you can try to use that (along with other ideas, e.g. psychological insights) to then come up with further concepts (e.g. “intrinsic motivation”, which is much harder to get at directly with an experiment), and you can (as I did) try to apply that in your own teaching. But still, if you can’t touch back to experiments periodically, then it’s not surprising if you get rather different results. So if Roger and his colleagues are having success (which, I repeat, I’m convinced he is) applying techniques that I would tend to label as extrinsic motivators (which I’m less convinced is the case, though that is still my tentative hypothesis), then there are several possible explanations for that:

• The original studies are not replicable after all.
• Roger’s practomimetic teaching techniques aren’t similar enough to techniques used in those studies for generalizations from the studies to be relevant.
• The state of students when practomimetic techniques aren’t applied isn’t similar enough to how students behave in the non-extrinsic side of the original studies to expect extrinsic motivators to cause problems.
• Practomimetic teaching has benefits that are significantly greater than the comparatively small drawbacks from extrinsic motivators.
• Practomimetic teaching has aspects that actively innoculate against the drawbacks of extrinsic motivators.

There are probably other explanations that I’m not thinking of, too. And certainly none of those five explanations would surprise me at all in practice; in fact, I’d be surprised if the bottom three weren’t all true.

Still, this is all not so relevant to me, given that I’m no longer actively teaching in a classroom; given how last time went, I doubt we’ll get any further if we continue that line of discussion, so I’d just as soon drop it for the next Symposium.

What I will propose instead is a different line of discussion: how do practomimetic teaching techniques change as teachers leave more space for students to explore? For example, if we draw a spectrum between a situation where students are told what to do every minute and a situation where students are given a vague goal with opportunities for feedback from teachers once a week or less, do practomimetic techniques lend themselves to one portion of the spectrum? I would think not so much the “every minute” portion, because the nature of role playing already carves out some amount of space for freedom of action. (Though, then again, I’ve played enough computerized RPGs that got in my face every minute…) But I would also expect that, as students get more familiar with the interplay that underlies the subject they’re learning (a language, an instrument, …), the benefits of external systems become less important. Certainly as I progress in learning guitar, I’m finding my actions somewhat more driven by what I’m seeing in the instrument and in the music I’m playing and less exclusively by the game, though the latter continues to be important to me. I’ll throw in a link to the concept of Shu-Ha-Ri here, too.

I’d also like to talk about this broadening of options in the context of games themselves, leaving learning (or rather: learning about something other than the game) aside. The fact that I love go so much is very much linked to my progression from its being a bit of a blur at the start to me learning about concrete techniques I can study to having those techniques link to more abstract ideas that I can play around with to another higher-level round of concrete techniques, repeating itself at several different scales: it’s great being able to go back and forth between concrete drills and conceptual experimentations. And I suspect that’s the way Patrick feels about Starcraft too. It isn’t, however, the way I feel about many games: e.g. adventure games by their nature fight against this, I think, and while the battling and leveling systems of role-playing games sometimes can take you a bit in the direction of exploring the games’ systems at different levels of depth, they don’t generally have enough layers to go really far. Which isn’t to say that role-playing games aren’t great: it’s just that the ways that they are great are, to me, not linked to their mechanics of their systems in the absence of any referents external to the games.

Hmm, actually, I’d be curious to hear what Roger thinks about that last sentence, too, given that he’s thought so much more about role-playing games, and in particular their non-combat systems, than I have.

• I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in a classroom for almost nine years, I haven’t seriously experimented with new ways of structuring courses for about eleven years.
• The symposium in question took place three weeks ago, I don’t trust myself to remember the details of Roger’s position, and he didn’t actually put a concrete position statement on the symposium blog post. (See the Pericles Group website for some information about his approach, though.)

So, in other words: what I’m about to do is talk about a woeful misrepresentation of somebody else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date. (Alternatively: I’m about to write a blog post! *rimshot*)

Roger sees a close tie between games and teaching, and had some sort of pithy phrase that he used to express that tie. I can’t remember what the phrase was, but I believe its gist was that classrooms are always a game, and that students are going to perform according to the rules of that game: so make active, conscious use of that fact, designing as good a game as possible and one where success in the game is as closely tied to your learning objectives as possible. And, as far as I can tell, he and his co-conspirators are extremely successful in this—I can’t imagine reading some of Kevin Ballestrini’s posts from last school year and not getting the feeling that something special is going on there. So I’d like to understand it, to relate to my own experiences and philosophical predispositions, and see what I can learn.

On which note: my philosophical predispositions towards teaching are strongly shaped by reading Alfie Kohn. His book No Contest had a huge effect on how I structured my classroom time; his book Punished by Rewards had a fairly strong effect on how I structured my assignments and grading, contributing to my feeling that I wasn’t a misfit in academia solely for research reasons, I ultimately was probably more of a misfit for teaching reasons, even though (because?) I cared about the latter more than the former.

