The role of the Dungeon Master.. in Engineering Management
Anyone who’s known me over the past couple of years knows I’m an avid Dungeons and Dragons nerd. I DM (dungeon master is a role within the game, generally that of judge and a story teller) a regular group of people through a campaign that’s been going for nearly two years and take part in one off games here and there.
Recently (as I’ve had a bit more time on my hands thanks to concentrating fully on getting my consutancy and coaching business up and running) I’ve been thinking more about management, what makes good managers and what makes good teams. I’ve reflected on how I’ve been bringing a lot of DM skills and lessons to my approach to management and leadership and was intrigued by the parallels between these two disparate settings. I use the word leadership below, but this should be interchangeable with manager in this scope (I firmly believe all managers should be leaders). Yes this post is a bit contrived but bear with me please, or don’t and I look forward to the robust feedback.
As a leader/DM your role is to be a judge and arbiter of uncertainty
In tabletop games this is widely recognised as the primary role of the Dungeon Master, does this effort succed or fail: roll the dice and the DM will tell you.
In business this is slightly more nebulous but is still the primary role of a good leader. You’re expected to rule on questions like:
- are we going in the right direction?
- are we doing the right activities to achieve the goal?
- am I being successful in the work I’m doing?
- am I able to do this activity?
Keeping cohesion to the ruleset and the world you’ve created is core (what are the teams objectives, what is the mission here, what are the constraints we have)
As a leader/DM your role is to ensure that people have autonomy
No one wants to come to a game of D&D and have a story told to them, they want to be able to influence the outcome. They want their devisions to matter and their actions to have consequences (even/especially if that means death to their characters).
In small businesses people have the same drives, no one wants to come to work to have no influence. They want to help drive the outcome of the company and to have autonomy in the work they achieve, this is where good leaders understand the concept of leading from behind and allowing their team to make mistakes, and get stuck in. They have to be able to help team members see the answers to:
- How is this work contributing to the whole story?
- How do I know if this is having an influence?
- Am I learning new skills here?
As a leader/DM your working with a diverse set of motivations and roles
As the name implies, Role Playing Games are all about players being able to step into a role, and experiment with role dynamics they wouldn’t naturally associate with. They’re about having fun as a player and imagining a role and taking the story wherever that entails (did you know table top RPGs are being used in therapy sessions?)
You might think that this might not apply to your team, what with you’re attempts to promote that “bring your whole self to work” policy, but I can guarantee that everyone is role playing at work, it’s just a question of how close to their natural state that role is. You need to be able to manage everyone’s diversity in the roles they play. Answering questions like:
- How do I get involved in this effort
- What’s my role within this team
- What’s my role within the company
As a leader/DM you need to create safety
Good DMs need to balance some need for autonomy and consequences with the need to ensure the players are free to have fun, to balance games appropriately, to make sure that if a character dies the player will still be able to be involved in the game (luckily in role play games you can come in as another character, it’s kinda hard to do that in real life.) players need to be able to fail, for their characters to die, for the mission to not go as planned. But if your players feel it’s unsafe to fail, they’ll never take risks and the game will be bland and unenjoyable for all.
In good leadership the same is true, if your team is unable to take risks, if they fear their very basic survival is at risk then they’ll be unable to truely enjoy their work. They’ll be unproductive and unmotivated and really start to disengage from your company. Leaders need to create safety to fail, to try out a new thing even if there’s a risk that it won’t pay off. The trick here is to set the constraints. DMs can allow the characters to do anything but they set the constraints of the world, leaders can do the same.
I’m sure there are a myriad of other ways that the two roles of DM and Leader/Manager overlap too. One of my favourite DM books is called “The Lazy Dungeon Master” and I suspect there’s something to parallel with The Lazy Manager that might be worth a future post. Now I just need to link my other hobbies and work out how beer and bread making are linked to leadership..
Let me know what you think.
