A Story Culture
The Editor and I don’t argue, we discuss.
We’re arguing… discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet.
I say, “Information just keeps getting smaller. We’re sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We’re just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There’s no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds.”
“No one is learning. There’s no work involved in knowing a thing, so we’re becoming mentally flabby. I want people to read more.”
To which the Editor retorts: “I don’t think you know what information is.”
Hmmmm.
Information has a Hierarchy
So I looked it up. According to Ray R. Larson at Berkeley, information has a hierarchy that looks like this:
- Data - The raw material of information
- Information — Data organized and presented by someone
- Knowledge — Information read, heard or seen and understood
- Wisdom — Distilled and integrated knowledge and understanding.
If you ignore the fact that the word information is used to define a hierarchy about information, this hierarchy makes sense, but it dances around a key point.
Another version of this hierarchy describes the same categories as above but focuses more on what happens to information once we get a hold of it. Not just consumption, but synthesis.
- Data — Raw material. Facts. Got it.
- Information - Organized data. See what happens here? Someone showed up and organized the data into something else. Why’d they do this? How’d they know it was the right thing to do? Let’s keep moving.
- Knowledge — Information seen, heard or read and understood. To me this is when information is transformed by the understanding of why. Our data is organized into information and that is passed onto someone else who can now recognize the value in the information and thinks, “Oh, wow. Now I understand how a trash compactor works. Slick.”
- Wisdom — Distilled, integrated knowledge and understanding. The idea here is that higher order constructions of information are based beyond our ability to consume, combine, evaluate, and interpret information. The information becomes a catalyst for creation. Think of it like this: maybe a lot of people understand trash compactors, but you know so much about trash compactors that you could build one yourself and perhaps advance the art of trash compacting in the process.
Still with me? This is going to take more than 140 characters and there’s a point. Just wait a tick.
Take a look at this list:
- New York is a city.
- It takes me about five hours to fly to New York.
- I’ve been to New York three times this year
- I never believe I’m in New York until I’m in a cab or smoking a cigarette.
Is this data, information, or knowledge? Or just four boring tweets? That would depend on whether or not you’re interested in my experiences in New York. But what I provide in this list is the opportunity for increasing amounts of understanding, and understanding is the progression through, and synthesis of, increasingly complex pieces of information. Right?
There’s another thread that ties this information together, and you may not initially see it, but if you’ve started mentally asking questions - Why does Rands go to New York? What does he do there? Did I know that he smoked? - you have started to find it.
I’ve begun to tell you a story.
A Shattered Narrative
The reason no one watches or cares about the evening news anymore is because there are a great many other ways to find your news. A weblog here, a Twitter status update there. In the deluge of information variety we’ve realized that the evening news is just one set of facts and just one carefully constructed story, and increasingly one with its own specific agenda. Who wants to be spoon-fed 30 minutes of ad-infested evening news when I can figure out what my world thinks is important by glancing at The Daily Show, Twitter, and NetNewsWire?
The traditional narrative has been shattered into bits of well-indexed information. Google wasn’t the first indexing tool, but it’s certainly the best. Still, Google is powerfully dumb. Yes, I can find whatever piece of information I’m looking for, but what’s more interesting are all the related pieces of information. How do you query for knowledge via Google? How about wisdom?
If you’re buying my definitions of the informational hierarchy, there’s no replacing the process of understanding if you want to delve into more interesting forms of information. There’s no replacing a human being combing through seemingly disparate pieces of information to evaluate, interpret, and combine it into something unexpected; into a new work. Into a story.
Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.
This is what is going on all day. It will start with a random tweet about conferences and you’ll think, “I don’t understand why everyone goes to conferences”. You won’t act on this thought; you’ll leave it buried in your head until you see that link on del.icio.us where someone important rails on the lack of women presenters at conferences. And in that moment, you’ll remember that drunken thought you had at that conference last March when you discovered the basic truth about conferences: it’s not what you learn, it’s who you find.
