Working at the Heart of the Team Part TWO!

all right everybody ready let's do this okay so uh before we get started i have to do the essentials turn off noise makers especially beepers if you have one of those just chuck it outside because that is just a problem um anyways uh you'll also be getting evals at the end uh excellent is uh recommended uh good is okay but definitely excellent is what we ask you to give uh so let me introduce myself first i'm grant trunkweiler as you can see commander and chunk of chunk ventures because when you start your own company you can make up your title so that's pretty cool i'll be your moderator and timekeeper which you don't have to worry about timekeeper that's more for them before garth gets started here though i wanted to introduce the talk and it is a talk it kind of looks like a panel kind of looks like micro talks whatever but really it's one cohesive story told by four different people these amazing people right here and you may have read this you may have seen this in the guide or hopefully you read it that this is more

about the feel portion of being a producer you know we we all know about agile and and scrum and kanban and all those things but what we wanted to talk about is the feel portion the soft skills of being a producer the one-on-one relationships that you have with the people on your team so that's what we're going to get into today oops go slide this is that awkward part okay uh so but we are producers right so we need to have some sort of agenda for our meeting i mean uh talk today so garth's gonna come up first he's gonna talk about for the love of the video game uh oksana will then talk about building team culture chuck charles will talk about uh creating thriving teams uh and then brian will close us out with uh conflict in the workspace um so yeah i'm gonna introduce everybody and then get ready there's an interactive portion of this so don't fall asleep i know it's thursday just stay ready so let me introduce garth first he's a senior producer at fraxis games overseeing the x-com franchise since 2010. he began his

career in design on x-com enemy unknown and an igf student prototype called winds of orbis in a previous life he was a vp at a large financial institution before pursuing his masters of entertainment technology at carnegie mellon garth was instrumental in coming up with the format and session idea for this a few years ago but wasn't able to make it because you know he's working on a little game called xcom 2. so we're super happy to have him here this year all right garth take it away hello everyone so yes we're going to talk about trust mechanics i'm very excited to be here today to talk about the harder part of our job which is the soft skills so this will not be a talk about agile waterfall scrum kanban lean six sigma or any other hybrid approach that i'm sure you guys are using in some form on your projects right now but there is no silver bullet as evidenced by our repeated post-mortem mistakes that we all share with each other so process is important i want to make

that clear but what if when it comes to enabling a culture for a team to find success we've been focusing a little bit too much on the wrong area this is a quote from pixar president ed catmull he's created a few hits i'm sure you guys are aware of from his book creativity inc you can't manage what you can't measure as a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors but in fact the phrase is ridiculous something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden a large portion of what we manage can't be measured and not realizing this has unintended consequences now i love this quote but i would not recommend you guys bringing this to your boss if you need more time on your project but there's a snippet in this quote that is critical it's being unaware of how much is hidden so after choosing a process that makes sense for your team then the trickier part begins you have to have an acute awareness of your team's dynamics to empower them to uncover the hidden within this vast dark cave when you start your project usually the magic in a project is in all the nooks and crannies and you have to help enable them to find a light so how do we do it i have no idea next time i really don't but

i can give you some two with two very simple key takeaways that stayed true throughout xcom and also um keeping them upheld throughout the project as well is is part of it and those two keys are trust and love now you guys all came to the video game industry probably because you have your own love story with this awesome interactive medium when you were young so that's that's to me is the easier part but the trust is more what what i wanted to focus on and and when i was sort of given the opportunity to go from level design and sort of this junior production role into lead producer the very first thing i wanted to do was sit down with each of the leads and ask them simply how can i make your job easier i didn't want to prescribe anything to them and frankly i couldn't because i wanted to learn from these very awesome senior guys but i think that helped set a tone with them that this is an environment where i want to support you and i want to have an ongoing relationship with you guys to have an environment where we can find success together so the trust mechanics are not something that i

knew about when i started out on this franchise back in 2009 but looking back in it sort of in retrospect our process has changed a lot those process elements that i spouted off at the beginning of this we've tried little tidbits of each of those we've tried you know poker planning and agile fall and anything you can think of and we're still experimenting today that's always going to change as you talk to your team but there's a few elements that have stayed true throughout xcom's production um and i sort of see this as a machination these are gears and cogs that work together in the different elements you want to love the vision love your support structure and hear your community so we'll talk about each one of these a little bit if you do these things i think success and it will follow of course you need individual hard work but these are the dynamics holding the team together so trust mechanic number one love the vision you guys all know what a vision is you must have a vision our vision like most took some time to find this is our shell screen i believe in 2007 2008 with one of our early gameplay

