Graham McAllister (Part 2) on aligning team vision (CAL121, S6E15)

Geri: 00:00:05

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. ​welcome to part two of my conversation with Graham McAllister, where we explore his next career pivot to a master's degree in organizational psychology at the London School of Economics. You may remember that at the end of part one, we left him having sold his startup company and on holidays and starting to write his book on usability and games. He talks about how during the writing process he realized that there was actually a deeper core problem, and that was the lack of a unified vision within the teams developing the games. Through some serendipitous encounters, he ends up at London School of Economics as a student again and studying organizational psychology to help him work out how he could solve this problem of shared vision and vision alignment Again, his insights have relevance beyond the video games industry to any creative team endeavor, including collaborative research projects. He discusses the transformative power of shared mental models and vision alignment within teams, the importance of hiring practices for diversity and the significance of values and beliefs. He also talks about methods to ensure alignment and resilience within teams and shares insights into how these principles can be implied to improve both product development and organizational cultures more generally. So we'll pick the recording up here at the end of where Graham has been reflecting on how he got to some of those deeper insights into what the real problems were in the video games industry.

Graham: 00:02:30

So yeah, eventually at the end of my career, I got to the bottom of my pyramid of whys, which is it's, it's mental models combined with vision and culture are the two things I ultimately come back with.

Geri: 00:02:45

So why did you think you had to go back and do an MSc

Graham: 00:02:54

I didn't know. I'd, so here's, when I left my company, I did not know for the first time what I wanted to do. But I did know that I was done there.

Geri: 00:03:06

hmmm

Graham: 00:03:07

I've never had that before. I've always known what the next leap was, like, you always join these dots up. My dot is here, the next dot's over there. I see, you kind of form a path. But there was no other dot in this case. But I went on holiday to a Spanish island, and in the morning I went for a long run, and in the afternoon I sat with my iPad and started writing a book. on my previous career. So on usability, it was called usability type testing or something. It changed over the years, but so I started writing this book and I eventually got to the chapter, which talked about user experience, so not usability. In other words, what's the barrier to playing the friction points, whatever. But more the feeling you get when you play the game. And I realized I found the chapter quite difficult to write. I was like, that's interesting. Basically, you're trying to answer the question, what is a video game? What is it? What happens when we play a video game? And how would I write that in a chapter? And I thought about, it made me think about my very first client in the video game industry, where they allowed me to walk around the studio. And I was able to walk around, and I remember asking people, Tell me about your game. No, tell me about your mission. What are you making? And I got a different answer from the different people that I spoke to. They're in different departments. Everyone was a designer. Everyone was a programmer. Everyone was an artist. Everyone was in the management. I remember thinking, isn't that interesting? This team. They don't really know what they're doing, at least I'm not getting that from the answer. And that game ended up being cancelled due to lack of vision. In other words, they didn't know what it was. So this problem, here's me trying to write this book as a chapter thinking, it's very difficult to write what a game is. And when I speak to people making the product, they don't seem to know what it is either. That's a fascinating research problem, right? What is it then? How do I, how would, imagine this was a PhD. What's the research question that we're actually trying to answer here? What is vision? What is game vision? And so someone eventually said I should speak to, actually it's someone we know, Pejman,Mirza-Babaei. Pejman said, I've got a friend you should speak to. And she was a visiting professor at UCL. And she said, Oh, I see your problem. That's organizational psychology. That's the sub branch of psychology you're in. I didn't even know what branch of science I was in. I was like, I've got a problem. I see the problem. All the evidence in the industry says there's a problem. But it took someone else to tell me the flavor that the science, the branch of science I needed to go with. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. So I better find out double quick about organizational psychology and thank you because you're part of my LSE journey by helping me do

