Amble RPG: a game of self-management
Welcome to Amble: the role playing game. Amble Studio is a newly formed table top game design company and Amble RPG is our ongoing process of self-management - working out how we work together. It incorporates mutual support, getting things done, reflection and fun.
Amble is committed to agile ways of working (I’ve written about my experience of that here) and Amble: RPG is no different. It has been developed through a series of small experiments with input from all team members at various moments. At this point Amble RPG takes the form of a playbook and two processes — The night sky and Star gazing.
Playbooks
It started when my colleague, Logan, produced a playful draft of “Amble: the role playing game” after a team building session where we discussed how each of us likes to work. Logan created a playbook for each character/ person in our team (see below for example). When people saw what he had done it generated a swell of energy, some felt moved to tears. We are a game design studio, full of folks who enjoy RPGs, what could be more fun than turning our organisational processes into a game?
A week or two later a group of us got together and brainstormed a list of ‘moves’ — concrete actions that progress the flourishing of Amble. We tried to identify all the things we need to do to keep Amble running and all the behaviours we want to encourage. Including everything from ‘Remind us of our values’ to ‘Update the Trello.’ This discussion led us into the development of a system for recognising and encouraging each other’s work.
The night sky — Who likes getting gold stars?
#the-night-sky is a discord channel where Amble troupe members are encouraged to appreciate one another by giving each other star emojis. Amblers can access the channel any time to give stars and we have a dedicated 5 minute star-giving session in our weekly team meeting to keep it alive.
The channel has a pinned post that outlines the purpose and intention of star giving:
- Encouragement — moves that are important to our functioning, moves that grow the team or team members.
- Recognition of people’s effort and contribution, the moves we make.
- Reflection tool — things that attract lots of stars, things that go unstarred, look back at the progress we’ve made as a team.
The pinned post also includes the list of ‘moves’ we brainstormed, to remind people what they might want to give stars for. Logan and I broadly clustered the moves (care, communications, insight, sharing, financial, strategy, design) for ease of navigation expecting that they will change as we go, we found these useful when we engaged in our first ‘star gazing’ ritual of reflection.
We are aware that this a process that can trigger a competitive response and we are committed to surfacing those impulses and keeping an eye on them. The stars don’t connect to ratings or prizes. They are not rewards except that they feel good when they are given. They are about helping us see patterns.
Star gazing
A regular rhythm of reflection is crucial to organisational health, it encourages continuous growth and gives a consistent opportunity for course corrections. As we were building #the-night-sky we were already aware that it would be a useful tool for reflection. So once we had the discord channel working we made time to dream up a ritual to help us reflect on our work together.
Star gazing happens on the Monday nearest the new moon each month. It begins with collecting the data from the discord and dumping it into a spreadsheet that gets circulated to the team. Jase and Hailey are working on a bot that will do this for us but for now it’s a simple copy and paste situation. The spreadsheet has a column with all the names and moves and a column of the moves with names removed.
The ritual opens with an acknowledgement of country and a slide show of star pictures set to music. Observing the cosmos reminds us of the bigger picture we are part of, it is humbling and exciting, marking this as different to our regular meeting processes.
We then go into a W3 (‘what? so what? now what?’) process, where we share our observations of our work in the last month, talk about what they mean and discuss actions that arise from this. We ended up putting the list of deidentified moves into our Miro board and worked together to arrange them according to the clusters (listed above). This led to several fruitful discoveries.
We realised that work that we do on our own is not recognised in the current system. We are now encouraging Amblers to give themselves stars as well as each other and have created a specific moment for this in our weekly team meeting to make sure it happens.
We discovered a number of things that might feed back into the Amble RPG core rule set. For example it turns out that play is important to us, we play games every week for fun and for research. We’re considering creating a new cluster category to reflect this.
We created ‘black stars’ for things we wanted to recognise during star gazing that weren’t captured during the month. The space between the stars also contains important information for reflection.
We finished with identifying the needs of Amble over the coming month and naming what we each need individually to thrive in our work.
How it’s landing
#the-night-sky creates and maintains an atmosphere of generosity and good will among the Amble troupe. Spending 5 minutes appreciating each other at the beginning of our team meetings sets an excellent tone for collaboration and gives us the connection needed to lean in to tough conversations. We follow star-giving with surfacing ‘twinges’ — anything in the past week that we feel uncomfortable about or is on our minds.
We did star gazing for the first time this week but it already feels powerful. There’s a hunger to keep working on Amble RPG and it feels like it’s time to go back to those individual playbooks and make them our own. The most amazing thing to me is how fun it is to work on. Shifting the frame from ‘policies and procedures’ or ‘team agreements and performance management’ to ‘role playing game’ makes a world of difference to the experience but produces many of the same outcomes. At each step of the process we have given each other permission to be weird and playful, building psychological safety and spurring each other towards new innovations.
As I sat down to write this article I thought it was going to be a fairly quick task to capture the story so far because the development process has felt so easeful. I am surprised at the complexity of what has emerged from our playful exploration and there is plenty of excited anticipation about what we’d like to develop next.
Next steps
Next experiments on the horizon include:
- Developing our individual playbooks — communicating what we each need, how we each like to work and identifying our growing edges.
- Developing quarterly or annual processes to build on our monthly rhythm and invite external perspectives into our organisation.
- Creating a bespoke Amble discord bot to streamline our star giving process and manage the data for us.
- Defining our organisational values and linking them to moves to keep our lofty ideals connected to how we do business.
It has a long way to go before it is fully realised, and (given its dynamic nature) it may always feel like a work in progress, but Amble RPG is already working in its own perfectly imperfect way. The stars look bright around this merry troupe of amblers.