prototypes and if you guys went to my art director's talk on monday greg ferch he did a really really great deep dive on this initiative that he and the lead designer worked with 10 artists before they had any engineers to sort of find what the gameplay of xcom enemy unknown would be greg i apologize for this screenshot if you're here i didn't get that approved by you but i'm trying to make a point that the vision can be murky up front sometimes if you look on paper this looked like a really poor production initiative we're sinking dozens of man months into something that we know is not going to ship but what in fact it allowed them to do was to make mistakes early and to uncover the hidden to start finding things so the fog of war changed the visibility system the camera logic how the soldiers worked with the ui and the action points all of these things were found in a relatively cost effective way up front that would have been catastrophic on the back end and it allowed the team to sort of find their way as we rolled on into production these are two screenshots of our of our glam cams and we took elements from that gameplay pre-visualization and actually executed

on them in the game you would think once that vism starts getting found then intuitively it's easy to maintain but uh you always have to keep that trust between disciplines going because you're gonna you're gonna have some problems when actual implementation happens where it's not as beautiful as that gameplay previz and the rubber met the road quite a bit we often fell back on a studio-wide mantra when we were having conflict between disciplines that you know i say conflict but they worked so well together because they understood what was driving our community at firaxis for all our projects we think gameplay first or game play experience first one of our pillars on xcom 2 that greg and our team drove was making a strategy game feel more action-oriented but when that presentation layer started stomping on the gameplay mechanics and the understandability of the depth of our mechanics and the interesting decisions and what was happening which is what our community wants then he was able to work with design and find that happy middle ground so the second mechanic is a multi-cog approach this is love your support structure and i say support structure because you have your team which everyone knows about but then you

also have your external partners and that can be an investor that can be a publisher and i think it can really be understated that you want to have a very strong relationship with the people funding your vision we're very lucky to have a relationship with 2k games and it started out on an excellent footing because they believed in a turn-based strategy game and giving it aaa support um which is which is critical and then day to day we have had a completely transparent relationship with them when design changes are happening when they need to see where we're at with the schedule i often hear stories from colleagues in the industry where their instinct is to hide information from an external partner and they're doing that to protect the team but to me that's indicative of a longer term problem where you want to have an open transparent relationship and make them understand the reality of game development and 2k has been phenomenal with that so the next cog is your team and this can be sort of its own presentation but we don't have a ton of time so these are the guys and gals that execute on the vision and i wanted to show a few a few pictures um before i joined for access i was at carnegie mellon like

grant said and our advisor jessie shell would often say the success of a student project could be reflected in their joy and their interaction in a candid photo he said there was a direct correlation between that and then a project project team that looked like they didn't want to work together and we made this roughshod terrible student prototype that blossomed into an igf winner and you can see we really enjoy working together we still like go to this picture every year and talk about hey we need to reunite there's a lot of trust and love between us and we wanted to get our get each other's backs we were terrified of letting each other down and i'm lucky to sort of have that microcosm from cmu and see that blown to a studio-wide culture at firaxis where every single project there is this high standard and we have teammates that don't want to let each other down these are pictures from the team back in the mid 2000s and all these folks are still with the company i think we have over a 60 attrition rate on the xcom team from one inception over a decade ago which is great in any industry let alone game development and it's really indicative of the culture that we have there sometimes

conflict happens but hey you got a tough love your teammates once in a while so not everything is always going to be hunky-dory of course you'll have team members get lost and they'll lose sight of the vision and it's the producer's job to champion that and get them back on track that happened often on enemy unknown and we did some non-publisher driven milestones to get levels back on track and then we parlayed concepts like that into xcom 2 with this idea of goal posts it's essentially epics and producer speak but what we did was we made them very very visible and transparent we laid out over the course sorry about that of multiple years on our war room whiteboard what the content team was going to drive towards and not only did they hit it but they exceeded it we actually shipped an entirely new environment set than what we had planned and we got a lot of feedback from them after the fact that they liked how visible these were and that these weren't buried away in some backlog that only a few producers would see so it was it was really good initiative it didn't work as well for design and tech because the acceptance criteria there is a lot more murky and nebulous and prone to change so we had one off design cabals with them to help them find their way

to have more actionable items quicker and then we would grow those into play-throughs which i would highly recommend using you have to use them conservatively though because there's key times in the schedule where it's um it's it's appropriate to use them as all the systems are converging and all the contents coming in it's going to be buggy and messy as hell up front and you want that team to feel a little bit of that pain so then you can see day over day it had it improves and you guys sort of uncover the hidden together and find the fun um okay i'm gonna make this a little bit shorter but this is a topic i'm really passionate about crunches is is big in the industry as producers and the owners of the time were responsible for the outcome of that if you do crunch xcom put in a lot of extra hours and i'm not going to say we did in crunch but we did want to respect what drives others i've talked a lot about vision about vision execution and i think those are the most important thing but they shouldn't come at the cost of spitting your team out for dead you have to be aware of the team health and figure out how to manage that um we had some ways of doing that i'll

