Like a Boss: Four Talents for Middle Managers

Posted on May 27, 2012 by lion

Last week a would be Studio Lead Game Designer asked me to summarize the traits of a good middle manager. I came up with four:

Leadership

Leadership and management are not the same thing. Leadership requires that your team listens to you. Before they will listen to you they have to respect you. Leadership requires the kind of confidence that can only be gained by sticking your neck out there at the risk of looking like a fool: think public speaking or stand up comedy. As a leader you need to make decisions and provide solutions. It also requires being honest with yourself and your team. I suspect this last point is where most people fail. One of my favorite frequent utterances of Zen master Dogen Hosokawa is “I don’t know.”

Management

The act of management doesn’t necessarily mean the management of people. You could manage inventory, or a portfolio, though as a department head you’re probably managing people. From this perspective, management means allocating the right resources (people) to the right projects. It also means firing people who are not making a positive contribution and hiring those who you hope will.

Facilitation

There are two types of facilitation that a department head or team lead will have to engage in frequently. The first type is like that of a counselor resolving interpersonal conflicts. The other type is helping your team to navigate your organizations political structure. You know what will help them be productive and happy, now make it happen.

Facilitation requires that you be able to “read the tea leaves”. You need to be sensitive to the feelings of others. If you attack too straight forward the other person will become rigid and they will not hear your words. More on this in Research below.

Research

Don’t make decisions out of hubris or ignorance.

When you don’t know the answer to a question you have three options:

  1. Admit that you don’t know.
  2. Make up an answer.
  3. Research until you do know. Ask your staff for their opinions, ask your peers, and scour the internet. Combine this knowledge with your wisdom and come back with some solutions.

Another aspect of research is an empirical approach to management/leadership. You will come across many situations that you’ve not had to deal with before. Conduct your own experiments and learn from your own success and failure. These can be experiments with new team structures, management methodologies, business models, etc.

You can also experiment with your communication. As you are talking with someone, be aware of their body language. If they start to look defensive, confused, bored, or uncomfortable find a way to lighten the mood and then try to communicate the same thing from a different angle. Each person responds differently so what worked with one person might not work with another. Keep up these experiments and build up your wisdom.

On Fear

Zemsky Roshi used to tell me “the primary concern of managers is to protect their position in the hierarchy.” If you are a manager, please don’t do this. Don’t be afraid of someone usurping your position; if your decision making process is governed by protecting yourself instead of making the best product or protecting your team, then you will be making sub-par decisions.

If someone does get promoted above you, or replaces you, then it was probably time to move on anyways.

Also, you have to involve yourself in all kinds of potentially uncomfortable situations such as speaking in front of your team, having disciplinary meetings, or making proposals to your boss. It is natural to feel fear in these situations but you must find some way to engage in these communications despite the fear.

And as I mentioned in Research, don’t be afraid to conduct small experiments.

Further Reading

Posted in Business | 2 Comments

What’s The Point of Zen?

Posted on May 24, 2012 by lion

A lot of people have misconceptions about the point of Buddhism or Zen — including things like achieving happiness, good health, outstanding moral character, relaxation, serenity, or the ability to shoot laser beams from your eyes.

These things may be side effects experienced or expressed by some practitioners but they are not the goal.

So what is the goal of Zen training? In a word: enlightenment. Here are some things that Zen Masters have said about the point or goal:

  • Absolute confidence in every day life.
  • Zen points directly to the human heart, see into your nature and become Buddha.
  • To see clearly.
  • To realize that the entire universe is the true human body.
  • To know thyself.
  • To become enlightened to the mind of the mind.
  • To become open to shifting.

These are all saying the same thing with different flavor. A trickier person might say that the goal of Zen training is Zen training. So enlightenment is the goal but there really isn’t a “point” because once the goal is achieved the point becomes irrelevant. As Shunryu Suzuki said: “Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.”

And after you attain it, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be a good person, that’s not the point, and even if it was, it would be irrelevant.

 

Posted in Philosophy, Shugyo | 3 Comments

New School Fool

Posted on May 17, 2012 by lion

Whenever I go to a new yoga studio, or get a teacher who I haven’t had before, they invariably ask: “how long have you practiced yoga?”

