Pay for tasks, not results?

Time Magazine has an article entitled Pay For Grades: Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? It’s about a very rare thing: a genuine research project done by a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities around the nation to study the effects of paying kids for grades or school work. They tried different schemes in different places, and some of them were successful, and others were not. I’ll leave it to you to read the article if you’re interested in the specifics …

The interesting thing to me was the difference between the systems they judged successful and those they didn’t. Universally, what worked was to pay children for small tasks and behavior patterns: get to class on time, do your homework, read a book, have a positive attitude in class. What didn’t work was paying for test scores and grades.

A friend of mine pointed out that basically, what they discovered was Getting Things Done … In fact, what they inadvertently discovered is what we in the business world have been (re)learning in droves over the last few years in the form of GTD, Scrum, and Agile Methodologies in general:

• Small achievable tasks are easier to get done.
• Larger tasks need to be broken down into achievable sub-tasks.

• Focus on what you need to accomplish right now, today, this week…

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