5 Comments
Jul 11, 2023Liked by John Cutler

Changing the game obviously depends on the position you act from. I assume being the director.

My intermediate goal is to make the game smaller to enable timely feedback and rewards boosting player motivation and meaningful choices that impact the outcome, fostering player agency.

I start by creating a narrative solely with my agents -- managers and teams. I will give input into what I think is important and why, but the first phase of the small game is to co-create the narrative which hopefully immerses players in a guided but widely owned narrative.

Once this smaller game has some traction, I try a show don't tell approach towards my principles both for improving the concrete task at hand and nudging the culture towards more continuous sense and response instead of reactive urgent action.

Expand full comment

This is a brilliant description and so common across businesses.

I use a Systemic Reality Check as a collective feedback related to loss making operational disruptions in the airline industry. Here outcomes like passenger experience and cost of change (undisputable facts) are obvious triggers for wisely channelled collective insights into problems that ripple across the org. The focus then shifts to identifying interactions and understanding underlying origins of problems. Looking at what and not who caused the problem in the first place removes biases and opens constructive discussions.

To organise this kind of systemic meetups you need system integrators, people with wide and deep industry knowledge.

Expand full comment

I'll give it a try.

In order to improve this game, let's change the game.

There are 6 levels of interaction. Let's cut them down to 2: technical, and managerial. Team, Manager and Director play in level 1 (technical). Director, VP, CTO, CEO play in level 2 (managerial). I've included Director in both assuming their role is to translate.

Now, a cultural change. In the case presented they're trying to fix a small thing. Let's take a step backwards and realise that it's the n-th time they're trying to fix a small thing. There's something else going wrong here, and someone, and some level, should realise that something is off with this approach. Let's find out the more general thing that is broken.

What game are we playing? Let's put it into words. Let's "problematize" what is happening. Let's agree, at both levels (technical and managerial) what it is we're trying to solve.

Let's turn the pyramid upside down. It's the CEO asking for things. Well, someone should tell them that's not their job. Their job is to show the path and the vision, and then ASK the rest of the organisations what their assessment of the problem is. They can't say "just fix it!", and someone should raise their voice to tell this to them.

Once the team is the one presenting the problem on a longer-term basis, the game can be different.

I'll leave it here, acknowledging that I haven't defined a new game, but just criticised the proposed one.

Expand full comment

Very good! Please, keep going!

Expand full comment

♥️

Expand full comment