Rules for Development (of People)

Good morning. Welcome to the rules for development of people. You had a lot of other cool places and choices to be here this morning, so in fact, in bed sleeping is probably among them given that last night was St. Patrick's Day, so I'm very glad that you all picked this room and this talk. Thank you very much for being here. I am super jazzed about the opportunity to share with you some of the ideas that we are thinking about around how Blizzard is trying to be more deliberate about the development and the betterment of their people. I am super curious about all of you though, so if I could just get a show of hands, uh, production, how many pretty okay, not nice. Uh, art? Okay, just one, just you. Nice, way to

represent. Design? Okay, well done. All right, and engineering? Okay, cool. Business-y type folks? Uh, okay, okay. And I know HR is in the house. I got a little support team there. Yeah, you, you too. Yeah. You rule. Um, and then how many of you are leads within your own studios? Okay, cool. That would be helpful to like craft this. All right, so I'm Julie Farbanic. A little bit about me. Uh, this is me in game. Come say hi. I'm in the Goblin starting zone. For whatever reason when I first started at Blizzard, Farbanic was really hard to say, so Fabernacle became really easy to say. I don't know why. So, that's that's me. And a couple of other things to share

just so you know a little bit more about me. Uh the first thing I'll start out with is I feel like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the best television shows ever. It's even superior than Firefly. Yeah, I said it. I said it. And I mean it. And in the wrap-up room, wherever that is, I don't even know where that is. I didn't ask. Um we'll discuss the merits if you want to after this. Uh I am a self-described leadership development nerd. I dig it. I enjoy working with our leaders at Blizzard, helping them be better. I read lots of books on it. I got my master's in organizational leadership. It's my thing. And you might notice some of that influence sprinkled throughout this talk. So, just fair warning to you. I've been in HR for 15 years and I've been lucky enough to have been at Blizzard Entertainment for the past 8 years. 8 this month. Yeah. I get my shield in 2 years. Um and so,

when I started at Blizzard, my focus was learning and development. So, I built a lot of training programs and did a lot of teaching and worked with a lot of teams across the studio to help them kind of work better together. And now I'm responsible for all the HR activities for three of our franchises. Diablo, right? Yes. Yeah. Hearthstone, yeah. That's it, right? And Overwatch. Uh It's so fantastic. Um and so, speaking of that, I have spent the last 4 years embedded with the Overwatch team. That means that I sit with the team, but it is a lot more than geography. Um I'm in the production stand-ups, I'm in the production team meetings, engineering leads meetings, art leads meetings. I sit on our steering team, which as the term suggests, it's it's our game director and our exec producer

and our art director and our tech director and business guy and we all kind of work together to shape and steer the direction of the group and we talk about things like schedule a lot. Launch plans right now are big topic of conversation. Build stability, just the health of the team. And I share all of that with you just so you have a sense of my experience and the perspective that I'm going to bring to this talk and also to highlight that all the examples that I want to share with you are all things that are happening inside the dev team. These are not things like we're sending people off to go do, they're magically different and then they come back and no. And so I thought that was important to mention. Okay. So what inspired the ideas behind this talk? It's this quote from this really awesome book by Ed Catmull called Creativity, Inc. If you have not read it,

add it to your reading list. It's there are a lot of similarities between how Pixar approaches their creative process and then how we make games. So it's it's fabulous. And this quote, "Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea." This really resonated with a lot of us at Blizzard because we talk about that a lot. We don't say it as articulately and eloquently as Ed Catmull did. We say things like making games is easy compared to making a team. And I am not at all suggesting by the way that making games is easy. I know it's really really really hard. But when you compare it to building a team, a a that has an abundance of trust, that has healthy conflict, that has a lot of passionate developers all, you know, rowing the boat in the same direction, and that uh right balance between the creative

ideas and the ability to execute on those ideas. That mixture, that's a really hard thing um to find. And I'm sure a lot of you can attest that if you've been on teams maybe where there's poor communication or weak leadership or minimal collaboration and teamwork, you would say that yes, the absence of those core things really hurts how the team functions, and ultimately what we believe at Blizzard, ultimately hurts the quality of the game. And so, because we think this way, we're starting to hone in a little bit on some rules that help us focus our actions and and dedicate time, energy, and attention to the betterment of all the developers on our teams and the teams themselves. So, let's look at these rules.

