Give Up Control: Zen and the Art of Leadership

[Music] um so the usual warnings or um phones to silent please um my name is steve cuss and i'm senior producer at criterion an ea studio in guildford in the uk i chose the title for this um talk based off uh robert pryzig's book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance i thought i'd look out my old copy of the book when i um was preparing the talk and i found um a couple of things that were really interesting to me within that one was that uh quote on the back there the fabulous journey of a man in search of himself and a lot of what this talk is about is going to be about um actually criterion's search for itself as well as my own place within that and the other thing i found was i'd left my bookmark in it from where i was reading it i was using a bus ticket

clearly as a as my bookmark within it and and on that bookmark um there's a date you can maybe just see it there in june 95. which is interesting because i must have been reading it just as i started in the games industry which is actually the same time that criterion was founded as um a subsidiary of canon research and these are all the games while the early games of our history up to um 2012. i actually joined around the time of um black on playstation 2 and so i've worked on every um criterion game since then and we've developed a number of amazing experiences in there um and actually the timing's good because burnout paradise has just been remastered and we launched that last week and we're super excited to see it going at number one on the um or formats charts 10 years after we made it

thanks so who am i and where do i fit into that story what is my job at criteria and so i could i could tell you that my uh job title is senior producer and um defining the producer's job i quite like um jack dorsey's definition of his job and he says which is to edit the team edit the product and edit the money which i think's quite a good good description of what um being a producer is i could say that um my job is to prioritize and manage scope to favor the player and all of that is true and those are things i do every day but i think my uh real job or a huge part of my job has become to help the talented people talented and passionate people uh out of criteria and make sense of the complex world of work that they find themselves in you could say to be the best versions of themselves that they can be i'm that person that uh people find for

five minute chats that uh turn into half an hour and then 45 minutes and and then an hour kind of about who they are and where they where they might go and at the start of my career some of those games i i showed you on the slide earlier they could be made by a few people for a few months but it's become increasingly complex as i'm sure you all know over the last 10 to 15 years for a number of years criterium was succeeding and there's a whole bunch of uh bachelor awards and spike vga awards and other awards amongst that collection of products and they sold to millions of um players but it was a really high cost to us as a team we had passionate and talented people who were massively passionate about making a great video game but stretched a breaking point by the old way of doing things we were

actively inhibited by the processes we had in place and as as leaders we had no way to focus the wisdom of the team on the increasingly complex problem that faced us of shipping a game across multiple platforms and as that contin that complexity of shipping games continued to spiral cracks started to show our culture started to turn toxic stress levels were at an all-time high i personally had to be signed off for three months with stress-induced depression here's my good friend and fellow leader matt webster describing how he felt leading at that time exhausted and unfulfilled and a questioning of your purpose so for me the purpose is to make amazing game experiences and um and to do it with a

like-minded group of individuals you can make wonderful things and we weren't there i think that it struck me that if we continued the way we were going it was only going to be a matter of time before we killed someone and that's not being dramatic it was through poor practices and misguidance and uh just a general just things haven't changed to reflect our changing times we were loading more and more stress onto people and it was only going to be a matter of time before that stress um reached a conclusion that would take someone to some very dark places but i think it was innate within us there was something bubbling that there needed to be change just didn't know what it was

so by the end of 2013 we found ourselves at our lowest ebb but a change of leadership and the unstilting support of electronic arts created the opportunity for change matt became gm and we just decided there had to be a better way and as we started to build that new way we started asking ourselves a really simple question why isn't it fun to make fun we make fun for a living how come we're so damn miserable all the time so i'd like to describe today some of that journey we took in the studio and my personal journey within it and how i found the most effective way for me to lead so let's start with criterion's journey to our philosophy to start with us we try to answer the question why isn't it fun to make fun we just followed our instinct we just started to put