From a disparate set of information, you continually find your own arc, your own story, and my question is: What are you going to do with it? You’re an information nerd, you’re adept at consuming massive amounts of micro-information, and those who watch you do this are saying you’ve got a short attention span, and you might.
But I think all this micro-information has macro-story potential.
Rands’ Story Hierarchy
As we’ve established, there’s information. Like everywhere. You, as a consumer of information, fall into one of three progressively complex buckets regarding this data:
- You can understand the information — What does it mean? Why is it important? How does it relate to other things I care about?
- You can explain the information to someone else — Hey Bob, this is what this means. I can explain it to you and impart my understanding.
- You can create more information, building something new and telling a story - Hey Jim, actually, we discovered a better way to do X. Bob and I were working on Y one time and realized that…
But Rands, I’m not a writer.
This is a poor excuse and the death of many a worthy story. The construction of a story has very little to do with writing. It has to do with the semi-magical process of you taking disparate pieces of information, combining them into something new, which includes your experience and understanding, and then giving them to someone else. Look around the walls of wherever you’re reading this and pick two random objects. Got ‘em? Ok, now tell me how they relate. No, you can’t say, “They’re both in the coffee shop”. What’s the first novel thing that crosses your mind about the intersection of these two items?
But you don’t have a story, yet. Just like information isn’t knowledge until it’s understood, your tale isn’t a story until you give it someone else — until they have a chance to see what they think about your inspiration.
But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.
I understand what you’re saying but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think what you’re saying is, “I don’t think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought,” and you’re wrong. You’ve got two things going for you. You’ve got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it’s the closest thing to magic you’ll experience in your life. Second, you’ve got the entire planet listening and there’s just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.
The value of the idea is one part that it is yours and one part that you gave it to someone else. It’s you and something new.
Information Is Getting Smaller and Faster
Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:
Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter
I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.
Yes, these frictionless tools make it so anyone can say anything about any topic, but these tools are built with you in mind and I do mean you. Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you’d have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don’t know and probably don’t trust.
We’re in a share everything world and you get to choose your role. You can be overwhelmed and sit in the coffee shop with your friends and say, “Twitter: what’s the point?” Or, you can jump in with both feet, grab those three random ideas and tie them into a story that no one has ever seen.
An Essential Skill
I wrote, edited, and published an entire book without physically interacting with a single person at my publisher. The t-shirt I produced last year and the one I’m doing this year were entirely designed, developed, and shipped by interacting with two different organizations that I never met. Paradoxically, it’s never been easier to share or meaningfully interact with more people with less physical, in-person effort.
Your ability to compose and convey information as well as express yourself through your fingertips is a skill that is only going to increase — and increase in value — as people become more comfortable with their place in communities that span the planet, and as the tools to connect them become more commonplace.
In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?
Wanted
Jesse walked.
Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch.
Their morning starts at 9am, and at 9:15 I got a call from HR: “Jesse’s not here”.
Bad traffic, miscommunication, there were a dozen good reasons he wasn’t there, but I instantly felt a rock in my stomach: “Jesse walked”.
A quick call to my recruiter and the mystery began to unfold, “Oh, yeah, he called just before 5pm on Friday and said he wanted to chat. I was off Friday, should I call him now?”
Yeah, call him. Tell me what I already know.
The recruiter discovered that Jesse was firmly ensconced in a cone of silence because his Friday call was his cold feet call. After three months of phone screens, interviews, offer negotiations, and acceptance of said offer, Jesse was calling to tell us that while he had resigned two weeks ago, a last minute counter-offer had shown up, and he’d decided to stay… at 4:45pm on his last day.
Jesse walked.
As I sat at my desk, lightly tapping the phone headset against my forehead, I thought how simple it would be to be pissed. In terms of respect, trust, and professionalism, Jesse had screwed me in just about every manner possible, but, in this case, the fault would be mine.
I had not explained to Jesse that he was wanted.