And certainly there are many ways in which Kohn agrees with (my interpretation of) Roger’s point. For example, Kohn rails at length against standardized tests, and one of his main points is that standardized tests encourage students, teachers, entire school systems to do well on those tests even if that comes at the expense of learning; to me, this dovetails quite nicely with Roger seeing classes as games, because you’d better make sure that the rules of the game enforce the behavior that you want! Standardized tests are, of course, a lousy game with lousy goals; Roger does much better on that end, and I’m sure that Kohn agrees that the sort of richer feedback mechanisms that Roger’s methods provide are a huge improvement.

Where I suspect the two would disagree (or, more concretely: my reading of Kohn gives me pause) is on the nature of the motivators that are involved. The point of Punished by Rewards is that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation, and that the latter drives out the former. Now, classes are already chock-full of extrinsic motivators (grades in particular); if you accept that as the basis that you’re starting from, then sure, craft your extrinsic motivators to promote learning in the areas that you’d like, and overlaying role-playing game mechanics may help with that. But if you start from an environment that’s trying to work with and nurture intrinsic motivators, then while role-playing sounds good, I get nervous about game mechanics: it’s hard to do that without bringing extrinsic motivators into play.

Looking at this from a slightly different angle: I like learning. I think feedback is inextricably bound to learning. But I’m a lot more dubious about certification: its coupling of feedback with extrinsic motivation can be actively counterproductive. And that coupling is often very strong, and is expressed as a refusal to give feedback without submitting to those extrinsic motivators: e.g. most colleges will kick students out of school if they refuse to engage in actions that lead towards them getting graded.

(Tangent: in my last year and a half in academia, I taught calculus. Those courses were full of pre-meds; as far as I can tell, the course served much more of a weeding out role than a thoughtful attempt to ensure that those students learned mathematical concepts that would help them be more effective doctors. Most of the students put in a decent effort to learn the material—you generally don’t get into Stanford without such habits—but not all were particularly interested; from my point of view, not being interested was a perfectly reasonable possible choice, indeed one that probably more of the class should make, and I did not enjoy working within a system with strong forces pushing against students making that choice, or even being aware of the possibility.)

So the question that that raises is: are games simply feedback mechanisms that can be used in a variety of ways, or are they certification mechanisms? I was going to say that, whenever you bring in scoring, you’re already moving in a certification direction, but upon reflection that’s too strong: if a game really is about itself (go or, I assume, Starcraft), then the scoring mechanism is feedback pure and simple.

But if the game is about something else (as classroom-based games always are, though Roger’s approach works at narrowing that gap), then scores make me very nervous. For one thing, if the score is tied to something else (e.g. a course grade that is necessary for getting a degree) then it’s certification, not simply feedback; for another thing, the distance between the score and the broader topic means that you aren’t getting feedback about aspects of the topic that aren’t covered by the scoring mechanism. I see both of these all the time in video game RPGs: if you don’t fight and level up, RPGs will refuse to give you access to the game’s content, and even if you are willing to go along with that, that focus on combat and leveling encourages you to neglect other aspects of role-playing. (Fortunately, there are people whose drive is strong enough to withstand such discouragement.)

If you’re sensitive to these issues (as I’m sure Roger is), you can design your games to open up as wide a space as possible for learning. Take Rock Band as an example; in this context, we’ll think of it as a tool to learn about music, e.g. by introducing you to a range of music, to help you pick out the different parts of a piece of music (Paul McCartney’s bass lines), even to teach you concrete physical and mental skills involved in playing music. The first iteration of the series was relatively prescriptive: it wouldn’t even let you try to play harder songs until you’d performed adequately (according to the game’s criteria, not your own!) on the easier songs. I suspect no-fail mode existed in the first game, but I felt that its use was discouraged; in contrast, the second game turned no-fail mode on by default if you’re playing in easy mode, so if you want to listen to music with a bit of guidance from the game as to the shape of one of the parts, you can do that without having the game punish you if you don’t conform properly.

By the third game, the amount and range of possible feedback has expanded enormously; because of that feedback, I’m finding the experience much more powerful as a teaching tool, with my actions being much less driven by the scoring mechanisms of the game. I almost always have no-fail mode turned on (and I wish there were a way to turn off the missed note sound: frequently I find that sound to be useful feedback, but in some circumstances it’s actively counterproductive to my learning goals), and while the game’s scoring system (and other metrics, e.g. streak length) can be a useful feedback mechanism (e.g. breaking a streak while playing Outer Space last weekend pointed out that I was missing a bass line transition), the extrinsic motivation aspects of that feedback, while still relevant to me, is no longer as dominant as it once was.