Geri: 00:05:41

LSE is the

Graham: 00:05:42

London School of Economics. Yeah. Sorry, I should say. So I applied to London School of Economics, which you, uh, very, you're very kind as many people listening will know, uh, you wrote the, the, uh, letter of support, the, um, And I'm sure your level of support is fundamental to me getting into LSE. But so I went back to London School of Economics to study organizational psychology, which is a very good program for that. It's only beaten by a few, like maybe Harvard or, or maybe a few others. So it's very, very highly regarded. I was lucky to get in. Um, but I was doubling down. The same feeling I had, remember I said I stood still when I knew I was going to start a games user research studio. It stopped me moving. That's how, that's how strong the feeling was. vision problem had the same effect. Where I knew everything was like, that, that's the path. There's no deviation from this path. That's the path for the end of my career is I did not know what I'll find and maybe what I end up finding is there's nothing to be uncovered. And it's just one of those problems where we don't know, but could have been the answer. I genuinely could have been the answer, but it's not. You actually can fix it, which is the good news. But I did know that I only had that feeling twice. One was user research to the game industry. And now game vision and bringing that into the game industry. I'm pausing there. Because I think there's going to be a, I could have a final chapter, some sort of, um, postscript, which just says, could I bring this to any team or any company? Because

Geri: 00:07:10

we'll get to that I want to pick up on, you said it's only twice you've had that feeling. Tell us more about the feeling because we're often, especially as academics, researchers, computer scientists, we're in our heads. And you talked about the first time you did the in your head spreadsheet of pros and cons and adding up and, you know, in the end went with the gut, the feeling there. And then you had these other two very clear experiences of being stopped. Talk more about the feeling, like how do you access it? How do you recognize it literally in your body?

Graham: 00:07:46

yeah, it is. It's a feeling. It's a, it's a very strong. all consuming feeling where, I don't know if you ever watch a TV, an American TV show called House, he's a doctor played by Hugh Laurie, and he's always trying to solve some really complicated problem, you know, and he, but there's a moment every show where the camera zooms in on his face and he stares into the mid distance and you realize he's got the answer to this problem, you know. That is exactly the feeling I get that I had in these two scenarios where you realize you're working on something but you don't know quite It's not all the cogs haven't quite aligned yet. And then suddenly you realize that's it. That's the thing. And I had it with user research. And I had it with game vision where it was like, that's the thing. Those are answering. You could say as well, we don't have that term, ikigai, you know, where it's like, do people have the need? Do you have the passion? Do you have the skill? Those that sort of intersection of these things overlap. And I think in each of those cases, the overlap was so strong, like it burned a hole through the center of the Venn diagram. Like it was just all consuming. That is the thing. And nothing has taken me away from the path. So I think if you had it where it was like, yeah, it's a bit like that. I'll try that for a few years. Then people change again. I was not changing. This is user research kept me for the company was seven years, but it was before that, you know, even at Queens. So that was over a decade. That's bringing HCI to the game industry, no deviation from the path. But then when the journey was done, I was eventually, my mind was released from that problem, thinking, well, we've done that. What else? Because I knew that user research was not the final answer. I got to a certain level of the five whys, which is, well, we can put a band aid over it. We can, we can make the product a bit better, but we're not actually fixing the team, really. They still don't know what they're making. User research did not answer that question. That is not a user research problem. That's an organizational psychology problem. So again, the hole was still burning, but I realized there's something else. I had saw that problem in my previous job, but I didn't have, when I left that job, I didn't quite hadn't connected yet because I wasn't aware of organizational psychology and shared mental models and all that type of, I'd heard the terms obviously, but I wasn't. I hadn't investigated them enough to realize that is the particular that's leading to the user research problem. There's a deeper layer that needs to be investigated here. But it's all consuming. It's like that. I can't express other than when you know, you know, when you realize there's nothing going to take you off that path that I don't need to look anywhere else. This is the final, this is it. This is the answer to there's something here that is a decade long avenue of research and bringing the knowledge and the findings to to your domain, your industry.

Geri: 00:10:30

I can hear that just certainty. I can hear the certainty and the conviction. And, and it also sounded like you needed to give yourself some space for it to mull in the back of your mind to get to that. It wasn't so much an intellectual process. It was Something that percolated and it needed time and some distance, some stepping back.