The Requisition Situation
This article is going to talk about the beginning and the end of the hiring process. I’m going to make sure you know two things. First, that you understand how urgent it is that you hire, and second, how to make sure those you hire actually show up. There’s a huge pile work in the middle of this process involving phone screens, interviews, and offers, but for this article we’ll just focus on the beginning and the end.
Let’s start by understanding where this whole hiring process starts. We need to talk about requisitions.
In many companies, jobs are ruled by requisitions (“reqs”). These imaginary pieces of paper give you, the hiring manager, the permission to hire, but they serve two other purposes. First, they document and formalize the process of hiring a new full-time person, and more importantly, they give executives visibility into the state of the company’s growth.
It varies by company, but reqs, specifically open, approved reqs, are one of the more popular organizational levers the execs have to control of the growth of the company. In software development, one of your larger corporate expenses is base salary, which means the moment uncertainty appears on you company’s horizon, reqs (read: potential large expenses) are one of the first things to vanish.
This leads to the most important rule regarding requisitions:
Reqs vanish randomly, often without notice, without reason, and at the least convenient time.
In larger companies, the bureaucracy involved in actually getting an approved req is impressive. When the req is finally approved by the 17th person you don’t know, you have a false sense of accomplishment. You believe this req is yours, but there is really only one way to make it yours — make the hire.
It’s not just corporate nervousness that causes reqs to vanish. Your boss, who you love, is a likely req stealing culprit. Anton’s got a guy right now who is perfect for his team and we’ve only got one req. He can hire him right now and I swear we’ll get you a req when you find someone.
You believe your boss. You trust your boss, so you give him your req and Anton’s a happy guy and you feel like you’ve done the team a solid. Except when you actually find someone, guess what, you don’t have a req. Neither does your boss because some time between when you gave your req and actually found someone for your position the first rule was invoked: every single req in the company was frozen.
I’m guessing 50% of the reqs I’ve managed to get approved in my career have resulted in a hire. Meaning, a flip of a coin would as accurately predict whether or not I’d be able to hire someone.
From the moment there’s a hint of an idea of a req in your future, you need to work on improving your chances that you’ll be able to hire. And that means, as quickly as possible, you need to: find the person, phone screen them, interview them, interview them again, negotiate an offer, get that offer accepted, and get them in the building. Think of that as you’re staring at your shiny new req. Think that the industry average for hiring against an approved req is 90 days — three months — and each of those days represents a day that someone, somewhere can steal your req. This is why you need to…
Spend an hour a day on each req you have
We’ll talk about how to make sure they’ll show up in a bit, but to start you need to get the pump primed. A former boss helpfully suggested, “Spend an hour a day on each req on your plate”.
An hour?
If you’ve got an approved req, you have approval to grow you team. To add new skill sets. To build more stuff. In your role as a manager, I ask: “What’s more important than growing your team?” No, this isn’t a draconian hour; this is a daily reminder that you need to grind away at this req until you’ve hired someone.
Rands, I have no candidates yet. The req was just approved. I…
Again, reqs vanish. Randomly. At the end of each workday, you need to think, “Phew, no one stole my req.”
Here’s how to start:
- Search the web for candidates. — Show me a stranger who will be perfect.
- Mail friends who might know the perfect person. — Know anyone? How about you?
- Annoy your recruiter. — Where are my resumes?
- Ping folks who have turned you down in the past. — Are you ready now?
- Scan your inbox and sent folders for folks you need, but may have forgotten. — Really, are you ready now?
- Read your job description for additional inspiration. — Do I actually know who I’m looking for?
But isn’t this why I have a recruiter?
It’s terrific that you’ve got a recruiter. They’re going to streamline your entire hiring process, but you still need to spend an hour a day for each req. A quality recruiter is going to find candidates, do time-saving phone screens, and they can keep in-flight candidates warm. When it comes to offer negotiation, they’re great at providing you essential compensation telemetry and they’re good at playing bad cop, but as we’ll see, it’s your job to demonstrate that the candidate is wanted.