Okay, so we'll go over these really quick cuz we're going to spend a lot of time doing a deep dive into each one. So, the first one is intentional investment. Our time, our money, our energy, our resources, these are finite things. And so, this rule is really helping us determine who and where to put invest those things in to get the biggest return. Second rule of utilizing frameworks. Um so, this just reminds us that we need to pick really proven methods that work in order to maximize those investments. We'll talk more about that. Prioritizing connection. This is really at the heart of this list. Um, because for us it's about what we what makes work worthwhile and meaningful. If you ask anyone at Blizzard, probably in your studios as well, what do you love most

about your job? I guarantee you or I would bet a lot of money that the first answer would be, well, I just love making games. And then follow closely by, I love the people I work with. I love the people I stand shoulder to shoulder with. And this rule is all about us building upon that and and emphasizing and making it easy for our developers to connect with each other to kind of keep building our brotherhood, our sisterhood, our tribe. And lastly, collaborative learning. This rule builds upon that. And really, uh, is a reminder to us to never underestimate the power of peer-to-peer learning and feedback. And we'll talk a lot about that. Okay, so none of these rules exist to imply, I need to be clear, that Blizzard has it all figured out. We so do not have it all figured out. We are still trying and learning to do these things

well and in ways that feel meaningful to our employees. And so as we'll go through each rule, what I thought would be good is we'll talk about uh, why it matters, of course, and then give you some context and talk about some of the things that inspire our action towards those rules because I think that kind of context matters. And then most importantly is to give you at least one solid, very practical example of how we are trying to bring that rule to life. And the hope by doing that is that if you think any of these ideas are cool or might make a positive difference in your own studios, take them. Try them. That's the whole point. It's my favorite part about GDC. You come here and hopefully get a little nugget of inspiration and take that back and maybe make your you know, your games or your business or your teams better. Oh, you know what I didn't say? Shut off

your phones. Yeah. That was my bad. I didn't lead with that. Um anyway, so let's dive in. Intentional investment. So, intentional investment is first by design because it is the most important thing. Without it, we would be growing our people by chance or by luck and that is not an awesome strategy. But what do I mean by investment? I think it's important to be really clear about that. And so, how we think about it is probably how you'd find it in any dictionary, but it's important to say that investment for us is the time, energy, and resources spent in the hope of future benefits actualized. So, each day at work or outside of work for that matter, we are all constantly faced with choices of where to invest our time or our energy or our money, right? So, going to dinner with your friends is an investment in

them, right? In that relationship. Or coming to GDC is an investment in your learning or your career. Or based on last night, your alcohol consumption. From what I saw. The shenanigans. Um but then at work, our investment choice can be things like what part of the project gets our focus, right? When we're trying to get pulled in a lot of directions. Or even what what meeting do I go to when I'm double booked? And then with respect to the topic of this talk, the choices are who are the people that you are choosing to invest in? And how is that effective? Some things to think about. I also want to just make sure we're talking about the word intentional. I want to be intentional about our intentions. Um and how we think about it for us, it's discipline, it's focus, it's

deliberateness, right? Being very deliberate so that those I guess here's what I want to say. Everyone can make investments that don't pay off, right? That that's kind of an easy thing to do. Um but intentional investment for us is the thought process of trying to make the smartest investment so that we get the biggest return on that. So that's our first rule. So what are some of the things that inspire our action towards it? Well, first, it's awesome talented developers like this and all across our studio at Blizzard and insert any picture of your teams on here, right? These people are worthy of your investment, right? And your top performers in particular, they will stop being top performers or they'll go be top performers somewhere else if you don't make intentional investments in them.

Second source of inspiration behind intentional investment for us is a very much a strengths-focus and rooted in some of the work that the Gallup organization has done and Marcus Buckingham, another great read. It's called Now Discover Your Strengths. I recommend it if you haven't read it. Um and what Gallup suggested, which maybe a lot of you know about, but it's worth just being clear. Right? So, they said that we spend way too much time focusing on our weaknesses and try and make them better instead of identifying and capitalizing on the things that we're already good at, our strengths. And they argue that if you can identify somebody's strengths and the things they are naturally born and awesome at and really lean into that, you will get far superior performance than if you would if you spent all that time trying to make their weaknesses better. So, a couple of examples to drive this

home. So, let's look at a study that the Gallup organization did a number of years ago, and they took 6,000 10th graders. Uh some of which were identified as average readers. So, they were clocking in about 90 words per minute. And then they had another group identified as above average readers clocking in at about 100 or 350 words per minute. And they took the whole 6,000 10th graders through one semester of a speed reading course. What do we imagine that the improvement was for the average readers? 150 words per minute. Pretty good, very respectable. But what about our above average readers? What do we think they improved by? Insane. It's an insane amount, 2,900 words per minute. So, we look at this and we say, "Okay. The average readers had respectable gains. That that that's good. But woah,

it pales in comparison to the gains made for the above average readers." And so, for us, Gallup's work on strengths really helps serve as a data point, I guess. Um when we think about developing our people and it's starting to help us crack the code of where to invest our valuable time or our energy or our money. But it's not just that. Let's look at Rudy. Uh Rudy movie going way back starring Sean Astin. Anyone see it? Okay, so I'll explain for those of you that haven't. Um Sean Astin was also Samwise in Lord of the Rings. And because I love 80s movies uh Mikey from The Goonies. So that's also important to know. All right, but let's talk about Rudy. So Rudy was a small guy in football player comparison, right? He was shorter, he

