Positive-sum games to play within an organisation

Alignment, skill, productivity, judgement, relationships, fun

Below I brainstorm positive-sum games to play within an organisation instead of the zero-sum game: Status Management.

The positive-sum game test: if you have more of X, you also have more of X. To not be confused with positive/negative feedback loops: a positive-sum game can have either positive or negative feedback loops embedded into it (or both).

I’ve come up with six areas: alignment, skill (mastery), productivity, judgement, good relationships, and fun. You may also add Psychological safety, but it’s probably just the blend of good relationships and fun (or you may say that fun happens when there are good relationships and psychological safety). I don’t see anything markedly different, however. If you can think of such an area, please share it in comments!

In the bullet points, I put some tips for playing these games. If there is something missing, please point me to them as well.

Alignment

Skill, mastery

• Mutual learning: learning sessions, mentorship program, pair programming

• Accumulate knowledge by capturing and sharing it

• Proactively invite feedback

Engineering productivity

Note that playing the productivity games needs to be balanced with team's outward contribution: Solve users’ problems, not technology problems. (Balance within an organisation)

Empower teammates and yourself with better tools:

• Communication, project management, and knowledge management tools

• Deployment with fewer steps

• Shorter debugging loops

• IDE setup

• Command-line productivity

• Shared libraries

• Project setup, shared linting/static analysis configuration

Buy teammates and yourself time, reduce unintentional rework:

• Effective project management

• Effective communication, but which is also sufficient for Alignment

• Effective meetings

• Feedback & learning

Judgement

• Making better product decisions:

  • Involving engineers into users’ problems

  • Growing the business domain knowledge

• Good decision-making processes

• Feedback & learning

Good relationships

See People are more important than things.

Fun!

Make the workplace more fun :)

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Thank you for reading!

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