wingspan as a guide to onboarding

I don’t think of myself as a board game guy. Very long, unsatisfying Risk and Monopoly experiences from my youth have soured me on this as a way to have a good time. 

Thanks to a couple of friends in Minnesota, I have discovered that I really like one game called Wingspan. This was especially surprising to me. Before playing in Minneapolis, I received warnings from other friends about this game in particular. Avoid! They said. It takes an hour to explain the rules - and then you’re still confused! Not worth it!

It’s true that the game is complex. It’s true that it can take multiple hours to play all the way through. 

My friends in the Twin Cities, one a school founder, the other a coach of professional athletes, were good teachers. This is unsurprising. They’ve built decorated careers as explainers. 

But the magic of their Wingspan explanation was that it almost didn’t exist. They sketched some broad principles, they gave me the basic guidance to make some wobbly-legged first steps, but that was it. The nuances of the game were brought to light gently over many turns and many rounds. They made me play the game to learn the game. Real turns, with real players, in the real game environment.* Few hypotheticals; little direct instruction; ample, rapid feedback. 

Do a thing. Then we’ll tell you if it’s a) illegal (in a strict, local sense) or b) dumb or c) doesn’t matter.

I’m starting to think that we should onboard teammates the way my coach and founder friends taught me to play Wingspan. Get them doing real stuff as close to moment zero as you can. Give them rapid, generous feedback. Don’t protect them from the complexity by explaining it all ahead of time. Let the complexity happen to them; let them safely pay the consequences of it. 

-Eric

*A benefit of this game is that it is competitive (someone amasses the most birds, eggs, and points and thereby wins) but it’s not really adversarial. You can’t do much to frustrate the efforts of the other players; you also can’t amass resources to deny them to others. This gives the whole thing a positive and nearly collaborative vibe.