Game Studio Management: Making It Great

[Music] welcome everybody all right so today we're going to talk about game Studio management this is my 20th GDC yeah and what better way to celebrate than talking about game Studio management okay uh so for people who don't know about my situation I've worked at a lot of places over the years one place I got a lot of Education about Studio management was at Disney imagineering uh where I was the creative director of the Disney virtual reality studio also for the last 12 years or so I have taught at the entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Millan University where I at this point I guess

I've helped oversee hundreds of different teams uh make various game projects and also for the last 12 years I've run my own Studio shell games which is in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania we started out with about five people and over the years we have gradually grown up to our current staff of a hundred people um and so part of what I'll be able to talk about today is some of those Transitions and some of the things you run into so first I would like to ask who here is really excited about management raise your hand raise your hand all right I see a lot of ironic hand raises there and then I see a lot of yeah there's no way no and and uh and I guess I have to wonder like really did you see what was on the door I mean it's it's a management talk all up in here um because one of the things we find in the game industry let me ask this question who here is excited about making great games raise your hand yeah there's all the hands right and that is the thing in

the game industry people are not super excited about management all the time some people are um but everybody's excited about making great games but the management still needs to get done and so a lot of it is bad as we know because people just aren't that into it because most of us you know when it comes to management you know we're kind of this guy right here you know i' I'd much rather be focusing on my games uh and not having to deal with all this management BS and this often leads to a lot of problems so some of the common problems that you get from Bad management right um you're in a situation you're like I don't know how to structure management because hey I didn't I don't have an MBA what do I know about this I don't know how things should be structured particular as your studio is growing I've got this one project I'm not sure what's the right way what is the best and optimal way to manage this given project oh my God we had another miscommunication with a client you know we thought they understood what we meant when we said we were cutting the combat but no they didn't understand so you got that and

then tell me tell me if you've ever had this problem too many meetings right I don't think I've ever been anywhere where people haven't said oh my God you just have too many meetings low morale it's embarrassing it happens sometimes and like you went into games because you wanted to be awesome and then if you're going to work every day and it's not awesome then that is not awesome now the next one I'm sure has never happened to anyone in this room late games late games are not an accident or you know you can't just blame it on the creative process late games is bad management that is what that is and then the last one the worst one the one that we never talk about at GDC our game sucks oh man damnn it we worked on this a year and a half and it sucks right so those are things that happen all the time they happen to everybody and uh the key is finding a way to fix these things okay so when I was trying to understand this stuff

because you know I you know I I don't come from a place where I'm like you know had some super amazing management education or anything um as particularly as my studio start to grow it's like man what are we gonna do and I thinking kind of broadly about it I couldn't help but think about ants and bees because you know ants and bees get a lot done oh my God they get all this stuff done like look at this the bees built that right they got together and said yeah we're going to build this and they did it look how perfect it is there was no design document right there's there was no daily scrum right there's there's no deadlines right it was they just like no we're just going to get together we're all going to do this and it's going to be awesome so how is that possible and check this one out here's this guy he's really into ants so he finds abandoned anthills and he gets a big five gallon drum of dental plaster and he pours it down slow slowly slowly into the antill

waits for it to harden and then slowly carefully digs it out and hangs it up and that's the interior of an antill those um those little spiraly things are tunnels uh going down sort of cork screw tunnels that the ants make and those little flat leaves hanging off are rooms that the ants have created most of the lower rooms are kitchens where food is prepared uh for the rest of the colony and they do all this with no meetings so I want to understand how is that possible because I'd like to live in a world with no meetings what's going on so then I read this book The Super organism uh by a couple of guys who really studied the heck out of insect societies and uh they explain a lot of it and one of the key quotes I liked was actually from another book the formation of a higher level unit by integrating lower level units will succeed only if the emerging organization acquires the appropriate Technologies for passing information among its members and I think think the key phrase there is

passing information it's really weird to think about ants and be having information Technologies um but that's exactly what they have they have systems of communicating with each other in in evolved organized ways so that the right information gets to the right insects at the right time so that they all know what to do for the good of the whole organization so it's very efficient okay so I got thinking about that man man that's cool they they they sort of do have meetings but they're just really really efficient they're so efficient you don't even notice they're having them so thinking about that then thinking about other things about this notion of information um a lot of philosophers have been talking about information lately we used to talk you know philosophers used to talk about the universe made of matter and the elements and then they started saying no universe is really made of energy and now the modern thing is actually the universe may be made entirely of information and nothing else and that's an interesting idea and then I got to thinking about kind of Eastern medicine and body

meridians and acupuncture and when you talk to Western doctors about it a lot of times they say well that doesn't really exist Chi energy flowing around the body show me it's not there you can't see it it doesn't exist it's not there this is a placebo effect but anyone who's had a massage or meditates or uh or has undergone acupuncture or does taichi um has experienced this energy flow and I've often wondered if well okay maybe CH isn't like electrical energy or or something or some Mystical Force flowing around what if it is a kind of information traveling in the body because we know that our body is a big Information Network it would be like if I said hey here's the internet there are viruses on it Point them out as you look at the physical Network you might conclude that no they don't exist because they're invisible and Christopher Alexander um one of the greatest Geniuses of our time