I found them! I’m done!
No, you didn’t, and no, you aren’t.
No really! He verbally accepted, he starts in two weeks. It’s a done deal.
No, it’s not. If randomly vanishing reqs are painful lesson #1 of hiring, painful lesson #2 is: people lose their flippin’ minds during job transitions.
Think back to your last job transition. Think about the mental turmoil. When did you actually fully believe that you were going to accept the new gig? For me, it’s about two months after I started.
You keep recruiting; you keep searching for the perfect employee until your new hire is sitting in their office. It’s not common for an accepted offer to be declined, but it needs to happen once for you to learn the lesson, to suddenly realize, “Oh, I need to start over. Crap.”
Until he’s sitting in the seat, in the building, badge hanging from his belt, you haven’t hired anyone.
Deliberate Want
Michele’s team was embarking on a new technology direction and while she had the basic talent in place, she needed two more hires and we had the reqs. In a recruiting brainstorm, I sketched out the type of person we needed. “Ok, we need Alex. He’s the Sr. Architect at this other company, but he’s the right combination of technical brilliance and architectural jerk. We need someone with that technical ability and the will to enforce it because we’re starting from the ground up.”
Her: “Why not hire Alex?”
Me: “He’ll never leave his start-up.”
“Have you asked?”
“No.”
“I’ll ask.”
She did, and while it took six months, Alex, the perfect fit for the team and for the project, joined the team. Halfway through the recruiting stint with Alex, when it looked like he might not budge, I threw another perfect candidate on her plate and said, “Maybe ask him, too?” Sean was on the team a month after Alex.
Two hires I thought we had absolutely no chance of hiring. Both on the team in a matter of months. Your question is, “What’s her secret?” and the answer is dangerously simple - deliberate, consistently expressed and reinforced want.
Both of the positions we had were attractive. Senior engineering gigs working on a 1.0 product in a name brand company. But these guys were the top of the field. Recognized names. There were any number of opportunities across the Valley that would be attractive. How’d we win?
We continually and consistently explained that they were wanted.
The idea of a new gig, a fresh start, is appealing because of its simplicity. You know nothing about your future team; you have no idea about potential death marches, or that guy down the hall that just bugs you for no particular reason. It’s simple to think about the future optimistically because the future hasn’t screwed you, yet.
This optimism fades in the middle of the night when you open your eyes, startled, and think, “Why in the world would I leave a solid gig with people I know and a bright future?” The reasons are myriad, but that’s not the point. The point is for any big decision, you’re going to question it from every single angle. You’re going to have endless inner dialogues with yourself. You’re going to talk yourself into the gig and then you’re going to talk yourself out of it.
It’s exhausting.
Michele’s message during the entire hiring process was, “You are the best person for this gig. We want you.” Remember that we’re not talking about random, anonymous candidates; we’re talking about handpicked candidates.
Before any interview, she’d drive to them, explain the gig, and begin, “You are the best person for this gig. We want you.” After the first round of interviews, her message was the same, “See, this gig is perfect for you. We want you.”
When we started the offer negotiations, she’d worked with the recruiter and knew exactly what we’d need to do to lure the candidates. She knew that base salary was a big deal for Alex. She knew Sean was going to be a stickler about stock. There was no offer negotiation because Michele constructed offers that were going to be accepted. She presented them: “This is the offer you wanted. This gig is perfect for you. We want you.”
Once the offers were accepted, Michele didn’t change her tone or message a bit. She’d had rockstars walk before and she knew the slippery inner dialogues that were going on. She knew that change begets more change and that the easiest time to lose someone was during that post-courtship purgatory between gigs. She had her team take them to drinks. She planted seeds of future work that would need to be done. She reminded them, “We want you”.
This strategy reads like a massive ego-stroke for an attention-starved engineering rockstar, but it’s not. Whether you have pre-identified a candidate for your gig or you’re lucky enough to randomly find a great fit in a pile of anonymous resumes, the strategy is the same — you consistently remind the candidate that they are wanted. In the mental chaos that is a career change, you and your gig are unchanging in your message. You’re not coddling them; you’re a constant amongst mental chaos.
