How a computer game made me ask questions and do the right thing at work
For many years, I played an MMO (massive multiplayer online), role-playing game. I grew into the role of a healer and with a small group of people, it was easy to keep alive. However when I got to harder levels, it became more difficult to keep this going. I was using the same heals as earlier and the same strategy but the team started to die. When I grouped together with other team into raids, the same thing occurred — the heals weren’t enough to keep the team alive.
The tools I had were clearly wrong. I was clearly bad at my role.
My next steps
I started talking to a more senior healer in the game about my experiences and frustrations. They taught me that to fine tune my healing craft, I had to look ahead and be pro-active in my approach, to be efficient in what I did and to make sacrifices for the greater good of the team or raid. This meant purposely choosing one scenario over another if it meant we could gain a small reward instead of carrying on in one direction and failing.
Eureka moment
Taking those points on board, I noticed a common theme — a pattern in how people were being hit. For example, doing something prematurely caused more pain, if someone wasn’t paying full attention it hurt everyone (not just them) and if there was no plan, it usually failed.
There was a learning for us all. I soon started to understand how others played their class, best practice and started reflecting on both mine and my peer’s actions. I had to find out what would be the most optimum use of time — for both myself and my team — to achieve success for the group.
Change was slow and while some of the team were reluctant, I knew we were heading in the right direction.
But why does this matter?
I initially thought I was the sole cause of some of the problems we were facing. Through the change of tools and efficiency gains, I resolved some of my own problems, but this didn’t fix everything. I then realised that the success of the team depended on all it’s members, not just one individual. By communicating and collaborating with the team, understanding their own frustrations, the patterns became more visible and these problems started to slowly resolve over time with small changes made each day.
I soon became a senior and was able to share my experience with others, teaching them how to become efficient in their own approach and challenge the standard model they were used to.
In my working life
I’ve been able to adopt this type of questioning, which allows me to understand the needs and frustrations of others, into my working life. I can now start to look at the bigger picture and understand that one tool, process or approach doesn’t necessary fit every situation. I need to be pragmatic and efficient in my own working life in order to help others. To help challenge teams with changing their processes to make small improvements. To ultimately enable a faster feedback mechanism for delivery of enhancements to our customers.