And with Rock Band 3 in particular, there’s feedback that’s provided outside of the game context, that your ears and hands give you. That game is, admittedly, a quite special case, but its nature may make it particularly well suited to provide examples for how to design games to work in a classroom situation.

Returning to what I said earlier: I’m convinced that Roger’s methods are effective, but I’m not sure I really understand the sources of that effectiveness. Continuing the theme of talking about areas that I’m ignorant of: how much of the effectiveness of these methods is due to a magic circle effect? Bringing in an explicit game mechanic (instead of the implicit mechanic that’s provided by grades and testing) may serve as an inoculation against extrinsic motivators, as an explicit acknowledgement of those motivators coupled with a refusal to give them undue power. And role-playing mechanisms in particular may be a particularly strong inoculation, with the dual role allowing for one of those roles to be motivated by intrinsic motivation while the other role goes along with the more certification-y aspects of the feedback systems.

Which, in turn, raises the question: what would a classroom look like with magic circle effects but without game mechanics? That puts an unexpected light on some of my own teaching experiences. One of the most powerful such experiences that I had was in the very first course I taught at Stanford: it was a differential equations course, and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to design the course. I balanced student work and lecturing in a very different way than in courses I’d been in as a student, and had a quite unusual homework / exam policy. I continued feeling this out as the quarter went along; I had a great time, the students seemed to be enjoying it, and the students seemed to be learning something.

So I was ready to declare the methods a success, and indeed I think the methods I used were good ones; but subsequent iterations of the class didn’t have the same feel. Part of that is doubtless chance (e.g. the specific students involved), and part of that is that I was less actively investing mental effort in the later iterations. But I bet that the fact that I was clearly experimenting had an impact on how the students saw the course, and did so in a way that’s similar to a magic circle effect, treating it as an explicit alternate space that muted the impact of certification on their learning.

Interesting stuff, I wish I understood the interplay of forces here better. I hope we’ll talk about this more in future VGHVI Symposia (of which there will be one this Thursday); follow the VGHVI blog if you want to participate!

The talk was all about how video games (and other sorts of games, too) are moving away from their traditional confines and are appearing in all sorts of surprising real-world settings. Given that I love games in general and video games in particular, one might expect me to find this super-exciting: I should see this as a way in which our culture could become even richer! (See, for example, this Jane McGonigal interview.) And the video game blogosphere might largely be expected to react the same way, too.

The talk did, indeed, get a huge amount of discussion in the blogosphere (I’ll include a bunch of links at the end of this post), but the tone of most of those articles wasn’t so positive: while people generally thought that it was a very good talk, they also thought that it was a very good talk about a potential dystopia. I suspect there are a few different reasons why the talk got that sort of reaction, but certainly one of the main reasons is the last part of Schell’s talk, in which he painted a world full of organizations trying to convince you to take actions based on receiving points. (And you don’t have to stretch to see this as a dystopia: in his GDC microtalk, Schell himself described that as being akin to Brave New World.)

Extrinsic Motivators

More broadly, much of the discussion focused on the problematic nature of external rewards. As a long time Alfie Kohn fan, I’m pretty dubious about external rewards (or “extrinsic motivators”), for many of the reasons that Jesper Juul gives.

Which leaves me conflicted: I love video games, I don’t like extrinsic motivators, but here we have a talk about video games penetrating broadly through society that is being read widely as linking the two! I don’t enjoy cognitive dissonance more than anybody else; what should I do to resolve this?

There are a few options here. Probably the most attractive is to say that games aren’t all about extrinsic motivators, that (for example) only bad games are. There’s probably some amount of truth to that, but less than I would have expected going in. Let’s set aside video games for the moment, and talk about my favorite game of any sort, namely go. This is a game that I think is an inexhaustible source of richness and depth, and even on a superficial level I think that the layout of stones on a go board in a good game has real beauty of its own. Yet, if I were given a go board and a set of go stones and told to make something beautiful, I wouldn’t be particularly likely to try to follow the rules of go to do so: I would only be likely to make go-like patterns on a go board if I wanted to win a go game. (Either a game I was playing right then, or a hypothetical game that I might play in the future that would be informed by my investigations on the go board now.)

So, while there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation in my desire to play go (love for beauty, love for problem solving, wonderment at the layers upon layers of higher-order concepts that emerge from such simple rules), there’s extrinsic motivation there, too: the winning conditions are one example, as is the fact that I play in tournaments and got excited when my AGA rating made it up to 1 dan and bummed when my rating slipped back to 1 kyu.

