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"In the 2000 Mind and Life meeting on destructive emotions, His Holiness [The Dalai Lama] asked me, 'What is destructive compassion?' My response then, which I continue to believe, was, 'Destructive compassion is controlling your children, not allowing them autonomy.'" (Ekman, Emotional Awareness, 31).
I’ve been reading lately about emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion in an effort to better understand how these cognitive concepts can be harmoniously utilized in software development. One of the glaring elements I’ve noticed while worming my way through psychology books is an emphasis on freedom from “parental” control.
Now, this parent-child relationship starts off making perfect sense. When a child is young, the parent uses his or her abilities to keep the child safe, often by being finite in explanation and demanding in results. In fact, the language of speaking to a child is often very direct and “command and control” in structure. “Do not touch the fire!” “Stop hitting your brother!” “Wash your hands.” These are imperatives that allow no wiggle room for questions or continuation without approval.
Obviously, for an early-development child, this makes sense! As the child grows, however, and gains a consciousness of his or her own, the relationship must change to remain healthy. Often times, there is a struggle as the youth attempts to gain an identity away from the command and control relationship established earlier in his or her life. Herein begins a potential source of life long anxiety.
I’ll save the particular details; but, generally, I also view this as similar to some of Joseph Campbell’s teachings. A hero must travel away from the village, thus gaining independence, self-knowledge, and world knowledge. Only through this journey may the hero come to be master of two worlds--potentially interpreted as the conscious and subconscious.
Where is this going?
Simply, in order to properly manage, we must understand the harm in “command and control” relationships. They may work early on in our interactions with an employee, where we are all testing the waters and finding our footing; but, when employees are skilled, intelligent, and capable, we will only cause rebellion by being imperative and forceful. Instead, we must be empathetic, compassionate, and understanding of the employee’s wants, desires, and capabilities. We must have trust. After all, why hire someone you cannot trust?
Agile specifically tells us to trust our developers. Lean has an emphasis on respect for employees. Instead of just saying, “Okay, I’ll do that,” we must understand the why of the rule. Why should we respect our employees? As managers and employers, we must be curious and find the wonder that resides within psychology, philosophy, and its application within our lives and workplaces.
Only through this complete integration of philosophical, psychological, and physical may we truly build workplaces that inspire consistent, stellar results with a happy corpus of participants.
About the Author
Andrew Andreas Grapsas is a game programmer at Arkadium, Inc. developing casual and social games. He previously worked at THQ and EA as a systems and gameplay programmer on triple-A shooters.
Andrew is actively writing and programming for various projects. You can read more articles exclusively at his blog aagrapsas.com.
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Would you say the "Don't teach a man to build a boat, teach a man to long for the sea." saying would be appropriate here?
To some degree, I believe it's, as Rollo May put it, about having them feel the "encounter" with the wonders of psychology or philosophy and their involvement in management, business, life, and so forth. How do we do that? I'm not exactly certain :) Ideally, it would be by allowing managers to rapidly fail (this is bringing in my background in Agile, Scrum, and Lean) so that they may, at some point, experience what works. This needs to be melded with a deep focus on introspection.
To some degree, those that have curiosity and wonder without an immediately visible map for achieving understanding are the ideal candidates to begin change. They're the ones that will readily search for new knowledge.
My point, and maybe others can help, is how do you change the mental models of those that do not believe they need to change? Of those that are not curious?
Nice one again, Andrew.
Failing early is really important. Building monolithic elements that slowly teeter on the edge benefits no one. A lot of it, though, requires an environment where management and employees understand there won't be repercussions from "productive" failure.
I think that's where the introspective element comes into play. Being able to honestly say, "What am I doing? How well am I doing it? How important is it?" and applying that back to the project.
Does that make sense?
I also definitely agree that there isn't enough focus on management and management culture having the same type of agility and change-acceptance as, say, software teams.
There's something here that reminds me of a book by Warren Bennis & P.W. Biederman on creative organizations called Organizing Genius. In it, they describe various organizations that needed creatives to do their job (fascinating cases with a unifying structure to do 'impossible' tasks), but they also had to deal with cultures that were adverse to exploration, progressive failure and risk. In all the cases covered, the role for the upper tiers of the management was defined as one of protector, a buffer between the stakeholders (risk adverse) and the careful environment set up for the creatives.
Perhaps there is a management taxonomy we can loosely suggest here. Imagine an environment where team managers are just as free to fail well and fail often, as the teams they manage; as long as there are protectors above them to maintain the environment, the accepting culture, and provide that buffer from outside influence that might not be as accepting.
Very interesting discussion, Andrew. Thank you.
"Cultures that were adverse to exploration, progressive failure and risk."
Sounds like this line was taken directly from EA and Activision's mission statement lmao....
Why can't the industry realize that most of us thrive when allowed to explore our own paths, while excessive, heavy-handed management tends to kill our drive and creativity, and even make us resentful of our job. Certainly a factor in the high turnover rate for game studios. Leave us alone, and let us do what we know! We're all in this game to excel, to be competitive, not to sit on our laurels and get a paycheck.
That is not to say that there should be no management, but certainly, management should take their foot off the gas sometimes and let the car go on cruise control.
Yes, I know, I'm completely cynical. But my opinion is based on twenty-three years of management experience with huge, multinational publishing corporations.