I am a creature of habits. I enjoy my comfort zone more than most, and I need to fight myself very hard to do something for the first time. Those are two poor traits for a manager, and I wage a constant battle against them. Before becoming a manager, my method of dealing with this was to try to expand my comfort zone - become a regular at a bar, and a room full of strangers is much less threatening, since it is now an extension of your living room.
Many of us do that every day. We are pushed into unfamiliar territory at work or in our personal lives, so we pick up a book or a podcast, get intimate with some terminology, and suddenly it becomes less scary. It’s a good system, and it works more often than not.
Unless you manage a large team.
No matter how much you try to prepare yourself, and how carefully you hand picked your reports, they will throw curve balls at you. And even if they don’t, you will still find yourself putting your glove on and getting in the way of things that are thrown at them. Your job is to operate in the noise, and your options are to throw it back into the void with a good reason, to swallow it yourself and deal with it, or to shape it into music and play it to your team.
This act of taking something messy and noisy and turning it into something easily digestible that helps my team thrive and succeed is one of the favourite parts of my job, but I’m never comfortable while doing it.
Fate, or whatever cosmic power is at work in my life, sometimes has a wicked sense of humor.
Towards the end of last year, I had to step not just out of my comfort zone and into the shoes of both one of my peers, taking over his team, but also temporarily into my manager’s, as they both decided to move on to the next phase in their career. It was a great opportunity to grow, and it was sheer chaos. All of a sudden I had to deal with managing people I didn’t know, in a field of expertise I’m less familiar with, all the while having to operate in a strategic layer I’m fascinated and terrified by. I needed to go deep into certain topics to be an effective manager to my new team, while training myself to get away from details and focus on the big picture and the bottom line.
More than ever, I was forced to prioritize brutally, to consider sequencing carefully, and to set up multipliers that will keep the balls rolling after I let go, and there were more curve balls then ever.
Luckily, I had played this scenario many times before.
I Have Parts of a Plan
Imagine living in a town where the hardware store has a variety of materials on sale, but only one item of each kind in stock. As you pick up a bundle of planks, another customer has picked up the box of screws that you need to put them together. Asking an employee about more screws will get you only “Come back tomorrow, we will have another one! (But don’t be late, someone else might take it…). If you insist, the friendly employee will tell you you can drive to the factory on the other side of town, where they make the screws. If you sneak the assembly workers their favorite pastry, they will get you a couple of boxes of screws off the books. Granted, you’ll have to rush to the bakery before, since they also have a limited supply...
This is what a worker placement game looks like to the untrained observer.
The premise is quite simple. On your turn, you choose an available action on the board, and place a piece on the slot representing it to mark your choice. The pieces represent agents or workers sent to perform the action on the slot. Once placed in a slot, it is usually considered occupied, and no other workers can be placed in it until the worker leaves it.
Some slots allow you to produce goods at no charge, for example, your worker may go mine some coal. Others have an activation cost. You need to have the right resources to take advantage of them. Maybe the blacksmith needs the coal you just mined, as well as some iron, to make tools.
Players each have a handful of workers, and they take turns placing them around the board. This continues until everyone has placed every one of their available workers. When this is done, the round is over - everyone collects their workers back to their hands and free up all slots. Another round begins, and everyone places their workers anew.
This continues until a certain number of rounds have passed, or until a certain victory condition has been met by one of the players.
At its very core, there is only one way for you to interact with a worker placement game. Nothing can happen if you don’t have a worker available to do it. The beauty of it is in the chain reactions that trigger once you do. The key to victory lies in careful planning and making every one of your very limited actions count the most.
Plans Are Worthless, But Planning Is Everything
Worker placement games are not just about doing the most with a small group of workers - they are about trying to do that while everyone else is trying to do the same thing in the same space. To a new player the beginning of a first round may feel almost random, as if you’re trying to set up a business without knowing what you are good at or identifying a market need. I have a bunch of workers to assign, and all these places that seem to produce something useful, and no way to decide between them right now.
Usually by the end of the first or second round the same player would be pulling their hair, agonizing over needing to accomplish three different things specifically, having only the one agent available, and everyone took the good places they wanted to visit anyway. You are constantly deciding between the priority of what you need right now, and the future availability of things you need later. Beginners focus on risk management, while advanced players make an effort to get into the heads of their opponents, trying to anticipate when they might be competing for the same spot, or even deny something intentionally from an opponent even if they don’t particularly need it.
It’s an evolving optimization problem where everyone throws sticks in each other’s wheels just by trying to do their thing.
You absolutely have to have a plan since timing is so critical, while at the same time you must be flexible, since either your plans will be disrupted by lack of availability or by tempting opportunities.
While most worker placement games don’t provide you with workers with a personality, they are still very much a team. The individual output of a single worker is mostly irrelevant, if taken out of the context of the whole. I lead my teams, in game or in real life, by fitting them into a bigger picture inside my head, a vision I’m steering towards.
My job is to make sure each of these teams is focused, not trying to solve too many problems at the same time.
My job is also to make sure that the team is heading in a cohesive direction, taking into account the needs of the organization, the team, and our customers.
Most of the times that I feel I’m not doing my job well, are instances in which I feel these two statements are conflicting. Whether it’s because my vision (or the one I failed to reject from the organization) trump the common sense of what’s in front of my face, or because the team is jumping from problem to problem, dealing instead of improving, the result is that our most precious resource - time - is not well invested.
My job is to create context for whatever my teams do, and make that context relevant over time.
Playing worker placement games led me through the experience of making a grand plan, meticulously crafted according to the resources at my disposal. It also led me through the experience of seeing it shatter to pieces due to an unexpected move on the board. It helped me become a more adaptable leader, and also value plans for robustness on top of value added. Getting too attached to plans is never a good idea.
Emotionally experiencing the results of over-attachment and the inability to adapt in a friendly competition has helped me learn how to let go and constantly reassess.