Its not all about the money afterall

The process of developing an IDEA (Integrated Data Engineering Application) sounds like such a consummately technical task doesn’t it? Sounds like you might need some client side boffo cranking out an ungodly detailed MS project file that would then mesh with a WorldAPP Statement Of Work eight tomes thick.

Well, yes and no.

I just looked at a video that a colleague of mine, Matt Haney, jabbered over. It’s fascinating stuff. First, it’s on a larger theme that has always entranced me – the subject of how to correctly motivate a workforce.

But there’s more in this pudding than just these raisins.

It also reveals how incentives can become disincentives when the work task shifts from straightforward or mechanical tasks to those that require expansive lateral thinking. (Hat tip here to one of my all times heroes, Edward de Bono, the “father of thinking”.)

In the video, the presenter, Dan Pink, shows how it has been repeatedly proven that the bigger the pecuniary incentive for cognitively challenging tasks, the higher the fail rate. Hmmm…. I hope our CFO, Oleg Matsko, isn’t reading this. This means we should be cranking out IDEAS for our customers with a bunch of lateral thinking mavens from the client’s team matched with a bunch of rag-tag rightbrained geniuses on our side .…AND…if we want it to really work well…the success of the project should largely be uncoupled from its cost.

You can view this interesting lecture at http://bit.ly/F0gJu