didn't weigh as much, he wasn't as fast, uh but Rudy wanted nothing more than to play football for the University of Notre Dame. And he applies three times to Notre Dame and is rejected three times. And on his fourth time he finally gets in and he earns a spot on the team's practice squad. So the practice squad is those folks that just practice, you know, they're in the drills every day with the team, but come Saturday, come game day, they do not run out on the field in the uniform, they are watching that game from the stands or on the television. All right, so there's Rudy practicing every day. Finally, fast forward to the end of the season and Rudy finally gets to like suit up. So he's in his uniform. Um he gets to run out with the team. He's on the sidelines, he's cheering, and then he finally gets in the game. And then he runs a play and he makes this awesome one single tackle. And the crowd cheers

and the players carry him off the field and it's a really awesome moment. So what I'm going to say might sound a little cold and uncaring. And I don't mean it to be. But when we really look at that and we see years of pain, of sweat, of sacrifice, blood, sweat, tears for one single tackle. That is not a really good ROI, right? And so what Rudy's story makes us think about is be careful of taking the path of most resistance. And this is a really hard thing to do. Um, you know, we we have a culture of rooting for the underdog, right? Um, and it's really, really hard.

So, it's something to think about. And so, we're here. The yeah, but. Cuz all of you are like, "Yeah, Julie. I've heard the strength thing before. Yada, yada, yada." Um, and there's this thing called reality, Julie. And you're right. You're absolutely right. Cuz sometimes a person's strength does not match what's needed on the project or team. And sometimes even strengths overdone, they become weaknesses, right? That hard-charging producer Oh, there's a lot of producers in the room. Hard-charging producer that's really, really focused and driven and gets stuff done also gets so tunnel vision on the objective sometimes that they start running over people to get there. As example. And you we cannot ignore the dark side. The dark side matters. Weaknesses do matter when you're trying to make a game and build teams. So, where have we landed on this at Blizzard? I would love to tell you I have this awesome spell that we just cast and it

fixes these things. But, uh, no. Where we've landed on this is that people aren't binary and we can't solve for every problem. So, these are just the realities that we manage and we don't make them problems that we solve. So, let's look at a example, a Blizzard example. And I thought it might be interesting to actually use a look at strengths from a team perspective. Hi. Love that picture. So, before the inception of Overwatch, um the team was actively working on a bunch of different game ideas, right? Trying to kick around and just generally trying to figure out what was next for us. And as part of that process, our game director, the very amazing and talented Jeffrey Kaplan, was building out his development philosophy for the project along with with the team.

And one of the pillars that came out of that, one of the bullet points that showed up on that, was play to team strengths. And that's how Overwatch was born. Um is specifically and intentionally investing in the strengths of the team that we had. Decisions about where to put our time and our energy and our resources with respect to the technical aspects of the game, with respect to artistic actions, those were in very large part looking about what the capabilities were of the team as a whole. More specifically, when we look at this iconic lineup, and I know uh Kaplan has mentioned this a few times, we actually see how some very key strengths of various people really influence the direction of the game. And specifically with this hero lineup, we see the strengths of two people in particular.

The first is a guy named Jeff Goodman, who's one of our principal designers, has been with Blizzard about 15 years and is probably one of the most talented and gifted hero and ability designers to to walk the planet in our opinion. And we also see the work and the strengths of another guy named Arnold Tsang who's our current assistant art director on the project. And Arn's talent Arn was put on this earth and he is an amazing character concept artist. And so when we look at this the the team really made a big intentional investment to really lean in on Jeff and Arn's strengths to help build the core of this game. And I am very biased um but I believe that the decision to use a strengths-based like intentional

investment approach has resulted in the exponential payoff. This is our equivalent of going from 350 words per minute to 2900 words per minute. Next rule. Utilizing frameworks. Why does this matter? Um well for us we look at of course how that term framework is defined and dictionary says an essential supporting structure from which to build things. And this becomes really important when we're talking about building the capabilities of others. When you build a house, right? You need that really solid foundation. For us that solid foundation is intentional investment and then that frame on top provides structure, provides stability. And that's really really key. A framework does this for us. The second thing that we really like about utilizing framework is it's just simpler

and easier, right? When you've got a group of people following the same steps and the same thought process. And third, and maybe most important, is that for us, a framework gives us the needed discipline. Right? To have disciplined thought and disciplined action when we think about this. And so, the framework that we've chosen um to approach really getting intentional about building our teams and our people is based on the work of the Center for Creative Leadership, and it's the 70-20-10 development rule. Is anyone familiar with that? Oh, well, yeah, you guys. They're HR. They know. All right, so let's talk about that. Okay. So, if a strengths focus helps us determine who or where to invest in, the 70-20-10 development framework um is the