everything in the way we instinctively felt was going to make being a worker more of a fun experience for us and still be able to meet our goals and um then somewhere on the way i read this book by daniel h pink called drive the premise of this book is that once you're paid fairly fairly meaning it's the same as what you could get in the market and it's broadly the same as what somebody else doing the same role as you is doing within your organization more money is not going to make you more motivated or engaged it's not to say that um you wouldn't want any more money because we can all find something to do with it right it's just that you'd be the same amount of engaged and motivated as you were before you got the money so actually if it isn't that money is effectively just a hygiene factor what is it and it turns out it's these three things autonomy so as far as possible my influence and choice over um team task and technique

mastery getting better is something i care about and purpose which is um the trickier ones to describe in some ways so it's really attaching my ideals to something that's bigger than myself and for many of us in our industry um the game is that you know that's the reason that is our purpose the to ship that game um it is our means of self-expression but increasingly i feel as well as that criteria and our purpose is to find this healthier way uh to make uh amazing entertainment experiences so we started to deliberately um tailor everything we were doing actually to maximize those three things and if you want the detail of how we did that i would invite you to go to the vault and watch alex moles talk autonomy mastery and purpose building our hyper-engaged team from two years ago but we found somewhere along the way that there's um there's a missing piece in that um and that is recognition

in terms of it matters so much to engagement and motivation so that isn't recognition in the form of pay and benefits as i mentioned earlier they're just a hygiene factor the most powerful piece of recognition i still believe is thank you or well done from someone you respect the respect bit's kind of important it'll have some impact from someone you don't respect but it really matters from someone you do respect so that's that's the core of our philosophy for engagement and motivation and we found that we could uh express our philosophy when it comes to people and process essentially in two phrases no dogma and treat people as talent so what do i mean by that and just break down no dogma for you no dogma means people-driven process we passionately believe that process exists to serve people and not the way

other way around as far too often i've seen things being done just because that's the way they're done actually we quite like process criteria and i think we've got more of it than the many studios uh it's just that we don't necessarily uh accept the status quo when it comes to any process if it's not serving us as a team on the people um we will actively change it as i've mentioned autonomy is very important the main parameters within which it is executed at criterion are the budget and the studio priorities but we maximize for our developers who they work with what they work on and how they work on it and goldilocks goals for mastery so not too not too cold and not too hot so beyond something i know i can do and short of something i know i can't do are critical for moving towards mastery in our craft

and when i say treat people as talent that breaks down to three key pillars for us one is to presume passion so as a leader i'm not asking anyone at criterion to prove to me that they're passionate about their craft or about the game they're making that's a given and that's a framing for every interaction for people within our studio and it makes a huge difference that framing it's a given and unassumed and sometimes i think people lead other leaders i've spoken to worry that is that is there a risk in that and i really don't believe there is because if someone on your team is not passionate then the team will edit that person out passionate people do not want to work with other people who aren't passionate and they'll they'll come and tell me or another one of the criterion leaders that that there's a problem with someone and they should be edited out of the team to build a team noah team there's too many times i've seen where a group of people have been

assembled into a space because on paper they have the skill set to knock over a particular problem um or challenge that the business has that is not how you build a team we've developed a number of exercises and practices within criterion to really get to know people from the motivation level up actually you know why you're in the industry at all but there's other things too about their chosen working uh style and preference they prefer a really well defined problem and a really well defined solution or the opposite of that and the final piece is we fundamentally changed our leadership style so we dropped a command and controlled leadership entirely to fully embrace influence and inspire and what that means to me is what i'm going to spend the rest of this talk discussing today this new approach has been working for

us so we've been partnering with other great studios within ea to produce significant parts of all of these titles whilst continuing to create uh the concept phases of our own uip we've succeeded in making games that maintain the quality standards we've set for ourselves with ever increasing complexity but in a healthy way for us and for our talent we were very proud recently to win a best places to work award in the uk from gamesindustry.biz we've also engaged with the an external consultant who put us through something called the cultural entropy barrett test it measures within the organization how much energy you're losing to inefficiencies so for example if you over value control you end up with bureaucracy this test is across multiple industries

