I Haven't Gone Blood Simple

What stikes me most about Red Harvest; is how willing the characters are to act based on the tiniest amount of information. Hammett's Continental Op raises merry hell with the criminal elements of Personville precisely because they're ready to leap at each others throats on the slightest pretense. This leads to the manipulation of the most impulsive characters by the smarter ones, but even the Op himself occasionally believes something he shouldn't.

Which, of course, makes great fodder for gaming, if only we'd do it. I've had great fun with characters who act first and ask questions later¹, but I still get protective of them sometimes, leading to a more reactive style than I'd like.² Even in Fiasco, a game whose subtitle is "a game of powerful ambition and poor impulse control," I haven't played anyone who has just cut loose.³

That surprises me a little. And, come to think about it, I do the same thing in improv. Unless I'm playing a character I know is supposed to lose in a big way -- like playing a villain in an opera -- I don't take big risks. The thing is, I have fun with those characters, the ones who let the very firstlings of their hearts be the firstlings of their hands. Maybe I need to do that more.

Red Harvest, by the way, is a Fiasco playset waiting to happen.

¹ The half-demon son of a nature goddess in Jesse's "Conan by way of Wuthering Heights" Sorcerer and Sword game, Rugo the Magnificient in Andrew's Reign game of magical theatre troupes, and Xander Yvarai in the ongoing Houses of the Blooded LARPs all come to mind.

² This where I need to be more like Peter. He knows what I mean.

³ Unlike Graham in our Vegas game. There's nothing like storming into someone's house and shooting his pillows, only to discover it's the wrong house.

Pieces Clicking Into Place

One of the big messages of Group Genius is that innovation is about collecting and connecting small sparks of creativity, not about singular moments of revelation. One concept that is repeated over and over is that the key to having good ideas is having a lot of ideas and then figuring out which ones are good. Another is the notion that creative insights come from long immersion in the problem domain, followed by time off to reflect. While reading it, I came to realize I’ve been unknowingly trying to structure my time around both of these principles.

My approach to tackling the first idea is to try to stop questioning the value or quality of things I create. I’m trying to blog more in part because I know that forcing myself to write, even if most of the things I’m writing are glorified book reports, will eventually kick loose stuff I’m really happy with. Not being brilliant all of the time is price I have to pay to be brilliant some of the time, and I can live with that.

I’ve noticed myself doing two things that help with the second concept. First, I’ve found that I do my best work on a project when I work on it every day, if even it's just a little bit. Now, for every project I take on, I reserve at least thirty minutes every day to spend on it. If I can’t find that time, I have to pass on the project; experience tells me I'm not going to be able to do it justice. I’ve only started doing this recently, but it’s proven to be really powerful, and it helps me keep myself honest about what I really do and don’t have time for.

The other thing that I’m slowly realizing the value of is a small amount of unstructured, “thoughtless” time each day to let the things I’ve been thinking about coalesce. Washing the dishes is something I try to do every day, not just because it helps keep the house clean, but because it’s also a repetitive, almost hypnotic task that lets bits of my brain rearrange themselves. In the kitchen doing dishes has become my second-most-common place to have good ideas. (The shower is still king, but for pretty much the same reason.)

I listened to an old episode of the Radiolab podcast this morning that talked about priming and our increasing understanding of how the brain works. What I love about books like Group Genius is how they help me turn that understanding into something I can use to make mine work better.



A Pair Of Well-Paired Books

The two latest books through my reading queue fit together in interesting – though not necessarily unexpected - ways.

The first, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, is one I’ve been meaning to read for a while. As a Scrum Master, I have to facilitate one of these every two weeks, and as the sort of person who doesn’t shut up, I’m not always as good at them as I need to be. This book is exactly what I needed, as it’s very step-by-step and practical. It’s built around a five-step framework for retrospectives:

• Set the Stage
• Gather Data
• Generate Insights
• Decide What to Do
• Close the Retrospective

Each of these steps does something important, and the book is clear about what those things are. To that end, it provides a good selection of activities for each step that are designed to get you there. For me, these were a godsend, as the activities are designed (at least in part) to deal with people like me, as well as people who are normally quiet and don’t contribute. It also has several chapters on what facilitators need to do and the skills they to develop to run effective retrospectives.

There were three big takeaways for me. First, you need to go into the retrospective with a goal. You need to know enough about your problems were so that you can select activities that will tell you how to fix them. Second, even though you know what your goal is, you need to set aside notions of how to achieve it. You need to let the activities guide you the answers. The danger is that you’ll skip over the Gather Data and Generate Insight steps to get to your action plan. If you do, you miss out on the collaborative power of retrospectives, which is not to be underestimated. Third, you need to focus on the actionable output of the retrospective. Some amount of processing is useful, as a way to give closure to the iteration, but the focus should be on what you’re going to do as a result of what you say and learn.

I’ve run two retrospectives since reading the book, and I (or really, we) have already seen a marked improvement in our process. We’re getting to better answers faster, and we’re seeing results from the changes we decide to make. The philosophy of “inspect and adapt” requires you to actually adapt in response to your inspections, and Agile Retrospectives has helped us do just that.

