Management as video game design
Here’s a situation most managers encounter at some point: you’re doing a progress check-in with a team you lead and they’re way off-course. Their solutions don’t make sense given either the timeline you’re working within, the resourcing available, the strategic situation, etc. Basically, they’re not doing what you would have done or getting to the answer you would’ve arrived at.
Clearly you have to solve the problem in the moment, but unless you look at the root cause of how you wound up here it’s bound to happen again and again. You’re going to keep wasting your time and the team’s time and getting substandard results. What do you do?
Ultimately, you wound up in this situation for one of two reasons. Either:
- You hired and staffed the wrong people to solve this problem, or
- You have the right people but didn’t create the context for them to succeed.
As the team’s leader, both of these are your responsibility.
A friend of mine — the COO of a multi-billion dollar mid-stage startup — told me that he thinks of his job like playing a real-time strategy game. He continuously evaluates resource deployment and his own actions-per-minute and zooms in on critical situations that require his attention while less urgent tasks run in the background. It’s not a bad analogy. If you have the wrong resources attacking a problem, you’re not likely to solve it. If you automate the wrong things or pay too much attention to the wrong things you’re not likely to succeed. There’s a reason why so many people in the startup world talk about games like Factorio.
In this framework, reason 1 is like having the wrong units attacking an objective in the game — say, sending ground-to-ground units to attack a base defended by air units. If you do that you’re obviously not likely to succeed. You built the wrong army. Reason 2 is more like sending a bunch of units to attack a specific objective but having them get destroyed en route because they’re only focused on that objective and not, say, on defending themselves against things they encounter en route. They had the wrong context: the objective mattered, but they had to survive to get to it first. All this is fairly straightforward.
I’d go one step further in the running-a-company-as-video-game analogy: being a manager is as much like designing a video game as it is playing a video game. The art of designing a video game is the art of designing context and incentives that enables a player to achieve a goal. That’s all it is.
The first problem—hiring — is akin to designing an effective tutorial system to ensure the player has they skills they need to play the game. If they can’t pass the tutorial, they’re not likely to succeed in the game. I wrote at length about how to design a hiring process elsewhere so I won’t cover that in detail here. If you find the first hire you make for a role — the first person to have passed the tutorial — doesn’t work out then it might just be bad luck. Most hires should be some kind of a stretch, so if you have zero failures you’re not taking enough risks on talent. But if you find several people in the same role don’t work out, or multiple people you’re hiring on your team, or an above-expected failure rate across the board at the company then the problem isn’t in the candidates: it’s you and the process you’ve designed. And unless you can look at that honestly you can’t ever hope to solve it.
The second problem — context creation — is a matter of finding the right balance. Providing too little context is akin to dropping someone into a video game with no explanation of the controls, the mechanics, or any of the objectives. Sure, they might figure it out through trial-and-error, but that’s not going to be the swiftest way to learn how to play the game or one that makes them most likely to keep playing. The right kind of player might enjoy that, but far fewer people will succeed in that scenario compared to a more fleshed-out one. (But hey, you might want to hire that kind of fully autonomous person. Just design the role and the hiring process to find them!)
Prescribing too much context is just as bad as too little. Imagine if you were playing a game that basically played itself for you. There would be no challenge in it. You’d just be a passenger. And while the game designer might have devised a particularly cunning solution to the situations they created, there’s little joy for the observer. It’s all a bit self-congratulatory on the part of the designer. Too much context at work is similarly destructive: prescribing to a team how they should solve a problem is contemptuous of their abilities and dismissive of their talents. It treats them as mindless drones. Eventually, a team led this way will zone out and reach learned helplessness: they’ll pick up that no matter how hard they work it doesn’t matter because their manager always has the right answer.
To paraphrase Dieter Rams, good context is as little context as possible. You need to provide the information necessary for your team to do their job well but not overly circumscribe their actions. Channeling the right information to them about what matters to the company and what constraints you’re operating under directs their focus without unnecessarily limiting their ambition and creativity.
What does context creation look like? It telescopes from the highest level to the more tactical. In a broad sense, it’s continuously painting a picture of the vision of the company — why it exists and what its Everest is. This is something a company needs to be consistent about. But as you narrow down into tactics, flexibility emerges because that’s where you need to rely on the abilities of your employees. (After all, “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and they’re the front line.) This includes everything from the company’s goals for the year, quarter, or month, to its KPIs. So cultural things like establishing customer focus (rather than competitor focus) are important, and reinforcing the company’s raison d’être. But if you have to overrule your team on what the right KPIs are, there’s a pretty important disconnect that needs to be addressed. Or, there’s more tactical information that isn’t flowing to them — and that reverts back to your responsibility as their leader to figure out why they aren’t getting that information. System design, again.
High-performing employees are like border collies. Border collies are working dogs: they have a lot of energy, they’re smart, and they like having a job to do. If you don’t give them a them a job to focus their energy and attention on they’ll find a job for themselves. And sometimes that job is chewing your shoes. Or, in the case of employees, working on the wrong things, wasting time and resources, or even creating internal fights and drama. (The latter is especially common in environments where micromanagement is pervasive. People’s drive to create, stifled by the system they’re working within, metastasizes into frustration and resentment, often directed towards peers who are perceived to have more freedom.)
If you create context effectively you’re more likely to have your high performers find jobs to do and problems to solve that are actually aligned with the company’s goals. With the right information environment, teams understand both the big picture business context (what matters to the company right now and why) as well as the constraints you’re operating within (e.g. we need to achieve cash flow breakeven in 6mo so we’re not making big R&D swings right now, but we do value things that bring our costs in line quickly). As a result any free cycles they have for work are more likely to be channeled towards productive endeavors rather than dead ends. You’re more likely to have teams suggesting projects or solutions where your reaction is, “I never thought of that, but that’s a great idea!” Context creates leverage.
If you find you have a team of smart people that keeps on coming up with suboptimal solutions or going down the wrong path, you have to ask yourself as their manager: what context am I not giving them? What information, if they had it, would change their behavior, and how do I get them this information? How do I design an environment in which the team I’m overseeing focuses on the right problem and delivers the right outcome 90% of the time? Because after all, you hired this team because you think they’re smart. You trust them to do what’s best for the company. Therefore, if they’re not doing what actually makes the most sense, you have to ask yourself what information they don’t have. It might be information about runway or about fundraising or about competitive environments or whatever, but if you start not by asking why did the team get this wrong, how could they do this better, but instead how can I design a context in which they’re more likely to achieve the right outcome, then you’ll find it pays compounding dividends over time and creates a culture of autonomy, ownership, and high leverage.