not just for the games industries and is independently verified so a good measure for that is to get your score below 10 the criterion score and this is based on survey of the people who work there it's not by um information that we provided as leaders was three percent which is actually the lowest score they'd they'd achieved so something something is going right about what we're doing now and it should go without saying but it's unfortunately not the case yet that we do not crunch so that's criterion story so how about my story and um why did i decide to give up control and what does it mean to me so first of all let me describe how things used to be

the old change cycle as i would call it it would start with a small group of people maybe even one person imagining some future state of the software then a small group of people again would plan together that group of people would command the vastness the larger group of people the talented people on the game through a set of tasks controlling the execution for a given period of time measuring the progress before once again a small group assess the results of that work and then another imagine of new future state of our game and we go around that cycle again i would call that now looking back on it not just command and control but mask and task because it relies on people putting on a mask of inauthenticity the master says yeah i know what everyone should be doing i know the best use of everyone's

time i just don't believe that that's possible in any way and i also don't believe you get the best out of people by telling them what to do but more on that to come so that was how things used to be and as i said when i came back from uh illness i knew personally that something had to change and the and that i had to change as well so the journey i went on was facilitated uh by learning mindfulness techniques i believe that you do find out who you really are at the worst of times and and not just the best of times i certainly found that i could not be all things to all people and that might and i had to find my personal truth and a new way to operate within our industry so what is mindfulness you may well have heard about it and there's various definitions the one i like best is putting a gap between stimulus

and response where we might put make a more skillful decision it doesn't mean we will make a more skillful decision about how to proceed but at least if we can create that gap between stimulus and response we have an opportunity to respond in a more skillful way what that leads to is an understanding that we do not always know what beliefs we're holding about ourselves the people we work with or the game we're making without deliberate inquiry so it started off as a personal journey for me then we started to bring mindfulness into criterium as it resonated with initially other leaders and then the wider studio team we've run many eight weeks 16 hour courses and we have a mindfulness coach who works with us three days a week and as i say it really has helped me answer the question who am i but first let me give you

the business case for mindfulness in your organization because as a producer we've always got to have a business case right for everything we do so let's start with this uh a definition of emotional intelligence um there's again there's a number of these around but i particularly like this one um from travis bradbury and jean greeve's book emotional intelligence 2.0 where they talk about emotional intelligence skills in terms of what i see and what i do so there's a personal competence angle to this so my personal confidence in what i see is my self-awareness so we could define this as the ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen and the self-management so that's your ability to use the awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your own behavior so there's also a social uh dimension to this as well

so social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on the emotions of other people and understand what is really going on relationship management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and other emotions to manage interactions successfully now you can probably see how those things are critical to leading a large group of people all the time but the science backs that up as well so emotional intelligence is twice as important as iq and predicting remarkable employer in performance and it's what differentiates the very best in the top 20 of all leaders and there's a number of scientific studies that have backed that up that i can provide you with the references for if you're interested so emotional intelligence is key to leadership success but it's also trainable so it's the insight of google's jolly

good fellow chad menten that these skills are trainable skills and he created within google what is now a public course search inside yourself that i and many leaders have attended actually um that uses mindfulness techniques to train emotional intelligence so it's a pretty simple business case really emotional intelligence makes you a better leader it's trainable by mindfulness techniques so it's worth investing in mindfulness so without any of the self-discovery elements of it i still think it's a tremendous benefit to any organization actually and particularly to the particular challenges we face making video games so as i continue with my practice i realized that i was holding a number of delusions about myself um but also about who i believed i was as a leader so i'll take you through the four things that emerged for me