how. How do we go out go about making a very calculated investment about that? And so, if I asked each of you, what's the best learning experience that you've ever had, the one that had the biggest impact, I really doubt that you're going to tell me it was this training class that I went to. Or this awesome GDC talk. No, I don't think that would be. What I think you would say is, oh God, Julie, you know, it was that time I was on that project. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I did like try all these new things, stretched really beyond my capabilities. That's the thing. That's the thing that I learned the most. And this is at the root of the 70-20-10 development framework. The best learning, the stickiest learning, happens when it's built into the work itself. So, if I need to get better at talking in front of the team during team

meetings, I am not going to do that by taking a class, watching a TED Talk, reading a book about it. Yes, those things are important and they do provide sources of inspiration and models of excellence, but that is actually not how we learn things in a way that it actually takes root and and and sticks. The best way that we're going to learn and build our public speaking muscles is to find ways to talk in front of the team as much as possible. That's that 70%. And the 20% in the middle can't be overlooked either, right? That's the part where after that team meeting, I get immediate feedback and coaching about how I just did, ideally from my manager or a trusted peer. And together, all these elements really create and establish an environment

where deep learning and development can take place. Something though to emphasize, not a warning, but something to emphasize, 70-20-10 is not a fixed ratio. Right? Um, and in fact, for those of you that are leads in the team, we've found that not skimping on the 20% is really, really crucial. In fact, do more of that if you can, cuz that has really led to be significant differences in the acceleration of someone's development. So, some examples. Let's look. So, um, I mentioned I'm a leadership development nerd, um, which is good because Blizzard cares a lot about building the capabilities of leads. So, all these examples are things that we do when we're trying to build leadership capabilities in particular and how we try and fill each of these buckets. Um, really critical, right? Cuz when you

think you all know this, but leads on your teams, right? We think of them anyway as force multipliers, right? They have the greatest chance to do the most good. They touch the most people. But they also have the greatest chance to do the most damage if that's not done well. So, we emphasize this a lot. All right. So, how do we try? What are some of the things on our list um of how we build 70 or how we build work development into the work itself. Um, so one thing that we do a lot um is we have these strike teams at Blizzard and the whole purpose of bringing a strike team together um is to make our games better. And so, it's comprised of a bunch of people from cross disciplines and cross teams and their sole focus is to give feedback on a game that's not theirs. And so, we found a lot of learning leadership-wise when someone has been assigned to either participate on one of these strike teams or lead it. The scary thing

hosting internal peer talks, right? Um, but what we found is that one of the things that can be really helpful in leadership development is building someone's presence, right? The ability to communicate ideas in a compelling way. And so, when we're thinking about that for someone, we might ask them to um prepare and deliver an internal peer talk on some area of their expertise. Fixing inherited problems, another awesome way to build learning into the work itself and to fill our 70% bucket. Particularly when someone has to go outside of their group to solve a problem, right? So, they might have to go across a discipline or across another team in the company. That can be a really effective way. And scope and scale. Right? So, maybe I was responsible for this part of the game and now I'm responsible for this part of the game. Or I'm overseeing these functions and now you just gave me these functions.

So, those kinds of things can also help how we fill that 70% uh bucket. 20%. I can't emphasize enough this 20% bucket is all about support. Why? Because learning something new is inherently about failing, right? And failing doesn't feel good. And so, providing a mechanism for people to talk about those failures and to kick some things around is really paramount in the learning process. So, examples for us that we use. So, one-on-ones there are soapbox I would get on it. I would tell you all to do one-on-ones if you don't already do them. But, I'm also being very purposeful about meaningful and effective those terms used. Particularly in this case if we're thinking about helping to build somebody's leadership capabilities. Ideally, those one-on-ones you're having

are less about just the day-to-day tactics of getting the work done and more about whatever that thing is that this person's trying to learn and helping them talk through that and asking questions like what's going right? What's getting in your way? And what are you learning about leading? Effective meaningful one-on-ones. Mentorships. So, we do not have a formal mentorship process at Blizzard, but we do like the idea of intentionally There's that word again. Uh pairing people together and we think about it in two ways. The uh traditional like senior person along with a less experienced person, or we're also starting to play with peer-to-peer mentorships. Always being very intentional, so as example, if someone has to get better at their soft skills, we will intentionally pair them with someone who is already really good at

that, really respected for that, in the hopes that that kind of thing can yield good results. Discipline lunches, we really like and try and encourage and push leads talking to other leads to learn about how things are going in their worlds, and it's a good place to kind of again build that 20%. And we also have these things called coaching labs, which I will talk about in more depth when we get to collaborative learning part. And the 10%. So, we're lucky enough, we have this Blizzard Academy, so there are lots of training classes that people can go to, or grab books from our library, or we'll just shoot out, you know, a really cool TED Talk or a thought-provoking podcast, just those kinds of things. We'll go to that internal peer talk that we forced some other person to do, um that kind of thing. And an important note on all these just examples of lists that I gave you is that we just think of them as a menu.

