Lessons in team building I learned from a barbarian horde

Life in a modern video game studio might look like a decadent offshoot of a very sophisticated society. After all, what we do is to make a peculiar form of entertainment that relies on a veritable mountain of advanced technology to even function. But if you look with the right kind of eyes, you can spot some remarkable similarities with some of the most ancient forms of human organization.

Don’t laugh!

Bear with me!

The history of humankind is a curious thing. It stretches back into the past for hundreds of thousands of years, yet only about 3% of it got recorded in any form. To the horror of my generation, we are at the moment, twice as far away from Nirvana then Nirvana was from The Beatles. We are also closer to the age of Caesar and Cleopatra than they were to the age when the pyramids were made.

In centuries past, humans have experimented with many forms of social organization, from ancient empires and feudal monarchies to new age utopias and communes. Yet ancient as it might seem this weird thing called civilization is a relatively new invention. The earliest cities originated some 8000 thousand years ago. The advent of the first urban communities was the singularity point when humans began to live in groups so large that one individual could not anymore know by name every other member of the group.

For hundreds of thousands of years people have lived in groups smaller than that. Small enough that each member could have at least a casual acquaintance of other people in the group. Indeed for the overwhelming part of their history homo sapiens has roamed the earth in packs no bigger than 20 to 50 people.

This is the first parallel that I am going to make. A friend and a good colleague of mine, a veteran of the gaming industry, once said that the first sign that a studio or a company is getting to be too big is the moment you meet a person in the office and you have no idea who the person is or what role it has. Based on my experience, thus far the median team size seems to fall in the same rough boundaries.

No I am not saying that we are all deep down savage barbarians. However, gaming studio organization has been evolving for some 30 to 40 years. A mere eye blink compared to the eons that raving packs of tribal warriors had to work out some of the organizational quirks. Just like sharks, something that survives that many centuries essentially unchanged must be very streamlined!

It pays off to take a look at the internal organization of such groups and analyze what makes them so robust, versatile and adoptable. Many of them shared the same internal pattern that holds some valuable lessons for our own team building organization. These patterns consist largely of roles and functions that these roles have within the group organization.

The Leader

The chief, the chieftain, the one in charge, the leader. This one is the obvious choice to begin the discussion with. It is also the easiest parallel to make. After all, our companies are highly structural, hierarchical organizations. The command of each sub-unit at each level of hierarchy is given to one individual, the boss.

Much has been made about the leadership in corporate organizations in general and in gaming companies in particular. Therefore, I am not going to dwell much on this topic. Suffice to say that this is one of the most clearly defined roles in the modern corporate world and its functions are probably the best defined.

The most obvious and arguably the most important of these functions is the power of decision making. The leader is the person invested with the authority to make decisions, with its own domain. The leader doesn’t need to be the best at any skill in particular, he doesn’t need to be even the wisest person in the group. In a tribal society the chief was not always the best warrior, nor the strongest individual, neither the wisest. The skill he possessed was something else, it was the skill to make all these individuals work towards the same goal, in other words he possessed the skill to coordinate the efforts of all the members in the group and put their individual talents to the best possible use.

This intangible thing called charisma, without a doubt plays an important part. The leader is often the visible face of the group. The one who speaks in the name of the group. The interface to the outside world.

Ultimately, this person needs to be the one who makes a call. The one who has the acumen to point a direction when no one else sees the obvious direction.

KEY IDEA: The leader shows the direction, even when direction is not obvious.

The charismatic nature of this role hides its dark side. The power invested in it by definition attracts specific kinds of persons, some of which can have serious character flaws.

The Druid, the Sage

Every team has at least one such person. He is the absolute expert in his field. An old sea wolf with years of accumulated experience and nerves of steel. This person has probably been with the project for far longer than anyone else and possesses the arcana knowledge of the technology and of the darkest corners of the project itself. In a jaded voice this figure will explain, carefully and patiently why some course of action is going to be detrimental to the project, and will never lose his nerve even talking to the biggest of young cocky hotblooded fools.

In ancient times, such a person would act as an advisor to the Leader, maybe even as his mentor. In truly hard moments this person would act as the conscience of the group. The key quirk to this role is that it never acts directly. Rather the sage is the one that gives the expert opinion at the strategic junction. The decision is still on the leader.

KEY IDEA: The Sage gives the expert opinion, the decision is made by the Leader.

An interesting fact about the Sage is that this role stands somewhat outside of the internal hierarchy of the group. The Druid is not interested in the power struggle of the leadership. He might not possess the charisma or other soft skills that could make him climb the hierarchy ladder.

It is curious to note that modern corporate organizations are only half aware of the existence of this role within modern teams. Unlike the role of the Leader which is enshrined in the very foundation of corporate life the role of the Sage is accepted only implicitly through the title prefixes such as Lead or Principal. It usually means that the bearer of the title has made a conscious decision to forgo the career development into more managerial directions and accepted a semi monastic life of perpetually honing its skills.