which were clear delusions that i was holding the first one my job title should change before i do so i actually believe that there's quite a problem with roles and the problem with roles is the unconscious commitments we make when we take them on so i think there's a companion to this is believing that you are your job title or that you are defined by your job title i don't believe that's true i think it's important that we let go of the idea of i can't lead until they make me the leader i felt strongly that i couldn't wait for something outside to change me or to define me i had to change myself and wait for the world to catch up this is the one i found myself acting in a way that suggested i believe this to be true and i've seen it in lots of people

especially when they first move into leadership positions suddenly feel that they alone should know exactly where we go next and it's just not the case we're all occasionally alone and afraid and denying that it's a classic example of the mask i talked about earlier and another powerful example of an unconscious commitment we make when we take on a role so i came to realize that the real visionary is the person who can listen to everyone and reflect and synthesize a unifying vision for the game not someone who sits on their own and comes down from the mountain with a ground vision for others to enact so going very closely partnering with that is delusion number three if i need to tell people what to do talented people do not need instructions

it doesn't give them the space to apply their talent to the video game they they need many things um not least context and constraints um but no instructions i'm actually quite a keen golfer and although rather a bad one which is a tremendous test of your mindful technique actually if you've ever tried it as a sport um but you need a golf instructor when you don't know what you're doing if you're a professional golfer you don't have an instructor you have a coach and that's what talented people and professional game makers really need too they don't need to be told what to do they just need a coach and a clear unifying target so the last of my big four practice makes perfect well i've got two major problems with this delusion that i realized i must be holding one

practice doesn't make perfect actually practice makes permanent if you keep practicing a bad technique you just get really good at a bad technique but there's something more dangerous in the whole idea of perfection the belief that perfection is anything more than a fleeting moment in time in a video game or in us as as people uh sets us up for a really dangerous bout of self-judgment and i certainly found that that was uh the case for me and trying to be all things to all people and targeting perfection and actually uh we're always defining who we are you may have seen before this quote from mahatma gandhi uh but i think it bears reflection on again your beliefs become your thoughts your thoughts become your words your words become your actions your actions become your habits your habits become your values your values become your destiny particularly like that

because it to me it speaks of how we're defining ourselves all the time not from some thing we put in the future of who we're going to become but of who we are as we act in every moment and i like that it comes from mahatma gandhi as well because gandhi discovered his real mission of non-violent resistance um when he was in his 50s actually and i haven't quite made it that far yet but i'm heading that way i promise you so i believe that you as i went on this journey to decide okay what sort of leader do i want to be and i believe there's a strong connection about how you want to relate to the people around you and the type of leader you want to be so i want to break that down for you on a scale of how engaged you want to be with the people that you lead so there's a stage of um on the left of

this which i'm pity which i'm going to define as i acknowledge others struggle i think there's a stage to the left of this called apathy but i'm just going to leave that out for the for this point because it's really unhelpful um so um the next level of engagement up from there's sympathy which i would define as understanding others struggle a further engagement we have empathy of i feel other struggle and at the highest level of engagement um compassion which is i want to help others with their struggle and the interesting thing about those predominant ways of relating to other people you lead i believe defines your leadership mindset so over here in pity i think if you're defined by simply acknowledging other struggle what you're saying is i see everything

as broken and that's a victim position and there's no leadership from there i'm not saying we don't all find ourselves in a victim position because it's very easy to fall into that but it's important to recognize that when we're in that position we can't lead from there we can't help the people around us find their way through from a position of just seeing everything as broken so sympathetic style i think he's saying i want to fix everything and that's a hero style of leadership there is a period of time at a certain situation where hero leadership works and where things may be really really are broken my observation is that is not sustainable over the longer term i think it was trying to lead that way that ultimately led to me but getting ill of trying to fix everything around me on a complex video game project there's a lot of things to fix and as soon as they're fixed they're going to break again in most cases

