Tag Archives: leadership

Lessons Learned from playing Dungeons & Dragons

Not too long ago I started running a Dungeons & Dragons Campaign. Though the game we play is just the starter set of the fifth edition, ‘The Lost Mine of Phandelvar’, you can gain some insights. Though they are crude, I’d like to share them with you.

See, role playing may seem like a fun activity for your free hours, but you can learn a lot and apply a lot of it to, so here’s five lessons I’ve learned from playing D&D. But let me preface that with the fact that D&D’s magic doesn’t lie in the characters or setting, it’s in the collaborative effort. That’s where the magic happens and how that comes to be is not so different to work situations.

1. Being a DM is much like managing

For those who don’t know, a DM is a dungeon master. Essentially you play the monsters, other characters that the players encounter and you judge whether things that the players try to do work out. Most importantly though, you run the story and try to make everyone enjoy the ride. As a DM, more often than you think, you’ll try to guide the players or direct them. However, you shouldn’t, as this is exactly the part that they need to do themselves. As a DM you have to rely on the qualities of the party. You can suggest or hint at things, or throw some extra stuff their way, but basically you’re managing a team of skilled individuals. Trusting them is a challenge.

2. Role playing only works when you are vulnerable

Role playing is collaboration. Collaboration between the DM and the players and between the players. This only works fully, if you manage to be open and trust each other. As a DM I sometimes have to voice certain characters. Since I’m not a voice actor, it can be tricky, so the willingness to engage with my meager acting skills is extremely important for the mutual fun we want to have. Similarly, if I laugh or mock another player for attempting things in the game or imitating a voice, I might cause a big decrease in expression and joy of that player. He or she will think twice before speaking up again.

Do you have one of those managers or bosses that are hyper-direct, blunt and pretty much always right (even when they clearly aren’t)? Pretty much everyone knows the kind of character I’m talking about. It’s that person who chokes the creativity out of any project group or team, the one that makes refrain from sharing ideas/suggesting things. That’s exactly the same thing. Feeling safe and being able to feel vulnerable are key ingredients in any collaboration.

source: Dungeonsmaster.com Click the image for a great article (even though its 4) on engaging your players.

3. Engaging your players is harder than you think.

Apart from that safe environment, there is another huge challenge if you want to get things done. Engaging with your players is vital to the success of a D&D campaign. If they don’t feel invested or attracted to the campaign, they won’t get into it. Even less chance that they do in the way you want them to. In fact, to get the interaction going and the story rolling, you need every single person around the table to be invested. To achieve such engagement, knowing their various strengths and interests is vital.

This, again, is very similar to a project. No one wants to be bothered with a project that doesn’t offer any challenge. Why? Because it’s boring and doesn’t give you those positive vibes of excitement that make you go out of your way to contribute your best/to do your best, etc.. Simply ‘challenging’ someone does not make for a good project. It’s a matter of constantly estimating their attitudes and interest and working that on a personal level. Challenges have to be tailored to the individual. Have you ever been in a project where everyone was agitated and nobody felt like it was really his or her project? That’s the absolute opposite of an engaged group. If you find that exact bit of the story in which the player can excel, it becomes her story. The same goes for work-like situations: if you don’t feel engaged, you’re not switched on.

4. Reward effort, even when it fails.

Your players will attempt stuff, that will be creative, weird or even utterly out of place. Also stuff that you were simply not prepared for. So… sometimes they fail. Sometimes players come up with elaborate schemes and actions, but they roll, you roll and they fail. However, that’s not the end of it: the creativity of the players should always should be rewarded. Just let them succeed or do some accidental good to the players. Why? Because speaking out is brave, trying things is daring. Creativity already is stomped upon way too often in this world of ours.

Again, let me compare this to the bad manager that sits you down at a table and asks for ideas, yet somehow every idea gets ridiculed and mocked. How many ideas would you like to share with this person? None. So it’s vital to reward people that share thoughts, give feedback, offer suggestions and so on, because once that flow of information stops, you might end up having to do all of the work by yourself. For a D&D game, that would suck. For any work endeavor… well, what do you think? Always show grattitude for the input of others and reward the courage to stand up and say whatever you have in your head.