And, of course, this mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators within a single game isn’t exclusive to go. I’m growing increasingly tired of the combat in games where I’m primarily interested in the environmental or narrative hooks. So, I have an intrinsic motivation which certain aspects of the game satisfy (the stories, the cities), but the mechanics fulfilling that intrinsic motivation serve in turn as extrinsic motivators to get me through other aspects of the game (slogging through repetitive combat).

To make game designers’ jobs worse, the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators isn’t universal across their audience! If I’m playing a narrative FPS, I may feel that I’m slogging through the shooting because it’s the only way to progress the plot; an FPS fan, however, may be going to the kitchen to fetch something to eat during the cut scenes, waiting until he or she can get back to shooting stuff.

I’m not sure exactly what to make of all of this. I guess one lesson of the go example is that one level of extrinsic motivators is fine, even good: it can give you the structure to make something a game instead of an activity, and as long as accepting that structure opens up a range of experiences that satisfy your intrinsic motivation, great! But once you open up extrinsic motivators on top of extrinsic motivators, experiences get a good deal bleaker. My problem with most JRPGs isn’t just that I have to fight through battles to advance the plot, it’s also that I’m applying the same strategy over and over again in battles: so I’m only pressing the buttons out of the extrinsic motivation of getting through the battle, and I only want to get through the battle out the extrinsic motivation to advance the plot. (Which I am intrinsically motivated to do!) And of course it gets worse if games (as frequently is the case) add a third consecutive layer of extrinsic motivation: maybe I’m only going through battles to advance my level or to be able to buy new loot, which aren’t (for me) intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I’ll propose that as my definition of grind: three directly nested game mechanics that function as extrinsic motivators for me.

This desire to avoid consecutive extrinsic motivators almost sounds like my old friend Alternating Repetition, this time between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, though I guess the analogy breaks down somewhat because we’re changing levels of scale while going down the motivation chain. (Also, I don’t see anything inherently bad about having consecutive layers of intrinsic motivators, if that makes sense in a game context.) And the main tool to get layers of intrinsic motivation is, I suspect, my recent obsession of Strong Centers: going back to the RPG example, make the battles strong enough to stand on their own (which seems to be the secret behind the appeal of Demon’s Souls), strengthen the appeal of exploration itself (Etrian Odyssey), make the cut scenes good enough that even people who are there for the fighting will be happy to watch them, make both fighting and narrative elements strong enough to appeal to people who come to the game for one of those are happy to stay for the other (Mass Effect 2, see Christina Norman’s GDC talk).

Achievements

The above discussion of extrinsic motivators considers them inside core video game gameplay; but many of the followups to Schell’s talk discussed extrinsic motivators outside of the core gameplay, typically using Xbox Live achievements as an example. (Almost always a negative one.)

And, indeed, achievements seemed to me unambiguously like extrinsic motivators when I first encountered them; now, though, I’m not so sure. Many achievements do seem to me to be extrinsic motivators: taking Mass Effect 2‘s achievements as an example, “Power Gamer” acts as an extrinsic motivator (though not one that’s been effective enough to get me to earn it!), and I spent a while thinking about how I would react to “Paramour” and “No One Left Behind” in that light. (I ended up deciding that I wouldn’t go out of my way to earn either of them, but then Thane won my heart and I made the right choices on the final mission so got them both after all.)

Other achievements, however, didn’t act that way for me. The story progress achievements were simple checkpoints from my point of view: there was never any real question as to whether or not I was going to make it through the whole game, so they just served as a bit of punctuation. (And added a bit of fun looking at my friends’ profiles and seeing how much faster than me they were going.)

And then there’s the combat achievements: these did affect my gameplay, but in general not in ways that I think of as extrinsic motivators. The clearest example here is “Tactician”: my character didn’t have any biotic powers, and I wouldn’t have thought to experiment with combining biotic powers if the achievement hadn’t been there. But it was there, and it served to open up my eyes to some new tactical possibilities that I hadn’t considered before. (And then I closed my eyes after experimenting with it a few times.) So that achievement served to make me aware of an area of the gameplay space that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise; to use an education analogy, it’s like the difference between a professor telling me that I have to study something to pass an exam (extrinsic motivation) and a mentor suggesting that I look into an area that I hadn’t studied before because it fits in with my interests. I don’t think that the majority of achievements act this way, but Mass Effect 2 certainly isn’t unique in that regard—I could post to examples in The Beatles: Rock Band and Burnout Paradise as well.

And, as with the earlier example of in-game extrinsic motivators, these aren’t clear objective categories: an achievement that serves as an extrinsic motivator for one person can serve as a neutrally-marked progress meter or mentoring for another person.

A great talk; I will repeat my exhortation to watch the video. The combination of extrinsic motivators and video games certainly gives a lot to think about; I hope I’ll be able to understand their interplay better in the future.