so to believe that is a dangerous and i believe unsustainable style of leadership for a long time i've been in a highly collaborative style of leadership but what i found to be the most powerful means for me to deliver meaningful and lasting beneficial transformation is to move beyond wanting to help with everything and into service in good to great jim collins identifies level five leaders distinguishing qualities as the most effective leaders according to the study he's done as drive and humility and i think that's the very basis of servant relationship of servant leadership sorry so it's important to say that this is how i relate to people uh but i'm people too so this is also about how i relate to me so can i look at all my actions through the lens of wanting to be of service

and wanting to help with my own struggle it's very easy to leave that part out as we go on this journey it's a challenging place to be actually to make that commitment uh to service leadership and i like this quote from well it's attributed to lausa or there's some debate whether there was a person called laosei but in the dalton ching there's this quote um and what i think is interesting about that it helps define the challenging part of committing to this style of leadership actually because no one really wants to be the type of leader at the bottom there who's despised and defied i've met some people who are pretty happy to be feared but not many people really want to be led by that person and we could probably easily sign up to being the person who's loved and praised so what about that top one then the highest type of ruler is the one whose existence people are barely aware and you all wanted to be that type of leader

but could i commit and to quote gandhi again i do really believe the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others i think a lot of the fear that i had and that other people had and that i talked to about this and committing to this style of leadership is that it sounds really passive and i didn't understand how i could actively lead from that position but actually the discovery is that many things stay the same passion purpose commitment and permanent change are still absolute requirements of servant leadership as they are of any other style of leadership and far from it meaning giving away my power or our power it meant stepping into that power more fully so this is my leadership style and this is what emerged merged for me and i have a metaphor for

you here this is the 1109 carat laced la ronda diamond it's the largest rough cut diamond in existence today and it was recently bought at auction for 53 million dollars and i read an interview about the jeweller whose responsibility it was to cut the diamond so 53 million dollars worth of diamond in front of you one chance don't get it wrong in the interview you said to to the jeweler how are you gonna how are you gonna cut the diamond then how are you gonna work out how to cut this 53 million dollar diamond and his response was the diamond will show us how it should be cut and i thought wow that's a beautiful metaphor in the way of these complex video game projects that we're trying to run that there is a

way in there somewhere and it is known how there is a way to find that path through the video game but it's our idea it's our our challenge to uncover that way actually and there's a as a concept a chinese concept in taoism again actually called wu wei and it's loosely defined as meaning natural action or in other words action that does not involve struggle or excessive effort and we were also the uh cultivation of a mental state in which our actions are quite effortless effortlessly sorry in alignment with the flow of life i feel a very strong alignment with that idea and trying to make a video game i believe if you pay attention humbling with a quiet ego the way through the complex and chaotic game project reveals itself to us by doing too much actually there's a risk that we get away get in the way of that order

and break that flow so my job is to lead that collaborative discovery of the way it's still about as i said creating meaningful trans transformative beneficial change but it's the very opposite of trying to force that to happen so if it's not that what is it how do i actually do it so i'm going to present seven key practices uh that i think are key to leading in this new way for the first one i'm gonna borrow a quote from playwright oscar wilde it's hard to do any presentation without a quote from oscar wilde right um and it's a beautiful quote and the reason i think it's important especially at this time as i would say in our industry and maybe arguably in our society at large people are crying out for purpose and meaning and purpose and meaning can only come from truth and you can only provide truth as a

leader if you are personally authentic authenticity being true to yourself actually i believe is the ultimate act of self-compassion because it is so painful and requires so much energy to wear a mask at work every day that it leaves very little energy for any other type of leadership and i believe we're at our best when we're being true to who and what we are so being yourself is absolutely essential however scary that may be and it can be scary actually because it may mean forgiving yourself too in my experience others forgiveness will not touch you until you're prepared to forgive yourself so authenticity matters and of course personal integrity is non-negotiable