Graham: 00:10:58

It needed two things. You're quite right. It needed time, need space to, um, need space to not think about your current problem, but I also needed education. I needed someone to tell me, I was not aware of this thing. It was an unknown, unknown that I'm going to do that of all the possible branches of science that I could go down and MScs I could do. I could have took the wrong one. I could have ended up doing something kind of similar, maybe behavior change, which is kind of similar. But not quite in the same sphere, you know, there was multiple ways I could have went. But this was laser, this was the one. So, I think you needed a little bit I needed a little bit of education to say, Okay, um, I don't want to do this three or four times in a row until I get it right. I needed time, I needed a bit of education by speaking to different people, and then this UCL professor said, This is where you need to go. Which proved to be true. So, that's lucky, right? That's luck as well that Pejman happened to know this professor that happened to know who happened to know that.

Geri: 00:11:59

I always say if I did a word cloud from the podcast of all the people sharing their stories. Luck would come out and it's amazing how things work out. Serendipity happens. We just happen to meet or, you know, and there's, there is a part where we have to be open and in a place to respond and, you know, it's not going to drag us. Luck isn't going to drag us kicking and screaming. We have to be open. But yeah,

Graham: 00:12:28

And I think that problem academics suffer from that as well as in, especially industry people, where they're so busy on the treadmill of, like I remember trying to do some, some consulting, audio consulting a little bit. And some companies are, we've no time to do that. So vision is the number one problem. I bore you for another hour. I'll tell you all the evidence. It's the number one problem, stopping a games team, the game. And even for the number one problem, making that team effective. They say, we have no time. They don't have the headspace to even pop the head up and say, what problem are we actually addressing? So they're happy to build the wrong product and make a mess of it. Than stop for four hours and address the problem, which sounds insanity when you put it like that.

Geri: 00:13:12

Sounds insanity

Graham: 00:13:12

That's what happened.

Geri: 00:13:14

Sounds

Graham: 00:13:15

what happened.

Geri: 00:13:16

Yeah.

Graham: 00:13:17

Even as a researcher, like I would say, going back to my LSE Masters, I knew going in that if I found a meaningful result, I would be commercializing it in some way or giving it away, writing a book and talking about it, sharing my knowledge. Where I did not have that mindset when I was a PhD student, I was doing a PhD because I don't think I wanted to get a job, you know, and someone paying me some funding to hang around a computer for three years felt like, you know, that was wonderful. So, if I got, if I was doing a PhD now, my mindset would be, well, is the problem substantial enough that I want to do it? Could I, would I write a book over it at the end? Could it turn into a company? My mindset would be completely different back to me as a 22 year old,

Geri: 00:13:58

And that's a journey as well, isn't it?

Graham: 00:14:02

Yeah. Well, at least I fixed it with LSE. I did go in thinking this is going to be a tool, it's going to be a book, it's going to be a series of talks. Um, so at least I did learn rather than repeat this, repeat this

Geri: 00:14:11

And did, how, did you enjoy the, the master's like, because this is going back to academia again, but this time as a student.

Graham: 00:14:19

You have no idea. I didn't want to leave. I did not want to leave. London School of Economics was wonderful. I was smiling to myself walking around campus. Like, I'm not using that as a metaphor or saying that figuratively, I was literally walking around smiling by myself, just thinking how lucky am I to be here researching a topic that I cannot stop thinking about, that's going to solve the number one problem for games teams. Well, there's a chance I might solve it anyway. How lucky is that? What's wrong with that picture? That's, that's, that's as good as it gets, honestly, um, I couldn't imagine anything better. That's high up. Yeah,

Geri: 00:14:59

Oh, that's

Graham: 00:15:00

so yeah, I think being a 50 year old student, you know, I was clearly the oldest person in the room, uh, including most of the lecturers, but I didn't, that didn't bother me at all, you know, um, even when I applied to LSE, they asked me, I applied as Mr. Graham McCallister, I never used my PhD, um, so I applied as Mr., but when they wrote back, they changed it to doctor or something, you know, and I was like, oh, oh, they really, really do look at that stuff, but I didn't, I wanted them to Ignore that. I'm a student. We're all students. You know, this, uh, this identity title that, oh, you, you learned once, so now you're finished. That's complete nonsense, you know, and I want, I wanted the Mr. title. I did not want the, the PhD title, you know, so I was disappointed that they used that.