be happy to talk about with with people afterwards where we had sort of a tailored extra hour approach where we got the buy-in from individuals after we balanced loaded we made them aware of the why we were asking for more for more work and managed it that way so the last trust mechanic is community and community is everything they're your pillar beneficiary uh the recipient of everything that you've worked to build and you want to maintain a relationship with them after you ship especially in this day and age now too where there's more ways to communicate with them you want that community to grow if you notice i say hear your community and not listen to your community it's very very easy to design by community and and we want that information after enemy unknown we actually aggregated all of their feedback that was trending on the top forums and the top reviews and we made design aware of that feedback but it did not drive our design pillars for xcom 2 it was just part of the informational process so these are xcom's trust mechanics love the vision love your support structure and hear your community these are ultimately what allowed us to light up our cave with a thousand bonfires

how will you light yours thank you thank you garth thank you all right so we're going to do something that uh maybe a little awkward for some of you uh this comes from scott crabtree by the way he has a talk tomorrow at three o'clock i recommend you go to because he is amazing nice plug okay uh so if you're willing to enable please stand up that's now this is the part where you stand up i know it's thursday if this was friday i would not ask you to stand up um find your nearest partner and talk for 30 seconds each about what you just learned from that from garth's talk that was excellent thanks man let's do the thing with your hands what are you talking last year the photographer came in during this part we got amazing pictures because we're all like

that was yeah thanks yeah i noticed it i was gonna go all right all right all right all right everyone sit back down don't worry don't worry stop talking you in the back time's up time's up don't worry you'll get to talk to each other more i promise i promise and now you have new friends you can go to the bar later and talk about this even more i promise there will be more time to talk um but next up uh we have aksana she's gonna talk to you about the oh that was the wrong thing to say

anyways she is the development director at riot games heading up the platform group uh she has 10 years of experience in the industry as an engineer and five years in production so she made a pretty cool switch so oxana hi guys hello thank you hi wow awesome i love this all right so i'll be talking about high-performance steam culture and i'll give you four tips today um these are the tips that actually come from my own experience something that worked for me in the past i find those to be very like easy to understand but very effective and so i'll jump right in and the first tip the first step of the day is start with the y when we talk about high performance on teams we usually talk about motivation so what drives motivation what drives people to perform highly and um it's an interesting question i remember when i was interviewing at microsoft about like

five years ago i think the interviewer asked me like how do you motivate teams through uh crunch time and i was just switching to production at the time and i thought about it i'm like well uh i buy pizza and donuts and i hope they feel better about it so my interview didn't go well but um my thinking evolved since then and so um i read the book by danielle pink about drive and in that book he says there are three primary motivators um three primary drivers for motivation uh and its purpose and mastery purpose autonomy and mastery and so the sense of purpose is probably the strongest way to motivate people and um the way i mean this is when you have a team comprised of individuals whose sense of uh their own internal purpose is aligned with your why for the team it's a very powerful combination i'll give you an example of how this works on my team i'm heading

a platform team and we're doing stuff that's generally considered not very sexy i personally think it's sexy but it's like installers patchers servers localization all this stuff that is not the actual game development and so when i try to motivate people uh to work on my team but it sometimes is hard but i have this guy on my team his name is michael and i talked to him about why he works on my team and he gave me this story he actually used to be a teacher and he one day noticed a kid in his class the kid was like super unhappy he was very shy very um like every like nobody would even talk to the kid and michael decided to help him so he sat down with the kid and for the next couple of weeks uh he showed him how to make a game so they made this little game together and then kid this kid brought it and showed it to the classmates overnight he became from like a total pariah somebody who nobody would even talk to to the most popular kid in class and so

michael changed this kid's life by helping him with doing making this game and so when michael works on a platform team he actually does that for other people help them focus on building the game and creative side of it by taking all of this other stuff away and he does that because aligns with his own sense of purpose what gives him fulfillment so i don't have to buy him donuts to convince him to go and work hard on my team he does that because he wants to so that's the tip number one start with the y make sure you have very clearly articulated why for your team but then make sure that your people on your team actually align with that sense of why so that's number one number two um define success um a while back my boss gave me a book it's it was called something like on leadership how to build successful organizations and it was written by this guy how many of you know who this guy is

okay a few so um so this is a basketball coach at the time i looked at the book and i'm like uh i don't want to read this i'm not into sports like why would i even read this and so i looked him up so this is coach wooden of ucla basketball and this guy this his team won 88 consecutive games 88 in a row so it's win after win after win after win continuously non-stop he won 10 national championships in 12 years with a record seven in a row previous record is two in a row so if anyone knows about performance is this guy and so i'm like okay i'm going to read this book and in this book he defines success like this so i'm going to read it because it's very important i know you all can read but i'm going to read it anyways success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you're capable of becoming so

understanding this had a profound effect on how i motivate my teams and how i set the goals for them it's very easy to set the goals that are like external kpis or metrics or targets you know your game must perform to certain metacritic score or you must ship by certain date when you motivate people by those external kind of outcomes they don't necessarily have control over that and so um it may drive like wrong kind of behaviors i don't know if you guys know about wells fargo recently fired like 5 000 people because they were creating all these shadow accounts because their kpi was how many accounts they sell in a given time frame so you don't want that kind of behavior what you want is your teams to continuously and relentlessly compete against themselves one of the probably most weird conversations i had at riot when i joined when we were talking about releasing some feature and i said well we should look up how the competitors do it and the guys look at me like competitors

