by Vasco Duarte

Rob van Lanen, a Dutch consultant told me he often uses a Management 3.0 exercise called Moving Motivators. It’s a ‘game’ played with a series of cards with the intrinsic motivators on it. Motivators like freedom, honor, acknowledgment etc.

Moving Motivators

The game works as follows: you put the cards on a horizontal row with the most important value to the right and the least important to the left. You can now figure out what kind of impact (possible) changes will have, simply by moving cards vertically up (this change will improve my freedom) or down (this change will mean less honor) and thus decide whether it is a good choice.

A personal conversation

I asked Rob what he liked about the game and he said, ‘It gives me a perfect opportunity to start a personal conversation with my team members. Like, ‘Hey, you put freedom on this spot, but I thought it was way more important to you.’ For Rob it is an easy way to talk about serious things focusing on simple practices to highlight hopes and fears.

Seeing is believing

Rob said one of the scrum masters he works with had an excellent idea. She not only played Moving Motivators with her team in order to make everyone to get to know each other a little bit better, but she visualized the average team outcome in an Intrinsic Motivator radar (image below). It is on their wall as an invitation for dialog. Rob thought it was a great idea and now uses the outcome in his working agreement. So it not only tells what the team agreed upon, but also what they think is important.