Geri: 00:15:45

Yeah. Because it is, it is an ongoing learning journey. I know that, um, I also went back and did a master's. I think I was, I think I had just turned 60, actually, when I went back to do my, to do a master's. And it was in a applied positive psychology coaching psychology. So again, sort of in that area, because I saw a need and, and really wanted to address it and have an evidence base. And I, I couldn't, I was just smiling to myself because I, it was hard work and I was doing it on top of my day job and I loved every single minute. It was never a chore to sit down and read a paper or write an assignment.

Graham: 00:16:27

What do you think changed between us as 18 year olds doing our first bachelor's degree and going back in the middle years of our life, you know, and kind of thinking, this is the best thing ever.

Geri: 00:16:37

I don't know, it's funny. I'd go back and study again and I still keep doing courses. I think it, I heard what you said about it connecting to the why you're doing it. You've got a really clear sense of why you care. And you also have a clear sense that you don't know enough in order to solve a problem or help in a way that you want to help. You need some more input that you don't have so far.

Graham: 00:17:05

Yeah. I think as an 18 year old, you're doing a degree to get a job. That's a stepping stone, but at 50 or 60, you're doing it because of some cause, some mission that you're on to say, well, you don't need to do it at that stage, but you do. And, and you want more as you say you do it, it's not like you come out and think, well I'm glad that's done, I'll now go and do, I want, I want to do more of that, because there's more, you're just uncovering more of what you don't know,

Geri: 00:17:32

Yeah.

Graham: 00:17:33

I don't know how I

Geri: 00:17:34

think also when you think also when you're 18 or 28, you also think that somehow this is your path. You know, it's a career and. And it's not, it's just a step,

Graham: 00:17:51

I don't what type of PhD you did. I broadly see two types, so one is, you join a department or a research group, and they're working on problem X, and you're another researcher working on problem X. But mine was not that type, my PhD was, the funding came from the dean or something, there was some strange Prize or award or something I had. So I basically said, we can do computer graphics, but you go and find your problem and then go and research it. And of all the things that stood me the most over time was being able to find the problem. The first part of that PhD is they didn't give the problem and say, no, go and solve the problem. It was you find the problem and then go and fix the problem. the first part was by far the most interesting. How do you find the problem? That's the bit that's lasted me through the company, and what I, the vision, or player psychology, team psychology, that's the part that's remained, is your ability to see the problem. That will endure forever. The PhD in computer graphics, whatever, no one's, you know, who cares, right?

Geri: 00:18:53

yeah,

Graham: 00:18:54

But your ability to think through, well, if you're going to solve the problem, how do I know, how do I know how to solve the problem? Where do I look? How do I look? That's interesting.

Geri: 00:19:03

mm, it is, yeah, I, I also did a PhD similar to that. Um, so you did your, you did your masters and you've talked about how the, the key learnings insights were around this, um, the value of, of bringing a mental models perspective to understanding shared vision within a team. And you're very much applying that within the games industry and how to make games development better, going back to this core problem. I'm curious whether you think that, you know, because you also talked about doing some consulting outside of the games industry. So I'm curious to hear whether this notion of teams and having a shared vision is a problem in other domains as well. And I'm thinking of, you know, our academic research projects, for example,

Graham: 00:19:53

For example?

Geri: 00:19:54

as an example. Yeah.