So, depending on whatever that thing is that we're trying to get somebody better at, we just pick and choose what might work and kind of build a plan for them from there. So, what does this all look like in practice? Some more kind of practical examples, so you know how we're trying to bring this to life. Um and we're going to look, again, cuz it's easy, cuz I'm with the team, we're going to I'm going to tell you more about uh Overwatch, um and particularly our art leadership team. So, recently we appointed several senior artists into lead roles and everything that comes with that. So, now they are directing the work, managing the work, having one-on-ones in the leadership meetings, all that good stuff. And that's how we're trying to fill that 70% bucket. 20% is yes, we're utilizing one-on-ones as a mechanism to provide them to support as they're in these new roles

and falling down and failing and learning and picking them up and all that other good stuff. And there's also something else that's kind of interesting that I wanted to share with you that on the slide says team coaching with art direction moments. So, let me tell you what that is. Um So, because this matters and because we really want to build those guys and their leadership skills and invest in them, every single week at art leads meeting, we intentionally invest a dedicated amount of time. This is the brainchild of Billy Padrick, our amazing art director, and Seth Spaulding, our really talented art manager. And dedicating some time to talk about for lack of a better term, the art of art direction. Our lone artist, he knows. He knows what I mean. Um cuz that's really, really hard, right? So, it's like learn how to art direct others and and, you know, the vision part and in particular, um a

recent example that the group was talking about was um how do you uh claw some pull someone away from this thing that they love doing. They're noodling on it. They're perfecting it, right? And yeah, you know what? It's not really making gameplay move forward or particularly in our case, things are moving too fast. The player's not going to see it, right? And so, how to pull that and so, that group spent time peer-to-peer in those um meetings talking about what they're trying, what they're failing at, what they're learning, or what's working. And every week we're trying to do that, and that again is kind of filling our 20% bucket. And then 10% after we ship, we'll send them to a training class, but not until then cuz we're busy. Um And so the ability though of that art leadership team to share, to be vulnerable, you

know, to talk about things that they're not not going well, that actually takes us to our next rule of prioritizing connection. And we lean a lot on this rule when we think about building and strengthening healthy teams. So we are social creatures, right? We are wired to connect to others. And this rule is how we intentionally create opportunities for that connection. And this matters a lot cuz connection, at least how we think about it, is how we build trust, and in particular try and get that alignment needed to manage those conflicts when they do come up cuz they always come up, right? Um and so what inspired some of our thinking behind this um is worth talking about. Um and it's based on the work of Patrick Lencioni

and the book of Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Another great read, recommend it. And so really quick, an overview of what Patrick's book is all about is the first dysfunction on any team is the absence of trust, right? So team members do not generally you know, uh open or honest with each other, impossible to build a healthy foundation of trust, which leads to the second dysfunction, the fear of conflict. So, now I'm not I don't trust you. I don't feel comfortable talking about it. So, we don't really have any conflict, right? It might be like veiled discussions or very guarded comments. And so, because we're not engaging in that kind of healthy debate, a lack of commitment emerges, right? Because there's no buy-in. We haven't had been able to have that conversation in a healthy way. And when there's no buy-in across the teams, you start to turn to the fourth dysfunction, which is

an avoidance of accountability, right? It was okay when it left my desk. Poof, throw it over the wall, like that kind of thing. And then all of that leads to the fifth dysfunction, the inattention to results. And that's where you see really, really unhealthy stuff, in particular, um people acting in their own interest, right? To feed their own needs of, you know, whatever it is, ego or recognition, instead of putting the needs of the collective ahead. So, not not fun. Not a good place to be. And so, our rule of prioritizing connection um starts at the bottom of this, cuz that's the foundation. And so, let's talk about that some more. Um because the absence of trust, I'm sure many of you are like, "Yeah, Julie, that's super obvious." Right? Nothing No surprising there. But what Patrick Lencioni was taught was not talking about was what he called predictive-based trust. That's the kind

of trust that happens when we've been working together a really long time, and I know exactly what you're going to say, and I know exactly what you're going to do at any given situation, right? Charlie or Charlie Brown and Lucy. Um that kind of trust happens everywhere. Very easy to get. What Patrick Lencioni was talking about was vulnerability-based trust. And that's the kind of trust that exists and you can hear people on teams say things like I don't know the answer to that. I need help. Or hey, I'm really sorry. I I I was out of line with what I said the other day. And and that's the focus um of the emphasis on vulnerability-based trust and that's what helps I guess without it what happens is things get very politicky, right? And can turn into these horrible manipulations to win, right?