we don't compete against people we're actually focusing on trying to do the best thing for the player right now and so that just blew my mind but that's a really good way to motivate teams to to focus on continuously improving and competing against themselves and so my tip number two tip number three we talked a little bit about trust um we all know that there is no high performance without trust right and um in fact patrick lincione in his book the five dysfunctions of a team says that absence of trust is probably the most foundational the most common dysfunction on team by the way if you haven't read this book please go read it it's a foundational must read for every producer out there but um building trust is easy to say like of course we've got to build trust but what does it mean like it's it's a hard thing to do and i'm here to tell you it's not a hard thing to do i'm an engineer i love formulas i'm going to give you a super simple formula to build trust on the team you ready yes yes yes yes okay

there you go done boom so trust equation trust is credibility reliability intimacy over self-orientation credibility is you have the experience and the in the knowledge about what you're talking about so i can trust you on a subject reliability is i can trust you to do what you say you're going to do intimacy is i can trust you with my secrets and that you're not going to tell somebody else about these secrets or you're going to kind of use them against me but all of that is trumped by self-orientation if i for a second believe that you're acting in your own interest and not in mine i will not trust you no matter how credible how reliable or how trustworthy you are i will not trust you and this works um this is a super powerful formula that works from a team individual level all the way to organizations on the team level it works like this it looks like this an engineer goes hey i really like this system i really love this system and i want to work on this but my team needs me to focus here so

i'm going to put this down my pet project my love child and i'm going to focus on what my team needs me to do right now and so he's sacrificing his own self-interest for the interest of the team and then when other people see that they start doing the same thing and next thing you know magic happens and the same thing works all the way to an organizational level so at riot we made this our fundamental principle the mission of the entire company is to aspire to be the most player-focused company in the world and that means that we have players trust because no matter mistakes and we make a lot of mistakes but the mistakes we make players know and forgive us because they think and they know that we have their interests at heart first and foremost and it has to be genuine too so that was my tip number three my tip number four and the final tip is distort reality just a little bit um what does this mean um you you know this guy is pretty famous for distortion of reality

um but what i mean here is is going back to that sense of trust um it's when you walk on a team and you want to build this high performance culture you don't go and tell them hey guys we're going to be high performing team so let's all focus and do this instead what you want to do is you want to act and talk as if they're already there you pretend but then you believe in your mind deeply that your people are the best people you have that they're bright that they're brilliant and they can and will get there and then you just talk to them that way um there's this very funny kind of experiment that was done um i was really surprised by the outcomes of this so they took a set of rats same kind of rats and they separated into two sets and they gave one set to one set of experimenters and the other set to another said these reds are stupid these threads are smart and they had them run the restaurant labyrinth and measure how fast the rats would finish the people who believe their rats are smart

actually had much better results than the people who believe their rats are stupid same type of reds it's so weird and so they looked into it and it turns out that people who believe their rats are smart they actually treated them a little bit was more tlc they gave them little snacks they encouraged them a little bit more they petted them and so rats perform better like holy and now if that's how it works for rats imagine what it do it does for people when you genuinely believe in your people just imagine the results you can accomplish and um and that's the distortion reality and so uh this is their comment uh recommended list that uh some of the books that i used in this talk but before we go before i go i want to use the distortion of reality on you guys okay are you ready okay everybody's taking pictures one second okay so i'm gonna use the distortion of reality on you in this audience we are all of course the type of people that fill out gdc

surveys so when we walk out of here when we receive our results back we will have 100 completion rate yes yes thank you [Applause] thank you thank you oksana well my friends has come for come to that time again clearly you all enjoyed this so once again stand up and uh chat about what you've learned from oxana it was awesome that was amazing

and we had where you're from uh like what your hobbies are outside of games and something that uh your like high school friend would be amazing to know about you and i heard like the most religious things one guy was like i sew better than my wife another guy was like i dropped out of a high school i have a ged yeah it was it's amazing thank you thanks we're really we're really good how are you feeling physically you're hanging in there we're gonna we're at about 28 minutes that's good all right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right in the back of the room all right calm down you crazy animals thank you thank you maybe i should

announce la la land as a winner maybe that'll that'll get everybody's attention all right cool uh up next is chuck uh he is uh the cpo of shell games he can tell you what cpo means it sounds fancy his background is in architecture he worked on sims 2 ep team and now works on theme park attractions such as disney toy story mania which i got a high score on just saying to cutting edge vr and ar such as i expect you to die also he's an adjunct faculty at cmu teaching production and leadership all right chuck i like finding uh sage wisdom inside of jira [Laughter] well said atlassian