I hate answering that question because my answer is “10 years”.

“Oh wow!” they say.

After 10 minutes, however, it is clear that I look like a n00b.

Why is this? I have a few theories:

I’m a Yoga Idiot

Maybe I’m just not very good?

Changing Schools/Teachers

I don’t think changing schools or teachers is a bad thing, but I do think it can make you feel like a yoga idiot.

Different teachers have different aspects that they focus on, they have different asanas (poses) that they practice, and different pose sequences. I had a class today where we did some poses that I’ve never done before, so obviously I wasn’t good at that pose. But triangle pose? Bring it!

Conditioning

There are sports where technique and muscle memory are not enough for proficiency. Taking 2-4 weeks off a sport like rock climbing or yoga to nurse an injury, or because life gets in the way, will significantly reduce your strength and endurance. It could take weeks to get back to the level you were at before taking a break.

Summary

Getting a new teacher, practicing infrequently, or returning from a break can shake your confidence in an activity. Don’t give up. It is hard to be good at some things without doing them frequently and recently.  Bear with the embarrassment for a few weeks and get back to a level where you feel less like an idiot and more like a practitioner.

Also, try not to let your preconception of the right way to do something get in the way of the opportunity to learn from a teacher who has a different emphases or style than what you’re familiar with.

Posted in Life, Shugyo | Leave a comment

Four Key Traits for Designers

Posted on April 26, 2012 by lion

These are the traits that I look for when hiring designers. These are also the first things that I teach when training new designers.

Know What is Essential

Designers need to understand the soul of their product plus its constraints (including technology and platform limitations, budget, corporate goals, and their team’s skills). Once they have an understanding of what they want to make, and what their constraints are, they can finally set about the task of providing solutions.

Communication

It is no good if only the designer knows what is essential; they must communicate that knowledge to the rest of the team. Designers must be able to communicate ideas verbally, in writing, and visually. They are in a key position to facilitate cross disciplinary communication within a team as they have one foot in the arts and the other in the sciences. They’re a better programmer than most artists and a better artist than most programmers. They serve as a bridge, translating artist speak into engineering speak and vice versa.

Right Attitude

Designers must have an open mind. They need to be receptive to critique, others’ ideas, and new ways of doing things. They should be eager to learn and to continually improve their skills and knowledge. They must be proactive in providing solutions.

This is the most important trait for newbies since it is the foundation for them getting good at any of the other traits.

Provide Solutions

At the end of the day, design is all about providing solutions. A good habit is to provide three solutions to every problem, stating the strengths and weaknesses of each solution. These solutions need to be presented through clear communication.

Posted in Design, Game Dev | 6 Comments

Seven Steps for Better Documents

Posted on April 25, 2012 by lion

Forward

This is a document about creating documents, or as we jokingly said at the office: “the Inception of documents”. The entire seven step process is covered in this blog post, but due to the limitations of the blog layout you don’t get the benefit of seeing the embedded version of this document’s state at each of the steps.

  • Here is a link to the printable PDF layout of this material. This is what this document looks like at the completion of step #7.
  • You can also download this zip of OpenOffice files. This is probably the trippiest way to experience this content since the step 7 document has all the steps — including itself — embedded within it. This version won’t print in any meaningful way and it probably won’t look good in MS Word either.

Overview

How do you get started writing a document or a presentation? There are many ways you can approach this task. The following is a description of the process that I personally use – in fact, I used this approach when creating this document.

