Driving Motivation – an exercise for understanding the Daniel Pink’s Drive model

Recently, the issue of motivation is permeating my work as an agile consultant. And not surprisingly,  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink is the main model I’m currently excited about.

Today, while a colleague was describing the Autonomy Mastery Purpose (AMP) model in our Agile Forum meeting, I thought of an exercise that can be used to learn and internalize the model. ( this can be thought of as a pattern of the Force Field Analysis retrospective activity)

The outline of the exercise

• Ask participants to come up with as many management actions they can think of that happen in their organization, they heard of, are considering, etc. Write them on sticky post-its.
• Provide a primer on Drive and the AMP model
• Meanwhile Draw the diagram from the first slide on a whiteboard / flip chart / several flip charts
• Ask the participants to come place their actions in the right place in the diagram – each action can be driving/restraining one of the A M P aspects.
• Ask the participants to look for duplicates and conflicts – actions that they have disagreement/confusion about
• Have a discussion about the items in disagreement
• Ask participants what are the actions they are committing to try in order to help drive higher motivation, and what are the actions they are committing to try to stop. One from each category should be enough per participant.

Some advanced tweaks or ideas that might improve the exercise:

• Use pictograms for the actions
• Use different colors for activities currently being done, and ideas.
• Separate discussion to current activities, and later on after discussing the model, ask participants to come up with ideas that can help drive higher motivation
• Reorder the steps somewhat…
• Provide a set of activities that the participants need to classify, instead of coming up with their own, or on top of it as a bootstrapping activity.

If you try this and find it useful – let me know!

[slideshare id=6938527&doc=drivingmotivationexercise-110215152934-phpapp02]