so i've been making games for a while uh or what feels like a long time anyway i've worked on dozens and dozens of games and and i've seen a lot of them do really well and succeed and i've seen a lot of them crash and burn and i'm sure most of you in this room have gone through those observations on different projects you've worked on or projects you've seen out there and after a while you start trying to figure out what what the difference is between those really successful teams and the ones that fail what the impact is uh that that informs how those teams are going to do so what i want to talk about today a little bit is is teams that thrive and kind of our quest at shell games to figure out what enabled those teams to thrive when others didn't and and trying to replicate an environment to have very successful teams so i actually had a hypothesis going into this a few years ago and the first was that very successful teams had much higher morale or happier with their vision

believed in their project more and were generally happier working together and certainly when i say that i mean all else being equal right there's plenty of things outside the team that contribute to the success or failure of your game that sometimes you don't have control over but when you look just at the teams uh you know i certainly posited that happier teams did better work and i had a second theory that that most of the teams uh that we experience in the game industry have a very similar curve of morale over time uh you know maybe something like this where you know we start off really early at the beginning and there's there's tons of potential we have the world in front of us we have a prototype that feels really good and then the reality starts setting in about what we have to build and all the crap we don't know about and it gets really scary but then we get really good at focusing in our scope and the possibility space narrows in morale starts to lift back up and you

get to a really good spot and things start come together and you ship your game and you feel really good about it and i'm sure there's slight differences in this but i really felt like over time a lot of projects followed this same curve and i kind of wondered if we could map this curve if we knew this existed for multiple projects as a studio can we head it off at the past do we can we anticipate these dips and valleys so that we continue to boost the morale of the teams from the studios perspective so that we can reduce the impact of these valleys so we did an experiment and for two years every three weeks i sent a survey to about 12 teams in our studio and i asked three big questions the first was to rate your project's chance for success then we ask people to rate your overall satisfaction at that given day and then we ask people to select any number of emotional indicators that they wanted and this is the graph we used uh so on the the vertical up and down are positive or negative

emotions and from left and right is kind of the intensity of these emotions and and people could go through and pick and choose so i'm going to show you if i can get the mouse over here maybe yeah all right let me show you what that looks like over time uh so while this is playing i'll just explain it uh this is just a subset of the data but here's some examples of four or five teams uh the vertical access is their satisfaction on the project horizontal is over time so there's a motion graph showing that the duration of these projects and actually the size of the sphere in this example is related to the joyful quadrant of those emotional indicators so we got a lot of data over two years so what did that show us well not a ton it wasn't actually that useful the first thing uh our first hypothesis

did seem to be correct when we looked back at our teams we saw ones that were consistently higher in morale over the lifetime of their project we're generally more successful so that was cool that was kind of useful but man there was no relationship with teams that that fictional curve did not seem to be replicated across different projects in any way uh it was really shocking how little uh projects looked like each other um and what was kind of crazier is they didn't even seem to map to big points in the project it wasn't like oh we had a big cut in scope here or a big shift in decisions here or priority changes from the client it was like teams with really high morale were consistently pretty high and they kind of ebbed and flowed seemingly randomly and teams that were lower kind of did the same thing so a lot of our realization from this was you know we could look at the team's morale we could track it but any interventions we tried weren't super useful or impactful on that morale over time

and we realized that you know team morale and happiness wasn't something that we could impose on the team it was something that that really needed to come from the heart of the team from its people i like how we all randomly picked like four lessons for everybody to learn producers here i always love this uh quote by peter drucker right that uh culture eats strategy for breakfast and when we looked at teams for that that really thrived at our studio it wasn't because of uh process or schedule or best practices it was kind of these cultural norms on the team and not just the team leadership but the entire team and when we tried to replicate those we we really looked at the teams that were doing really well we found kind of these four common cultural traits for these thriving teams so i'm going to share those next and some concrete steps about how you can maybe apply those to your teams so the first that we noticed was our our thriving teams were really ones that were willing to buy into a decision fully and then just move

on so one of the strategies we saw time and time again is people on these teams were willing to be convinced of different points of view but more so than that they would tell each other specifically what would change their mind right if garth and i are in a disagreement it's one thing to acknowledge that i have a particular viewpoint but these teams elevated that and we're actually open with each other about yeah i don't agree with you but here's some things that would get me to agree with you and these may be big things right it may be building a prototype it may be answering really challenging questions it may be data or information that you don't have uh but but going through this process made it really clear to people on the team that there's a culture of being open to changing your mind and people were being people were very willing to be convinced the second kind of almost powerful phrase we saw these teams reference a lot is one called disagree and commit and these were teams that were really focused on building consensus like that was very important for them

but on larger and larger teams these teams acknowledge that that's not always possible you don't always get everyone on the same page and that's kind of fine that's normal but but we saw teams that were much more successful focus in on if you can't build consensus at least commit to the group commit to the team and by doing that a lot of times they were able to eliminate a lot of the well i told you so right out there in the future or people sabotaging the team because they didn't feel like they they ever bought into the decision so people that were willing to acknowledge and say their disagreement but then commit to each other as a team were much more powerful teams so the second cultural attribute we noticed a lot uh was the teams had really good strategies for cutting through complexity so just as an example here this is a what we call propaganda poster that these teams use in our studio and this was for our recent vr title i expect you to die and lots of people use things like vision statements and pillars but when we saw teams that were really

