We all want to be on a great team - with fun, competent and enthusiastic people, delivering successful projects to wow the customer. However, this reality is hard to archive - fun cannot be mandated, success requires coordinated effort of many people, and customers have a hard time explaining what exactly will wow them.
Consider nudging - making a small suggestion in a powerful way. A right setup will help the team communicate better. A good nudge will encourage the customer to share their feelings about the project early and often. There are also small nudges (not orders!) that help everyone enjoy their workday more, and be more creative and productive at the same time.
Richard H. Thaler studies behavioral economics the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology.
About the book: Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The person who creates that environment is, in our terminology, a choice architect. The goal of Nudge is to show how choice architecture can be used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves) without forcing certain outcomes upon anyone, a philosophy we call libertarian paternalism. The tools highlighted are: defaults, expecting error, understanding mappings, giving feedback, structuring complex choices, and creating incentives. - See more at: http://nudges.org/#sthash.jCAFhpp8.dpuf
“Do as I say, or else!”
Chairs on the street invite people to lounge.
How is this nudge thing relevant to IT?
Part of the ThoughtWorks Bangalore team room - they're an Extreme Programming team, as you can probably guess from seeing them sit together, the whiteboards, and stickies.
Any metric tracked over time, when prominently posted, is a powerful nudge to do better on that metric.