Real Life Example: Building a New Game

When I spend a lot of time explaining how I use Obsidian, it doesn't always give you a good idea of why I use it. What is the purpose? What am I trying to achieve? I think it would be best if I zeroed in on some actual examples or scenarios about how I use Obsidian.

I did not come to building a digital second brain because I wanted to be more productive per say. I started building a second brain because I had a problem I needed to solve.

How To Grow GameTruck

Five years ago, we had a brainstorm about how we could grow GameTruck. We do tremendous business selling video game birthday parties to parents who want to celebrate their son's birthday (while we have grown the percentage of girl parties from 5% to 15%, boys still dominate our market.) We do a lot of birthdays, but not so many corporate events. My partner Dave McLurg asked, "Could we do a team building event?" The answer is, "of course we can do team building with video games!" However, I also know that many people fall into what I call the "competition trap" when they think of adults and games. According to Robert Bly, over the past 100 years, the types of relationships we are allowed to have at work, especially with men, has collapsed into one kind of relationship, we are supposed to compete with each other. As a result, most people confuse play with competition. They are not the same.

Years of coaching young boys taught me the difference. What is more, I have come to believe that competition in western culture is often applied between members of the same team. While Pete Carroll famously declared in his book Win Forever, everything in his team culture would be about competition, most companies cannot tolerate the turnover of professional sports. What's more, competition has a narrowing effect.

I had a feeling that there was another culture that would better suit knowledge workers than sports like competition, so I told Dave and the rest of the leadership team, "Let's create a real teambuilding experience for people." Exactly how to I was going to do that, started with a process I learned in college. It's called, The Engineering Problem Solving Process.

Engineering The Solution.

This diagram embodies my most basic understanding of how to engineer a solution. I'll collapse the entire process into three steps.

1. Do your homework until you understand the problem.
2. Take what you learn and produce a solution.
3. Test, learn, and repeat until the problem is solved.

That first part, which involves several steps like defining the problem, doing your research, and finally writing requirements to me is all encompassed in getting to a fundamental understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This building an understanding is where my digital second brain comes into play.

Better Teams

I started with the book Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg. While listening to that book on audible, I learned the story of Google's Project Aristotle. And using the process I described before, I listened with audible, but highlighted with my kindle so the highlights would appear in Obsidian. The story goes, the founders of Google did not believe managers were necessary. Erik Schmidt, the chairmen disagreed. They could not come to a consensus, so they decided to ask the engineers what they thought. The engineers emphatically asked for managers. Google wanted to know what made a good manager, so they launched Project Oxygen and in 2008 identified 8 Principles for great managers. I'll list those here for your benefit.

Armed with this great information, Google trained their leaders worldwide in these new skills, but being google, they wanted to measure the effectiveness of their training. After a year they were shocked to discover that the training had virtually no impact on team performance.

They were stunned by the results. But also, curious. Why hadn't that worked? According to Duhigg, Google People Analytics division launched a new program to find out what was going on. They called it Project Aristotle. They were missing information, and they wanted to figure it out. This is when Amy Edmundson enters the picture, the now famous Harvard Professor was part of a team of social scientists trying to understand the principles behind group norms. They had a theory, that it is team culture that affects team performance more than any specific set of skills employed by the boss.

Down the Rabbit Hole

You can begin to see how my research started to blossom. From one book, I discovered that in 2011 Google had put the results of their research and tools online under the category of "re:Work" (that's an old google short code for regarding work.) Also, Professor Edmundson had a Ted Talk, and the more reading I did, the more tools and information I found about group norms and what they call Impression Management. I also came across the term Psychological Safety for the first time. Suddenly, I had access to some real science and facts that said, if you want to build a better team, you had better train you people how to create psychological safety for each other. What's more, the science explained why competition can actually undermine team performance if not used correctly. And since most people don't know the true purpose of competition, by default, they do not use it correctly.

My digital second brain became the warehouse for all of this research. As I gathered more highlights, I made more notes. As I took more notes, I formed new questions that lead to new lines of research. My second brain became the connected repository for all this information. Armed with that information, creating a rational problem statement and requirements was easy.

I wanted to create or find a game where people would work together toward a common goal. I did not want people to compete with each other. I wanted to train them how to deal with their own Impression Management and give them the chance to develop real skills. Not only did I need to integrate the techniques and methods I learned to create psychological safety, I also had to meld it with the best practices for experiential learning, and what I knew about video games, and facilitating meetings.

Ready, Set, Cook

My research turned to productivity when I created a presentation to convey all this information. That was when I started to use PARA. My research started out as a folder on team building under my Resources folder, but when it turned to production (creating a presentation), I made a new folder in my Projects folder. I also created a folder on my hard drive to hold all the assets I would need to make a power point presentation to share the content. This folder became the sort of workshop I used to create my presentation. The interesting thing is that when the work was done, I was able to archive the entire project but take a copy of the final presentation and move it to a new resources folder. My finished work had become a new building block in my Where not What System. Later, when I needed to modify the presentation to use a different video game, it was easy to duplicate the original folder, make a new one and stick it in my projects folder, working on it until it was done. Version control had never been so easy for me. I got a running start, wasted zero time looking for files, and I could be impactfully productive with minimal effort.

As we developed Culture Kitchen, and then later renamed it TeamCraft, I started out using off the shelf video games. I knew there was a rising genre of cooperative video games, of which Overcooked is the most famous. But eventually, I ended up creating my own version of a cooperative restaurant simulator to meet the needs of working professionals called Ready, Set, Cook. It turns in a browser, requires no installation, fancy graphics cards, or account creation, and it scales to virtually any size group. (you can check it out at: https://scottnovis.com/ready-set-cook)

Work At Play

The final step in the creative process for me was when I wrote a book about my workshop called Work at Play (available from Amazon). The book shares all the research I conducted, and provides solutions and tools, including a step-by-step outline of how to hold your own Team Building session with Ready, Set, Cook or Overcooked.

Summary

My goal here is to give you an example of how I started with an idea, then used my digital second brain to aid me in understanding a problem I wanted to solve, then helping me pull together the resources to solve it, and finally producing new work that created new value for my company.