good at cutting through complex decisions and understanding how to simplify down to what was really important these were teams that would essentially actively market their vision in their team they wouldn't just write it in a google doc or buried on perforce they would make posters they would hang them up in the team areas right this became a marketing or propaganda effort for them to get everyone bought into that vision which allowed a lot of you know really strong conversations of just you know we have a lot of complex options in front of us but how does that match up to our game pillar another really powerful phrase we noticed a lot uh was the term or the sentence basically what problem are we trying to solve and oxana mentioned earlier starting with the y is really critical and we found this as a really useful tool and teams leverage this a lot on on really successful team cultures because it kind of cuts through a lot of the complexity to focus on the actual core of the problem you're trying to address and a lot of times that that problem

isn't obvious may have not been agreed to or is really challenging to get to but teams that were able to use this phrase were able to kind of get down to the meat of the conversation get everyone on the same page with the problem we're trying to solve and it was much easier to move people through solution spaces so our third one here uh are really you know our teams that were most successful were willing to be very vulnerable and part of this involve them not punishing mistakes and one side of this coin right is being willing to to admit your own mistakes or screw-ups but but that set a lot of a strong team culture as an example to the rest of the team that mistakes were okay people were willing to hear them they were willing to be vulnerable in front of each other because guess what if you punish mistakes it's not like they go away you just don't hear about them anymore because people are afraid to tell you

another thing these teams did in their in their culture was a lot of transparency which a few people have mentioned already today and i remember actually from my background in architecture you know a lot of architects build houses with like these giant ass glass windows right and people always think it's for the view or for the light in the house but really architects do that because you'll keep your house cleaner it changes the culture in your house to be transparent if is familiar with frank lloyd wright i remember one of his philosophies you know he'd do a lot of houses for clients and he would refuse to put garage doors on garages he would only make carports because he knew if he put garage doors on there people would just fill their garages with crap and he didn't want people to do that he wanted them to have simpler cleaner lives so he would build in transparency into their homes even if they didn't want it so it's kind of interesting to think about i think a lot of folks view transparency on their team as something they need to navigate or negotiate either with their

clients or partners or within their organization but transparency on your team can actually be a real benefit or transformation for the culture on your own team and last number four folks on these teams were excellent at resolving conflicts but man the thing that stuck out was how swift and rapid they were able to do this uh you know when we look at the best examples of this on teams these are people who are resolving conflicts within minutes of them happening not hours or days or weeks so they had essentially zero hesitation in approaching each other to resolve conflicts and i'll share another kind of key or powerful phrase and and this one's kind of funny this this actually uh circulates around our studio and has been kind of a key phrase at shell games for a long time uh and really in my mind it goes back to valuing the understanding of other people over just being right uh and and that phrase is tell me more about that and we've kind of built a strong culture

around people using that phrase when they disagree with someone or when someone says something that they immediately recoil against and it's kind of funny to uh about three weeks ago we were sitting in a meeting and someone said this to someone else and jesse scheller ceo and founder started laughing in the corner of the room or like what what's so funny and he's like i don't think you guys realize where i stole that from he got that from a chat bot named eliza that came out in 1966 and eliza had such poor ai that she wouldn't really function well when you chat with her uh so to kind of trick people around this they found a phrase where a lot if eliza didn't understand what you were saying she would simply write back tell me more about that and it's it's kind of stupid but it's an incredibly powerful phrase because it really it does two things right it signals to the other person that you really value understanding them and to yourself it reminds you that there's a lot more to understand to

get to the why to get to the real understanding of why someone is bringing something up so it kind of lowers your initial if your gut reaction isn't defense or countering someone's argument but it's let me hear more about what you're trying to get across man people don't change until they feel heard and this is a good kind of powerful phrase to remind you to to hear other people so everything we talked about today in terms of teams that thrive and and teams that are successful and teams that have really high morale all of this from our observations boiled down to essentially how people treated you each other on the team you know success was never based on a strategy or a process it always ended up being part of the culture and that culture needed to be built bit by bit by every single person on the team and if you haven't noticed already those four items we just talked about those aren't things that your team can do those are things that you can do because culture made strategy for breakfast

but you get to make the culture so while you're here at gdc i would certainly challenge everybody not to get too swept up in focusing on how to improve your teams focus on improving yourself be the best example of what you want your team to be be an exemplar for them that's where your best value is going to be and that's going to give you the best chance of making a thriving team [Music] thanks all right all right stand up we're gonna do something a little different this time so last year stand up still you still stand up so last year's uh version of this talk the prequel if you will michelle ducker talked about stress and dealing with stress and and one of her ways of dealing with it is to scream and i like to do this because it really messes with the people on both sides of us so what i want you to do is i want you to take just a few seconds close your eyes and think about what what makes you stressed this week what makes you stressed at work the things that you're kind of thinking about now instead of just being present

