This week I worked with a team who were wrestling with how to make decisions about what they do as a team and what they want to delegate or outsource. The discussion went on for a while and started talking about where the team could add value as opposed to the delivery of commodity services where no value was added.
This was great and at least gave the team one criteria to talk around, but in itself wasn’t enabling decision making.
I decided to introduce another criteria into the discussion, is it Fun?
Fun might seem like a flippant word in a business scenario, but it bloody well isn’t its absolutely key because fun = motivation.
Adding the criteria of Fun vs Boring into the debate enables decision making. I sketched up the quadrant below on a whiteboard and we could immediately start putting things into boxes. All of a sudden we had a way of placing our problem within a space that gave us an idea of the action the team should take:
Fun is a pretty loose term, what might be fun to some people would be boring to others, e.g. some people like to perform repetitive tasks.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid concern for your team, it just means you need to be clear what fun is for your team and if you find that the definition of what constitutes fun for your team is difficult or so diverse as to be irreconcilable then maybe the real problem is that you don’t have a team, you just have a collection of people who happen to work together
and that is a more fundamental problem that you need to solve.
