[Deep Dive] Contracts & Pay Packets
August 25, 2010
Use Game Theory to understand and improve the context of your Agile Adoption.
There are many factors outside of the team and outside of Scrum which affect the success of any Scrum project, and ultimately place a ceiling on how much value your organization will be able to realize from their Agile or Scrum adoption.
There often seems to be an “invisible hand” guiding people’s actions for better or worse, and far too often this is put down merely to “luck” or “attitudes”.
The reality of the situation is however, that this invisible hand was created deliberately.
In this all day session we will explore the two most common and virulent barriers to Scrum success (outside of just doing it wrong) - the mechanisms by which team members are remunerated and the manner in which Agile Contracts are put together.
In the morning we’ll start by exploring the original Incentive Trap simulation where multiple Scrum teams all strive towards the same goal, but under different incentive schemes. A thorough debrief guides participants through exploring and understanding the root causes behind individual behaviors and team dynamics and then guides them towards related these outcomes to real world employee incentive schemes.
In the afternoon, we’ll discover how Incentives work at the macro level by using established Game Theory and behavioral economics to uncover what’s really going on when two or more organizations contract to have a project delivered in an Agile fashion.
The Incentive Trap is a highly interactive and introspective day and is based on a blend of science and experience, and is a great resource for anybody tackling organizational impediments to hyper-productivity.