The Seven Steps

The Goal of Creating Documents

The main goal that you should have when creating a document is to clearly communicate your ideas. I hope that the process described in this document will help you to make documents that more effectively communicate by:

  • Promoting the organization of your ideas (by continually re-visiting and updating your Table of Contents)
  • Having ideas that are fleshed out through repeated refinement
  • Presenting ideas professionally with a consistent use of visual style
  • Supporting ideas through images, diagrams, and a page layout that considers the contextual relationship of ideas (images should be placed physically close to the text that they relate to)

Note: While I’ve presented this method as seven discrete steps, in practice you will be working in one continually evolving document. You can be “at step 7” and still add new ideas.
Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Design, Tools, Tutorial | Leave a comment

The Basics of Scrum

Posted on April 23, 2012 by lion

I’ve personally been interested in various production methodologies since about 2005. The two that have been the most interesting to me are The Cerny Method and Scrum. Gameloft recently gave me an opportunity to participate in a Scrum Master certification course which was a lot of fun. I’ve since passed my PSM I Assessment and have begun implementing Scrum in a few of our teams. Today I had a small formulization of the ideas while driving to work. I’ve put this down here under the “Basis of Scrum”.

Definition

Scrum is a framework for developing complex products.

Basis of Scrum

Scrum is based on four main ideas:

  1. Kaizen (continuous improvement)
  2. Timeboxing (a fixed period of time for an activity)
  3. Self Managed Teams (trust them to accomplish their goals)
  4. Prioritizing Value (working on the most valuable features first)

Scrum’s Kaizen

Kaizen in Scrum is accomplished by using the three pillars of Scrum in conjunction with timeboxing.

Scrum has various timeboxed events. The main one is called a Sprint. Sprints are generally 2 weeks to 1 month in duration. Each Sprint has the following sub-events which are also timeboxed: a Sprint Planning Meeting, Daily Scrum Stand Up Meetings, a Sprint Review, and a Sprint Retrospective.

These timeboxed events give formal opportunities to employ the three pillars of Scrum which are:

  • Inspection
  • Adaptation
  • Transparency

These pillars are active in the timeboxed events in the following ways:

  • Daily Stand Up Meeting — an opportunity for transparency. Everyone knows what everyone is working on. There is a small amount of inspection and adaptation going on here too: “Oh, you’re waiting for me to do X before you can do Y? Ok, I’ll work on X today so that you can start on Y tomorrow.”
  • Sprint Review — all the work that was done during the sprint is presented. It is an opportunity for the team and the stake holders to inspect the progress and quality of work. It is also an example of transparency.
  • Sprint Retrospective — this is an opportunity for the team to discuss what went well, and what didn’t go so well. They can make a plan on what to do differently during the next sprint. This is an example of inspection, adaptation, and transparency.
  • Sprint Planning — a chance to apply the agreed upon adaptations.

Scrum teams also generate various “artifacts”. These can include a Product Backlog, a Sprint Backlog, a Release Burndown Chart, Sprint Burn Down Charts, and Task Cards. These serve to visualize the project status and are viewable by all team members and stake holders and are yet another opportunity for transparency.

Prioritizing Value

Scrum has this great artifact called a Product Backlog. This is a list of every feature or requirement for your product. It isn’t just a feature list though; every feature has an effort estimate (determined by the Development Team) and a value estimate (determined by a Product Owner).

The Product Owner’s role is to represent the interests of the client/customers. Based on what is valuable to these stakeholders the Product Owner prioritizes the Product Backlog to maximize return on investment. Generally the higher value/lower effort features make their way to the top of the list.  By following this method, if a product development time get’s cut short, at least the most important features are already done.

Self Managed Teams

The Product Owner can determine what features a development team works on, but not how the work gets done. Development teams take the top priority features from the Product Backlog and determine what tasks need to be done to complete the requirements of said features. They estimate how long the tasks will take to complete and they verbally commit to completing them during the daily standup meetings. Because the “how” is in their hands, and because they verbally commit to completing tasks, members of development teams are more likely to become highly functional teams capable of solving complex problems.

The Contract

Stakeholders agree not to interfere with a development team during the duration of a sprint (if they have a new top priority item, it can be added to the product backlog and worked on in the next sprint if it really is top priority) and the development team commits to transparency and delivering value by the end of each sprint. That means a working increment of the product composed of the highest priority features.

Implementing Scrum

The easiest aspect of scrum to implement is the daily 15 minute stand up meeting. In this meeting, each member of the development team says:

  • What they finished since the previous stand up meeting
  • What they plan on finishing before the next stand up meeting
  • Anything that is blocking them from finishing their tasks

You don’t even have to be using Scrum to take advantage of this short daily meeting.

