structure vs. culture — applying game design to management
Persistent conflicts within your organization might not be chalked up to personality, or culture, as you may think. It could be that discord is the natural outcome of the way the “game” is structured.
For nearly eight years I worked at a small cable network, and the entire time, to varying degrees, the were some tension between the group that ran programming (i.e. which shows to acquire/produce, and how to schedule them), and the group that was charged with producing the promotional spots for that programming. (I was working on the digital side, so had a more or less neutral vantage point.) For any big programming event, everyone would wait with bated breath for the ratings to come in. If they were good, everyone was happy, and there were mutual congratulations all around. If not, things tended to be less sunny. The promo folks would grouse about the quality of the shows, and of the difficulty in trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, while the programming folks pointed the blame at the promotional spots. More precisely — everyone acknowledged that the promos were creatively excellent, but what was questioned was the efficacy of the messaging in those spots. The criticism was generally that the producers spots were more interested in winning awards (and win awards they did) than putting “butts in seats.”
This conflict led to back-channel sniping, heated meetings, and a general low-level hum of tension between the two groups that lasted during my entire eight-year tenure, despite some changes in the key personnel involved. Despite this persistence over time and changings-of-the-guard, it was generally thought to be a personality issue, or was perhaps more broadly attributed to the respective “cultures” of the departments. This way of thinking imagines some germ of conflict back in the beginning, which is then reproduced and magnified in those back-channel conversations, passing from person to person, like a disease.
It recently occurred to me that there might be a more fundamental, structural explanation for this conflict. That it was, in fact, inevitable given the way the reward structure and evaluation criteria were laid out. In short, the rules of the game guaranteed this conflict, much as the rules of Battleship ensure that one side will lose all its ships, or the rules of Monopoly that all the wealth will inevitably end up in the hands of one player.
Here’s why: both groups were evaluated by the same measure — the ratings. But there was no way to reliably isolate the impact of either group’s contribution to this measure. It’s a messy, abstracted, complex variable. On the other hand, the promo group *did* have another way to measure success, one which was clear and unambiguously attributable to their own efforts — those industry awards they were often faulted for chasing. Presented with two “success” paths — one in which success was clearly and solely their own, and one in which success (and failure) couldn’t really be easily attributed to them, they tended towards the latter. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s the rational path for actors trying to maximize their own sense (and others’ perception) of accomplishment, and advance their careers. But for a business in which the ratings ultimately matter most, a structure which creates this sort of dissonance is flawed. Goals need to be aligned, and a structure put in place in which each contributor is reliably and objectively rewarded for their individual contribution to those goals.
In this case, I reckon the best solution would have been to make Promotion accountable to Programming, creating a sort of client/vendor relationship between the two, and making ratings solely the responsibility (for better or worse) of Programming. In this scenario, Promotion is structurally required to please Programming, and if their efforts aren’t meeting the greater needs, changes can be made.
The larger point is here is that it’s important to look at the structure of rewards within an organization and the methods by which success is measured and attributed, and that it may be hermeneutically useful to view the system as a game, with inherent rules and win conditions which each individual actor is “playing” by and striving towards. The trick is to design (or redesign) the game so that everybody can win, the conditions for winning are clear and measurable, and that everybody’s win condition contributes to the overall success of the enterprise.