and being part of this and then on the count of three we're all gonna scream as loud as we can and get that out okay ready okay one two three perfect okay now do the normal thing turn and talk to each other for a few seconds and uh we'll get that going i don't take 15 minutes don't take 15 minutes but you have god it's almost like someone produced this

well done grant and uh created a story a narrative you're right it's almost all right all right one more to go and then you can then you can talk in the hallways forever you can spend as much time getting to know each other as you want all right all right i just want him like mcconaughey all right all right all right people in the back everybody in front of you is set down that is the indicator that we are ready to move on with our lives all right last one here we go uh brian over here is game director at backflip studios they're based in boulder colorado he constantly is going to redrock and

sending me pictures and making me angry uh he's worked on a bunch of games paper toss which is one of my favorite ninja ragdoll blaster franchise along with dragon bale and his personal favorite army of darkness defense all right brian [Music] uh what i just screamed about was this moment um what are you most stressed about about 12 seconds from now um so so forgive me for being a little raspy um in my lifetime i've been an algebra teacher a wrestling coach i was a bartender i was a pastor that didn't stick i was the lead singer in an 80s cover band which is what that picture is i'm not crying or hungry i'm singing and this kind of crooked path through a bunch of different jobs and careers and weird things has helped you realize that no matter the job no matter the scenario whether it's a sophomore who's retaking

algebra because he failed it once already and hates you on day one uh or maybe it's a really fiery debate about the nature of magic and dragons with your lead artist being able to communicate in the midst of conflict is a skill that will help you everywhere always right so it is a little difficult talking about soft skills feely things and having it not feel like a poster hung in your kitchen in your game studio like hang in there um because it can feel like platitudes right what is a concrete thing that we can do um uh from from soft skills and that's why they're called soft skills not so concrete um so but my aim today is to target a few scenarios that you will inevitably find yourself in at different points in your career provide you some resources uh oxen and i picked one of the same books uh share some examples from my life so

that hopefully my failures can enlighten you or at least you can laugh at me which is fine but my intent is not to give you a bunch of crap for motivational posters although that might end up happening so i wanted to do here's some books these are good you should read them except for the third one because it's not out yet uh it comes out in like two weeks um but uh but kim scott gives a bunch of talks about radical candor and so the whole point of this is this is difficult conversations having to initiate them it's receiving feedback the five love languages is a bit churchy uh as a heads up but um but understanding what motivates people getting to the why is an important thing uh and that this does a really good job of understanding what motivates different types of people uh and then the five dysfunctions of a team oxon is right go read it now maybe not right now uh so i think it's important you were talking about who was talking about this chuck uh was talking about conflict and

how it got resolved quickly conflict isn't failure um and this is important to know conflict is not failure if i worked at a place with only clones of myself first of all that is damn terrifying um and the beer fridge will be well stocked though um but i would still have problems um i get mad at myself arguably more than you know goody does arguably um conflict is the surest human interaction with a group of people over time my own equation is people plus time equals hostility um and so and this is also just like a really good lesson to learn i think a lot of producers a lot of leaders like to be liked and um it's super important that you just absorb this now some people won't like you

and that's okay we're not for everybody everybody's not for us some people won't like you that's all right um i mean that's not like a you know a badge to go around and be like captain a-hole firing off all the time some people just don't like me that's not right it's not an excuse to run roughshod and be a douche but i am saying it is okay some people won't like you so here are the three types of conflict you will undoubtably have in your life work things always when members of your team are not getting along and you have to mediate that sometimes people don't like each other chuck and grant tough to tell sometimes uh sometimes people don't like each other or sometimes there is conflict and they're not great at navigating that sometimes you have to be the person who initiates a difficult conversation you have to say something to someone that you are relatively certain is going

to be unpopular and then at some point in your life you are going to have to be told something you don't love and knowing how to be able to do that is important so how to handle when folks aren't getting along so step one have them try to do it themselves i know that sounds lazy and it sounds a lot like conflict avoidance and the opposite of what i'm talking about for the next five minutes but if you can trust them to figure it out themselves trust them to be adults i think you guys can figure this out you girls you can figure it out figure it out right but you have to monitor the situation otherwise that actually is just laziness because what happens in a lot of conflict is one person feels fine i have been heard i feel fine and the other person not fine and if you ask somebody hey how are you doing fine how are you doing

not fine you gotta you gotta be able to manage and understand that so what i try to do is bring people together uh i put them in the same room and purposefully mediate my wife's a therapist so i uh get lots of practice she specializes in adolescence which is how she puts up with me um she grew she married a giant man child um but what i find when you put people in the same room is their complaints get a little less hyperbolic it's not they never listen to me it's always this way they treat me like i'm stupid it's i kind of don't feel listened to there's a difference in how people communicate when when they face their accuser but having people in the same room is helpful and it's also important to know that there's a difference between somebody who needs to vent and when it's time to mediate sometimes somebody's just got to be able to come in close the door and go what the that's an important thing that needs to happen sometimes and then