um that's another talk for another day uh in his books he talks about space being defined by channels of energy and I think we've all experienced this you know as you move through cities there are certain channels where there's good energy and bad energy and even in your living room there's the spots where everybody kind of moves through and then there's that dead Corner that everything's kind of weird and you realize I should move the couch and that so because that that corner feels weird and bad so you have that kind of uh in that that may be a kind of information flow and in our Studios there's everybody working away and you can see people working and you can look at their emails and you can see that stuff but the thing that you can't see is the relationships between people and the relationships end up defining an awful lot of how things happen at the company but they are invisible um unless Google comes out with some new app that like lets you you see that but we don't we can't see that uh just yet oh my God that's that's why Facebook bought Oculus I just

realized anyway um so as uh as s sui said in the little prce what is essential is invisible to the eye and so just because these things are invisible doesn't mean we shouldn't focus on them and in fact maybe it means we should focus on them all the more a book that was very influential on me is this book design yourself by kareim Rashid uh it has a lot of really kooky advice in it but the spirit of the book is what influenced me the most his fundamental uh idea is that you should design your life so that you like it you shouldn't just live your life or just deal with things you should look at the things you don't like and say okay you know what this is a design problem I'm going to design this so that I like it and when it comes to how to get Studio management going if you don't like the information flows in your studio you need to design them so that they are good but in order to do that you need to know what is the

information in your studio and that's a little tricky because again it's invisible and and we don't oh we see it so let's meditate for a second on the notion of information we get the sound up yeah all right maybe we'll get this there we go by hook or by crook we will right so getting information is difficult and it may take a lot of hooks and a lot of crooks uh in order to get it out of a studio so at first it seems kind of dawning like let me look at all the information that's flowing around in my studio um so I tried to come up with simple things and I couldn't do it I was taking this top down approach of trying to dissect information in the studio and was kind of failing and so I sat down with Chuck Hoover and we started making a big list of like well let's talk about all the many many kinds of information that are in the studio and here's we just made this big crazy list with hundreds and hundreds of elements and here's some samples right that we took a very bottom up approach you know hey there's a change to this project hey

there's a new project hey we got a new studio policy hey there's a best practice for the right way to do searp cating um we're having a birthday party on Friday um hey the Project's in a little trouble hey I'm I'm really uneasy oh I'm super confident about this I'd like to throw a red flag on the way that we're documenting everything um I need help uh that Benson guy I don't I don't I don't trust that guy at all um hey um hey clients we got something to tell you um wait no who who's good at what are you good at this and are you good at that I'm I'm blocked I can't I've got nothing to do hey I've got an idea hey we're out of paper towels um that benenson guy he's an idiot oh my God right all right the the studio mission is is this um I'm from Idaho um this information that I'm telling you is very very secret I'm I'm I'm I'm really upset right now um I'm about to start coding this module right now anyway so there's all these kinds of information and like it seems sort of overwhelming

when you're like yeah this is all flowing around what am I going to do with this um so looking at it and kind of shaking it around we started to come up with categories and I I realized that there were some simple categories of information one of them is sort of obvious facts duh a lot of information is facts okay everybody knows that and then other information is opinions sure okay we know we know that there are facts and their opinions okay that's an information uh hierarchy right there and but then there's something else emotions now some people would say no no no those are just opinions and I say no they're not right they are not I am mad at you that is not opinion that is a stone Cold Fact right so weirdly emotions are actually more facts and they are opinions but they're not like pure objective facts they're very personal kind of facts so I find it a good idea to separate those out because emotions travel differently than normal facts do so those are three kinds of information facts opinions and in emotions and they are about things and

what are they about when you're in a game Studio well a lot of times they're about projects it's like hey we're working on this project and I have facts opinions and emotions about that project separate from that they're about processes processes outlive projects sometimes sometimes they live within a project but processes are really kind of separate from projects the way you do things how you do things and then the third one is people um because people are doing these projects okay well that's a thing maybe you can break that out out you have facts opinions and emotions about projects processes and people well okay that's something does that cover everything I don't know it's not perfect but going back at to the spreadsheet and going back to the big thing kind of made the six columns you know and started to kind of check it off and it's like yeah you know Studio po new studio policy that's that's a fact about a process Um well hey I need help that's an opinion about a project and and and I'm blocked that's that's a fact you know and it's a and it's about about a project and probably about a process

too um and we found like yeah this seems to cover things so that's kind of cool that's kind of interesting um okay well so that that's a way to break down information now we need to look at like where does information where does that information go because information is not static the first thing to think about is the fact that we ourselves are information networks we are not just like a point on a graph we are a complex Information Network inside ourselves and inside our minds and if you've ever tried to think of a name and you can't think of it and then two minutes later you thought of it like yeah that's because the information was in there the whole time it just had a little trouble it got caught in a router somewhere and could not find its way out so first we are information networks but then of course it's hierarchical because you connect up with other people in the studio so there's internal information flow and then this external information flow and then it's hierarchical again because the studio communicates with other entities maybe a publisher maybe with your players uh maybe got a licenser or the Press or Outsource Partners or all kinds of other things so

you have these sort of hierarchies of information flow all right so that's useful to think about but now the way all information flows is not created equal um in the uh in the business World We tend to use four main ways of communication uh face to face we do a lot we is more and more we're doing Skype sort of video conference uh phone calls sometimes and then lots and lots of email and as much as some people like to believe that all these are equivalent they certainly are not we have lots of evidence that they are not and it's interesting to wonder about why the key seems to be that the things at the top you're getting much more information and the things at the bottom you're getting much less face-to-face communication is a lot of information because yes you are hearing my words but you're also hearing my tone of voice you're seeing my facial expression but then it gets even weirder and deeper than that because that's always with your conscious mind your

