AGDC: Lead with Your Gut: How Courage and Common Sense Improve Efficiency

I had to duck out early for a partner meeting, but I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to catch any bits I could get from the AGDC session, "Lead with Your Gut: How Courage and Common Sense Improve Efficiency":

"This session provides insight into how studios can gain project efficiencies by communicating more effectively and engaging in constructive conflict. Using the trials and successes at Next Level Games, learn how efficiency drops and work gets derailed when people work in silos, don't communicate or 'assume' they know what's going on. Getting questions on the table at the beginning and throughout the project, along with planning for more face time, creates efficiencies that will reclaim hundreds of lost hours. Attendees will learn how common sense and the commitment to applying these principles consistently will put their team in a better position to turn out a superior product. It may sound simple, but if it was so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"

Edoardo De Martin, Studio General Manager of Next Level Games, is an impressive fella. He was honest about his own experiences, shortcomings, and costs of genuine leadership (and the lack thereof).

He was a non-gaming leader poached into Black Box Games (then EA). Kudos to BB for recognizing talent outside the industry and hiring it into a senior position. Doesn't happen nearly enough.

Edoardo was actually going to leave the game industry and its burnout work ethos, until Next Level approached him -- and he said he wouldn't unless they did things differently.

This "differently" largely revolves around what Edoardo calls coaching, but not the touchy feely vapid non-coaching that tends to give the vocation and skill set a bad rap. What he described is akin to what I probably called mentoring leadership for the development teams I managed in past lives.

Other principals of his:

• Avoid the "squish" (neither upper management or staff are happy with you) - naiive guys take it, but good leaders leave
• Make then accountable (requires respect, integrity, constructive conflict, continuous learning)
• Lead through action (have an idea? Act on it - quickly and consistently)

Edoardo reduced leadership in the games industry to business leadership (too often reduced/compartmentalized as producer) and creative leadership (same for game director) - which really requires purposeful conflicts to create genuine collaboration and work two very differnet leadership styles.

(Then I had to leave. So I didn't get all the "how to fix its". I need to call Edoardo.)