I attribute a lot of the increase in value to the second step I mentioned above: harnessing the collaborative power of retrospectives. By happy accident, the next book I read after finishing Agile Retrospectives was Group Genius by Keith Sawyer. He’s an education professor (with a truly fascinating CV) who did his PhD in pyschology at the University of Chicago, studying with, among other people, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. One his earlier works, Explaining Creativity, lays out the state of modern psychological research and what science tells us about creativity. This book attempts to dispel the myth of the “lone genius” innovator by explaining how we unconsciously collaborate and how to create better environments for conscious collaboration to take place. (He’s also a jazz musician and he spent a lot of his doctoral work studying improv troupes; after a set up like that, how could I not read it?)

The book itself is a mix of history (the real process Samuel Morse went through to develop the telegraph), psychology (how the brain combines concepts to create new ones), and business (principles to follow in creating an environment for innovation). As usual, I was looking for clear guides to action, and by and large I found them. Sections in my notes include:

• Seven characteristics of effective creative teams
• Ten conditions that help a creative group perform at its best
• Seven rules to increase group flow
• Five steps of the collaborative process
• How the mind connects conceptual sparks
• Top ten secrets of collaborative organizations

Why do I believe in this stuff? Because it explains why our retrospectives got better. If you look at the activities laid out in Agile Retrospectives, they follow these principles. That was the real joy of reading these two books together. The first told me what do to; the second gave me solid understanding of why it worked. It's nice when things work out that way.

American History For (And From) Canadians

Last Saturday afternoon, my friends Nancy and Albert and I were at The Trappist, a haven for Belgian beer lovers in Oakland, CA, when a convoluted chain of comments and references leading me to this post began. Nancy told me about a job interview she'd just had in Charleston, SC. Having just been doing a lot of reading about the Civil War, I made a comment about Fort Sumter. Nancy pointed out that, as a Canadian, she didn't actually know that much about the American Civil War. ("It's not my fault. We had one year of American History1 in 7th grade.") This, of course, made me think of (fellow Canadian) Robin Laws' comments on my friend Ken's The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated. It also reminded me that I'd read it but not yet talked about it. Which brings us here.

First things first: It's great. Ken manages to pack in a tremendous amount of (sometimes surprising) material into 176 pages, and Shepherd Hendrix does an amazing job of keeping up with the almost-frenetic pace. It's also laugh-out-loud funny; my guffawing and reading of occassional excerpts were enough to convince my friend James to ask to borrow it when I finished.

So here's what jumped out at me:

• Lots of Quotations. Ken is perfectly content to let history speak for itself when appropriate, and that's more often than you might think. Sure, there's a full-page spread of the Gettysburg Address, but you also get H. L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding's prose style: "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."
• Jefferson. I don't have the page count at hand, but he might have more appearances than anyone else. (George Washington is the possible exception.) And he's a troublesome figure, given his difficulties in dealing with slavery. Or as he said: "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
• Chicago. Ken holds that it is the greatest city in the world, and there's more than a little evidence presented here as to why.
• The slavery narrative. In many ways this is the strand that ties the book together. The last section, Tear Down This Wall, is about the Civil Rights movement as much as it about the fall of Communism. Which, I suppose, is only fitting, given where we started and how we got here.

So there you go. Need a crash course in American History and hope to have a good chuckle in the process? I know of no better book.

1 As a bonus feature, the one event in American History that Nancy (along with all other Canadians, apparently) did know a lot about was the War of 1812. She and Albert pointed me to this song by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie which serves a reminder of the war that, as I told her, "we don't like to talk about."

A Pair Of Recent Reads

For some reason I decided that I can't remove a book from the Currently Consuming section until I talk about it. Here's two that need off the list.

Mastering Virtual Teams: I'm working on three projects right now where we don't have everyone in the same place (two at the day job plus the Origins Awards), so I was hoping for some good answers from this book. What I got was two general principles with some specific advice. The principles are these:

• Different tasks have different needs when it comes to collaboration and communication technology. Choose technology appropriate to your tasks.
• Be aware of how different cultural backgrounds (be they national, organizational, or functional) will affect aspects of you team dynamics.

This is good stuff, but I did find myself hoping the book spend more time showing how these ideas apply to particular situations than it did. It also suffered from some organization problems. The big one was that in the section on tech, it showed for each technology what its strengths and weakness are. That's fine, but if I'm choosing a technology based on the task I have hand (as the book recommends I do), I need the lookup table to go the other way. If I know we need to brainstorm, I want the book to tell me what my best choice for that task is; I don't want to have to look at each choice in turn and see how it compares in the brainstorming category.

Overall: Worth reading if you're completely new to the topic (e.g. you haven't seen Geert Hofstede's framwork for assessing culture before), but probably not the Single Most Indespendible Book On The Topic.

The Thin Man: I picked this up from Borders last weekend because it (and The Big Sleep) jumped off an endcap at me. (I mean this metaphorically, not that I'm notably clumsy.) I'd never actually read any Dashiell Hammett, nor had I seen any of The Thin Man films. (This latter fact left me at considerable disadvantage during the drive from Chicago to GenCon last year, when Greg Stolze and Ken Hite were discussing at some length a hypothetical remake of the series.) I enjoyed it, though I found the nigh-constant use of dialogue vaguely disorienting.

Overall: It was nice quick read, so I'm tempted to go back and fill in with Hammett's other novels.