Government Executive - Authors - Christopher Mims

Everything I Need to Know About Management I Learned From Playing Dungeons and Dragons

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 11:25:33 -0500

January 25 marked the 40th anniversary of the world’s most iconic role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons. Even if you’ve never known the pleasure of wiling away an afternoon bashing Orcs with your 4d6 warhammer, odds are you or someone you know has internalized the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, either by actually rolling its unique polyhedral dice or, for younger players, through one of the countless video games that use its system of experience points, items and talent classifications.

It’s easy to look at Dungeons and Dragons and think that it’s all about the mythical, Tolkien-esque world in which it was set. But the real attraction of the game was the way it boiled down human experience—or at least the experience of growing older, buying stuff, and using it to kill things—to pure numbers. Its ordered universe, built on integer values for various skills and their interaction with other numbers, is catnip to teenage geeks who are trying to make sense of the adult world.

It’s an open question whether the numerical system that drives Dungeons and Dragons is a fair (if simplified) simulation of the world or whether it has so shaped generations of teens that they now see the world in terms of D&D stats. Either way, here’s everything I learned about how to manage a team—and I have been responsible for many—by playing Dungeons and Dragons.

1. Preparing for performance metrics and the quantified self

We can now measure more aspects of workplace performance than ever. This makes it possible to rank and compare people and give them feedback, in real time. All these are components of video games and are integral to the D&D system. Meanwhile, outside the workplace, more and more of us are also strapping on activity monitors that measure our every footstep, encouraging us to meet specific goals or just to tell us when we’re slacking off.

While the paper-based version of Dungeons and Dragons was limited by the patience of its players in terms of how many stats it could track, the game popularized real-time measures like “hit points” (how much more damage you can take until you’re dead) and “mana” (how much magical ability you have left to cast spells). And then there’s inventory management—how many arrows do I have left, and what kind are they? Am I going to run out of light if I don’t find another torch soon?

It’s not easy to get adolescents to think about managing scarce resources—both material and personal—and tracking them in the mental equivalent of a spreadsheet, but D&D made it seem normal. What better preparation could there be for the world of work?

2. There is no such thing as the perfect employee

The creation of a new character in D&D is a surprisingly good analogy for how skills are distributed among humans in the real world. The only real difference is that the former involves rolling dice and the latter comes from the interaction of genes and environment. In D&D, you roll the dice for each of a dozen different “stats”—strength, intelligence, etc.—that your character possesses. Each of these is modified by the character’s race and class—elves get more intelligence, warriors more strength—but no matter what character you are, a complete set of “perfect” stats is vanishingly improbable, and most of the time you’ll have a mix of strong and weak ones.

The same is true in real life: People who are exceptional at one thing may be lousy at others. Often, the best candidate for a given job isn’t the one with the highest skill for the job’s primary requirement, but is someone more well-rounded. Soft skills—getting along with other team members, being consistent—also matter.

3. A diverse team is essential to survival

In D&D, a “party” consists of a group of different characters who together face the trials of the adventure to come. It’s basically impossible to win unless you’ve got a warrior to beat things up and take damage, a wizard to deal with magical foes and occasionally drop the hammer on something big, a cleric to heal your party members, and so on.

It’s the same in the modern workplace. It’s not enough to hire in order to fill distinct roles within a company. It’s just as important to realize that different backgrounds are valuable as well. This is perhaps the one place in the D&D mythology in which Tolkien’s implicit racism actually counts in favor of the series: Orcs might be swarthy and villainous, and elves Nordic and haughty, but at least a successful D&D party requires a little bit of every race and creed of Middle Earth.

4. Understanding probability is not an optional skill

None of the lessons in probability that teens pick up from playing D&D are terribly complicated, but that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant. First, there’s the fact that every roll of the die is independent of every other roll. In the real world, a company is never “due” for any particular success or failure—all you can do is weight the odds in your favor.

Rolling multiple dice at once also provides an intuitive window into the nature of statistical distribution—and how counter-intuitive it can be. This is as significant for understanding the characteristics of a group of customers as it is for evaluating how long someone will live with a cancer diagnosis.

5. Prepare for major goals by treating them as “boss battles”

It’s not the everyday slog that defines the success or failure of a team, but the way it handles the big, ambitious launches or the major setbacks. In D&D, how you prepare for a battle with an exceptionally powerful foe—a “boss battle”—determines whether you’ll win or be wiped out. This means giving your characters tons of practice against easier foes so that they can gain experience. In other words, employee development is key.

D&D also teaches that even average team members can do exceptionally well with the right tools. Plus, managing a party requires that you optimize your workflow as a leader, and then optimize some more. This is so important that the current head of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, has talked extensively about how he honed his management skills by playing World of Warcraft, a direct descendent of D&D.

