Freedom to fail – or managing to succeed?
international.brandeins.de
international.brandeins.de
To explain in more depth:
People need both accountability and autonomy. But different people need these in different amounts, and not everyone has the maturity to know how much of each they require. A large part of forminga strong working relationship is learning together how much of each is needed, and building the trust that allows for greater autonomy.
You want to start any relationship with the expectation of trust, but ultimately trust must be earned. However, if you're constantly verifying whether you can trust the team then you don't really trust them. Allowing them to set the plan gives them autonomy, and also gives them an initial chance to show that they are worthy of trust by creating and communicating a realistic plan. By giving them the responsibility for defining what their milestones are it changes the dynamic. Instead of you the leader inspecting them to see if you can still trust them to do a good job, it becomes an opportunity for them to show off what a good job they are doing. Small change in ownership, big change in relationship.
Unfortunately some people will show you that they are not able to keep themselves on task with too much autonomy. Even then you have an opportunity to create trust. You can invest time in helping them identify why they are underperforming, and try to help them succeed. Act as a mentor, not just an overseer and you will gain their trust in your leadership. Even then, some people will still not step up, but most will.
Ultimately real trust must be earned. It can be given optimistically, loaned so to speak, but must be eventually earned. Always assume the best, and try to ascribe good motives to your people, but don't set them up for failure by allowing them to be disconnected from reality. Set them up for success by giving them accountability and opportunities to demonstrate the great job they are doing.
From the article:
> “They did admit that of course things hadn’t gone too well. But afterwards they spent half the day playing Counter-Strike again. There was no learning curve at all.”
> He ought to have become sceptical sooner, when he noticed they had formed a close-knit community, from which he was largely excluded.
He basically hired a bunch of 20-somethings and literally hoped that it would work out - doesn't sound like a plan to me even for an idealistic person. Sorry, but he seems highly incompetent as a manager. Maybe it would work for people who come from bureaucratic environments and who are grateful for this opportunity.
I wonder how he managed to finance that for so long.
I would like to repeat the same experiment with people who are self-motivated because they've been in the workforce and burned out. I guess this might work.
Manager didn't allow senior devs to have any authority, because who can contradict a 25 year old in the middle of the cultural revolution?
Allowing people to do so completely disconnected from customers or funder: bad
Picking a team entirely of inexperienced people: also bad
Even experienced industry professionals need some guidance and supervision.
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I think it had a much lower expectation to start with, but also the delay to launch wasnt absurd and the end product is quite good in my opinion. Also, it was a comercial success for its niche.
People who have never managed or been part of managing big projects with deadlines don't understand that. They see the above as a failure rather than obstacles that they succeeded in getting over and releasing a moderate to good game.
I agree that among the titles I mentioned is the less disastrous, but is still an example of developers being given a large amount of money and almost free reigns, and delivering something late and below expectations (I played the game as well, it was decent but really not that remarkable).
They delivered a documentary series, with a high production quality, while they were developing the game that was incredible to follow.
The communication through the forum during the development was excellent, transparent and informative.
I was very hyped about the game and it was not below my expectations. I enjoyed every minute of playing. It is not the best point-and-click adventure of all times if that was your expectation.
I believe it is nonsense to put in this list as well as comparing to the situation of the OP
Daikatana was done by an industry veteran who revolutionized gaming and was an attempt to try something new.
Duke Nukem Forever is the butt of all jokes, but the end result you are talking about is a thrown together piece of shit that had nothing to do with the original and nothing with the article.
Broken Age was also done by veterans and even thought it wasn't what was expected it was a decent game.
Star Citizen I fon't know much about and since it isn't released yet I wont comment on it
Anyway the article is about giving students who didn't do anything but had an "award winning" idea free reign about money and clear goal without monitoring them. They then played counter strike in 600$ gaming chairs.
There is a documentary of the making off of broken age and they didn't just fuck around with the money, so most of your examples probably don't fit at all
Sometimes you need to let people have enough rope to hang themselves. Sometimes you need to take risks that may come back to harm you for the betterment of your culture & team.
Micromanagement should be a last resort and is indicative of other issues that should be addressed.
I like what the Netflix culture slides say about Freedom & Responsibility [1].
It is a good idea letting people to fail early with the minimal amount of money possible.
That was exactly the idea of YCombinator. Experimenting before scaling could be cheap.
My understanding is they had very minimal supervision but effectively endless money from government funding.