i think we just got the adult rating sorry uh and then and then there's a time uh where you're like okay that wasn't just event this is a persistent issue that we're going to have to handle so here's a few things that i like to do in these moments i like to remember that conflict uh arises out of passion not apathy usually conflict happens because people believe in something and they believe different things and their ideas or problems right i loved tell me more about that tell me tell me some more about that what i'm hearing is what does that feel like what does resolution look like to you what is this here we are we have a conflict what does a solution look like to you asking do you feel like you're being understood giving somebody the opportunity to go no i'm pretty sure you're just talking i do that sometimes and then one of my favorite uh was actually clint who sent me a list of 31 powerful questions and one of my

favorite ones was if you could go back and do this over again what would you do differently it's a really good way to get somebody to analyze a conflict situation and go yeah what would i do differently and it puts it on them what could they have done to improve this scenario so that's step one um so you have to tell somebody something that you think is going to embarrass them um or make them feel bad about themselves um how do you do that in a reasonable way maybe that's you have to give like the hygiene talk has anybody ever had to give the hygiene talk and not to bro not to like two broader strokes but it's usually starts with dude um not always uh maybe you got to tell someone on your team that their work isn't meeting the

standards that you've set you're not re you're not hitting the bar that we've decided on um there's kind of two scenarios here sometimes it's simply helping someone see something they're oblivious to like lettuce in their teeth and sometimes it's uh they'll make an observation about themselves because they've got a sneaking suspicion they're not great and they will say i just don't think i'm doing a good job and a lot of folks are going to try and say no no you're fine you're fine nope you have a responsible or you have a responsibility you have a moral obligation as a leader to be able to say man i think you might be right things don't feel awesome right now what can i do to help you you're right it feels like things are a little off what can i do to help i think that's super important all right getting to that time uh when you have to receive a message that you don't love don't just cover your ears

so for me i'm gonna tell a bit of a personal story i know we're getting close to the end of the time and this is helpful because then i won't get emotional about it um i had a tough conversation that stung uh and i had a tough time hearing it uh i will say um it led me to meditation practice actually and thank you to brian sharp who gave a talk about that and really kind of changed my life um but a couple things here when somebody these are just kind of very practical things if somebody tells you something that you don't think you're going to love understand the truth understand their truth hear what they're hearing not just what you think find the nuggets of truth in that even if you don't agree with the entire message remove the butts right you're going to be like well yeah but that it's not about them it's about you take that um uh so how to do this quickly imagine i'm painting a picture for you that could be viewed two different ways you're in a meeting

you're a person who's slightly intimidated by the person leading the meeting you're a bit quiet you're worried your feedback can get shot down or dismissed the leader senses that and asks you to speak you fidget uncomfortably you stammer you don't do a good job presenting your idea the leader presses you again saying it's your job speak up in that moment you feel vulnerable and a little humiliated your leader seems like a bully who cornered you and kind of made you feel dumb or you're the team lead you're having a discussion about an upcoming release for your game it's a relatively healthy group discussion but your designer hasn't chimed in you ask them for their thoughts they kind of muddle through it you push them to clarify they say they'd prefer not to comment and you remind them that it is literally their job description to have opinions about this feature

guess which one i was in this scenario without knowing it i was a total bully and i didn't know it i didn't mean to be like i didn't i think of myself as a rather gregarious dude i kind of try to be a little my wife calls me intensely laid back i thought i was the pretty girl in this picture i was not i goaded someone who was being quiet i prodded them when they felt intimidated i didn't allow their truth of intimidation to exist because i didn't mean it it's like when i was little and my brother would hit me and it hurt and he's like i barely hit you we were both right he did barely hit me compared to what he could do but damn he's four and a half years older than me he's like six foot two in the military he's mean it hurt uh but it wasn't my intention but my behavior that mattered and in their moment of vulnerability i met that with aggression and snark

uh so i was i got pulled in by the founder of my company and the hr manager that i was being threatening dude that hurt and i wanted to make excuses and i want i had all the butts and but it's his job but it did no somebody felt threatened by me i had to i had to feel the truth of that and think i'm a bully and that hurt but i had to see that truth of it i had to understand and i had to process that because it was important to how i treat people and how i lead now this was an important thing for me to hear and i didn't love hearing it um i'm gonna

leave you with uh some little snippet to remind myself to not be emotional about this anymore which is um when you get into a position of leadership the same discussion that you have the same words with the same person changes context and you have to be aware of that i wasn't aware of that and it's why i was being a bully essentially i would be able to have a discussion with somebody and go that's kind of dumb why would we do that sometimes that would almost be like a healthy conversation starter when your peers not so much when you're in charge hey that's dumb sounds really dismissive don't mean don't do that anyway but still so if you have the final say don't speak first thank you all right so uh so we're actually uh

pretty much out of time um i want to thank you all for coming and uh joining us on the journey of production working in the heart of the team part two maybe there will be a part three because you're all going to give us excellent reviews um so thank you for coming also thank you to the awesome cas in the back george autumn chris william and uh for working our shift and uh eric and the rest of the av crew for uh providing av if you have any questions we will be around thank you very much for coming