subconscious mind is very good at communicating with other people face to face is there's well documented notion of micro Expressions micro expressions are generally when there's a conflict within you you want to communicate one thing but you you want to hide your emotions you can't hide them perfectly and so there is a period of about 40 milliseconds where you make these tiny Expressions that show your true emotions and you can't see them very well consciously but your subconscious totally picks up on on them you ever have that moment someone's saying something you're like something's not right about that that guy's trying to pull something it's often because your subconscious picked up on a micro expression now given that those last about 40 milliseconds and given that Skype on average gives you about 20 frames a second you are unlikely to pick up micro Expressions through Skype um so that's important uh another one is this is going to sound really crazy smell we a subconscious picks up on the

smells of other people and emotions are communicated through smell uh there have been studies done as a weird study right we have two groups one group's GNA watch a comedy movie The Other group's gonna watch a horror movie and they each put pads under their armpits all right and they watch the movie and then the pads are collected up and an unfortunate third group of people is asked to smell the pths and better than average they can tell which movie was being watched because you really can smell fear and but you can't smell it over Skype yet no I don't I don't know what that means anyway um this is important because fear is an important thing on projects you know some hey you gonna get that done by Friday oh yeah yeah I'm gonna get it done right yeah really right and anyway so face to face is really really important tone of voice is really important which is why uh you know phone even a phone call can be better than email but you know so so

choosing the right channel of information at the right time is really important so now when it comes to scaling um people often feel like as their Studios growing you hear a lot of thoughts about scale there are some people who say you can never do a good game with more than five people and then there's other people say you can never do a good game with more than 20 people right and and uh but then you see big studios that do good games and what's exactly is happening and why is it different with more people what is it that changes well the key thing is just simply this um the number of interactions between people goes up in kind of an exponential way technically the triangle numbers pattern right um three people working together you're just it's easy right you just the channels of communication are really simple but even when you get up to something as small as seven people like look at all those different Paths of information and this becomes really important if you on a team of five people every day when you come in you

all talk to each other every day when you're on a team of 20 people you're not necessarily going to talk to everybody every day but you'll probably talk to everybody at least have some minor contact with them once a week once you get up to 50 people you might go four weeks six weeks and there might be somebody in the studio who you have not exchanged one word with in all that time and it may be that they have some super important piece of information for you but you wouldn't know it because um you you know because the the is big and so what we do is we try and set up organizational structures in order to try and get the right information to the right places at the right time because it's not going to happen simply organically this way so this is why we have org charts here's a picture of the org chart for Shell games um and org charts are typically organized by uh discipline um you know we've got our production team and our engineering team and our design team and our art team um and our operations team and that's pretty simple simple and straightforward but nowhere in there do you see

reflected anything about our projects we do six to eight projects at a time um but you sure couldn't figure that out by looking at this organizational chart because the point of this organization is not to talk about projects but to talk about specific discipline things to talk about things that have to do with art or talk about design so a lot this is really very much a chart about mentoring and just sort of getting information to the right people about their discipline and so for Studios to do more than one project this is why it's become very common to use a form of Matrix management Matrix management is a simple idea the idea is that you you sort of report to two people when you're on a team you report up you know if you're a programmer you report up to the head of engineering or head of programming whatever and you you work with them on things that are about sort of long-term mentoring and coaching but on your project someone else is in charge of your project um in at our place we use a we always have a producer and a director at the head of every project um the director is responsible

for the Creative Vision and making sure it's great the producer is responsible for making sure it's done on time and then everyone has everything they need now some people say to me that's a bad idea you can't have two people in charge of a project that's like having two Gods it doesn't work um and I say no I think it's more like having two parents uh it's it's kind of a good idea sometimes and there's a lot of good reasons for that they have different areas of expertise the people running your project are are focused on on two different things and then similarly backing out to the Matrix management point of view there's the people in charge of your project and the people in charge of your discipline and it's good to be able to talk to the two of them about two different things you talk to the people at the head of your project about project issues and the people person at the head of your department about longer term issues and if you've got a problem with one of them you can go to the other and say man you know I'm I'm I'm hitting a log Jam with this guy can you help me and then they can often help you out so the the reason Matrix management seems to be a good idea and is used frequently is because it it allows two different kinds of channels of

information so so uh organizational structure is one tool for managing your your flow a second one is office space now everybody rolls their eyes when it comes to office space nobody feels good about it um people rarely get excited about yeah man our office is so incredible you don't hear that people are like G it just it feels it feels bad it feels corporate and that's often because it's not welld designed now it is a hard hard design problem um but when you if you work at it you can certainly make it better so there's a lot of things to think about when you're designing your office space one thing is to realize that a little distance is a lot of distance so here's an illustration of a thing I literally saw right outside uh you know my desk one day we had a project there were four people working on it and three of them were sitting right next to each other like that and then in the middle you see this kind of a low counter that green bar up the middle was just a low counter