Hire for Your Career
The strategy I’m proposing steps on a lot of recruiter toes. Recruiters are professional relationship people and their instinctive reads on candidates can be eerily accurate, but their job is the hire and once the hire shows up, the recruiter vanishes. The relationship is ended because the job is done.
Your professional relationship with those that you hire is never over.
If you’re hiring well, you’re hiring people not just for this job, but for your career. These are the people who, for better or worse, will explain to others what it is like to work with you. They’ll explain your quirks, your weaknesses, and your strengths. When they eventually leave the group, they’re taking your reputation with them. You may never talk to them again, but they’ll continue to talk and my question is: what stories are they going to tell?
Your daily hands-on management of your hiring isn’t just going to improve your hiring process, it’s going to improve your career because you’ll demonstrate from the first moment you interact with your future employee that you care.
Jesse didn’t decide to turn us down at 4:45pm on his last day. The decision began long before that and I wasn’t listening. I didn’t hear the parts of his current job he loved because I didn’t do the phone screen. I didn’t understand his concerns about leaving the first job he loved since college because I didn’t build enough trust in the interview. I didn’t hear him drifting away during the offer negotiation. The last thing I heard about Jesse is he walked.
A Creative Soundtrack
The first story I wrote for myself was a piece of fiction about God being sent to high school. I was, not surprisingly, in high school at the time. What was surprising was the vein of writing I found in myself. I sat down at the computer and the story just showed up — seven pages of it.
As the creative burst subsided, I stared at those seven pages in the word processor — Wordstar — and I began to fret about line spacing, page numbers, and other formatting decisions. I was silently asking myself, “How am I going to make this palatable to the editor? To the publisher?”
My first story ever. Seven pages in and I’m worried that double-spacing is going have an impact on whether I get published.
Ambition. The great blind motivator. You gotta love it.
To God and Back Again was never finished, let alone published. It’s sitting on a 3.5-inch floppy somewhere in a file format I’m certain will prevent me from ever reading it again, and, that’s probably best. Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality.
Since high school, I’ve continued to write constantly. Journals, physical and online. There was a weblog way back when, and then there is this one, which, 15 years after my first foray into independent writing, actually resulted in published work.
The lessons I’ve learned in that time are myriad, but today I’m thinking about simplicity.
The Writing Tools
For first drafts, I use one of two tools: a Moleskine notebook or TextEdit.
The choice of which to use often comes down to location. Is where I’m currently sitting MacBook Pro friendly or not? If that answer is yes, I’ll fire up TextEdit and get started. As sophisticated tools go, TextEdit is bare bones. It’s just a simple text editor (Sentinel, 15 pt, FTW) that allows me to do rich text editing, search and replace, bold, italics, and the occasional underline.
That’s it. No macros, no line numbers, no revision control, just pure writing simplicity.
This requirement of simplicity is rooted in my belief that choices are distractions and distractions are the leading cause of you not writing. And I think you should write more, which is why my holiday present for you is OmmWriter.
Let It Begin
Let me start by saying that I didn’t write this draft in OmmWriter. I used that fine tool for a good two weeks before I returned to my pleasant, vanilla TextEdit, but that two-week journey is worth understanding.
OmmWriter is a full-screen text editor with an intense focus on simplicity, and when I say intense focus, I mean a maniacal focus on stripping away every distraction that might prevent you from writing… and then providing a subtle set of new distractions. Briefly:
- There’s no menu bar. You must be in full-screen mode. If you leave full-screen mode, the full-screen window calmly fades away.
- In full-screen mode, there are three gorgeous white backgrounds to choose from: snow, white, and white-pattern. That’s it.
- Applications preferences are built right into the writing area and are represented with glyphs. These minimalist preferences allow you to choose a serif, sans serif, or script typeface, and one of three typeface sizes.