The fact that this type of role exists in practically every team, but almost always in an informal manner leads to some serious shortcomings. The typical problem that happens in so many projects is that a new Leader is instated, presumably by the organization beyond the team, and that this person cannot recognize or appreciate the gravity of advice given by the Sage. In the ensuing conflict one figure will possess the external institutional authority but now real knowledge and the other one will possess the knowledge but most likely lack the institutional recognition. Woe to the team caught in this crossfire.

The Bard, the Skald

While the previous two roles exist in practically every team, the Bard is the first of the roles that we are completely lacking in our modern lives. I will try to demonstrate what the purpose of this function was and what we suffer from not having it onboard. What is the purpose of the Bard, then?

Ostensibly the Bard is the guy who sings. But what kind of a song does a Bard sing? It is an epic. A narrative of the past events in which the group has participated in. The Bard is the one who creates the epic of the team. One who preserves the shared experience of the group. One who creates the commonly shared narrative about the events that the group has been through.

The true purpose of this epic is not to be the factographic recording of the events. The epic is there to homogenize the collective opinion about the past events. It is a form of the official accepted narrative.

Reality is relative. Memories are fickle. They fade quickly. Emotions survive longer than facts. Old petty grievances, if let to fester, can develop into a state of constant malcontent. Constant repetition reinforces the official truth and affects the memories even of the participants.

The Bard is a record keeper, not of facts but of the decision making process. Did we encounter this type of a challenge before? How did we deal with this problem back in the day?

Modern team organization does not employ a person to fulfill this particular role. We live in an enlightened civilized society and count on the project documentation to provide us with the record of our cumulative knowledge. However, there are at least a couple problems with this approach. I have been part of a team that has maintained the same live service for more than half a decade. Despite the meticulously maintained documentation, time and time again we faced the same type of problems, trying to remember how we handled a particular situation in the past, or why some decision was made.

Documentation is by definition imperfect. At best it records the result of the decision making process, and not the process itself. Furthermore, the documentation, despite our best efforts, is not an actual living being endowed with consciousness and emotional intelligence! It is just a medium of recording. There is a clear distinction between information and knowledge. This is something that is often overlooked.

The intangible emotional part of the institutional memory is what constitutes the biggest and the most valuable part of the knowhow. Understanding it requires a human. The absence results in Corporate amnesia.

What many modern teams, especially working on a project that stretches for multiple years, need is a person to take the ownership of its collective memory.

The Fool

Finally we have the fool. No, I don’t mean a guy in a funny hat, juggling the balls and telling crude jokes. His purpose is not lighthearted entertainment.

The fool is the one who dares to ask difficult questions. The one who dares to challenge the status quo. This person is the dissenting voice. The one who dares to go against the groupthink. The one who is allowed to call any decision into question.

In this capacity, the Fool is absolved from the negative consequences of challenging the authority. Indeed, this is the inherent duty of this role. The purpose of existence of the Fool in any successful team is to provide a circuit breaker, a negative feedback loop, a kind of a handbrake that can steer the team away from the catastrophic course.

KEY IDEA: The Fool is the circuit breaker who dares to call into question the groupthink.

The need for this role manifests itself most often in the time of leadership crisis. Asking difficult questions can be cathartic. The Fool is the one who dares to speak out loudly what everyone else has on their mind. This can serve as a safety valve to release the tension. It can also be a catalyst of change. Alas, since our modern team organization does not recognize this role in any formal way, it is usually up to brave individuals to assume this mantle. More often than not, such individuals are the subject of corporate wreath, and suffer career consequences for daring to challenge the established hierarchical norms.

Vengeance is something that the Leader was explicitly forbidden to enact upon the Fool. Indeed, without this immunity the role of the Fool would lose its power.

In the absence of this role, contemporary corporate entities try to compensate by various surrogate methods. These are usually some cumbersome HR systems. Various anonymous or quasi-anonymous surveys are an example of methods by which the corporate hierarchy tries to feel the pulse of the team. As such they take on some of the duties traditionally belonging to the Fool.

Key Takeaways

• All human groups of certain size share certain similarities
• The needs of human interaction have stayed consistent throughout the centuries
• Old structures offer lessons from the past for the future
• The Leader is the one who sets the direction
• The Sage is there to give the expert advice
• The Bard is the custodian of the shared institutional memory
• The Fool’s duty is to challenge the status quo

Links

• Band Society
• Chiefdom
• The Sage as Jungian Archetype
• Organizational memory
• Corporate memory
• The Dangers of Groupthink
• The Fool Archetype
• Heyoka — sacred clown among Sioux