Graham: 00:19:56

It appears to be the case. So whenever I've talked, we talked a few times about this publicly, the game vision model, but whenever I have talked about it, it would not be unusual where people on the team would say, Hey, that's interesting. This is showing we're not aligned on our goal. Could you also help us at the company level, not at the product level, but at the game level? In other words, I don't think the founders of the company all want to take the company to the same place. For example, and people have said that from, uh, academia has come up, for example, banking. I gave a talk at a design conference and someone said, the, the management of the bank aren't taking it. And I've always, I've always said, see, I always thought that was an easier problem to solve because they're more tangible. It's easy to see with video games, it's an experience. So it's intangible. And I thought the problem was, and it kind of is, because it's not tangible, you can't point to it and say, Well, we're making X. So we all know we're going in the same. But if we're making a company, the KPIs are usually quite clear, which is we're going to, you know, solve this problem for these types of people in that market. Um, are we all doing that? Yes, we're all doing that. And what do you realize? And shared mental models is you're probably not going deep enough. In other words, at the surface level, it looks like you're aligned, but then you might get to something like, well, how do we go about doing that? Or what do we sacrifice? Or what are you willing to leave behind the typical organizational change models, Kotter's model of, you know, what do we change or what do we keep and things like that. So you realize that if you're experiencing. People say they're aligned. It's probably not true. That's one thing to bear in mind. The second thing is just look to see are you experiencing friction in your team? After experiencing friction, is it over a goal? And why is that? It means that if you think you're aligned, but you're still experiencing friction, then you haven't gone to a deeper level of what are we aligned on? Like maybe you're not aligned on values. Like maybe we get growth. We're getting the numbers. We're making gazillion dollars a year. But maybe we sacrifice to ethics, we're horrible to people, we're horrible to employees, we're horrible to our customers, we're horrible to the environment. We'll sacrifice all of that for the bottom dollar. That's a source of friction, but that, that means you're not aligned, obviously. So alignment, you need to be, figure out, well, are we aligned all the way down? Not only in the goals, but also on how we deliver the goals and how we check that.

Geri: 00:22:17

So how we deliver the goals, which goes back to, you know, cause what you said there reflects Our shared understanding of the values underpinning the decisions for how we achieve that goal.

Graham: 00:22:31

And even back to your why, like you've got a research group. Why do we have a research group? But why does this research group exist? Is it just to churn out papers or to fund PhD students to sacrifice my career growth? Or does the research group exist to do some other bigger purpose? Does it have a mission statement? A company should have a mission statement. What I've also seen, I'm going to speak about my own industry and video games here. A lot of them, although they say they have mission statements, they're kind of paper thin. Like really, it's about making money. And part of me just wishes them to just be honest and say, we make, we're making money. At least it'll be authentic, you know, instead of saying, oh, we do it for the players or some nonsense like that. So, and you realize that a lot of people don't hang around in those companies because they see through it pretty quickly. But. They don't want to belong. You're just, you're not being honest at least, you know, if you want to make money, there's nothing wrong with it, but at least to wrap it up in some paper thin, you know, I

Geri: 00:23:26

with your own company, you would do things differently now, having gone through the master's degree.

Graham: 00:23:32

I think so

Geri: 00:23:33

What would you do differently if you were starting up your, um, your own company now?

Graham: 00:23:40

I think the way I, the way I viewed hiring people back then was people who were like me, I'm going to hire people with my skillset culture fit. You might say these days, but again, we look at the science of building teams. That's exactly what you should not do anymore. It's culture add, but you're looking for people with the skillset. The reason why you hired hired me, in fact, you were ahead of the curve, so you're looking to build people who are, you know, they fit your values, but they're going to add something to the team. So you don't want people disagreeing on, uh, I'm not a culture researcher, but obviously it came up with LSE, but you want someone who fits into your way of doing things. You don't want someone who's all about money and somebody's all about ethics. Clearly that's a clash, you know, but you want someone who's going to fit the values of the company. In addition to adding different skill sets. So culture fits now the outdated model where you're just building more and more the same and the company doesn't have any real, it's going to stagnate over time. Effectively, you may get success in the short term, but over the long term, you're not building a very good culture. Culture add is the current best way of building teams.

