Grand strategy is alluring: I worked with a VP of Product handing out copies of Roger Martin's Playing to Win even as the team was moving in a poor direction. It's much easier to sell a story about how you will "win" and that you are currently playing to do so, than it is to be certain you're making good moves, and playing them well. The unexamined default, for many teams, is one of not attentive or competent play.
The team must know how to formulate simple moves and build confidence that they are pointed in a useful direction. They must know how to play those moves well, and learn and adapt based on how the field responds. The competence here — in team and leader — is what engenders the feel for strategic possibility. The first phase of Wardley Mapping's strategic doctrine is titled “Stop Self-Destructive Behavior,” and I've joked to good clients that my job is stopping smart people from doing stupid things. The self-harm and stupid things, in the context of product work, emerge from attempting strategic play without a feel for how the game works, or a sense of how it is unfolding at the moment.
In the game of Go, they say beginners should lose their first 50 games as quickly as possible. Players need exposure to common patterns of play and internalization of game mechanics before they can hook any technical and skillful knowledge onto that experience. Players without a feel for gameplay slow down, pause, and question their low-level steps, until the smaller and lower-level patterns of play are understood and consolidated. Worse — more common in product work than clearly bounded games like Go or Brazilian Jiu-jitsu— is when leaders and their teams don't learn how to focus on gameplay at all: they make moves for the sake of making moves, instead of questioning their steps and scanning the game for weakness and their own mistakes. They don't learn to work with the critical feedback signal of internal and external players' change in play, or lack thereof.
There is no recipe or simple method to build good gameplay though there are clear areas of attention: the game in its context, the structure of the field of play, and the sequence of moves coming out of each game. Good leaders help their team understand the game and start playing with confidence. It is more important to make sure the team can play one good move, right now, rather than abstracting the reality of the situation for a far-flung vision of future glory. Good leaders avoid the pitfalls of working towards high-level operating models or broad-brush change until they have proven gameplay in specific, local contexts — if they can’t even help one team play smarter, how can they hope to usefully adapt the play of many?
When the team stops leaking attention, effort, and energy into poor decisions and self-defeating play, they gain the more time and space to act appropriately in the larger context. Here is where it makes sense to find and harvest successful patterns, and pour more energy and strength into scaling them. While teams are yet committing unforced errors and fighting to make basic progress, their view of the larger field and their sensitivity to strategic opportunity is obscured by their own inward focus on frustrated efforts. (The same is true for you, too.)
As a leader of work or of people, you may not be in a position to shift the narrative of grand strategy, but you are always in a position to improve the gameplay — your own, your team's, and others' — within the games you are playing. As you improve that play, you also gain a feeling for the games that connect to it and contain it. Over time you earn access to the see and shape gameplay in those games, too.
The distinction between strategy and gameplay is merely a way of describing play at disparate levels of scale depending on where the observer is sitting. 'Strategy' is no excuse for ignoring the material structure of now for some ungrounded vision of the future. In complexity, strategy emerges from gameplay. To work in the other direction and constrain play within a rigid, top-down strategy is wishful thinking at best and — especially when gameplay is weak — harmfully stupid or self-destructive at worst.
Other things of note
A few little sparks from authors with good eyes (links to goodreads):
- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune:
There’s no reassuring ceiling over you, Moneo. Only an open sky full of changes. Welcome it. Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change. Does that tell you nothing?
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Afterword to The Farthest Shore:
The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.” It is a sentence that has meant a great deal to me. Sometimes it tells me that by going where it is necessary for us to go, by following our own path, we learn our way through the world. Sometimes it tells me that we can only learn our way through the world by just starting out and going.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan:
He held up his watch to sunlight, letting it drink in the wherewithal that was to solar watches what money was to Earth men.
Until next time—
This is The Product Game, a newsletter for players in the product organization.