Other Writings

Some blog posts that other people have written about Schell’s talk:

• Sirlin on external rewards.
• Mitu Khandaker on the future of games.
• Annie Wright and Kirk Hamilton on too much for me to summarize in one sentence.
• Dan Lawrence on behaviourist game design.
• Jesper Juul on demotivation by external rewards.
• Jim Rossignol on taste.
• George Kokoris on achievements unlocked.
• Chris Breault on grinds.
• Ferguson of Interactive Illuminatus on rewards.
• Ian Bogost on persuasive games.
• Ralph Koster on gameifying everything.
• Bryan of The Pretentious Gamer on convergence.
• Jay Bachhuber on “ludic century nonsense”.

And he said something else that I thought I’d noticed but was glad to have confirmed: it seems like preview length (i.e. the length from when a game is first shown to when it launches) has shrunk over the last year or so. Nintendo, in particular, more and more frequently isn’t letting people see a game until six months to a year until launch. Which, potentially, puts a different spin to hardcore gamer complaints about Nintendo’s E3 press conference this year: I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they release a new Zelda game in 2009, despite not having shown anything along those lines this year.

He also talked about how, once you pull yourself away from the lure of the big enthusiast press sites, there’s not much reason necessarily to be frustrated that you can’t be like them: it’s so easy to make your own space talking about what you want to talk about! (Or something like that; I should really go back and listen to at least that part of the podcast again. Maybe I’m just talking about what I want to talk about, instead of accurately representing his views.) Which raises a question: what do I want to talk about?

Which, actually, isn’t what I’m going to talk about right now, but rather the somewhat related question: what do I want to play? There’s such a drive to always be playing new games; but, now that the scales have fallen from my eyes, I’m not at all sure that’s particularly healthy. Certainly I would never consider restricting myself to only reading new books, or to only listening to new music; why should video games be any different?

I actually have been playing some older games recently (or at least not-brand-new-games), but there’s still an important difference: even though those games were released a while ago, I hadn’t played either one before. I reread books (and especially listen to music repeatedly) all the time, whereas I almost never do that with video games; why is that?

First, a spot check: is that actually true? Looking at the current list of the last fifty books I’ve read, I only see five that I’d read before. If that’s a representative sample, I’m only rereading books 10 percent of the time; seems a bit low to me, but who knows.

Still, I’m sure that’s higher than my percentage for video games. Or is it? Looking at the corresponding list there (only 25 items long), I don’t see any games I’d played before, but I’m pretty sure I dipped into two other games in that period. Having said that, “dipped into” is the right phrase: I didn’t finish either of them, or even play them for more than a few minutes at a time, which is a rather different thing.

What’s going on here? Part of it is that familiar works of art are like comfort food for me; that’s the reason why I recently reread The Dark is Rising, for example. And comfort food is probably most needed in small doses, or at least in smaller doses than your typical video game. (I’m sure that’s a big reason why I listen to old music frequently, and of course an album is a good deal shorter even than a typical book.)

Or sometimes I revisit books because they’re important to me. I’m not sure how that ties in with video games; several video games are quite important to me, but not quite in the same way that, say, my favorite nonfiction books are. I think there is a genuine difference there; I also think that, in some sense, it’s a sign that I haven’t been taking games seriously enough, to try and find what I could learn from repeatedly playing through them.

I’m pretty sure that a big factor, though, is being swept along by the tide: if everybody and his dog is talking about a game at launch and if I genuinely think that it’s a game I’d enjoy, then the idea that I should play it sticks in my head unduly. So while it’s unlikely that I’ll play it at launch (because of time constraints), it gets stuck in a queue in my head. And it’s probably worth making a conscious effort to try to fight that.

Sometimes, when I notice my reading habits go out of whack, I put myself on cycles for the books that I can read. (Though, retrospect, that may have been a sign of bad inventory management more than anything else; I haven’t felt a desire to do so since I fixed that.) Maybe I should try the same with games? Play on a four-game cycle: new, old but new to me, new, old friend? (Where “new” means “released within the last year and a half”, say.) I’m not sure if I’m going to do exactly that, but I really should find some time to replay an old friend or two.

Which I was strangely taken by, but I have to admit that it sounds more like snake oil than not. At least I hope that the psychological profession is sensible enough to pick up on techniques that can cure serious phobias in five minutes, if those techniques actually work! Then again, it’s not like I actually took the few minutes to go through any of the exercises in the book; maybe traditional psychologists took the same approach to the ideas as I did…

Having said that, there were a couple of ideas in the book that seemed worthwhile. One was the notion of the direction of motivation: you can either be motivated towards something you want or away from something you don’t want. Or, of course, a mixture of both, even in a single situation, and certainly people can be motivated towards something in one aspect of their lives and motivated away from something in other aspects of their lives. But their claim that most people, in general, lean in one direction or the other sounds plausible to me; and I think it’s worth playing around with the idea of exploring both sorts of motivations in various context. (Of course, I still think it pales in comparison to the power of the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.)