no big deal like people stored things in it and on the other side of that counter was this other guy with his other desk couldn't have been more than 15 feet okay from those three desks to that one desk and but but like we were observing that there was some bad communication problem where that one guy kept getting left out of the loop and we're like man that guy is he dope why isn't he talking is he just lazy is he ignorant and then just watching it's like oh my God I could see it happening someone be like hey I've got a problem and the guy next to would say yeah what is it well it's this and this and this and the guy over there is kind of like wait is you guys talk and you can see he's kind of listening he's like no I don't want to interrupt them I'll get back to work and he was just left out of the loop we simply moved his desk over next to the others and like the problems got like so much better right so thinking about that is is really important a lot of notable companies have really gotten aggressive about office space Pixar is one that's very notable a lot of times you walk into some big fancy company and you go into this big open space and you do that here when you go to Pixar and that open space

is full of weird sculptures and creepy security guards and like you don't really see it doesn't appear to have any point or purpose other than to intimidate you or whatever when you walk into Pixar you're in the cafeteria look I mean these are the B this is the places people sit and eat in the cafeteria you walk right in and it's it's the central Hub of the building and the whole Space is designed very much to get people to cross through this space as many times as possible all the bathrooms for example are in this Central space the offices are often like hallways that go out to the sides and people are forced to cross through this many times this all the meeting rooms you see all those glass walled things up there those are the meeting rooms you can stand in the middle and kind of see oh there's that where that guy is oh look there's a vacant meeting room you can you can see all that stuff um it was very very much designed uh interestingly Steve Jobs was very very involved in the design of this particular space uh we've tried to take a very similar Approach at our space trying to have things be very very open you know we don't have 1500 people like Pixar does we have about 100

um but we are big fans of open plan and uh so you can see there's most of the folks kind of working down there the way groups are organized is by project we move desks around all the time anytime there's new projects we get desks so we so people can get together and you'd think we were we would maybe organize them by um those kind of islands that you see but they're really organized by canals okay so people with backtack are the ones working on projects together because someone could say hey can you take a look at this and they can just turn around and take a look it's very different than oh can you walk all the way around the island and come and see us it's just a small design thing but it it makes a big difference okay so Office Space is really important there's so there's that's that's I could talk about that for for days and days but let's talk about other things another really important flow management tool is ritual and our most common ritual is meetings right and uh people never mostly don't feel

great about meetings because there's a lot of bad meetings because no one bothers to design them well-designed meetings are awesome um you go in you get stuff done it was like oh that really helped me you come out thinking man now I know what's going on that really helped me now I can I can work with more confidence I know exactly what's going on badly designed meetings are I don't know the ninth level of hell they're they're really really bad and there's a lot of ways to design meetings people who do actually hands out people who do Agile I'm curious look at there's a lot of agile here and there's a lot of people like I don't do Agile maybe I should I don't know what's or I hate agile stupid jerks you know it's a lot of things but anyway one of the key elements of agile is the notion of the scrum meeting and this is very very much a designed meeting the idea is it's very short you're talking about a very small number of things and often part of the design is people say this is a standing meeting there'll be no sitting down in this meeting because we want to get this done and get back to work and get and not not turn this into a waste of time

and so that's cool look at these happy people having their scrum meeting right here uh and you know why they're happy because they're out of those horrible cubicles that they're in look at those those are like the worst of Both Worlds when it comes to cubicles right um so because look at the height of those you go back and sit in that do you have noise protection are you like I'm in my isolated pod no there's like all the potential noise of the studio is there can you see where anyone is or what anyone is doing no even if you stand up you can't you got to peek up like over the wall so it's like this illusion of I have a big important office but with all the horrible aspects of of that I I am not a fan of the six foot high uh Cube wall okay but so the talking more broadly about agile agile is really just a system of coordinating and and uh organizing information flow right you've got your product backlog these are all the things that we would like to put into the game and then you organize Sprints these

little you know two three four week um uh sessions where you have a very specific goal everyone knows the goal you've communicated the goal clearly we're going to deliver this at the end of 30 days and then once a day you have your your uh scrum meeting where what' you do yesterday what' you do today what problems are you having okay good let's get back to work and let's change it uh so that we know uh what we're doing and that's all very much about organizing information flow about what we're doing so that you can optimize continually on the project Fred Brooks author of the mythical man month um you know he was looking at how bad software projects tend to go and someone was saying look I don't understand you software people you said it was going to be out by this date and you were a year late I can understand somebody being two days late or a week late a year late how are you a year late for something yeah don't worry honey I'll meet you at 5 o'clock oh sorry I'm a year late late right and his answer is you get a

year late one day at a time that is how you do it and so the idea is to do this sort of daily management so that you can steer the project get the right information to the right people and steer your project okay so agile is really a system of information uh flow so another popular thing uh popular with some people less popular than others is the notion of 360 feedback people tend to dread feed feedback reviews at work most of the time the people giving the reviews don't know what they're doing because they haven't they're not experts in this it's super awkward you're having this awkward conversation about what you're good at and what you're bad at and like do I trust this guy and is this guy G to believe me often this is because it's badly designed uh well-designed 360 feedback is an opportunity to collect feedback from all the people that somebody works with and get all the information that maybe they say to each other but maybe they don't because it's really awkward like like dude your Bo is killing me

