Defining the game. Working from the same playbook.

Welcome back! I have some VERY exciting news on the project front this week. Okay, maybe it won’t be VERY exciting for you, but I’m super psyched.

Our journey now has a direction, a bearing, a heading, an azimuth pointing us to our destination and that destination is a… wait for it… room. Well, it’s a series of rooms. I hope you like games, fun, and being trapped in a small space solving complex puzzles under time pressure because we are on our way to building an escape room challenge! The project is to create a 3d game hosted on GitHub pages that requires users to solve multiple puzzles to escape a room and there will be at least 3 rooms in the game. And just like that, the game was defined. Now, we just need a team and a playbook. Yes… I will continue to mix sports and adventure metaphors. Can’t exorcise those climber and coach daemons.

Did someone say we need a team for this sinister project? It just so happens that was the next big reveal. Now we can’t have folks coming for us after they finally escape the room, so for the safety and privacy of the team, I will use the pseudonyms Rebecca, Ted, and Coach Beard. I do realize you already know my name and I am writing in first person, but I’m really feelin’ that Coach Beard vibe today.

I was able to chat a bit with the team last week on Discord and was very psyched to hear about their skills. Rebecca has experience with developing simulations using Unity and C# at work and Ted has a lot of escape room experience and a background in psychology. I also have escape room experience as both a participant and creator as well as experience creating real life team building games that require complex problem solving. Both Ted and I also have experience with C and C++ as well.

Our first task as a team was to start the playbook we will use for the project by setting team standards and expectations for communication, processes, and tools. Even though expectations are not the content of the final end product, working from the same playbook and getting on the same page is crucial for a project to go well. I have worked with teams in large organizations for longer than I care to admit and time and time again, we see that without a common context, vision, and direction teams spin their wheels and the result is often discord and frustration.

This reminds me of an activity I facilitated this week for a group of folks starting their career as analysts. We run an activity where one group is split into two smaller groups. Each person is blindfolded and given an object. No one else can touch their object. By the end of the activity, the entire large group must determine two missing objects from the set.

When the activity began, both small groups were separated and started by clarifying their own process for discovering what each person had in their hands. During that process, each group developed words to describe objects and got an inventory of what they had. Then before coming together each group came up with a process of how they would go about working with the other group to solve the problem.

Up to this point the process had been smooth and efficient. When the groups came together however, group one immediately said they needed to know how many of each object group two had and started asking about specific objects. Someone in group two asked if they could propose a different process, but no one amplified the voice and others kept trying to move forward with group one’s method.

For the first couple of objects, this process moved forward smoothly as they counted. By the third object, people started getting confused. It turned out, both groups used similar words for different objects and different words for the same objects. As you can imagine, people became unsure of what they had and they had to count and recount, start and stop, many times. The more times the team got stuck, the more the body language of the members showed frustration.

The team reflected afterwards that they would have solved the problem much faster and with much less frustration if they had stopped and taken a few minutes to clarify each group’s context and language and clarified the process they were going to use to solve the problem together before they began trying to solve the actual problem.

Working out of the same playbook saves time and frustration. Much of the work I do with teams hinges on communication. Sharing, clarifying, understanding and working from the same context and vision is vital for team performance and for a positive experience for team members.

Shifting back to our team, below are some of the promising signs I saw that will serve our team well.

While we aligned our context and vision for this project we

• Built flexibility into the plan and process
• Checked in about what will work for other team members
• Created a clear process on how to manage conflicts
• Designated water cooler meetings so team members can connect without responsibilities or accountability
• Played to the skills and experience of team members when we chose tools for the project
• Built in buffer time before deadlines to reduce stress when things inevitably don’t go as planned
• Showed openness to input from team members

Now that you and I know where this team is headed, I can safely say that some of the topics you’ll see will be around developing with Unity and C#, using GitHub pages for hosting a Unity developed program and how to forget what your doing in the middle of a task. Oh no wait, that last one is just what’s happening right now.

Until next post, be a goldfish.