In particular, I’m starting to buy into the notion of how powerful having a strong vision of a future goal can be. This is, of course, the core of “motivation towards”, and also ties in with their approaches that I outlined in the first paragraph. Thinking back on my life, or even about my present-day life, I think it’s not too implausible to think that the areas where I’ve been successful are areas that I’ve had a strong vision pulling me forward, while areas where I’ve been less successful are ones where that hasn’t been the case.

For example, I think you could make a reasonable claim that part of the reason I left academia was that I didn’t transform my vision of somebody who knew a lot of mathematics into a vision of somebody who discovered a lot of mathematics. I was quite good at the former and mediocre at the latter; some of that is doubtless due to my innate talents, but I bet a lot of the reason why I would pull out a math book at a moment’s notice (and work through all of the exercises in it) during parts of my life without putting in the same energy towards discovering new math later in my life had to do with my lack of vision of what the latter would be like.

Though, of course, having a strong vision by itself isn’t good enough. On that note, I thought their presentation of research on what factors lead to successful rehabilitation for injured athletes was quite interesting. The list they presented was:

1. Inner Motivation. Both towards a future vision and away from the painful present, in the case of rehabilitation.
2. High Standards. The successful athletes wanted to get back to their former peak performance levels or better: they wanted to run like the wind, not just get to where they can walk.
3. Chunking Down Goals. They broke goals into extremely small chunks, e.g. gaining an extra quarter-inch of range of motion in their feet.
4. Combining Present and Future Time Frames. They concentrated on the present when moving towards those small goals, while also having a vision of the future to sustain them through the rough times.
5. Personal Involvement. They helped design their recovery plans and carry them out themselves, not just putting themselves in others’ hands.
6. Self-to-Self Comparisons. They’re not worried about comparing themselves (especially in their injured state!) to other athletes: they’re comparing themselves today to themselves last week, and noting how they’ve progressed.

There are several things that I like about this. For one thing, it fits well with my view of areas when I’ve been successful: in those situations, I have a vision for what I want, I break that down in small steps, I take charge of my own plans, I don’t worry particularly about comparing myself against others but instead note the progress that I’ve made on my own. Whereas in areas where I don’t satisfy those criteria (which is also frequently the case), I make much less progress.

To take a much more modest example than a world-class athlete recovering from injury, I want to become a fluent reader and speaker of Japanese. That’s my motivation, mostly towards, though there’s a bit of an away from motivation in that there are art works I can’t really access right now! I won’t claim that my standards are wonderfully high, since even if I succeed fabulously there will still be more than a hundred million people who are more fluent in the language than I am, but I’m also rejecting goals of being able to just get by: one of my goals right now is to memorize the two thousand basic kanji and all of their common readings and meanings, for example, and I have no intention of stopping when I get there. But that goal will take me years to reach; that’s okay, as long as I know 14 more kanji this week than I did last week, and can keep that up for a little over two more years, I’ll make it to that goal. (I suppose that will also serve as an example of combining time frames!) I’m certainly involved personally: I’m not depending on anybody else laying out a course of study for me, I’m doing the best I can of finding resources to help me wherever I can and combining them to make a coherent plan that I’ll actually be able to carry out. And I’m not comparing myself to anybody else while doing this; sure, the kindergartener two houses down is probably learning Japanese much more quickly than I am, but that’s her, I’m me.

And, of course, I’m always gratified to see somebody talk about the virtues of breaking large tasks into small steps. I’ve certainly spent enough time obsessing about that over the last five years, whether in the TDD cycle, in breaking up features into small, coherent stories, or in the GTD notion of “next action”. It’s a very powerful concept.

The list also sheds an interesting light on Seth Godin’s The Dip. I blogged before about my mixed feeling towards the book: I initially found it seductive, but when I thought about it more it didn’t really feel right to me. And comparing it to the above list is useful: Godin does great on the High Standards part, and okay on the Inner Motivation part. (Though even there I think the fit is a bit uneasy.) I think he’s fine on the next three factors (they’re not particularly the focus of his book, but that’s okay), but the Self-to-Self Comparisons seems to me where his presentation really doesn’t work with me. Don’t worry about being better than everybody else in your niche: follow your nose, and see if you’re getting closer to your vision every day. Maybe this will lead you to being king of your niche, maybe you’ll open up a glorious blue ocean, maybe you’ll just end up having your life quietly spiritually richer without being able to say you’re more successful than your neighbors. Any of these seems like a good outcome to me; focusing on being the best has its virtues to the extent that it encourages you to set High Standards, but is harmful to the extent that you’re excessively comparing yourself against others.