we have to do the right thing even if no one's watching practice two you've probably heard of multiple points in your career part your ego at the door or no egos here it's actually impossible ego's integral and very necessary part of how we function as humans so what's quiet ego then it's much more about accepting that your ego is part of who you are and listening and but not being allowing your actions to be dominated by the needs of your ego or to control your emotional weather within and it's a mindful practice actually that starts to build that awareness that gap between stimulus and response is the place where we can be aware of just the thoughts of the or the needs of the ego and make different

decisions and it's not and i believe it's not a place um to lead from an egoic place is not a place to leave from there are a number of ways that that matters importantly to leading big complex game projects the first one is to listen mindfully um most people never listen they're just waiting to speak so to listen mindfully means to listen without judgment and bringing all your attention to what the speaker is saying it's actually very difficult to do but incredibly powerful experience for the person being listened to the second part is to accept that you are the co-creator of everything that happens to you and not to be blaming others for anything that you're involved in and ultimately the metaphor i like for leading with quiet ego is to lead like water to flow around your team that you're in service too and to be the river that the t that keeps the team buoyant and flowing

towards our goals i'm not saying that's easy by the way and it's a constant process and some of you are old enough may remember the david carradine show from which patience grasshopper comes so you're going to be repeating yourself if you choose this leadership style you'll be repeating yourself a lot people are going to challenge you constantly and you're going to be on the end of a lot of other people's ego noise and noisy egos tend to tune others out so you're going to need to be patient and repeat whatever messages you have as a leader a lot and patience to me is more than that actually patience is about to keep believing that the talented people that i lead will be able to find their own way and access their own internal wisdom actually believing in someone especially if they don't believe in themselves is the most powerful gift you can bestow

on someone so you have the opportunity to do that as a leader you're in a very very powerful position it's a position i think you should take full advantage of so patience so to be present this is the very fundamental uh essence of mindfulness bringing our attention non-judgmentally back to the present moment this is kind of what mindfulness practice teaches us usually by anchoring ourselves on the breath but what does it mean in terms of focusing on a video game so primarily it means focusing on what we need to do right now to have fewer goals for more significance as um john kabazin was the doctor the professor actually who brought mindfulness to the western world and kind of made it into a secular medical

benefit and there's a lovely quote from his book that says don't let the destination become more powerful than this step and in video games especially ones are going to take us two three or more years that's really really real i believe the enormity of what needs to be achieved two years away can lead us to making poor decisions on what we need to do right now and actually becoming quite overwhelmed by the next step we keep doing the right thing over and over again you end up with a great game so asking what we have today and what we need to do today frees us up from those assumptions and helps us to not be constrained by i can't do this now because i know i'm going to have to do all that stuff later on and that sort of thing keeps us in the future and away from the the present and if you're truly paying attention in the present moment you see something else really really powerful

and that is about what doesn't need to be done and as my engineers will always tell me doing nothing is the ultimate optimization there's actually something else about presence that's really important and it's something that's a lot less tangible and that's to embody presence on a day-to-day basis within your team and it's the foundation of mindfulness inspired servant leadership that i'm talking about today is to facilitate a calm space from which effective collaborative decision making is possible there is a cost to it to autonomy in that it shares the burden of responsibility about what the right thing to do next is and it's important that there's a supportive and calm space for those decisions to be made in and the present present leaders is key to facilitating

that space practice five frame everything in learning so this is really about uh having a growth mindset and there's a whole bunch of work by carol dweck that basically says the most likely predictor of whether we're going to improve at something is whether we believe we're going to improve at something or not and that's an interesting piece of research to go into not having a sort of fixed ability mindset so for us i think in making games it's expect error learn from performance constantly reevaluate scope so one of the key jobs of a producer but across the whole team to re-prioritize get around that build play change repeat cycle as often as we can so we're going to learn things but actually how we greet the things we learn is really important

