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
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
Feedback & learning
Good relationships
See People are more important than things.
Fun!
Make the workplace more fun :)
Thank you for reading!
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