My favorite feature of OmmWriter is the soundtrack. The application comes with seven chill songs, which are designed to stay the hell out of your writing way. More importantly, the application provides seven keyboard soundtracks. You pick the sound that occurs when you’re typing, and it’s not a solid, repetitive sound. The keyboard sounds have variation and generally don’t annoy. My favorite is #7, which I call: “My old school typewriter and I sitting at the bottom of a well”.
OmmWriter leads with a simple idea: creativity has a soundtrack. Think about how you begin an intensely creative act. You get your environment just so. You brew the coffee, grab the right mug, which you then place in precisely the correct location on your desk. Your feet flat on the floor in front of you, your spine is straight, and you look directly the screen. Let it begin.
And sometimes it does. It just starts flowing, and the number one rule regarding flow is: “Ignore it,” because any observation of flow risks that flow making a run for it. Your goal is to just sit there and not listen to the music.
The folks behind OmmWriter are aware of this ephemeral soundtrack, and they’ve done everything in their power to give you a fighting chance to get in the creative flow. The experience of first firing up and using OmmWriter is akin to the sensation of putting your head on a down pillow; you can’t help but say, “Ahhhhhhhh”.
This divine experience, even if you’re not a writer, is worth the download of the free beta of OmmWriter, but it’s also the reason I’ve stopped using it.
A Peculiar Creative Flow
My test of OmmWriter was a holiday letter to a friend. After some tinkering, I settled on a clear white background and the bottom-of-the-well typewriter soundtrack. I sat cross-legged on my couch and began. The full-screen editing made sure I wasn’t distracted by icons dancing around in my dock. The delicate soundtrack gently nudged me along when I stared at a half-written paragraph too long. An hour later, I had a comfortable first draft.
As I’m apt to do, I let this draft sit for a day. During this lull, I continue to write in my head. I know what paragraphs suck and I’m instinctually aware of what I have not yet written. My issue during this time was that I could not get the OmmWriter soundtrack out of my head. Rather than thinking about how bad the end of my letter was, I was craving the calming clickity-clack sounds produced by my keyboard while in OmmWriter. Rather than thinking about the writing, I was thinking about the tool.
Having been writing for close to two decades, I’ve learned that the more I write, the less I need. Every feature, preference, or choice that your application gives you is a ripe opportunity to think about writing rather than actually writing.
OmmWriter is a gorgeous experience that you can’t miss. What they’ve chosen to strip away from a traditional word processor is impressive, but what they’ve designed to surround you in as a comforting, artistic, and inspiring experience is even more impressive. It’s not a tool for everyone, but it’s worth, at least, a first draft.
Happy Holidays.
Gaming the System
On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard.
The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in a moment of desperation.
It was end game. The time in the project where you pay for every single shortcut you’ve taken, for every specification you didn’t write, and for all the warnings from engineers that you’ve ignored. All the data is grim. Bug arrival rates are skyrocketing while bug resolution rates are pathetic because, uh, well, engineers are still finishing features.
Like I said, grim.
The endless stream of bad news was grating on everyone. We were already three weeks into working weekends with no end in sight. A normally pleasantly pessimistic engineering staff had gone uncomfortably quiet. Everyone was staring at “the date we can’t miss” and thinking, “I guarantee we’re missing it”.
I needed a game.
An Entertaining System
As I said before, geeks are system thinkers. We see the world as a very complex but knowable flowchart where there are a finite number of inputs, which cause a similarly finite set of outputs. This impossible flowchart gives us a comfortable illusion of control and an understanding of a chaotic word, but its existence is a handy side effect of a life staring at, deducing, and building systems. It’s also why we love games — they’re just dolled up systems — and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you’ll be at managing us.
As with all mental excursions with geeks, there’s a well-defined process by which we consume a game, and it goes like this:
- Discovery
- Optimization, Repetition, and Win
- Achievement
Discovery — From confusion to control
The initial joy of a game for the geek is discovery. This is a delicate balance of confusion and progressive disclosure. A game is initially attractive because it starts chaotic and unknowable, but even in the chaos, there’s always a hint of the rules… of structure. What are the specific rules that govern this game? And how might I learn them?