Instead of the assumption of positive intent and the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of what's best for the game. So, to build healthy amounts of vulnerability-based trust, Lencioni in his book says and suggests the use of personal histories exercises. Okay. So, if you went back to your teams and you're like, "Hey, I saw this cool talk. And and we're going to do some personal histories exercises. I'm sure uh you'll get some eyes rolling. But um what if you came back and you said, "Hey, let's try Pikachu." Everybody likes Pikachu. It'll be good, right? Um this is what we jokingly call um the technical term is Pecha Kuchas. And Pecha Kucha uh means chit chat in

Japanese and it's a presentation style that was developed in Japan in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each and you so you have a 6-minute 40-second presentation. And it was meant to um have really really concise presentations that were really fast-paced and often they were images only. There was no text on it. And I have to thank actually GDC four or five years ago for this idea cuz this is not Blizzard's idea. Throw up the picture could you thing there. Um I sat a bunch of us went to a talk by a guy named Scott Crabtree. If you've been to GDC for a long time, he used to do a lot of talks and it was called um This is your game on on This is your brain on game development. You check it out in the vault. It's really cool. Anyway, but in that talk, he was working at Intel at the time and he talked about

how their teams were doing Petcha Kutcha's. A person would do their own Petcha Kutcha and how it was starting to help with how those teams functioned and how they operated. And so because of that, that idea sparked and now Petcha Kutcha's are running rampant across many many teams at Blizzard. And it's kind of cool. So let me tell you what they look like. So I I fudged this out, right? I don't want to embarrass David Gibson's Petcha Kutcha, who this is. Super talented animator on Overwatch. Um but for us, Petcha Kutcha's have morphed into like somebody's origin story. And we are not hardcore about the 20 seconds or the 20 slides. So Petcha Kutcha's are generally 10 or 15 minutes long, sometimes more. And it's where the person is talking about maybe where they grew up or how they grew up. Um things that influenced them.

By the way, when you see your co-workers um with really bad haircuts or in their awkward teen years, it's fantastic. Right? It's great. Um but also you start to see what matters to them. You see their family or their hobbies, their favorite games, first job, worst job, right? All these kinds of things. And we're seeing some really interesting results. Even outside, yes, it's helping with the vulnerability-based trust building, but we're seeing some interesting gains also. And one of the first gains that we're seeing is it's starting to chip away a bit at tearing down hierarchy. Because after you see your art director with his '80s mullet or your HR person who wore headgear all the time with her braces cuz she thought it was cool. Um

you you just you can't help but think, "Okay, all right, they're just like a big dork just like I am." And And so it's starting to chip away at that. The second thing, and maybe this one's the most powerful, is that simply the act of doing them communicates a message that is really powerful beyond what is actually said in the Pecha Kucha itself, right? It communicates things like these things matter. We care about relationships. We care about connection. And that has been hugely important in terms of our teams and and how they feel about um coming to work each day. And the third thing that's been really fun is that Blizzard has One of our core values is embrace your inner geek. It's one of my favorite core values. And this is really helping bring that thing to life, right? Cuz now you've got developers going, "Oh, you know, I totally love that game, too." Or

you know, "Dude, I had no idea you were in a punk rock band." Or "I had no idea you brewed beer." And we're starting to now have people talking about shared passions when they might not normally have done that and that's a win. So we have found the same results that Lencioni actually talks about in the book Five Dysfunctions of a Team about doing those personal history exercises. I'm going to quote this because I want to get it right. So I'm going to read it. He said by describing these relatively innocuous attributes or experiences, team members begin to relate to one another on more personal basis and see one another as human beings with life stories and interesting backgrounds. This encourages greater empathy and understanding. It's amazing how little some team members know about one another and how just a small amount of information starts to break down barriers. So it's win.

All right, our final rule, collaborative learning. So collaborative learning for us, this rule takes those ideas of building trust and safety and admitting mistakes and really builds upon them. So how are we thinking about collaborative learning? So we think about it just as a situation when two or more people are coming together to attempt to learn something, right? So they're leaning on each other's skills and experiences and there's some level of dependence and accountability once you have that group. And maybe you're thinking to me, you know, I was in college, I did a lot of these group projects and they totally sucked. And maybe that's just me, but I don't think you're wrong. Uh so let me just share how we're thinking about these um at Blizzard or how we think about collaborative learning at Blizzard. So it's in five ways and the first is it's peer-to-peer. When you are surrounded by really smart,

thoughtful, creative people, you want to hear what they have to say. You want to know how they go about solving problems. And it's very powerful to put peers together in that context. It collaborative learning for us is informal, meaning that the group decides what they're going to talk about, how they're going to talk about it, the pace, and all that stuff. This is where it departs from those annoying college work groups, right? There's no one from top dictating what they do or don't have to do. Um sharing strategies and wins is a significant part of collaborative learning. It's really critical. Um it's that idea of replicating awesome, right? What's working over there? Wow, that's interesting. Let me try it out in my world and see if that works. And vice versa, it's an area where it's expected, encouraged, rewarded to share what's not working, mistakes that are

being made, and what we're learning from them. And so at its core, it's really group problem-solving. It gives us diversity of thought, um different perspective, different experience, always leading to a better outcome or a better solution. And so a good example of collaborative learning, actually, that we already talked about a couple slides ago, is what the art leadership doing art leadership team of OverWatch is doing. Those art direction moments that they spend that little bit of time each week, informal, no one's driving what they talk about, they're sharing wins and strategies, they are sharing what's not working, and they're working together to solve common problems. So, that's one example. Here's another one. So, we have these things called coaching labs. And we use these coaching labs in a leadership development context. So, what that means is we put together