Hmm, maybe I should figure out what, if any, my vision is for this blog?

• In a recent lean blog podcast episode, Norman Bodek talked about how great mistakes are, because making a mistake is the best way to learn something.
• In an episode of The Cranky Middle Manager that I just listened to, Patrick Lencioni talked about how one of the signs of a bad job is that you can’t tell whether or not you’re doing a good job at it.

Everybody wants to do things right. But if you make a mistake, don’t freak out about it: notice that you made a mistake, figure out how to do things right the next time.

This has two hard parts: you have to notice that you made a mistake, and you have to not freak out about it. Which points at a problem with our educational system (among other aspects of our culture): it’s designed to get you to freak out about making mistakes, without giving you nearly enough tools to help you notice that you’ve done it. As math teachers all know, telling students to check their work isn’t sufficient support; helping students develop the skills to notice when they’ve made a mistake is hard, and I suspect that attacking them when they screw up probably isn’t the best way to go about it.

Of course, while making mistakes is all well and good from a learning perspective, we don’t want to go too far with that. Which is why, as Bodek continues, we should distinguish between mistakes and defects. Making mistakes is all well and good, but we don’t want other people to suffer from them. This is where poka yoke devices come in: they help improve quality by making it as easy as possible for people to notice when something is going wrong.

The big news around here for the last week has been the oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The news coverage has been all about whether or not it was the fault of the pilot or of a machinery malfunction: train wreck management, or at least train wreck news coverage, at its best. I have no idea what really happened there, but I hope the actual investigation is focusing more on learning about what went wrong and preventing this in the future than on figuring out whom to point fingers at.

(I can’t remember where I read this – Gerald Weinberg somewhere, maybe? – but if you really feel a need for a rule on how to point fingers, here’s one: if you aren’t authorized to sign off on a purchase for X dollars, then you’re not ultimately responsible for a mistake that costs your company X dollars. Again, I don’t want to excuse defects, but people higher up in the company should be growing an environment that minimizes the chance of defects happening at an unacceptable frequency.)

I’m currently in the middle of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Pactrick Lencioni. (Almost done with, actually, even though I started it yesterday and have done several other things in the intervening time; admittedly, it’s a quite short book, a little over 200 pages with very little text on them.) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see any of the various teams I’m a part of being particularly dysfunctional; the book was actually a little comforting in that regard. Having said that, there are certainly scenes described here that are pretty familiar, and if I were more at ease with conflict, I could doubtless do a better job of helping us get productively aligned. A fun, fast read; I’ll probably check more of the author’s books out of Sun’s library.

The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt, however, was completely and utterly absorbing: I brought it home and spent more than one night reading it rather later than I normally consider wise and then lying awake for way too long after turning off the light trying to figure out what, if any, concrete actions I could take. It’s about queue theory, or the theory of constraints, or leanish ideas, or something; basically, taking a manufacturing plant, figuring out what results are actually important to the plant, and figuring out how to alter the behavior on the floor (and elsewhere) to dramatically increase the quality of those results. With some quite surprising twists, if you haven’t seen this sort of thing before; I really should dig up a link to a Theory of Constraints simulator that I found somewhere and try playing with some variables.

Which is all pretty interesting, but what kept me up at night was: what does this mean to me? One of the basic principles, for example, is that, when considering the productivity of a system, the bottlenecks are almost all that matters. So, for example, keeping people working on non-bottleneck tasks just for the sake of looking busy probably isn’t doing you any good and may in fact be actively counterproductive. Which is pretty interesting, and I can imagine trying to apply that on a manufacturing floor. Does it apply to a software team, though? I’m pretty sure the answer is “yes”; how do I then go about identifying the bottlenecks that determine my team’s effectiveness?

There are probably several lessons to be learned here: my difficulty in even starting to figure out how to identify the bottlenecks is a warning sign in itself, for example. (There are other related warning signs, e.g. the fact that I have no clue in how to draw a value stream map for our situation.) But of course that’s the wrong place to start: following the title of the book, the first question I should ask is: what is the goal? Which my boss and I had a talk about recently, and it turns out that we came up with the same answers: that alignment is certainly a good sign, and it’s greatly clarified some decisions that we’ve had to make this month.

So what are other interesting novels out there on topics that would normally be covered in nonfiction? What other nonfiction genres does this work with? (I have a hard time imagining learning, say, algebraic geometry by reading a novel.) I am curious.

Still, I was pretty sure he was onto something. (Side note – where did I read an article recently complaining (intelligently) about bossism?) But then, a couple of days later, I saw Brian Marick on a stage helping present the Gordon Pask award. So it would seem that my understanding of the “Great Man theory” and his understanding are somewhat different. I guess he’s more focusing on the ills of executive leadership than on other forms of leadership? The team leads the Scrum Master but the organizer leads the XP day participants? Seems a bit odd to me.