A geek is searching for a single source of joy in this initial state. It’s the sense of discovery and progress toward a currently unknown goal. I want to see the engine that defines this particular universe… I want to see its edges. We’re looking for those edges because as soon as we find this wall, we know this is a containable and knowable place and that is comforting because the game becomes a controllable thing.
There’s creative flexibility in rule discovery and pacing, and it tends to be a function of the size and the intent of the game. The beauty of Tetris is that the initial rules are immediately obvious. But the wonderful curse of a massive online game like World of Warcraft is that while there are rules, they are vast and, as we’ll see in a moment, they are changeable.
This discovery is the hook where a geek is going to know in just a few minutes whether this particular game suits their particular appetite. But getting past the initial phases of discovery doesn’t mean you’ve successfully engaged the geek. The real test is…
Optimization, Repetition, and Win — A paradox and a warning
With the basic rule set discovered and defined, the process of optimization begins. Ok, I get how it’s played, how do I win? This is the phase where, now equipped with the rules, the geek attempts to use them to their advantage.
There’s a discoverable structure to the rules. There’s a correct order, which, when followed, offers a type of reward. It’s the advantage of thinking three blocks ahead in Tetris or holding onto those beguiling hypercubes in Bejeweled. This is the advanced discovery of the system around the rules that leads to exponential geek joy.
There’s a paradox and a warning inside of optimization and repetition.
The paradox involves the implications of winning. Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can’t let them win, even though that’s exactly what they think they want.
Think of it like this — does it bug you that there’s an absolute high score to Pac-Man? It bugs me.
To get around this entertainment-killing paradox in subscription-based games like World of Warcraft, game designers freely change rule sets as part of regular updates. The spin is, “We’re improving playability” which translates into, “The geeks are close to figuring it out and we can’t have that because they’ll stop paying.”
This paradox does not apply to all games. It’s hard to argue that there is much more to learn about Tetris, but folks continue to play it incessantly, which leads to the warning.
There’s a socially frightening act inside of optimization that normal humans don’t get and it’s the calming inanity of intense repetition. In a game like World of Warcraft, many of the tasks involve an exceptional amount of repetition. Repetition like, “Hey, go kill 1,000 of these guys and come back and I’ll give you something cool.” Yeah, 1,000. If each kill take a minute, you’re talking about sixteen hours of mindless hacking and slashing. This is not a task that requires skill or thought… and that’s the point.
If you walked in and looked over my shoulder at troll kill #653, you’d think I’d dropped into a twitchy-fugue-like mental state and I have. I am… a machine. Machines don’t have a care in the world, and that’s a fine place to be. This is the act of mentally removing ourselves from a troubled planet full of messy people, combined with our ability to find pleasure in the act of completing a small, well-defined task. This is our ability to lose ourselves in repetition and it is task at which we are highly effective.
In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read “Go waste sixteen hours of your life doing nothing”. They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.
As I’ve never designed and shipped a game, I can confidently and ignorantly say the compelling magic in games comes from the design in optimization and repetition. This is the portion of the game where we spend the most time and effort and derive the most pleasure. It is this abstract mental state we long for when we’re not playing.
But there is one last phase to consider, achievement.
Achievement — Who cares if you win by yourself?
Once a geek has learned the game by discovering how to win, they become interested in advanced winning. They’re interested in how their win fits into the rest of the world. They want to compare and measure and answer the social question, “Is my pile of win bigger than yours?” They believe they’ve mastered the game, but reputation — achievement — is nothing unless someone else can see and acknowledge it.
Before the Internet, winning was a private thing. You entered your three-letter name into the local Pac-Man machine and then anonymously stumbled off in search of Donkey Kong. In an interconnected world, games became social, and once we discovered each other in these virtual worlds, we looked for a means to compare our feats. We began to understand that achievement was not just becoming great at a game, but being recognized for being great.