small groups of leads, no more than five or six, together to talk about being a lead and all the challenges, fun, that go with being a lead. And so, it's topics like uh you know, you've got that really challenging employee or you've got that really tough conversation that you need to have that you're probably avoiding or managing up and all the things that go at the list is the list is pretty endless. So, we've got these coaching labs, small groups. They're really static, by the way. Um so, we've got coaching labs, I'll go back. They're um we have coaching labs that have been happening probably for five or six years now. So, you can imagine the levels of trust, vulnerability-based trust, that is developing within those groups. It's super powerful. Frequency of these coaching labs matter only in that there is some level of frequency. For us, we do them every four

to six weeks. We do them over lunch, a 90-minute lunch, and so the cost is really low. Costs some pizzas that we bring in. Um and that's really important. And then the makeup of the groups do matter. Yes, they're all leads for our purposes, and then we've got some coaching labs, we're getting bigger now. So, we have some coaching labs that are all leads from the same team. And we've found those to be really effective when we're trying to build trust and alignment across, you know, one unified group. And then we also have coaching labs that are from different teams and different disciplines. And those have been super powerful as well in terms of a silo buster, right? So, you just get more perspective from other things that are happening across the studio, and more diversity of thought. And those are really really interesting and good. And then the last thing for us, all of our coaching labs have some rules of engagement and the group decides what

that is. The one universal rule that we have is Vegas rules apply. Right? What's said in here stays in here. We don't talk about Fight Club. And that's really important in terms of that safety piece. Again, reinforcing that vulnerability-based trust that we talk about, all that good stuff. And so I I went to a bunch of my coaching labs and uh asked them, said, "Hey, I'm doing this talk. Can you give me some quotes about what it means to you?" Cuz I thought that would be more powerful and better. Um and so these are some of the ones that the guys came back with. My favorite is this is the last meeting I ever want to cancel. That's the value that that that it's bringing. And the other thing is this really funny happy accident that we didn't intend when we started coaching labs, that last quote at the bottom saying there's pressure to do something, pressure to do the right thing in particular. Um so I'll just share a

little story that kind of brings that to life. So you can picture this coaching lab, we're all in a conference room, there's pizza in the middle, we're mowing down some pizza, and one of the leads starts talking about this really challenging issue that they have with one of their employees. And so the group's starting to ask questions, right? And get a lot of context, like trying to understand. And then you start to see things like, "Oh, have you thought about this? Maybe you should try this. Something similar happened to me and I did this. Maybe that could work for you." And that lead is walking out of that meeting with some nuggets, some actual practical things that they can do to make a positive difference on their challenge or their situation. And so at the end of this particular meeting, this guy says, "Okay, you're right. I've been avoiding this conversation. I know I need to have it. I got to tell this person what I expect, what's happening. Yes." And everyone's like, "Yeah. Go." Fast forward to our next coaching lab, a

couple of bites of pizza's in, everyone turns to look at that lead, right? Again, this is informal. No one's driving any agenda. And they're like, "How did it go?" And he goes, "I didn't I didn't get around to it yet." And everyone's like, flipping the table, and teeth, and he knew he knew what you had to do. And next coaching lab, there's no way that lead is walking into that room without having that conversation. So, it is forcing people to do the right thing and make good leadership calls. All right. So, let's summarize what we've talked about. So, our first rule of intentional investment, hopefully some big takeaways are that using a strengths-based approach can help crack the code of where to invest your very valuable time, energy, or resources. And invest for the exponential payoff. Lean into someone's

strengths so you get the biggest return on that investment. And just be careful about taking the path of most resistance. Utilizing frameworks, right? So, for us, and maybe for you, that's helping build disciplined thought and action. We didn't talk about it too much, but choose a framework that matches your culture, right? That's really key. And if you're intrigued by anything in the 70-20-10 development rule, follow it. It does help. It does make a difference. And our third rule of prioritizing connection, trust matters. Vulnerability-based trust matters. It matters a lot. Invest accordingly. Make it easy for your folks to connect with each other, to build that level of trust, and Pecha Kuchas are for the win. And lastly, on collaborative learning, learning is an in social construct, right? So, utilize that, lean in on that. Don't underestimate the power of

putting really smart peers together and seeing what they can accomplish. And if you like the idea of a coaching lab, I don't know, call it a manager club. Call it whatever you want. We're actually thinking, we haven't done it yet, of potentially putting disciplines together for something like that. So, maybe putting on a bunch of designers and have them start talking about design challenges. That could be interesting. So, take that idea if you like that. And then I will lead close with just this one thought. It's a quote by uh one of the greatest quote makers, Mark Twain. He had the best quotes. So, he says, "Everyone must choose between one of two pains, the pain of discipline and the pain of or the pain of regret." So, in our crazy world of making games, sometimes it's sometimes it's not easy No, often it's not easy to be very deliberate about developing your people,

