THE LEAFLET

July 04 2024

wingspan as onboarding, out of the quagmire, reframing gratitude

WINGSPAN AS 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

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A PATH OUT OF QUAGMIRE

Ben has a great go-to move when you’re stuck in a rut. It’s the same go-to move he uses when you’re not stuck at all, when you’re just starting a project and you’re full of vim and optimism. 

He forces you to look ahead, 6 or 12 months into the future. “Your future self is looking back at this moment and laughing because you’ve moved so far beyond it. Your current problems seem quaint, bygone, or transcended. What is your future self doing? What did you do between now and that future moment to get there?”

Another way I’ve seen good managers frame this up for their people is to fashion a rough alter-ego: “Badass [Employee Name]”. If This Eric is stuck, ask This Eric, “What would Badass Eric do?”

Ben’s prompt uses time (travel); the badass prompt uses identity. Both rely on imagination that isn’t beholden to present constraints but doesn’t ignore them either.

Both nudge (or shove) a stalled teammate out of malaise and self-pity and into pragmatism. No matter what, some version of you is going to be doing stuff now and later. Let’s opt for the Badass version of you, doing the stuff that will make future you laugh at stalled you.

-Eric

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REFRAMING GRATITUDE

In a podcast episode with Mo Gawdat, Greg McKeown offers a couple of very slight edits to the definition of gratitude. 

The wannabe poet and grammarian in me thrills to these edits. He tweaks a preposition and a whole ecology of meaning flowers out of the phrase.

My summary of his edits:

• The first reframe: Gratitude isn’t being grateful for the good things. It’s being grateful for everything.

• The second reframe: When you’re grateful, you don’t think about things happening to you. You think about things happening for you.

I was tempted at the beginning of the interview to swat the whole thing away. Airy pop psych. Woof. 

McKeown offers these reframes, though, through the story of his adolescent daughter’s terrifying neurological condition. If there’s a truth he’s caught hold of here, it’s in a hand that blistered to calluses.

-Eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Writer Greg McKeown on priority:

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.

Former Google X leader Mo Gawdat on time:

Imagine that the whole universe is squeezed into one train: every galaxy, star, and planet and every grain of sand and living being. This train sets off on a journey, not from one city to the next but rather on a journey through time. As a passenger on that train, you can move anywhere you choose, but you can’t change the train’s direction or speed, which is restricted to a track that is the arrow of time. You just go for the ride with no control over its position or orientation, hopping from a slice of “now” to the next along the time dimension.

Chef and author Kenji Lopez-Alt on sobriety:

A part of sobriety is learning to deal with boredom, which in time you realize is more like simplicity.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric