Category: Uncategorized

Today is Pancake Day in the UK (also known as Shrove Tuesday). I looked up the reasons for the name and discovered "Shrove Tuesday is a day of celebration as well as penitence, because it's the last day before Lent (a Christian Festival hallmarked, in the past, by a long, strict, religious fast). Throughout the United Kingdom, and in other countries too, people indulge themselves on foods that traditionally aren't allowed during Lent. Pancakes are eaten on this day because they contain fat, butter and eggs which were forbidden during Lent."

This started me thinking about other organizational rituals, and their significance for employees. I remember years ago working for Prudential the insurance company in the UK. (Different from the US Prudential). At the time I worked for it the head office was in Holborn Bars in central London. I remember a certain annual ritual when staff would go and gather round a statue in the courtyard and sing what I thought was the company song. However, when I emailed the Prudential archivist to find out more on this (I was writing something else about rituals) I got a delightful reply – that, although it didn't quite square with my memory, is probably correct.

"Each year in March when the previous year's annual results were announced is that all the Field Staff (District Managers and above from all the Divisions)had an annual visit to Holborn Bars which culminated in an Annual Dinner held at the Grosvenor Hotel which all the Directors,Management and Chief Office Staff of Principal Clerk and above also attended.

Because the Field Staff were not normally present in Holborn Bars in November when the Armistice Day two minutes silence and wreath laying ceremony took place, we think it possible/probable that a similar ceremony took place during the morning of the Annual Dinner to respect the memory of members of the Field Staff who lost their lives in the two World Wars. If so this would most likely have involved the laying of a wreath and, in the absence of a religious service as such, the singing of the National Anthem."

Then earlier this week I was writing about the Grameen Bank. It has initiated a ritual because, as explained:

"The bank needs its members (or borrowers) to feel accountable enough to repay their loans, and empowered enough to take advantage of the loans they receive. In order to achieve this, Grameen requires members to form groups and relies on the social pressure of the group to promote accountability and fiscal discipline. Members agree to a set of "16 Decisions" related to discipline and self-empowerment, which along with the Grameen credo-"Discipline, unity, courage, and hard work in all walks of our lives"-are repeated at the beginning and end of each group meeting."

The ritual repetition of the credo and decisions at group meetings reminded me that other companies do similar things to encourage group cohesion, a feeling of connectedness, loyalty to the organization and so on. (The darker side to this coin are rituals of hazing or initiation that herald the right of membership to an organization.)

Mulling over my other experiences of this type ritual I recall my girls' grammar school annual traditions of 'Speech Day' and 'School Birthday' on both of which the school song was sung. This sent me scurrying off – not to a website this time, but to an ancient book – to see if I still had the words to the song. Answer? No, but I do recall that one of the lines is "Let Sapere Aude ever ring in our ears". (Dare to be wise).

I just received the Career Innovation Newsletter containing a link to an article When Performance-Related Pay Backfires. It previews a day of discussion of recent research on performance related pay that was held on June 30 2009 at the London School of Economics (LSE)

One piece of research, by Samuel Bowles and Sandra Reyes of the Santa Fe Institute, was an analysis of 51 separate experimental studies of financial incentives in employment relations' . The paper has the rather daunting title of "Economic Incentives and Social Preferences: A Preference-Based Lucas Critique of Public Policy". The Abstract is not for the faint-hearted:

Policies and explicit incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is pervasive, and that crowding in also occurs. A model in which self-regarding and social preferences may be either substitutes or complements is developed and evidence for the mechanisms underlying this non-additivity feature of preferences is provided. The result is a preference-based analogue to the Lucas Critique restricting feasible implementation to allocations that are supportable given the effect of incentives on preferences.

But this has been simplified for those of us not deep in the academic research sphere. Dr Bernd Irlenbusch from the LSE's Department of Management translates:

'We find that financial incentives may indeed reduce intrinsic motivation and diminish ethical or other reasons for complying with workplace social norms such as fairness. As a consequence, the provision of incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance,'

(In my current mode of trying to learn some Chinese, through the BBC, I find there are two modes of writing it one is in 'simplified characters' the other 'complex characters', also known as 'traditional form'. This seems an apt parallel between academic writing and newspaper reporting of it.)

Another research paper mentioned was Dr Oriana Bandiera's who, with two colleagues, researched team incentives. Her abstract opens with

Team incentives can affect productivity both through changes in worker effort and in
team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment that allows us to compare three common team incentive schemes: piece rates, performance feedback, and tournaments. Theory illustrates that when workers face a trade-off between matching by ability and by social ties, providing stronger incentives can lead high ability workers to prefer to form teams with similarly skilled colleagues instead of colleagues they are socially linked to.

What the newspaper article does not mention is another piece of research conducted by Bandiera on Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives

"This paper aims to provide evidence on the match between firms and managers through the adoption of different managerial practices. Using a survey specifically designed for this purpose we collect detailed information on managerial incentive policies – both explicit as performance bonuses and implicit as career advancement – and on the individual characteristics of managers and firms. Informed by incentive theory, we collect measures of the managers' talent and risk aversion, as both variables affect the managers' preference towards different incentive schemes."

What the researchers find is that there is a correlation between a manager's risk appetite, talent, and choices about incentive schemes.

The power of incentives is positively correlated with managers risk tolerance and measured ability and where incentives are more powerful managers exert more effort, are paid more and are more satisfied, as implied by our theory. We also show that firms that offer high powered incentives perform better and this result holds even after controlling for the type of ownership." (They investigated family owned and 'widely' owned companies.)

These various pieces of research led me to the (fairly obvious) conclusion that designing workable incentive schemes is a complex undertaking – what works for one person/organization does not work for another. Again the notion of a flexible or menu based scheme came to mind.

My mother is in hospital this week having a hip revision (and doing fine). Going into the place where she is having it reminded me that I'd been reading more stuff about hospital design. For example I'd looked at the Kaiser Permanente's Garfield Healthcare Innovation Center (established in June 2006) website

It describes itself as:

A living laboratory where ideas are tested and solutions are developed in a hands-on, mocked-up clinical environment. Many aspects of delivering healthcare can be innovated and examined at the Center using real-world scenarios and activities, such as simulations, technology testing, prototyping, product evaluations, and training.

Although several of their pages are locked for KP personnel only it's easy enough to get an overview of the types of activities the Center is engaged in and why this form of experiential approach to innovation and collaboration is an exciting and productive one.

I've mentioned before the short opinionator piece "A breath of fresh air for healthcare" by Allison Arieff. She makes the point that "Their [KP's] efforts to improve the patient experience touch all facets, from designing greener, healthier buildings to increasing the amount of time nurses spend at bedside."

The UK NHS established a similar innovation center in July 2005, The Institute for Improvement and Innovation. It "supports the NHS to transform healthcare for patients and the public by rapidly developing and spreading new ways of working, new technology and world class leadership." Its Practice Partner Network has been established to provide "an opportunity for organisations to work closely with the NHS Institute, has been embraced by senior leaders across the NHS. Interest in joining the PPN has been exceptional and we now have over 50 member organisations, who will be working with the NHS Institute over the next 12 months"

It works in six areas of healthcare: Building Capability, Innovation, Quality and Value, Share and Network, QIPP, and Safer Care. (QIPP is about NHS products and services).

Comparing the two sites – established within a year of each other – gives another perspective on organization design and culture. What impression are visitors to each getting about each enterprise? The KP one is simpler language, less cluttered pages, and seemingly with a different intent. It appears to be going for developing and piloting small innovations while the NHS one, with denser language and more crowded pages, seems to be going for a huge effort to make the entire system more innovative. (Going back to the 'bright spots' or 'positive deviance' I have written about – I wonder which of the two approaches will be more successful).

What I didn't come across in anything about the approaches was learning from other countries ways of doing things – there's no evidence of a 'global mindset' on either site, despite the much written about 'health (or medical) tourism' industry. (See, for example, the Medical Tourism Association website. Maybe learning from other countries goes on behind the scenes but it would be nice to see some reference to learning and collaboration from a broader perspective.

Heartening is the drive to innovate and improve the products, services, and physical design of the facilities. Just as an observer to my mother's three hip operations – more or less one every 12 years. I have seen and experienced advances on all counts.

Beyond the innovation going on around patient care and ways of delivering hospital services that the two innovation centers are involved in, it was interesting to see the article First Do No Harm in Fast Company on the physical design of hospitals. It opens saying "Hospitals have a brutal effect on the earth" and follows by presenting a prototype of the hospital of the future. It looks like a workable building from a sustainability point of view and would meet the LEED for Healthcare standards being developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. However, there are no costings attached to the prototype and it doesn't address what it would actually be like to either work there or be a patient there.

But who knows – if my mother has a fourth revision in another 12 years maybe she'll be in such a building receiving the innovative care being piloted now.

Washington DC in the last few days has been different from normal. Mainly it's been snowing. This means a whole different way of behaving, and as the Washington Post says "Washington's long history of relatively mild winters has left residents without a common sense of snow etiquette."

As one of my current pre-occupation is with cultural norms I started to wonder how long it takes to develop them, and what, in this case, they would look like. I think they would develop in relation to the following types of questions that have surfaced, for example:

• "If you dig your car out from its frozen tomb, do you then own that parking spot until the sun melts open the rest of the curbside space?"
• If the hardware store is closed and/or has run out of shovels and you don't have one are you still obliged to follow the "District's law mandating that property owners clear snow and ice from their sidewalks within eight hours after the snowfall's completion".
• If snow 'completes' but more is forecast within the eight hours are you allowed to wait and clear the snow in one go without incurring a penalty?
• Is it ok to walk down the middle of the street as it is the only (relatively) walkable pathway without incurring a penalty for jay-walking?
• If you are walking on a very narrow single-file strip of walkable sidewalk what are the passing regulations if the person in front of you is walking very slowly?
• Ditto if there is a person coming towards you – which of you steps off into the snow drift?
• If you are going into a shop with snow covered boots do you stamp off the snow before you enter or just inside the door where it is much warmer?
• If someone ducks their responsibility to shovel do you shovel on their behalf? One store owner mented on the "bad vibes rendered when a handful of store owners ignore their responsibility while everyone else labors to create lawsuit-free harmony.'Invariably, other owners will shovel out the rest of the sidewalk, but they're going to end up resenting you,' he said."

I then Googled the question: How do social norms develop? A paper by Ann Carlson caught my eye: "Classifying Social Norms" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Law and Society Association, Renaissance Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, May 27, 2004 . 2009-05-26

She asks three pertinent questions:

• How and when, for example, do social norms emerge to solve a social problem?
• What role can and should governments play in developing social norms as a regulatory tool?
• How should courts treat independently developed social norms?

And then poses an answer: "I suggest that the answers to these questions vary depending on at least two important characteristics: group size and the strength of economic or other interest among group members in resolving a social problem."

She then identifies four types of social problems relevant to the development and management of social norms:

• "large-number, large-payoff" social problems, of which smoking and seat belt use are examples;
• "large-number small-payoff" collective action problems, which often involve the management of commons resources and include carpooling, recycling and blood donation;
• "small-group, large-payoff" problems, including Robert Ellickson's famous cattle rancher
• a subset of small-group, large payoff problems involving commons resources, most thoroughly studied by Elinor Ostrom.

She makes the point that "within some of these categories — small-number, large-payoff problems, for example – norms may arise internally to help resolve group problems and government may play little role in either facilitating or enforcing those norms. For other categories — large-number, large-payoff problems in particular – governments may seek to shape new norms to overcome bad behavior (or even bad norms) (drunk driving and smoking illustrate the point).

I suggest that snow etiquette would fall into the large-number/small payoff bucket (snow melts, and is not present every year) so the DC Government may or may not intervene with regulations – as it has on the sidewalk clearing, but not on the shoveling out of the car. On this latter, according to the Washington Post: "Boston has codified its citizens' right to benefit from their backbreaking snow-clearing labor; a city law says that if you dig out your car in a snow emergency, a lawn chair or trash can renders the spot yours for at least two days while you're away at work."

Reading the Economist special report on social networking, coincides with my preparation for a seminar that I'm facilitating (in March) on the new designs of organizations, and in mulling over the tack to take on that I came across the Dachis Group who have a white paper on Social Business Design. It's a pretty interesting bundle – although conscious of my current thinking on 'management guff' v plain English I felt this was weighted toward the management guff end of the spectrum. One can't really argue with their start-point that Technology, society, and work are all changing at breakneck speeds. Businesses that seek to create and capture value from these changes must harness opportunities at their intersection, the hub of social business.

But then the nub of the white paper explains that

Social Business Design is a holistic, comprehensive business architecture that helps an organization improve value exchange among constituents. The Social Business Design framework consists of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes, Ecosystem, Hivemind, Dynamic Signal, Metafilter

Every business contains these archetypes; however, the extent to which they are dynamic and socially calibrated can typically be improved. Social business design provides insight to help measure and manage these areas to produce improved and emergent outcomes.

However, on his blog David Armano one of the writers of the paper converts this into plain(er) English "In its purest form, it (social business design) is a shift in thinking-less about media and more about tapping the benefits of being a social business in a purposeful way.

His colleague Jevon MacDonald explains that "Social Businesses are those which are designed from top to bottom as a reflection of the world we all live in online today. A business where everyone is connected and able to contribute but also where the right tools are available to them to do all of this with a business intent from the beginning".

It all sounds exciting and persuasive – but I found myself asking (myself) – where is any reference to anything around the greater good of all this? And I smiled at the Results section which has two paragraphs – one on improved outcomes and one on emergent outcomes. The latter reading The most compelling outcomes are the ones that cannot be immediately predicted, but will appear over time as a result of the altered system working in dynamic, social calibration. Which I interpreted to mean 'We don't have a clue what will happen if we go down this path but we think it will turn out ok."

Also this week I read a Fast Company article Cisco's Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities From Scratch which had a very similar social design intent. One of the comments made there seemed to present a counterpoint to the Social Business Design argument: "Cities are highly complex systems, and one of the elements of highly complex systems is that when you monkey around with them, their predictability goes to zero," says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst whose book The Change Function argues that the reason so many technologies fail is because the pain of changing old habits outweighs any benefits. And when it comes to something as complex as cities, he says forget it. "If you're trying in advance to define a future city, you're out of your mind. You'll spend years and money disrupting people's lives."

Substitute the word 'businesses' for 'cities' and the risk inherent in remodelling businesses in a social design framework for an unknown outcome is clear – but that's not to say it's not worth taking the risk. It may well be.

In February's Fast Company there's a preview of the forthcoming book Switch: How to change things when change is hard, by the brothers Heath (Chip and Dan). I haven't read the full book as yet. It goes on sale on February 16, so I'm only going on what I've read in this article. My first reaction to the extract was that it sounded identical to theories of positive deviance. I was right in that when I searched my desktop I found the article by Richard Pascale and Jerry Sternin that the Switch article had triggered in my mind. (Except that I'd forgotten the names of the authors of the article on positive deviance and only remembered the concept, while the Heaths mention the authors but not the article or the term 'positive deviance').

In May 2005 the Harvard Business Review published an article by Pascale and Sternin called Your Company's Secret Change Agents which opened with the remarks that:

SOME BUSINESS PROBLEMS – employees working at half their potential, endlessly escalating health care costs, conflicts between departments – never seem to get fixed, no matter how hard people try. But if you look closely, you'll find that the tyranny of averages always conceals sparkling exceptions to the rule. Somehow, a few isolated groups and individuals, operating with the same constraints and resources as everyone else, prevail against the odds. ….. We believe there is a better method, one that looks for indigenous sources of change. There are people in your company or group who are already doing things in a radically better way. The process we advocate seeks to bring the isolated success strategies of these "positive deviants" into the mainstream.

Looking further into my files I find I have the report from the Save the Children Fund, dated 1998, titled Designing a Community-Based Nutrition Program Using the Hearth Model and the Positive Deviance Approach – A Field Guide. The Guide was written by Monique Sternin, Jerry Sternin, and David Marsh with a foreword by Marian F. Zeitlin, at that time Visiting Professor, The Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy

In her foreword she answers the question "What is positive deviance?" saying that

Positive deviance in nutrition describes young children who grow and develop adequately in poor families and communities, where a high number children are malnourished and frequently ill.

They are positive deviant children, and they live in positive deviant families. These families have developed culturally appropriate positive deviant practices that enable them to succeed in nourishing and caring for their children in spite of poverty and an often high risk environment.

Additionally I have a very good PowerPoint slide deck titled "Positive Deviance Approach for Behavior and Social Change", funded through the Ford Foundation, Tufts University, that describes the methodology behind the Positive Deviance Approach

What I find both interesting and somewhat irritating is that it takes a language switch (and 12 years) to bring a concept, and a vivid example of it working, into the mainstream: the Fast Company Switch article is virtually a repeat of the positive deviance work but presented in a much livelier and more engaging style.

Given the visibility of the Heath's writings I am guessing that they will profit from switching the language of 'positive deviance' into the accessible language of 'bright spots'. (And I wish I'd thought of it). I've written a couple of times on the importance of language (Sticks and Carrots, and Plain English), and here we have the same phenomenon. In the clichéd phrase "It's not what you say it's the way that you say it" that makes something stick or not. If nothing else this would be a useful reminder to change agents – or do I mean bright spot fielders?

The last few days in Washington DC have been defined by snow (See NYT report) – falling, sticking around, and disrupting normal life. What's been fun to observe is how people and businesses are reacting to this.

On Friday evening I went to Eatonville (a local restaurant) and was chatting to the manager. Their plan was to stay open as long as transport held out that evening – their primary concern was ensuring their staff got home safely. Their sister restaurant, Busboys and Poets had taken a different tack. They'd booked all their staff into local hotels for the night – that enterprise wanted to be open for breakfast at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday as normal. (It was). Also open then was the U Street Cafe my favorite coffee shop.

On Friday night Wholefoods shut early but Yes Organic went right on till the normal closing time. On Saturday I went for two walks – one at 10:00 a.m. as the blizzard did its stuff and one at 5:00 p.m. when it had moved on. Wholefoods was completely shut all day but again Yes Organic on 14th St. was open. I passed many other retail outlets and although I attempted to find a 'unifying theory' of closure or open-ness I was unable to. The pattern seemed random – some chains were open, for example, McDonalds on 'my' corner was in full swing, but of the three CVS's I passed one was open, and two others were shut. Some mom and pop shops were open and again others were shut. So what was prompting the differences? Several theories sprang to mind:

a) Concern for staff safety about getting home. Overground public transport stopped from mid Friday evening and has still not resumed (now Monday). Today, all Federal Government offices are shut.

b) A cost/return calculus based on financials – there are so few people out why try and stay open we won't make any money?

c) A cost/return calculus based on customer service – there are so few people out but those who are will need our services and be loyal in the longer term.

d) A risk mitigation concern – e.g. what if we can't keep our floors dry and someone slips and sues us

e) A compliance concern e.g. Head Office regulations specify that if stocks drop below xxx we have to close (or conversely a diktat like "we never close")

f) Inability to open because staff had not showed up

g) Level of manager autonomy/initiative to make a decision that he/she thought right in the circumstances

h) Structural inability to open e.g. from power failure or fear of power failure.

i) Lack or presence of disaster recovery/contingency plan for this type of scenario

Pondering this on my 5:00 p.m. walk I got to Dupont Circle. Not having been Twittered (tweeted?) by anyone about the Great Snowball Fight I did not know about it. But it was there in full pelt. (My mother saw it on the BBC news and wondered if I was there!) I discovered that the Dupont Hotel – clearly the financial+customer calculus there – on the corner had set up a sidewalk bar (built out of snow) where they were serving hot and cold drinks – both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. With mulled wine in hand I watched the fight and marveled at the power of Twitter which was on my mind anyway since I'd just been reading the Economist special report on social networking discussing how social networking technologies change the way people organize themselves.

What I didn't see (which is part of 'normal' life) on 14th and P Streets were the several homeless people who live their lives on the sidewalks. Where did they go? Central Union Mission is the shelter on 14th St & R, while Martha's Table provides not night shelter but food and clothing for the needy. Today I'll walk over and find out how those organizations are responding to the blizzard. I wonder if they'd faced any choice about staying open or closing down and how they'd managed to organize in the face of the storm.

On January 31 New York Times had a fascinating article Is there an ecological unconscious? Briefly, it discussed the concept of 'solastalgia' (not a word I had heard before) which is "a pain or discomfort caused by the present state of one's home environment" and includes "the inability to derive comfort from one's home environment due to negative environmental change". The NY Time article then outlined the work of Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher who became interested and concerned about the growing body of evidence suggesting that "how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world".

His view is that this has a clear and detrimental affect on our mental health. A Wired article on the subject reports that In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are.

There's some interesting research going on related to this reported in an article Solastalgia and the Mental Affects of Climate Change on the World Changing website:

Nick Higginbotham, a social psychologist colleague who specializes in epidemiology and health matters, is working to gather empirical data for our solastalgia research. He has developed a much-needed environmental distress scale (EDS) that teases out the specific environmental components of distress from all the other things that go on in a person's life. We will be using this scale in the new AUS$430K grant the team has received from the Australian Research Council to extend our earlier work by addressing "the lived experience (ethnography) of climate change" among people in the Hunter Valley.

By further digging around I discovered an article describing the validation of the EDS, the abstract stating that: The EDS successfully measured and validated Albrecht's innovative concept of "solastalgia"-the sense of distress people experience when valued environments are negatively transformed. While the EDS addresses the power and mining industries, it can be adapted as a general tool to appraise the distress arising from people's lived experience of the desolation of their home and environment. Ideally, it can be used as an aid for those working to ameliorate that distress and restore ecosystem health. (Forget for a moment that the validation exercise was conducted by the people who developed the scale in the first place)

Although the solastalgia theory sounds, at first read, a little wacky I think there's a lot to it. On a sample of one (me) I know how distressed I felt when I saw a wonderful wooded area close to where I live being savagely clear cut – to the extent that I changed my route to avoid the repeated feelings). I admire the bravery of the tree-sitters who take a stand against tree-felling. And I remember, years ago reading a short story by Roald Dahl – The Sound Machine which records the screams of anguish from flowers that are being cut. It haunted me for a good while.

What could the solastalgia concept mean for organizations? Well, it could help in understanding why people are opposed to organizations strip mining, or constructing shopping mall construction, or building roads on 'their' land. It might lead to organizations intent on environmental degradation (though they may not see it that way) at a minimum listening to the concerns of the local population and providing some kind of environmental redress. It could inform the way buildings that people live and work in are designed – and some are now being designed to recognize the relationship between people and environment – the Solar Decathalon Competition is a good example of fostering this line of thinking. Simply raising awareness of the mental toll on people of environmental degradation would make a worthy contribution to the debate on the part organizations play in the well being of their people and the planet.

Yesterday I had two interesting experiences. I had to exchange my San Francisco driver's license for a Washington DC one which meant a trip to the DMV. I also had to go to an Embassy's (Visa Department) to get a visa for my planned trip to that country. Previous experience of both the DMV and visa applications led me to pack – yes I felt I was going on an expedition – a long novel and some unobtrusive snacks. (Eating and drinking in most of these types of places is not allowed – however long the wait).

In both cases my preparation was similar.

• Read the instructions on the website extremely carefully
• Print off the form.
• Complete the form accurately – always a challenge for me as I tend to dash ahead and do things like put my date of birth in the UK order and not the US order. NOTE in the UK the day comes before the month.
• Collect together the various documents that are required. For the DMV that means – social security card, passport, previous driving license, and utility bill as proof of current address. For the Visa application it meant passport, letter from people inviting me, letter confirming hotel reservation + passport sized photo.
• Check the opening times of the two offices and schedule enough time to sit in both for as long as it took. (I decided to leave the day free).

Getting this stuff together was not a two-minute exercise. I'd been taking what Dave Allen in his book Making it All Work calls "next action steps" for at least a week before I'd timetabled and steeled myself to go.

The offices are only a mile apart – hence the decision to attempt both in one day. I was of the view that if I ended the day with one of the two documents I definitely deserved a reward of some description. If I ended the day with both words would fail me – (you can guess why I'm writing this – words have not failed me). If I ended the day with neither I would grit my teeth and go again, bearing in mind the words of Yoda (Star Wars) "Do or do not. There is no try." As you may note my preconceptions and assumptions about official compliance offices are stereotyped, jaundiced, and probably (undoubtedly) not helpful to the transaction. I reminded myself of this in order to take action to redress my balance of feelings.

There were similarities and differences between the two centres that impact the 'customer experience'

Reception area
The Visa office has a desk with a person to greet each entrant. He (when I went) wanted to see in my bag and asked me to pass through the metal detector screening. The DMV does not have a greeter or metal detection screener. Several people (myself included) did not spot the DMV reception area on first entering the space. It is not signed. People looking around uncertainly were asked by security guards not to block the area.

Number allocation
At the Visa office each new arrival is given a number (of the type you get at supermarket deli counters) and told to go and wait sitting on one of the chairs. At the DMV the documents and form are checked before you get the number. I passed that first hurdle and got a number. You then have to watch a screen to see when your number comes up. The DMV has a voice speaking the number as it comes up. The Embassy does not. I was not sure of the added value of the voice – especially as it repeated the same number 4 times. At first I thought it was to do with blind people needing a voice to alert them. Then I realized it was unlikely that blind people would be applying for a driver's license. However, I then remembered that the office also offers identity cards so that might have been the thinking behind the voice.

Interaction with agent
At the DMV I waited around 50 minutes and was finally told (4 times) to go to counter 13. This took a few moments as the counters are not arranged in number order. At the Visa office I waited 10 minutes and could see directly which of the 5 counters in front of me had the beckoning agent. The DMV counter 13 was actually someone's office with her stuff personalizing it, whereas the Visa agent's counter like a bank teller's – behind glass with no evidence of anything personal.

Both agents had the same approach to scrutinizing the form and the required documents. This is always the bit I dread (although I dread the long wait too). I can't relax and watch them scrutinize – I am waiting for them to say one, or all, of several things a) "You have not completed this form correctly" b) "You have brought incorrect supporting documentation" c) "We can only accept this method of payment" – which is the usually the one I have not catered for although this time I had brought all possible forms bar a cashier's check. d) "I have to ask my supervisor about … " e) Something else that I have not anticipated.

Hallmarks of a good service center
As I am in the middle of preparing a presentation on service innovation the time spent was useful research. What could make the processes less of an ordeal and more of an efficient and pleasant experience for both customers and staff? Ten things sprang to mind (the same for both offices).

1 Post the anticipated wait time for each number (as in some telephone queuing systems)
2 In the offices themselves, have very clear signage and instructions posted or available for each stage of the process. (The TSA seems to be getting better at this – instructing people via short videos as they wait).
3 Let people know where facilities like restrooms and water coolers are. (If unavailable then provide them)
4 Have a roving helper (as in some USPS offices) asking people if they need help completing forms, having questions answered, checking forms, etc.
6 Make the look and feel of the centers less intimidating and more inviting.
7 Make sure there are no contradictions or inconsistencies between the on-line statements and the face to face statements. (I was expecting a DMV vision test that did not materialize. The opening hours of the Visa office as stated on the website were not the same as those posted on the door).
8 Enable people to pre-book appointments on line if they prefer to do that than simply drop-in. The Blood Donor Service in the UK offers both appointments and drop-in.
9 Segregate the reception into different types of services required to speed processing time. The UK post office has some counters for stamps only, and others for more complex transactions.
10. Remind customers that the service staff are there to help and not frustrate the compliance process. Short video clips with some information on the staff might work, on the lines of "Meet Susanna who has been a customer service agent here for 3 years. …"

Outcomes – I got the driver's license. I am returning to the Visa office tomorrow, in a relaxed, positive, and supportive mindframe.

Two articles in the Economist of January 16 caught my eye. The first Driven to Distraction was a commentary on Daniel Pink's new book Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. And the second was Carrots Dressed as Sticks (an experiment on economic incentives). Both were essentially about bonus and incentives schemes – a hot topic in any discussion of recognition and rewards in organizations. I get involved in these debates as I work with people designing or redesigning their organizations.

It's an area fraught with difficulty for several reasons:

• Most big organizations have a single scheme for the enterprise so suggesting that a different form of incentive or bonus plan for one business unit would be more appropriate tends to go nowhere and the scheme that is in place is too unwieldy to be effective.
• At a manager/staff level awards of bonus payments come out of a finite pot of money so I've sat in many long meetings where the allocation of tiny amounts goes hand in hand with deciding whether an individual is in the 'met', or 'well met', category of performance objective achievement with each manager pushing for his/her person.
• There is not a great case for any strong link between individual performance and reward – there are too many intervening variables. This is a point that Daniel Pink apparently makes in his new book. (I'm interested to see that Schumpeter, aka Adrian Wooldridge, the Economist columnist, describes Pink as "a highly motivated self-publicist" – I interpreted this, plus the subsequent discussion, to mean that Schumpeter was more than skeptical of Pink's theory). Listen to Pink talking about the book in the HBR Idea Cast, What Motivates Us.

• It assumes that financial rewards will motivate people – and that isn't necessarily the case. People value other types of non-financial awards e.g. promotion (that may or may not involve more money), extra holiday days flexible working schedules, training and development, and so on and some companies use these other motivators. Obviously there is an indirect cost of these but they do allow for individual preferences on motivators.

In my view, this 'menu' approach works better. It acknowledges the point – made by Schumpeter – that bonuses and incentives do work but goes further to recognize the financial ones are not either the best nor the only way to motivate people. The downside of this approach is that it is organizationally difficult to administer and leads to arguments of parity. (Is two days off the equivalent of …).

One of the points made in the Carrots Dressed as Sticks article was that the wording of the letter informing people of the details of the (financial) bonus scheme made a big difference to performance. The letter was worded in such a way to suggest that workers would lose a provisionally awarded bonus if they did not meet production targets (rather than saying they would receive a bonus if they did meet production targets). In the experiment "the fear of loss was a better motivator than the prospect of gain".

This notion of 'nudging' people through language and other methods in the desired direction is explored in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health Wealth and Happiness. which designers of bonus and incentive schemes would be well advised to take a look at – not least because it suggests that whatever incentive scheme is decided on the way it is presented will make all the difference to the results that it achieves.