and heard expressed beautifully the other day is can we meet what we learn with more of an aha than an oh no and actually what's interesting as well in everything we do is i don't believe that there's real failure apart from the failure to learn from every time we move our game forward um the outcome is not necessarily so easily or obviously judged as good or bad if you're going to start out with a clear with one vision of a game and then believe that's the game you're going to end up with two three years later i would suggest that you're setting yourself up for success and in complex game projects many of the best features are actually discovered by accident and not the thing we set out to build when we initially set out to build them so whilst it's important we're still delivering on our vision to deliver to create the exact feature that we thought we were building not so important i'd argue

post-its were discovered when 3m were looking for the strongest adhesive they could make and the scientist accidentally found one that didn't really stick at all he said actually this could be useful for something scientist or augustus kekule uncovered the ring structure of benzeme when he dreamt of a snake biting its own tail so if we're too focused on one outcome we can miss the learning of what our game could be and players don't mind what we cut we can cut whatever we like they just we just have to deliver them a great fun experience at the end of the day so everyone at criteria knows that i go on endlessly about goal setting and how we write our goals and it's really important that we agree our goals collaboratively so this to me is the embodiment of not instructing talent people so right goals that agree on the

benefits you can test this really easily about whether you've got a goal that describes a benefit and not work is the work can be changed and the goal would be staying the same so deliver a benefit so um you know an instruction could be attend gdc a goal could be become a better game developer there's a number of ways the latter can be achieved there's only one way the first one can be achieved so it also really matters in sharing goals and not tasks around a large game team as well because i can understand the benefit anyone wants to provide for our player but i can't just understand everyone's work on our team and my seventh and final practice is to empower flow so some wonderful work by the um the hungarian

psychologist whose name i struggle to pronounce scio i think i've just butchered that for you on flow and there's three clear conditions for flow so flow being the optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched to our abilities and actually it's been described in things like the pens model for the state we're trying to create for our players but it's really important to create for our developers as well um so there's three clear sorry excuse me there's three clear conditions that are needed to generate flow there's a clear goals it should be obvious what to achieve there should be a goldilocks ambition so it's about empowering others to find that goldilocks ambition beyond what we know we can do as a team and short of what we know we can't do an immediate feedback collaboration is

an equal exchange of an empowerment i believe with quiet ego we can be free from the need to empower ourselves and give ourselves fully to empowering others and i would invite you to consider how much of your feedback contributes this state i certainly found that lots of mine didn't so those are my seven practices and what excuse me these come together in what i would call the new change cycle so i told you at the start about the old change cycle which for me was very much about doing leadership to other people so in this new change cycle it starts with focusing on now helping your team understand the difference between urgency and importance everything is important but what is truly urgent what is the decision that has to be enough to be made now and what can be left alone that decision

making can be a service in itself from the leaders of your team inspire belief while widely in the possibility that there is a way in self in others inspiring others to share that belief in themselves reminding teams that they've solved similar challenges and problems in the in the past listen to them mindfully and remove any delusions they have about the challenge in front of them we put a huge amount of effort into sharing context as well as vision and criterion so that decision making can be made as close to the point of execution as possible the next one is to inspire trust i really like the definition of trust to be a confident relationship to uncertainty it's important to model this towards ourselves actually as leaders because without fundamental trust there's no trust at all but then also to model it towards others

and towards the work because what trust does is remove fear-based barriers to action and that's what we want to make rapid progress on complex games so a good example of that is we don't need to argue about whether one idea is more fun than another one if we could just put both of them into software and be playing them and find out which is fun goldilocks ambition so this is really where we start the planning phase and the goal setting part of of the cycle and the acceptance of the truth of where we are now so bottom up planning starting from where you are is super important there's so many plans i've seen for finishing games that rely on not starting where we are so they've started from the destination and worked back and gone this plan works until somebody points out that we're not at the start

of that plan so we can't actually deliver on it and where that comes from actually is about um just refusing to accept that you're not where you believe we should be and i talked a little bit about crunch earlier and i feel it's that failure to accept the reality of the situation the crunch is the most extreme example about off sorry crunch comes about when there's more work left to do than there is time available to do it the moment is going to come when this game ships to our players for the first time or maybe it's a release of our games going to update it and really crunch is saying i don't accept that that work can't be done in that time available but it can't and actually all the science tells you that by crunching you're actually going to get less work done than if you didn't crunch so why do we

