This is the first official part of Jeff's leadership series. See the introduction.
Producer saying Producer Things
The term "Psychological Safety" is gaining a fair amount of press these days. Psychological Safety in a work culture means that teams and team members have a significant amount of interpersonal trust; both among themselves and with the studio. Team members feel free communicating their ideas and concepts with their team members without fear of being attacked or belittled. Because game-making for us is largely about innovation, we are relying on interpersonal trust with our necessarily risky work. Having that trust and being able to communicate openly is a cornerstone of the culture at Schell Games.
But Psychological Safety alone does not create a successful company. Innovation is great, but without the ability to finalize projects, all that innovation goes unseen and unrewarded. Finalizing requires understanding the schedule, budget, and priorities, and working within those constraints. Like any successful studio, we know that great projects which never ship are not going to help the studio’s long-term survival, so shipping is equally important to the innovation.
Team members need to feel the pressure of accountability when driving to the goal of shipping. But those pressures have potential to do lots of damage to the pillar of innovation. We say that innovation requires risk taking, but those risks will bring both successes and failures. The latter of the two will affect the schedule, budget, priorities, and ultimately the morale of the team. So there is a tension between these two forces, innovation and accountability. That tension is an effect that we encourage team leaders to harness.
One way we get our leads to support our culture, while also enforcing the pressure to finalize, is to have the leads engage team members with goals over tasks. Our leads try to stay away from specific “do this” lists, and instead lean on “we’d like to get the player/character/interaction to accomplish this.” We then encourage team members to have ownership over the design and tasks that will best achieve that result.
Assigning goals with the spirit of curiosity can be helpful, as a way to encourage discovery on the team. It might sound like, “I wonder what would happen if we tried to tie this system in with the other system?” Responses could range from “That would break everything” to “I don’t know… it could work.” Each answer is acceptable. But with responses like the first, leaders could encourage further discussion with questions like “Tell me more, why would that break everything?” Discussing from here can serve to surface any possible misunderstanding of the goals, but the important part is that team leads express their curiosity, encouraging that type of tone in the team.
When discussing goals, another important strategy is to allow for failure at the beginning. “This may not work, but I’d be interested in seeing what happens when we allow inventory to be unlimited.” When said this way, a lead is already open to the experiment not working. This can open the door to a team member returning quickly to say “yup, that didn’t work,” as opposed to spending days and days trying to reach a goal that ultimately was not going to be successful.
To continue to apply the pressure to complete, often goal setting can be hemmed in with a suggested completion window. “I’d like to see how some other concepts might look, but just some rough version. How many do you think you could do in a day?” The invitation to team members to do the estimating themselves supports their sense of control while still setting a limit for the schedule.
These are just a few strategies to managing the tension between Psychological Safety and accountability. With consistent attention paid to harnessing the energy created by this give-and-take, studios can find themselves both innovating and hitting their deadlines.
Stay tuned for the next part of Jeff’s leadership series!