6. Workplace romances are just awkward

When two people play D&D who are dating in real life, it’s a lot like dating in the workplace. If two co-workers start helping each other out (or worse, taking revenge on one another) as a consequence of their romantic entanglements, others in the office feel like the rules of the workplace are being broken. And in Dungeons and Dragons, forget it—how do you fairly divide up the loot from a slain dragon when your elvish cleric and your dwarvish warrior are not-so-secretly in love?

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Why Patent Trolls Will Laugh in the Face of the Government’s Attempts to Fight Them

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:00:00 -0400

The White House Tuesday introduced an executive order intended to combat “patent trolling,” in which companies buy up patents and use them to sue “infringing” companies that actually make things. Patent trolling is essentially a tax on innovation, and tech giants like Google hate it so much that they partner with other tech giants to create portfolios of patents they use solely to defend themselvesagainst patent trolls.

The Obama administration’s efforts to combat patent trolling are admirable, but, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, largely symbolic. To understand why, let’s first rewind the clock to 2011, when Congress passed the America Invents Act (AIA), another admirable but ill-fated attempt to combat patent trolls. As I wrote at the time, the act didn’t address the core problems with the US patent system, namely that it’s under-funded, under-staffed, and has a backlog of at least 700,000 unexamined patents. Obama’s executive order doesn’t address these issues, either.

But what about the provisions in the AIA and today’s executive order, which are designed to at least nibble at the edges of patent trolling? With the results of the AIA as our guide, we can see that history is not on the side of innovation. One provision of the AIA about which I had been hopeful was designed to prevent patent trolls from suing whole gobs of companies at once over the same patent—a machine-gun approach to legal action that is relatively easy to initiate and virtually guarantees that at least some companies (usually those least able to fight a suit) will settle out of court. The AIA makes this, in theory, much harder to do.

Seven ways to look at US Energy Secretary Steve Chu’s resignation and legacy

Tim Fernholz and Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:17:58 -0500

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu confirmed that he will leave his position a few weeks into President Barack Obama’s second term. Chu is something of a nerd hero: A Nobel-prize-winning physicist for his work on how lasers affect cooling atoms, he was a professor at Stanford University and then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At Berkeley, Chu led the lab to focus on biofuels and solar energy, while warning against the negative effects of climate change.

When Chu was appointed in the heady days after Obama’s inauguration, he became the aspirational vessel into which the nation poured its green energy hopes: Who could be better qualified to develop US energy policy in the new century? He also symbolized the Obama administration’s belief in science—not something that might need emphasizing in other developed countries, but in America, a pointed contrast to the increasingly anti-scientific mindset of the Republican party.

Alas, it was not to be. The bulk of policy decisions are made at the White House, and after a major climate-change bill failed in the spring of 2010, Washington’s priorities changed from climate change—which before the 2008 election was a bipartisan affair—to a partisan battle over the economy.

How to Negotiate for Anything

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:00:00 -0500

Negotiation is a universal art, but many of us are surprisingly bad at it, especially those raised in cultures in which bargaining is not the norm. (I once participated in a panel on how to run a successful freelance business; at least half the audience confessed to almost never negotiating with their clients over rates.)

Even if you consider yourself an old hand at getting the best of your bargaining partner, I urge you to check out the Dec. 21 podcast of Planet Money. It’s about how to negotiate for things, especially when you’re Barack Obama and the US Congress and you’re trying to avert the fiscal cliff. I’ve distilled the lessons contained in that episode, plus a few from the literature, below.

1. Know your BATNA

Across all negotiating strategies—and this is a vast field of academic inquiry—one universal requirement for winning is confidence. The easiest way to be confident in a negotiation is to not have to fake it, and that means knowing your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” or BATNA.

When negotiating over a salary, your BATNA is whatever wage someone else is ready to pay you to do a similar job. That’s one reason that leveraging a competitor’s attempt to poach you is a tried-and-true method for getting a raise: that competitor’s offer is your BATNA in any renewed salary negotiation.

2. Expanding the pie

When negotiating, the human mind is automatically drawn to the point of contention, whether that’s the issue of new taxes or the price of an item. But that keeps both sides from realizing that there are other things that could be on the table, but aren’t. For example, when two companies are negotiating a licensing deal over intellectual property, one sweetener that is sometimes offered is a cross-licensing deal. In other words, instead of Apple simply paying Google for the right to use some of its patents, Apple might also offer the use of some of its own patents as part of the deal.

This negotiating technique is also known as “integrative bargaining,” and it’s the basis of William Ury’s bestselling book Getting to Yes. (Ury co-founded Harvard University’s Program on Negotiation.) The idea is that if both parties lay out their needs in advance, rather than keeping information hidden from the other party, each side can seek to meet the needs of the other in a way that’s mutually beneficial.

Read more at Quartz.

Image via Alexey Kashin/Shutterstock.com

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