right that is not a conversation that two employees will often have but sometimes it's a sort of thing that'll come out in Anonymous 360 feedback if it's Anonymous um uh and you can guarantee the information is not going to go it'll often go up to uh to one of the managers who can kind of have this conversation which makes it essential that the people who are giving these reviews know how to do them well and understand how to do it tactfully and usefully if they a good manager collects the information from a bunch of people processes it so that they figure out okay these are the useful things I want to pass on and discuss and and hear this person's uh feedback about um and and it becomes a conversation and if you do this right people don't dread the reviews they're they're like they get useful information that helps them and it can be very very positive but you have to take it seriously one thing we recently did because we realized you know it's tough to fit these in you're like I want to focus on the game I don't want to focus on filling out forms and and um and like sitting down having

uncomfortable conversations so you tend to put it off and we'd been doing that and that really sends this message that hey if you put this off it must not be important but it's super important this is all about making everybody the best person they can be so we've rescheduled it now instead of doing them all once a year or um once every uh uh six months we spread them out so they fit into people's schedules so that they're not an intrusion and that's made it much more comfortable and it's and again helps send the signal that look this is important to us we make time for this so there are many many types of meetings any kind of meeting that you have is a sort of ritual that your company has and you want to design that so it's good some of those are short and daily many of them are weekly some of them you do every like four times a year um and then there's some you do annually one that we do that was worked out really well for us is this notion of jam week we stop everything that the studio is doing once a year and we uh say you know what let's have people work on projects that they are excited about that they think might be good to go somewhere you know just just some something good could come with this my either my personal development

or maybe um just something that would be really good for the studio now is this an information flow management situation it totally is people have ideas for things that they'd like to do and it's blocked because it's not part of their regular daily project this creates an opportunity for like hey that cool idea bouncing around in your head we're making time it's important to us we're making time for it to come out and for you to experiment and connect with other people and good things come last year um one of ours was uh this enemy mind game that came out and everybody liked it so much after a onewe prototype they were like let's turn this into a real project and it got a best and play award last year GDC and one of the ones we did this year is this Ryan Trail game which we currently have in Kickstarter and it's in its final week so please back it I think we're going to make it but it's it's a little close so anyway so if you could uh if you could back that that that would be great anyway um but it's it's exciting I mean it's it people get really energized when the things they're excited about come to light and you have

to make channels for that to happen but there's lots of other rituals there's this great story I read about on the Harvard Business RW I just love this company where they didn't have a modern coffee pot they had this clanky old percolator coffee pot only two people in the office knew how to operate it properly and not get grounds in all the coffee right and so when they would make coffee they would get the coffee going and they'd say you know hey everybody coffee's ready and everybody would come fore coffee and everyone would hang out in the kitchen chatting and stuff and a lot of useful information was flowing around and the uh the guy was ahead of the studio he's like yeah no that's great look at this this is so cool I love our little coffee times and everybody's talking and this is cool this is cool and good and useful but gez I feel terrible that everyone's got this terrible coffee pot right so you know what I'm going to do because coffee time is so important I get one of these fancy modern Cake Cup things that way you guys have awesome coffee customized coffee just the coffee you want any time you want one cup at a time and coffee time went away and this really useful ritual

that had been part an information passing thing in the studio went away and it led to problems so these things are super super subtle and I know it's silly to kind of talk about things centering around food but food is super important to us as humans in our Triune structure of the brain the back part the most basic part is like very interested in food and it has strong opinions about food right go into any College cafeteria right you go into a college classroom and you look at like people sitting around and you're like wow look at this International mix of people and then you go to the cafeteria and look at the segregation that happens in the cafeteria because there's something in us that's like I want to eat with people like me because those other people might take my food right and then further it goes the other way right it goes the other way if you have if you eat a meal with someone you haven't eaten a meal with before your brain's like that dude didn't take my food I can trust that guy on a kind of a deep fundamental

level right so a lot of Studios they do a thing where we're so cool man we got three lunches every day we got an omelet Chef who comes at three o'clock every day and you never have to leave the studio isn't that great no that's not great never leave the studio it means you're kind of stuck in the same rut all the time and what do you do you go in you the omelet Chef you get your omelet you go back to your desk there's no conversation right so I don't like to do that we do that a little bit little free food once in a while but like every day because what you want is you want people to get together and go out of the studio because that changes their point of view and you want them to kind of bond up in social situations the notion of the hunting party man that's an old fundamental notion and you see it right someone's like hey you guys want to get frozen yogurt they're like oh okay yeah let's all go and they're going and you see that walk right there's that walk they're doing right they're just going down to you know hunt down to host's twinky or whatever but um but still you see it and there's a sort of bonding

that happens around it when that happens and a lot of useful conversation happens there so when you give out free food at a studio you're often blocking really useful information flow um also I'm very cheap okay so another uh flow management tool um is the just social factors so much about information is about who likes who and who likes talking to whom look at this team that looks like a team that is going to communicate pretty well right you can tell just by kind of looking like these guys are very very comfortable with each other they're going to it's going to be easy for them to share information with each other so now there's been a lot of research about this some of the most interesting I think is this research by Dr Anita woolly um and it's all about the notion of collective intelligence we've had intelligence tests for years and years and years we understand about measuring individual intelligence her question was what about the intelligence of a group group how does that work now a lot of people would say well that's