The rest of scrum is a lot more confusing. For instance, the classes and books don’t really tell you exactly how to implement a Product Backlog, nor the right way to do it for your organization. My advice is to follow a kaizen process for all of this other stuff too. Just start to make a Product Backlog. Don’t care about writing the perfect story or making the perfect estimate or doing the perfect grooming or the perfect prioritization. Just get started and make adjustments as you come across problems. Scrum is fairly open to tweaking so long as you don’t do anything to reduce the three pillars of inspection, adaptation, and transparency.

By the way, I’ve talked a little bit about Product Owners and Development Teams but there is one more role in a Scrum Team that I have yet to mention: the Scrum Master. The role of the Scrum Master is that of a “servent leader”. Their main responsibility is to ensure that the Scrum framework is being used properly — that means educating the organization, development team, and product owner about Scrum; facilitating the timeboxed events as needed; and maintaining the artifacts as needed (the team can do these things too). Their other main tasks are to identify and remove impediments to the development team, facilitate communication between the development team and the product owner, and to otherwise be an advocate for the development team.

Further Reading

Posted in Game Dev, Philosophy | 2 Comments

The Culture Wars Won’t End Soon

Posted on April 21, 2012 by lion

Culture wars. The red/blue one in the USA is well known but even socialist countries have them. I don’t think they’re going to go away anytime soon. I will support this thesis with two arguments: history and the Threefold Truth doctrine.

A recent conversation gave me some crucial insight on the culture wars. Those who are against social programs are afraid of a mythical couch surfing, baby popping, freeloader who is lazy and looking for handouts. Those in favor of social services are more optimistic about the state of most people.

History

About 2,300 years ago there were two prominent philosophers in China.

Xunzi argued that mankind was by nature bad and it was society that shaped them into proper people.

Mencius argued that mankind was by nature good and it was society that corrupted them.

The specifics of the argument are different today, but the core theme is still there. So, one reason why I think the culture wars won’t end any time soon is because they’ve been going on for so long.

If you’re optimistic about humans then you’re likely to want to extend the benefit of the doubt to all of society; if you’re pessimistic about humans then you’ll only want to lend a helping hand to those who you personally know.

Truth, Folded Thrice

As for why we have these wars, I think a loose interpretation of the Threefold Truth doctrine offers some perspective:

The Tiantai school took up the principle of The Threefold Truth, derived from Nāgārjuna:

  1. Phenomena are empty of self-nature,
  2. Phenomena exist provisionally from a worldly perspective,
  3. Phenomena are both empty of existence and exist provisionally at once.

Even if we could scientifically prove one side of the cultural wars “correct”, let’s say “ultimately true” as in the first truth, it does not exclude the subjective experience of the opposite viewpoint being “true” for the person holding it.

And, in any case, the world is more analogue than binary in my opinion. The question is, where do you draw the line? How large of a circle are you able to draw to include your friends and family? The original conversation was spurred by one of those horrible images with a caption that grossly oversimplifies a complex issue. Arguments on both sides were initially overly simplified too. As the conversation progressed we reached more nuanced arguments that were mostly agreeable to eachother. As long as national politics are steered by oversimplification, the war will continue.

Ignorance is Bliss

One of the things that I like the most about living in Vietnam is that I don’t feel suffocated by the culture war in the USA. Political discussion is such a central part of life and identity in the US and that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Maybe it is because people in the USA still believe they can effect the political process whereas no one in Vietnam is under that illusion? Maybe it is because the US is divided into two political parties and Vietnam only has one? Maybe there are big dividing issues here but they’re talked about in Vietnamese and I’m just blissfully ignorant? Whatever the case the repose is refreshing.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics | 6 Comments

Concentration and Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

Posted on April 20, 2012 by lion

While trying to make a point about omnicentric value paradox on facebook I did a Wikipedia search on Tientai Buddhism and came across a term I had never seen before.

Tiantai emphasizes śamatha and vipaśyanā meditation.

In fourteen years of studying Buddhism (and even more years of studying meditation if you include my childhood kung fu and chi kung experiences) I had never seen the term samatha. The wikipedia article is somewhat informative but it does’t really tell you how to do it. Searching the internet didn’t lead to many good results but it did lead to one.

