This week we are going to look at Motivation the 2nd of our 3 areas for the Waggledancer. Just ro remind you the motivation is about how you persuade others to be enthusiastic about whatever it is you have found. Instinctively we would rather that they were enthusiastic about us. Often they may not be enthusiastic about either us or whatever we have found. And we don't want them to lock into us becuase that means they will come to us instead of going off to retrieve the sweet stuff themselves. We don't want a stream of people giving us more to do and we don't have the capacity for going and getting more ourselves. We want them to go and get it. Hence the motivation.

Motivation that it is indeed worth getting. And will make a difference to the work they are doing. Motivation that they will pass on the information to others - so others will go looking as well. You may be getting bemused about what 'it' is. Well it could be an insight into the customer. It could be a strategy - a way of engaging with customers. But we want them to own it and not be doing us a favour.

The first aspect of motivation I am going to start off with is measurement. Which probably surprises you. Usually we don't think about measurement until we get to the end of a project and need some justification for raising a budget for the next project. Or we may be hoping that nobody remembers to ask so we get away without measuring at all. Trouble with these approaches is that measurement is for someone else (often in finance) - and that we don't expect it to tell us anything. We also have a problem with expecting that any set of measures needs to be 100% accurate - where don't have enough information or we aren't sure what to measure we back away. 

Actually you can measure just about anything. And you can measure in any way you like. If you measure up front them it shapes how you go about a task - the measurement helps to create the motivation. The other great thing about measuring up frount is that it is speculative - you are guesssing what is going to happen. When you actually get around to doing something then it is likely to be different. By comparing what really happened with what you expected to happen you learn.  And you are in a position to optimise. If you don't know how you think you will do then how do you know if you can do any better?

If the finance people aren't going to ask about their ROI until itsnearly all over then by starting so early you have carte blanche to set whatever measures you like.  You might want to measure how much time or work or money is likely to be saved by using this insight or by following this strategy. If it isn't going to make any difference then why bother doing it? So start with measures - in this coming week we are going to look at some of the things you can measure.