easy you just take the IQs of everybody in the group and you average it no you take the maximum no you take the Min I don't know what do you do and she found it has nothing to do with that the intelligence of the people in the group individually doesn't matter very much in terms of the collective intelligence of the group her studies found that there were exactly three factors that were critical when it came to the intelligent behavior of a group and she did this by giving groups these different uh tests so here are the three factors she found were really relevant the first one is how do people perform on the eyes test okay so the eyes test is this interesting test where you see a lot of pictures like this right how is she feeling right now A B C or D so think about that see if you got the answer all right all right all right hands up for a hands up for B hands up for C hands up for D okay the correct answer is a okay

all right you go Harley anyway um groups that had people who performed really well on this test because some people are great at it and some people are really bad at it groups who had people who were really good at this ended up being more intelligent second one conversational turn-taking they measured the amount of times that people interrupted each other groups that interrupted each other a lot behaved really stupidly groups that let each other talk let each other finish and were good had a good balance of conversational turn-taking they behave very intelligently and number three get ready boom goes the dynamite more ladies in the group made it behave smarter okay [Applause] now so and and groups with no ladies

they had certain pathologies that were really really bad and I'm sure some of us have seen this right you got a group of dudes all together and they're like we should put in nine features no let's put in 10 no let's put in 11 that's awesome let's do it right and you and then that's how you get a year late right that's totally how that happens but there's something that happens it's not that if there's a woman in the group it's not that the the woman comes in and says no everybody stop everybody behaves different again the back of the brain behaves a little different the male brain behaves a little different when the ladies are around right it's like let's put N9 no 10 oh actually you know maybe we shouldn't be so dangerous all the time maybe we should actually play a little safer so there's something in that now I got together with Dr woy because I'm like okay Dr will I've seen a lot of student teams a lot like thousands and I've SE certain pathologies with all male groups and I see certain pathologies with all female groups I've seen some all female groups do some really nutty things that are really really different she said yeah you know honestly we didn't test the all female case uh and and she's like I'm

working on now but she's like yeah I see the same thing that when there's a mix is when it's best um and so that's really interesting to know and interesting to think about exactly why is a little unclear but it's a thing to think about and given the game industry isn't very well balanced this way is something important to consider okay so we got all those things those are some tools you can use so now let's talk about what blocks information because there's a lot of things that can block information flow in your studio a lot of times oh man it's too much trouble yeah I was going to tell him but I'm busy and I I'm just not going to do that another time oh man I didn't know oh my God you got you guys are building like a vector-based calculation system I didn't know we've got one it's already done oh I I could have saved you three months of work I but I just I didn't know that you needed it another one is noise now of course there's lots of kinds of noise there's the uh there's a lot of Kinds there's there's certainly the noise in your head you know you're worried about some person personal problem or oh my God oh my God my body like I'm going to get fired whatever

noise in your head is not going to help you so that's you want to find ways to reduce the noise in your head uh there's actual noise in the office um that can block information flow anyone who's ever been to a party at the mini Gallery knows about that you know hey man I've haven't seen you for a year and then DJ earbud comes on for an hour like oh anyway so that doesn't usually happen in the office um but sometimes you know offices can be really noisy in our place we put up sound uh padding uh around because there was Echo that was a little irritating we put the sound padding and it was it was better the communication was a little clearer but then there's other ones interruptions people coming and bugging you all the time a lot of places have developed kind of an informal code of hey if I got headphones on don't bother me I'm busy right now right um another one is lying right lying is a kind of noise on information someone someone's delivering information but it's not the right information it's all noised up and one that we get a lot noise from the publisher yeah you're trying to make

your game and the publisher comes in with some weird thing and really that's not a good and it kind of noises up a lot of your information there's a lot of meddling that Publishers do and and and people get frustrated about that but uh Steph Bean explained this with the beaman's meddling Matrix so let's talk about this it's very important to understand the reasons the good excellent reasons that there is so much meddling from a publisher so let's look at these Act is okay let's look at projects some projects succeed some projects fail some projects have a lot of meddling from the publisher some projects have no meddling from the publisher okay so let's look at these four different axes think about this from the producer at the Publishers point of view this is the guy who's got to oversee this stupid group of game developers that we hired to do this and they're so crazy and what are we going to do so this guy's got to decide how much am I going to medal on this project because I want it to succeed what's the right amount of medling well let's look at this case so let's say it's a really successful project and the guy medals a lot his conclusion will be my meddling

worked that was excellent okay so then let's look at this case um he he doesn't medal and it succeeds then he's going to be like oh my God I'm useless if anybody finds out how little I was involved in this massive hit like it'd be bad so man uh that would be bad if that happen so that's incentive to kind of get in there and medal if it thing's going to be successful now let's look at this one um a failed project where the publisher was super hands off that guy's going to get so beat up by his his bosses like this thing failed what'd you do well I wanted to let them go their own way and oh my God they're going to get fired right it's really bad and then we have this last quadrant that we see quite a lot right projects where it failed and there was a lot of meddling from the publisher and then what did they say I did all I could I couldn't have possibly done M I was in there every day I was in there for two two hours every day talking to the team they still failed I don't know I gave them so much Direction and I

micromanaged all the hell out of it and it still failed what what more could I have done I don't know right so like it's easy to joke about this and stuff but you can kind of understand that there are incentives to kind of get in there and kind of be involved in the communication which makes it super important if you're working with a publisher if you're working with a client to design the information flow so that they have what they need so that they feel confident so they feel like they're doing the best they can um to to make it really excellent okay other things that block information flow mental ruts I've always been doing this the same way and uh I don't really want to change it and so I'm I'm not I'm GNA ignore this new information Secrets sh don't tell anybody you can't tell anybody this um that that's a that's what secret is an information flow blocker and then fear oh man fear there's so many kinds of fear in the office oh man they're all over the place right people remember Dune fear fear is the mind killer yes all right so many kinds oh my God the boss will be really

