Reflection on the AMP Motivation Theory

It was past midnight.

It was supposed to be the highlight of his career at Garuda Robotics, being a highly motivated developer who have developed mastery on his own with little guidance, to be given a chance to present his work before a room of both experts and novice user of the application he help developed.

Still, the feedback from the first iteration of the speech was not forthcoming. And he takes the stage in less than 15 hours.

I thought to myself, this must be the end of the autonomy given I guess? After giving him about a month of head's up to prepare and all the flexibility to fit the preparation into his busy schedule, he chose to start working on it 2 days before the event. How should one align priorities when given the freedom to do so?

Should I step in and start directing him for the next 15 hours? From a mastery perspective, he has already received ample guidance on pronunciation, hand gestures, etc. which isn't easy to begin with for someone whose native language isn't English. His great sense of purpose is sometimes overwhelming even to me. What went wrong from an autonomy perspective?

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He was in tears.

But he did not display such emotions at work, being the strong motivated engineer who tries his best to fulfil his role and responsibility. After 1.5 hours of starving as a pre-lunch status update meeting spiralled into a question of fundamentals on a new business we were trying to get in to, he realised a vast amount of his work last month were negated once the true customer and product we should be prototyping emerges.

Surely there can be some way to use these lines of code written in some way?

I wondered, was his misguided on the purpose of the work? Or did he take the original direction too literally? After all, in the drone business we often find ourselves being misguided by even our customers, as they try to clarify their own thoughts and strategies in robotics, drones, and advanced analytics.

I was hungry too.

Should I keep going to drive home the purpose of the activity? From an autonomy and mastery perspective, he is an independent learner and directs his time to hone his skills. But often the big picture does not translate to his scope of work well, as it was a highly specialised area.

How should we translate big picture talks like those our founders give at TEDx or grand sales pitches given to government and enterprises, to individual sense of purpose without it being just a a task list?

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A blank white screen.

That's not helpful. He couldn't decide whether the app crashed, the network was bad, or there's some cosmic radiation that flipped a bit. The potential client was standing next to us, watching. The sales person held back, twiddling the thumb hoping that he, the engineer who built the new technology, would say something to the customer. His brain raced through all his years of experience before hitting the refresh button, all the while worried about unexpected side effects.

The drone hovered, humming a peaceful tune in the sky. The battery was still at 80%.

Everyone on the field knew what was a stake. No sale has ever been made without the pre-requisite demo, and no demo has ever went exactly as planned. It takes a team, each mastering their respective skills, from the pilots who can react in split seconds to mis-commanded behaviour, to engineers putting together the advanced flying marvel well, to the data / GIS specialists curating accurate information, and so on, to piece together the puzzle and present a successful demo. Heck, we even run a school to teach professionals this.

I had my hunch of what went wrong, a mastery achieved through many years of engineering trials and tribulations. But it was time for him to grow. I wouldn't be available at all future demos as we scale our sales and solutioning team to cover more geographies.

Could additional training help prepare him better? Was there enough test conducted prior to bringing the new technology to the customer? A hardworking and self-directed engineer full of youthful drive to change the world, he could not find a way to get out his comfort zone of knowledge acquired at a very young age, as well as the way of solving often scaffolded problems in school made to boost the students self-esteem, into building systems that would survive the real world. He once claimed he needed a teacher to work on his mastery of his line of work.

Well, he was about to learn something the hard way.

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AMP Motivation Theory

A decade ago, behavioural scientist Daniel Pink published an influential book Drive and gave a passionate talk about his motivation theory, which proposed that carrot and stick style management only works if the job does not require cognitive work, whereas modern knowledge workers are better motivated by Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

(Source)

The stories I told above are very close to reality, anonymised and mixed up to respect confidentiality. They represent cautious tales about the balancing act when implementing this motivation theory.

What happen so often as I mentor my team, is that different people have different blind spots of their own situation. For example:

• A person who crave autonomy often misuse the freedom when given. ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) is a classic example. Despite having full clarity in measure of success and repercussion of failure, people are often motivated right but implement their own freedom in a way that are suboptimal. This is where SCRUM teams remain a bright spot, limiting the "non-performance" of a results oriented culture to that day or the past 8 hours only, where the scrum master has a chance to provide feedback and fine tune expectations. While that solves the organization woes, on a person by person level, we still need to provide templates on how to take control of an autonomous life (can I call this "adulting"?), especially after 16 or so years of Singapore/Asian style schooling.
• A person who crave mastery often find that they cannot achieve mastery. In fact, the deeper a person dive into a subject, the more questions they have, the more pandora boxes get opened up, and the less mastery the person will feel. Fortunately in our line of work, we are experts in levels of abstraction, harden interfaces, and independent moving parts, which allows the business to make buy-or-build decisions at every subcomponent, while dedicating more resource on honing the mastery for the pieces we choose to build. While that solves the business problem, on a person by person level, we still need to artificially create tiny milestones on a set of challenges that are scaled proportionately to their learning speed and capability.
• A person who crave purpose often confused external (often social media meme like) meaning with internal meaning of their respective work, resulting in much dissonance between what they choose to do day to day, and what they hear the company do as articulated by leaders or marketing team. This makes work planning, something we practise every quarter, extremely important, as leaders spend extra time to explain the strategy behind every activity in the company, the reason for every metric and why it matters, and the direct contribution of everyone's role towards the bigger goal. While that style of communication could only happen during checkpoints, on a person by person level, we found it necessary to verify how they feel about the day's work, and how they see that fitted into the next milestone, next project, and the future of the company.

For every interview I take, I ask for exactly these 3 things within the first 10 minutes. Demonstrate mastery (tell me about the most challenging project you've done so far), demonstrate purpose (of all companies you can apply to work for, why do you choose to apply to Garuda Robotics?) and demonstrate autonomy (suppose i give you the job today, what do you want to do every day when you wake up?), before I dive into the skillset and other important factors.

There's an enhanced AMP theory is known as RAMP, adding a final and important factor of Relatedness. To end, one last made up true story for you :)

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There was only one halal food joint with enough seats for all of us.

But everyone just went happily into it, relieved by the possibility of all having lunch together before our big event. As the team grew, not only was it harder to find a place that could sit a dozen, it became even harder when our team in Malaysia travels to Singapore to join us.

Nevertheless, we still make it a point to eat together at every possible moment and connect with everyone at a personal level. Currently, we have 4 nationalities that comes from a variety of background, and set to double in size very soon. Feeling related to one another, and a sense of belonging across geographical boundaries, is going to be our next big challenge.

And we better make sure we don't travel that journey hungry.

Eat well! You have control.

Want to join us to build Singapore's Connected Urban Airspace Management System? Visit https://garuda.io/careers