do it it's just fear it's just fear of not doing it the fear of not having tried hard enough or done everything and if we can accept and set ourselves a goldilocks ambition we can make the decisions however difficult they are to leave stuff out that we can't make because crunching won't get into the game any better you probably just have a lower quality of less stuff so we're doing some stuff immediate feedback as i said we push decision making as close to execution as possible engaged person in the state of flow moves towards mastery so this feedback that we can provide is really important and don't forget the most powerful thing is thank you and well done and then there's discovery so this is where we're going to frame everything in learning we learn something about the game we're making and how we're making it and it's a

discovery of a new truth and the diamond at this point are showing us a little more about how it should be cut and we're ready to focus on what we really need to do right now so this to me is the opposite of doing change leadership to other people as i said and all of these phases draw upon those seven practices that i mentioned to you earlier so to focus on now we need to draw on our presence and i think it's important to choose that we have a choice about how we relate to the problems we face and whether we even want to relate to them as problems at all actually you won't be able to inspire belief if you're trying to make it all about yourself it's a quiet ego inspire trust patiently because because you and the team are not two

different sets of people is not an us and them situation so we can be patient and we can trust ourselves and believe in ourselves before we move on as a team you'll notice that those belief and trust phases were completely missing from the old cycle so agree on benefits and not work to get to a goldilocks ambition and power flow and your ruling your role of that i believe the leader is to provide effective and immediate feedback and frame everything in learning and remember that we're trying to discover treat what we learn with an uh and our heart not on our oh no and fundamental to all of this is be yourself because everyone else really really is taken so ultimately you've got no other choice so that's my approach and maybe now

you're asking is this for you should i give up control um well i'm saying that i think you should we we have to do better as an industry too many people have been too damaged for too long i'm not saying that this is the only way i'm saying it's the best way i've found to start to do something about that and make it fun to make fun for a living so and let's be confident about it as leaders because true confidence doesn't need to defend its position just with quiet ego we can explain what we find to be true so i'm asking if you're in and are your fellow leaders in be brave be yourself for yourself and free your team thanks very much for listening

i think i've left time for um a couple of questions i've got some business cards up here if you want to grab one and i'm going to go to the breakout wrap-up room after this so if there's one or two questions anyone wants to ask now i'd be happy to answer them hi there thanks very much for the talk fun and very inspiring thank you one thing i'd like to ask about is given the focus on being present what is your view on on planning because it necessarily brings us into the future and away from the present yeah so um it comes down to the idea of don't let the destination become more important than this step and what decisions do we truly need to make now the difference between importance and urgency so there's a lot of things which feel like decisions on what actually don't

need to be decided now and actually are much better decided when we've made a bit more of our game and we know more about it so yes you always need that view you always need that vision of what your game you're making but as we learn more about the game we move more towards it so you're constantly re-understanding what your game is and how you're going to get to it so it's actually not less planning i would say and arguably it's it's possibly even more but it's it's planning to replan and don't don't waste that for creating a gantt chart that takes you to the future that's just one path of one version of the future and it's and it definitely won't happen thanks appreciate it okay um a lot of uh what you covered reminded me a lot of uh the work of frederick lalu in reinventing organizations right are you familiar with the book i don't know sorry so um it talks about teal organizations and the three pillars of that are self-management wholeness which is

about being yourself um having that self-awareness and bringing all of yourself and all of your energy and creativity to work and also evolutionary purpose so discovering the purpose of the organization as you go instead of trying to you know presume that you have it yourself yeah so i would very much recommend that you read that and everyone else as well if you're interested in in looking at further information on this thank you okay great thank you very much for [Applause] coming