mad if I if he finds out about this so keep it a secret oh Sue's feelings will be hurt if you tell her how much her art sucks right so don't don't tell her that if I if I tell people I really feel about this project everyone's gonna laugh at me um man I don't want I might make a mistake and everyone would find out oh don't tell the client they'll be so disappointed if they find out just like keep it quiet and like hope it gets better um man I I could lose respect to the team if I tell them like you know I really blew this and I don't want people to know so I'll keep that a secret and then the one in everybody's heart everyone will know that I'm a fraud if I tell them what how I really feel about this okay so that's fear is an information blocker and you got to be aware of it in yourself you got to be aware of it in other people and you got to find ways to reduce that fear so that it's okay to share the truth you want to create opportunities for the truth to go through I found as my studio has gotten bigger it's been super hard for me because Truth For Truth to power is really really hard the bigger you are and the higher you are up the ladder the

less people want to tell you the truth because they're scared of getting fired or you being mad or whatever so you have to work really hard to find ways to make sure people are comfortable and getting the information out so related to this fascinating research uh by uh by casaro and Lobo here okay they're looking at uh what makes people succeed in companies okay so here's the thing we often think about um the relationship about competence we all know about that we all know about some people are good at what they do some people are bad at what they do then they were looking at the question of how important is likeability in the office because we all know people who are really great at what they do but everybody hates them right so where do you want to be on this chart obviously you want to be up here right you're highly competent everybody likes you everybody wants to hire that guy that's obviously where you want to be where don't you want to be down here at the bottom incompetent jerk right guy sucks at what he does and what a jerk oh my God I can't stand him um that's obvious

these guys didn't study that these guys studied the other two boxes H so the question they asked was hey managers if you had to hire one of the other two boxes who would you hire would you hire the competent jerk great at what they do I want to ring his neck every single day hate that guy or would you hire The Lovable fool right not very good at what they do pretty bad at what they do but everybody loves that guy every oh it's man it's fun to have around so nice everybody likes him I feel really comfortable around them they found that generally managers if you ask them who would you hire they'd say well given that choice I'd hire the competent jerk because you it might be a jerk but it'll get the job done but if you ask people hey who do you want to work with people would say uh if I had to make that choice I'd pick The Lovable fool because yeah they're not great at what they do but at least they're not going to screw everything everything up for everybody else right at least they'll do very little damage

so that's interesting then they looked at okay let's do a profile of a bunch of companies and figure out which side they favor do they favor competent jerks or lovable fools and then given that um how does that relate to the success of the company and they found that successful companies favored The Lovable fool now that's really weird successful companies favored incompetence all right it's weird to think about so they thought this is really strange why is this the case and what they found was the competent jerks we know are a problem because yeah they're good at what they do but they wreck everything for everything else they block information for lots of people they keep secrets they they make other people want to keep secrets you always hear people say oh man I hate big company so much politics there's politics what does politics mean what politics means is I have something that I want to tell somebody and I feel like I can't so I tell somebody

else that's it that's all politics is anytime that happens in your organization you have politics if you can remove that then you have no politics in your organization jerks make for a lot of politics now on the other side this lovable fool character like they don't mess things up everybody likes having them around they might not be good at what they do and here's the thing somebody's got a problem they're all pissed off about something oh man that Benson God I hate that guy who are they going to tell the lovable fool is like super likable people you like you tell them stuff you can trust them and you're like man that Benson guy pissed me off so much and guess what this person's got a lot of time right and part of what makes them so likable is they like they care about they care about what's going on they're like oh really what's up what's up with B oh man he's in this meeting he said this and oh geez that's terrible I'm so sorry I'm sorry that happened and then it bothers them and then they go and they try and work it out a little bit right they might go and talk to Bon dude

you know how you know what people are saying about you I mean I just it's you know or or maybe they'll go talk to Benson's boss and say man A lot of people are really unhappy with this guy I'm not I'm not trying to be a jerk but I just and and what happens is all this blocked up emotional information flows through them and gets to where it needs to be and makes everything better and you know what happens over time because everybody likes The Lovable fool and they're always helping them they often get better and better and better and they move up to The Lovable star category because people get better at what they do the the competent jerk is he gonna get more likable over time no way no way that doesn't happen so talking about jerks I found this interesting book never check email in the morning some interesting business advice but it had this statement that blew me away there are exactly six kinds of jerks I'm like no way I could name 150 right now right but I went through their list and I went through my list and I'm like godamn if they hadn't had all all my 150 jerks like sorted into six categories and the thing that blew my mind was like of these six kinds of

jerks right of these six kind of jerks they were all information blockers in different ways the inaccessible jerk right oh I can never get a meeting with that guy he has what I need and I just oh I can never get through to this guy it doesn't answer his emails damn it that guy unreliable when are you gonna have that done oh have it done I don't know Wednesday and you're Wednesday hey is it done oh um no I no no sorry sorry it's just not oh you're killing you because they're unreliable um someone who's too rigid they're like nope this is the only way I do it you're like but but Bill it's killing the project man it's killing it and they're ignoring information someone who's disrespectful right you're worried they're going to spread bad information about you about other people and like you're worried things are going to get twisted and noised up vagueness you know when's that going to be done I don't know when it's kind of done oh that's not even information like you're pretending it is and it's not and then people the unfair jerk you're worried man this guy's this guy doesn't