5. You could treat any project like a dragon

Ok, so I kind of added this one for fun, but also to wrap it up. If you spark the interest, engage players and manage to provide that environment where people feel cool and feel that they can be creative, you can do anything. Seriously, ANYTHING! You’d be surprised by how often you see a D&D party beat the odds with daring ideas, out-of-the-box thinking and the creative madness that is born out of the excitement.

You might think: well, yeah, but they’re beating paper dragons… Well, isn’t most of the work we do all just paper dragons. Paper dragons are, at their core, problems that need to be solved. If you can make your team feel like they are facing a dragon and if they get as pumped and inspired as my D&D party, you’ll be surprised by what you can achieve. Really, they might just slay it in a way you had never thought of.

Don’t Be A Dick P.I: Your Friend Wil Wheaton’s Law

Your friend consistently counsels the same,
urging all dickishness struck from the game.

Your friend Wil
Your friend Wil declares
Your friend Wil declares: don’t be a dick

– MC Frontalot ‘Your Friend Wil’

Today I want to get serious with you about Leadership and Effectivenes. A tough topic, which has been elaborately described by many writers in amazing leadership books full of inspiration. I would like to touch upon a few of those to get to the core of what I want to say and then move on to something else that I think is the very simple core of the whole idea of personal leadership and in the end happy relations with all your surroundings, wether it’s work, family, social networks or just interpersonal relations.

7 Habits of a Better Leader, Better Life, but let’s start with why

I’ve picked three of my favorites for this post and mixed them up (see what I did there?). What they have in common is a set of tools to make your life better, by taking charge of your own life. Leadership is the core term that is used for most of these. The first in the title is the 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. There’s a whole series of adaptations to different situations, but this is the main book and thye work that made this good man millions.

Source: Daily motivation (dailymotivation.com)

It takes 7 habits as the tools to use, which are divided over 3 categories: Independence, Interdependence and continuous improvements. The idea is, this is probably a quote from the book, that you first have to be independent to become interdependent.  To be independent, you have to focus on being proactive, having your end-goal in mind and putting first things first. This is a great way to go into any conversation and shape your own role in those. Interdependence has collaboration at the forefront: Think Win-Win, First understand and then be understoot and Synergize. It’s all aimed at getting chemistry going between participants in the interaction. Habit number 7 speaks for itself. There’s a lot of things connected to these values, but it all serves the goals of gaining control by starting with yourself and then moving on. That is also the good thing about Covey’s system: it allows you to take things in your own pace with your own steps.

Better Leader, Better Life is based on the book by Stew Friedman, who supposes various circles in which you are active and focusses a lot on experimenting with your life to find improvements. Friedman supposes a four step proces in which you involve all the domains of your life:

  1. Reflect
  2. Brainstorm possibilities
  3. Choose experiments
  4. Measure progress

I personally find this a very difficult way to take on life, since constant challenging is very hard to maintain and to keep working on all parts of life. Balance is impossible according to Friedman, but everything interacts. There’s definitely a lot of value to his work, but like that of Covey it is highly idealistic and very hard to follow. Failure is not a problem per se, but does get hard to deal with at some point.

Why Wheaton’s Law?

At the core of all ideas there’s values as ‘thinking win-win’, ‘being proactive’ or other good behaviour that will eventually lead to an effective and problem solving attitude. We are not all robots however, we don’t go in every day being capable of all those good deeds. Some days we need a bottom line of what we should strive for to just get through that day. That bottom line is equal to the point where you atleast don’t do any damage to the relationships and projects that you are part of. Wheaton’s Law offers a very simple, clear-cut bottom line for those:

Don’t be a dick

It’s very simple, you just make sure you are not unfriendly, you make sure no one leaves your presence saying “What a dick…”. The point here is just to not offend people and let them keep their game up and positive. Now, that would be the second reason why Wheaton’s Law should be implemented on your work floor. It has everything to do with games and their likeness to our interactions. So first let’s talk nerdy for a bit in the next session. I have to add that this is a continuous discovery for myself.