Achievement can be as simple as a score, a numeric means of comparison, but the more sophisticated the game, the more complex the achievements. In World of Warcraft, you’ll be busily into your seventh hour of mind-numbing troll extinction when you see that night elf run by with… what’s that? A staff… where the hell did she get that staff? It’s sweet. My world will not be complete until I own that staff. Now, what was four more hours of troll killing becomes the quest for the staff.
There’s no well-defined rule that says, “To win, you need this staff”. Sure, it might make those next 200 kills easier, but that is not your entire motivation. For you, the staff is your own personal badge of mastery, and you don’t wear a badge for yourself, you wear it for others to see.
Most achievements do have an empirical value, but that’s not what makes them important. The point of an achievement is to have someone you know or don’t know look at your Violet Proto-Drake and say, “Holy crap, do you know what he had to do to pull that off?” It’s wondering exactly how far you’ll go to get the Legendary badge on Stack Overflow.
In a world where we spend a ton of time with people we’ll never meet, achievements are the currency of respect and identity.
The Rules of the Game
Now that we understand how games float the geek boat, we can tease out rules you can use to build your own business-centric games. This is will take a creative leap on your part because I don’t know how your particular situation is grim. Perhaps your bug count is crap like mine? Maybe you can’t hire fast enough? Maybe you can’t measure how screwed you are? I don’t know what game you need, but I know you need to follow the universal rules of games:
The rules need to be clear. Whatever game you design must stand up to scrutiny. Test the rules with selected geeks before you roll it out. Find the holes in your game before you’re standing in front of the team describing a game that makes no sense. Ambiguity, contradiction and omission are the death of any good game.
The rules must be inviolable. Enforce rules with an iron fist. A rule not followed is twice as bad as a poorly defined one. A violation of the rules is an affront to a geek. They react violently to violations of the rules because it’s an indication that the system is not working. Rules make a game fair, and when they stop being followed, the geeks stop playing.
The playing of the game must be inclusive, visible, and broadcasted. Include everyone on the team. Those not on the team should be aware of the progress and implications.
Only use money as a reward as a last resort. It’s a knee-jerk management move to use money as an incentive. Problem is, money creates drama. Money makes everyone serious, and while you may be in dire straits as you design your game, you don’t want the team stressing about who is getting paid; you want them to stress about the work.
This is not to say that rewards in a motivational game are verboten, but step away from the money and think about achievements. One of the best trophies I’ve awarded was a horrifically ugly ceramic blue rhino the size of a pit bull. The winner proudly displayed the rhino achievement in his office for years.
It’s not a game. Just because I’m using the word game all over this article doesn’t mean it’s trivial, simple, or something not to be taken seriously. Your geeks will treat the game as a motivational tool as seriously as you choose to treat it in building and rolling it out — because they want to win.
The Whiteboard Game
Everyone was working on a Sunday night as I stared at the blank portable whiteboard in my office. A weekend of hallway conversations, bug scrubbing, and informal testing confirmed what I already knew: the product was shaky, the bugs we were discovering were alarmingly bad, and there were too many of them.
Ok, a game. The game will be called Focus and it will concentrate and structure our attention on the worst parts of the product. I listed the 10 worst bugs I’d found during the weekend on the board. Next to each bug, I drew four boxes:
- Root cause
- Fix identified
- Fixed
- Tested
I grabbed a handful of dry erase pens and rolled the board into the architect’s office and said, “This is all we’re working on”.
He stared at the board for 10 minutes and finally nodded, “Good, but each person needs their own color and you should assign points for each of the boxes. 10 points for root cause and fix identification, 5 for fixes and tests.”
“Points for what?”
“Points for points. We’re geeks.”
“And everyone has their own color?”
“Yeah, so we know who has the most points. Give me a blue pen, I’ve already got root cause on bug #3.”
“Blue?”
“Yeah, I’m always blue.”