treat people fairly if I tell him the truth he's going to use it against me I got to block it and keep it keep it secret anyway so that's interesting to think about so looking at this we remember our facts opinions and emotions about projects processes and people so we have an org chart that's one of our tools and what does that tool do it manages facts and opinions about processes and people okay makes sense and then we have our project hierarchy like you know how how we manage individual projects that's about facts and opinions about projects that covers things pretty well except emotions are left out in the cold and if you look at the uh the castar and Lobo research they use this phrase affective hubs that means people you like who who spread useful in information through the studio in other words they're like the emotional router for your studio right these people are really important because what they do is they route emotional information some of the the most important information about projects processes and people if you manage not just one or chart but three

of these and you consciously think about these it makes a giant difference in your studio I once had a team that was having a lot of problems and I realized man it's not that they're lack of skill people were a little rigid they weren't always great communicators and um a resume cross my desk for somebody who was very inexperienced but like it was super likable some someone had reference and I'm like you know what let's try that everything changed this person with very little skill comes on the team but all of a sudden all the bad toxins came out of the team and everything got better okay a few more final tips here I love this book the advantage uh by Patrick lenion his his argument is that your biggest advantage in business is a healthy organization and what does healthy mean he's basically saying an organization with healthy information flow and he gives a lot of tips for how to make that happen some of his best ones are if you're running a studio you have to decide what is important and let

people know about it and not just let them know you need to overc communicated I love the phrase overc communicate you because um it just means I'm going to tell you A lot of times more than is necessary because if I tell you more than it's necessary it improves a chance it's going to get through we don't like to repeat ourselves um we don't like to repeat ourselves we don't like to repeat ourselves and uh but things that are important should be overcommunication things like a mission statement oh man that's so corporate and bad no it's not it is the reason you are doing what you are doing if you don't know what it is then what are you doing you're just wandering around and if you haven't figured it out and clearly communicated it no one else really knows what you guys are doing either because no one this is a weird thing to say people don't just want a job people want a religion right they want to come to work and be like damn what I'm doing is important it is important and I know why and if you run a studio it is your job to make people know and feel that and

understand about that now there's lots of other ways of overc communicating things too Steve Jobs was very famous for this right um how does Steve feel about the new prototype everyone knew it was no secret how Steve felt right and he wanted things to be excellent and he wasn't like oh yeah this is excellent um this is really bad this is kind of in the middle nope he to to in order to communicate that only excellent was acceptable in his vocabulary uh when he would evaluate your work it was either excellent and amazing or it was total right now I thought about that a lot when I read that I'm like man am I really going to run around the studio telling everybody whose work is kind of at the B+ level that it's total no I'm not gonna do that because that's just nasty and rude right I just I can't live that way there's too much bad news but there is a word you can use and so I will give you my very very useful magic word unacceptable right unacceptable is an objective word that is very very clear right I see what you're doing and it has

its benefits but man this thing has to be perfect So currently this is not acceptable this is unacceptable we need to get this better you can talk about that in a very clear way another tip an excellent book anybody who um has a brain and a mouth or ears should read this book um it's all about how to deal with difficult conversations because difficult conversations are massive information blockers there's awkward things that you want to say but you don't want to say this book is all about how to do it and the key is that is listening you go into there's like something you're really pissed at a guy about um U and the key is not to go in and say I'm going to tell you this and this and this and this the key is to say listen I feel this way about it um and and I want to understand your point of view and then get as much listening as possible they give a ton of good tips in there and if you want practice listening oh my God there's this website seven Cups of Tea here's the idea seven Cups

of Tea the internet is full of people who are full who are full of strife and trouble and they can go here and trained listeners will just listen to their problems and talk with them about it they don't give advice they listen and you can go on there and take a 10-minute video training course about how to become a listener and you can start doing it today and oh my God it totally works it's crazy it's crazy have this little 10-minute video can make you into a much better listener okay so wrapping up um here's one other book some people may have heard of um Matthew 7:7 seek and you shall find people always say oh my God you can't get a studio past a certain point we're going to hit these problems the thing that is true any problem that you have organizational in your studio if you want to solve it and you're focused on solving it you can solve it they're all solvable there are organizations that have 10,000 100,00 people these problems are solvable but if you say H I'm not going to worry about this I'll let it take care of itself that's when you get in trouble but if you look for the solutions you

will find them but you do have to look for them okay so Studios with good information flow they say I know how to structure management I know how to manage my project um we know I don't have miscommunications with clients because we have the right information flow we have the right meetings those meetings the meetings we have are good and useful our team has good morale because everybody feels good about what they're doing our game is on time yes and our game rocks yes those are all things that you want so I'll close up with this um this this quote I love from uh John Lori here uh he's a Zen master if the energy is really flowing freely the brush paints by itself the camera photographs the sculpture forms the words WR The Dance dances the creator of the art the subject of the art and the expression itself merge into a single process in which there is no reflection or evaluation just the art manifesting itself when you have solid information flow that's what the creative process feels like in a group thanks very

[Applause] much