What's your motive?

All our investment in knowledge sharing technology, all the collaboration strategy papers, count for little... unless we are motivated at an intuitive and individual level, to share and collaborate.

Over 11 million people have watched this great TED talk from Dan Pink on 'The puzzle of motivation'. Even if you've seen it before, motivate yourself by watching it again, or take a look at the excellent RSA Animate version of Dan's talk.  

The research has proven that some types of reward can have exactly the opposite effect of that intended. If you think about incentives and rewards for sharing at all, the obvious seems to be focused on extrinsic reward (eg feedback stars). 

Have a think about whether you are supporting and leveraging the phenomenal power of intrinsic motivation in your knowledge-sharing endeavours? In discussing this with KIN members, it strikes me that very often it is simple things such as 'my manager has agreed that I can spend half an hour a week sharing with others outside my team' or 'I now have knowledge sharing as one of my appraisal criteria' can be the most meaningful.

Dan Pink's observations on what motivates us is backed-up by this article HBR 'Does Money Really Affect Motivation?'

What intrinsic motivations is your organisation recognising and leveraging?

Related articles

• Motivation
• Layers of Motivation

Beautifying Your Way Home...

erica.hurley posted topic Beautifying Your Way Home... in forum "Cafe KIN". Mapping services like Mapquest are used to find the quickest route from point A to point B, regardless of the quality of the route. A team of researchers in Barcelona, Spain want to change that with a new algorithm designed to get users to their destination in the most pleasant way possible.The team at Yahoo! Labs used crowdsourced opinions and mined data to find the routes which are "not only short, but also emotionally pleasant," according to Technology Review. Initially, the team used the site UrbanGems.org to crowdsource which areas in London were the most pleasant by having users pick the most beautiful between two pictures. They then plotted courses based on the highest rated images. Researchers soon realized it would take too long to do this for all cities and turned to the image sharing site Flickr to fill in the gaps. While a normal mapping algorithm will find the shortest distance, the Yahoo! one pulls location and date data from Flickr to identity routes which are often photographed and receive multiple positive comments relating to the images.  Using this method, the team should be able to find the most pleasant route in any city. When they sent residents of London and their second test city, Boston, to check out the routes plotted by the algorithm they reported the the new paths were more enjoyable than the quickest route. These more pleasant drives or walks won't cost you much on time, either. On average, the scenic routes are just about 12 percent longer than the direct routes. The team is hoping to come out with an app that will plot these pleasure cruises in major European and American cities soon. This got me to thinking - what is the most beautiful (work related) journey you have had the opportunity to drive?  Mine was during an air traffic controllers strike in France a few years back, when I had to drive from Perpignan to Barcellona in a hire car to catch a flight back to UK :) The topic can be found here: http://www.ki-network.org/ipb/index.php?/topic/3594-beautifying-your-way-home/?view=getnewpost

Learning vs lending culture

The World Bank has recently undergone a major restructure to reflect it's purpose of becoming a 'solutions bank'. This requires a significant shift in how knowledge is used and shared. Monika Weber-Fahr, head of knowledge at the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) recently chaired an excellent conference on the most important topics contributing to organisational learning culture at the Bank 'How the Bank Learns' (80 mins). The speakers are managers of front-line departments ('Global Practices'), so their ideas on knowledge sharing and collaboration are perspective and pragmatic.

This video is also very good to see an innovative panel format, quality of chairmanship and use of real-time event tools.

All of the ideas about learning culture and 'making time for learning' in large organisations are relevant to KIN members.