This author basically says that samatha is concentration meditation where the practitioner focuses on a concept. In contrast he says that vipassana is an insight meditation where the practitioner focuses on present sensation (though he uses the term “ultimate reality”).

If you are counting your breath or thinking “in, out” as you breathe, then you are doing samatha because you are concentrating on concepts. If you instead focus on sensation such as the feeling of your nostrils as air passes through them, then you’re practicing vipassana. If you focus on the idea of air passing through your nostrils you’re back to samatha.

In my experience you normally begin zazen by concentrating on your breath or your koan. If you’re doing Soto and you reach a state of “just sitting” (shikantaza) then you’ve transitioned from samatha to vipassana. If you’re doing Rinzai and you’re concentrating on your koan then you’re doing samatha. As long as you’re doing samatha you will not pass your koan because the koan is an object that you are thinking about. That’s ok, it isn’t that doing samatha is bad or vipassana is good. One is a gateway to the other and they seem to flex different mediation muscles. But to pass the koan, it seems to me that you’ll need to transition the koan practice from samatha to vipassana.

If this topic has peaked your interest at all, then I suggest you read all of the links in this post but especially that one good one. Then you can help me to flesh out the following idea:

How does one practice koan as a process instead of a concept?

It seems to me that it can’t be the question “who am I?” but rather becoming aware of the process that is “who am I”.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry on koan I found this quote:

..in the beginning a monk first thinks a kōan is an inert object upon which to focus attention; after a long period of consecutive repetition, one realizes that the kōan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the kōan. The kōan is both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself.

OK, so there you have it. Concentration on the koan and awareness of the relentless seeking — koan practice as samatha meditation and as vipasyana meditation!

If you were using the “marking” technique in vipasyana then you’d say “seeking” every time you noticed that you were working on your koan 🙂

Posted in Philosophy, Shugyo | 7 Comments

9forthe90s

Posted on April 10, 2012 by lion

Here is my contribution to my friend’s 9forthe90s tumblr project.  The goal is to “tell the story of your musical experience of the 90s in only 9 tracks” without focusing on a single year or genre.

Paring down the 90’s to 9 songs was really challenging for me because so much of my life in the 90’s revolved around music. In fact I haven’t listed to all that much new music after 1999. All of the 90’s was building towards a crescendo that ended with the death of cyberpunk literature and drum and bass music and the dot bomb. Oh well, it was a fun ride while it lasted.

Track Listing:

  1. Nirvana – Smells like Teen Spirit – 1991
    Nirvana is the 90’s!
  2. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under The Bridge – 1992
    Reminds me of hanging out with Justin Roth during summer vacations.
  3. Nine inch Nails – Wish – 1992
    Thanks to the Haags for introducing me to NIN, maybe this was their best song? Certainly the best for fueling adolescent rage.
  4. Aphex Twin – On – 1993
    I almost only listened to Aphex Twin in the 90’s but this has always been my favorite song from RDJ.
  5. Autechre – Tri Repetae – Clipper – 1995
    Whether high, or tripping, or even sober, this song will take you on a mind melting journey.
  6. Ghost In The Shell – Making of a Cyborg – 1995
    I think Ghost In The Shell was more or less the height of the 90s, everything after that was a slow decay into a post cyberpunk world we now call web 2.0. This also serves as a stand in for the many anime soundtracks that I listened to.
  7. Titonton – Metaphysical – 1995
    I was deeply influenced by the events produced by the ele_mental crew in Columbus Ohio. Thanks to Aaron Shinn for introducing me to them.
  8. Dr Octagon – Earth People – 1996
    The guy at World Records said this was “head and heals above anything else”. I think he was pretty much right. I mean, “space dodo crystals” are hard to beat.
  9. Boards of Canada – ROYGBIV – 1998
    We had a PC running BeOS connected to the TV in our flat. This song was on heavy rotation.
Posted in Music | Leave a comment

Gameloft Vietnam’s First Game Jam A Success

Posted on October 1, 2011 by lion