right? Things are moving really fast. Expectations are really high, and there are really, really hard problems to solve. And so, taking that time to intentionally invest your people, that's the pain of discipline, right? And I would love to say that um Blizzard never experiences the pain of regret. We do. If you were to ask me, you know, "Hey, are there people that were where they are where they were last year in terms of their development?" I would say yes. But we keep trying and we keep learning and these are some of the things that are at least starting to make a positive difference in our world anyway. And so I encourage you You know, you're gamers. I challenge you. I challenge you to choose the pain of discipline. Right? As you think about the energy and the investment that you're putting into

your people, make that choice. Your games and your teams will be better for it. Thank you. Okay. Well, that happened. I went and did that. Um so um yeah, email's there. If you want to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or anything about what we talked about today. I guess we have questions too. We have 4 minutes up for questions. I have a question. Yes. Um when you were talking about uh intentional investment and you gave the example of the two uh people who were empowered to design the character screen for Overwatch. Um what would you say the alternative approach that you were discarding was? Was it like designed by committee? What was the What was the thing that you were doing instead? Oh, good question. Um so the question was I

have to repeat this. So the question was we made the decision to intentionally lean on the strengths of a couple people to build out the core of the game. Uh what were the alternatives? So design Design by committee was maybe one of them. We were just in a state where we needed to come up with some ideas right away for the survival of the team. And that was how we were going to get the exponential payoff. So, it's almost like we didn't have another choice. That help? Okay. Cool. Who's next? Okay. Hi. Hi. Yeah, I had a quick question about the picture culture practice. It's quite interesting to share. Thanks for that. I had a question. Was there any initiative for new hires? Or is it on a voluntary basis? So, how how Okay, cool. So, the question is for picture cultures, is it for new hires or

and is it voluntary? Uh it's not uh it's not involuntary, but there's definitely a group pressure to do them. And it looks very differently. So, for example, the Hearthstone team does it with their whole team. Like, they'll take a chunk of their morning like uh stand-up and someone will do a picture culture on the team. They're a bit smaller and that makes more sense. On some of the larger teams, it's discipline specific. So, like the engineering all hands, you know, one engineer will take turns like once a month to do it or our all hands. Um Diablo team's deciding to do it uh in their Monday morning meeting, someone's turn will be to do a picture culture. So, it just varies by the team. Okay, great. I had a second question quickly. Uh this group of problem solving and sharing strategies when is it as well done by initiative by people or is there a support from HR to initiate these

groups of sharing Oh, okay. So, the question is on the coaching labs, I guess, example for collaborative learning. Who drives it? Who puts those together? So, it started off and it's been traditionally like HR-driven. So, we have the model. We have HR people embedded with each of our game teams. So, they'll usually drive it. Um but just literally 2 weeks ago, one of our art managers says, "Hey, I want to spin up a coaching lab of my own." And we were like, "Yeah, that's great." So, we don't really have some hardcore rules around it. More importantly, thing is that it happens. Yes, exactly. Okay, thanks. Yeah, thank you. Hey. Hi Julie, great talk. Um one of the pitfalls that studios I'm at right now and the previous studios has been hail theory of promoting your best talent to leaders and managers. Do you feel like coaching labs is the best way to combat that? Right now, I've been helping people get indirect instead of being going to the direct manager for coaching opportunities.

So, okay, so the I'm repeating the question again. So, the question was, if I understood it right, so in your studio, you're experiencing the "Hey, I'm an awesome artist, so now I'm a lead artist." And that instead magically endows me with all the leadership capabilities needed. Okay. Um and are coaching labs for us combating that? Do you feel like that's a great way to grow people into get the soft skills to be leaders and managers? And so, It's It's an and. It's not the only thing, but it is proving helpful. Maybe more so um I think the guys would say, like there's some value in like I'm not trying I'm not struggling by myself. Like some of them joke and call it support groups. Um it's really not that, but it there is value in saying, "Hey, I don't know what to do about this thing. I'm not equipped. Right. And there's other people in that room that are and that can help. So, yes, I I'd say a yes

to that answer. All right, cool. Thank you. Sure. Hi Julie, thanks for the talk. Um with regards to the Petcha Kutcha's, what if you have one or two people in your team who are just not interested in sharing anything about their personal life with the rest of the team? Does that sort of break the flow or how would you get get over that? Okay, so the question was, what if you have people on the team that Pecha Kucha's are not their thing, right? You not want to get in front of the team and expose anything like embarrassing headgear wearing pictures. So we just kick them off the team. No, of course not. We there it is not mandatory. That that is not something we want to force someone to do that truly does not feel comfortable doing it and everyone gets it. They don't like ostracize them or it doesn't really break the flow. We just choose somebody else to go next. Cool, thanks. Okay, you're welcome.

Okay, last question. Are you cutting him off? He's cutting me off. Oh, okay. Sorry, we can do go in the wrap up room. Thank you everybody, appreciate it.