This seems to be the focus of his post:

We know how to do software better. It’s the executive’s job to support us in doing that—to clear obstacles out of the way of our practice—and not to lead us. We already know where to go. We know how to do our job. We need to be assisted, not led.

On the one hand, I sympathize with that a lot. I’ve had one notable experience with an executive pushing his pet theories on a development team, and it’s one that I hope not to repeat. I’m a fan of the notion that you should move decisions to the lowest responsible level. And it’s unquestionably the case that people who are doing something out of internal motiviation will work at it much more effectively than people who are doing it out of external motivation.

On the other hand, I can’t uncritically accept the statement “We know how to do software better”. Another past experience that I’d like to avoid in the future involved a project where decisions were supposed to be made relatively communally, yet where dysfunctions seemed to me to hurt the effectiveness of the team’s operation; while I can imagine other solutions to that problem, I’m sure that an effective executive would have stepped in and resolved the issues much more quickly. To be sure, an ineffective executive could well have exacerbated the problem, but I won’t argue that that group as a whole “[knew] how to do software better.”

And just what is the better way that we allegedly know how to do software, anyways? Given the context, I assume it’s agile in some form; my experience is that many/most programmers aren’t particularly well steeped in agile ways of thought, and that, when exposed to those ways of thought, most programmers find some areas they agree with, some areas they are suspicious of, and have good reasons for their suspicions. Also, if we know how to do software better, did we also know how to do software better 10 years ago? Were our answers the same then? Will our answers be the same 10 years from now? Are we sure that teams will always come to those new insights before executives? I’m not. This stuff is hard; I can use all the help I can get.

On the third hand, just who is the “we” who know how to do software better? Agile practices bring in a large number of stakeholders. In particular, even if we want to move decisions to the stakeholders most directly affected by those decisions, a key stakeholder is the gold owner, who is likely an executive. I can understand arguments that, say, the gold owner shouldn’t have much to say about the details of your refactoring strategies. But I think the gold owner might well have a lot to say about the composition, frequency, and quality of your deliverables, or about the reliability of your estimates, and hence has every right to feel strongly about, say, the planning game, frequent releases, and the quality of your test plan.

The most interesting examples I know of of companies that have productively moved decisions to lower levels are Toyota and Semco. My understanding is that, in both cases, executive leadership played a strong role. I won’t say that it was the only factor, but surely we can learn a lesson from that? One of the key agile tenets is the importance of communication; we should embrace productive communication with executives, accept them as potential active resources for change, not limit our vision of their job to simply be “to clear obstacles out of the way of our practice”.

 

After writing the above, now I’m starting to understand why some people say that retrospectives are the single most important agile practice. Communication is key, getting people at all levels to think about how we could best do our work is crucial. And I can imagine how increasing the openness of conversations could potentially have helped greatly with some areas where we’ve functioned at less than peak effectiveness over the last few years. I’m looking forward to our team retrospective on Monday.

In fact, the book continues to be awesome. Most novels could not pull off extended expositions/meditations on philosophy or aesthetics; no problem here. Not so much Zen in the book (at least not overtly; I will have to think about how much is there covertly, but I’m not convinced there’s much covert Zen, either), but that’s okay: there are lots of (relatively) popular books touching on Zen out there, but not so many delving into, say, sophists. And the use of motorcycle maintenance is well done. (Not that I know anything about motorcycle maintenance, but I did at least do a fair amount of bike maintenance when I was in high school.)

I’d completely forgotten the “grades are bad” theme from the book. That is an idea that has been embedded into my brain for quite some time now; I’d assumed I’d gotten it from Alfie Kohn (reinforced, of course, by John Holt, but I read him later), but it’s here in all of its glory.

The initial discussions of Quality reminded me of Christopher Alexander on Life, but they developed rather differently. Honestly, Alexander’s idea of Life seems rather more productive than Phaedrus’s idea of Quality, but that’s okay: that’s only one of the many strands that makes up the book, and the strength of the book in no way depends on our agreement with Phaedrus on particulars of philosophy.

I suppose I should read Lila next. I don’t have high hopes for that one: I didn’t like it when it came out, and it seems unlikely that my feeling will have changed in the interim. Still, it deserves one more shot before I give away my copy.

And, if the book is to be believed, it works extremely well. I was really impressed with their adapting to circumstances, to the extent that people would recommend changes to the company that ended up with their own job, even their own division, being eliminated. The ways they nurtured worker’s growth and development (both within the company and forming spinoffs) was great, too.

I have a lot to learn about how to manage, that’s for sure.