Geri: 00:24:40

You're not building a resilient, um, culture either because culture add adds in resilience by nature of the diversity that you're adding in.

Graham: 00:24:51

Yeah, diversity of thought, you know, challenging of ideas, so culture builds in resilience, those cultural resilience, and if anything the game industry is not resilient, you know, and they're also not very honest with themselves, they have lots of problems. Leadership problems are terrible, like they're not usually trained on leadership, they're just someone who was once a domain expert and has now been promoted to C level and they are. This is not good. They call it a professional industry, but I query that on a daily basis, and it's very much an amateur industry with pockets of professionalism. The domain experts are usually, you know, experts in their domain. That's true. But the higher up the management, the more culture sits or is normally controlled, not ideal.

Geri: 00:25:35

Mm.

Graham: 00:25:36

Not ideal.

Geri: 00:25:37

But many Part of the problem in academia, as well as we're not

Graham: 00:25:43

It is.

Geri: 00:25:43

trained in leadership, which is why we have our leadership development course.

Graham: 00:25:48

And it's needed. You probably remember, even as an academic, people said, why do we have academics do research and teaching and administration? Why do they have to be a jack of all trades, for want of a better phrase? Why do they have to do these three separate threads? When we could, another model is we have experts. But you apply that out and say, well, why don't we have management who are actually trained? In management, we understand culture and team building and building resilience and coaching and growth. And wouldn't that be nice in addition? So, we don't have that. We still have academics who do teach and admin and do research. And we still have, you know, the C suite in academia who are domain experts. They were professor of biology and now they're controlling a university. Can't see any problems with that. Carry on. Not to pick on biology, by the way.

Geri: 00:26:38

So and what else would you do differently in your company? So, one is hiring, the hiring decisions and this idea of culture add. How would you ensure shared vision?

Graham: 00:26:51

I think I did not, I did not think about the future of the company at all when I started because the most likely outcome is failure. So there are people who tried to build games Research Studios before me, and they were subdivisions of famous research agencies in London. And they wrote to me in advance and said, don't bother trying because we tried it and it didn't work. So we'll save you the money and time. Just don't do that. And they said you should also do it for the web or user research or anything, you know, be a generalist, do not apply it to only video games. Because we are the generalists, so we tried a games theme that didn't work out for us. And they're very rich and they've been around for a long, long time. So I had a few of those emails from several different companies. So the most logical path was, look, it's not going to work. And the vision for me was simple but clear, bring HCI to the games industry. So if people are hiring me to do usability testing, my one service that I was offering, Then I did not know what the end result looked like. I just knew what the start of the journey looked like. Could I get someone to pay me to run usability testing on their game? And can I find, and the business model at the time, uh, said something like, if I do two usability tests a month, I think that's enough money to start the company for a year. It would last for a year. Uh, and that's exactly what happened. We did way more than that, by the way, but I think. I'll not mention specific numbers, but I think we 5x'd the money for the first year that I needed to survive. So I needed x to survive and we 5x'd from memory. So it was more than I thought. Um, so it did okay. That was the indicator that, well, that's interesting. There's something here. But then you may ask, well, why didn't I have a vision? Once I knew it was going to be, you know, had legs to stand on, why not set a vision at that point? Um, I think I was just busy doing it. You know, that as long as I keep doing it, then that's, I don't even know what the vision would be. You know, even when I think back and go, knowing what I know now about a vision, I'm not sure what I even would have said except bringing this to the game industry. It's more of a mission than a vision. It was an enduring purpose. Like,

Geri: 00:29:02

Is there a process that you Could imagine going through with, let's, let's pretend you're starting a new company, new team. Is that, is there a process that you could go through or talk about, share to get to some sort of at least initial shared vision for this new company?

Graham: 00:29:22

I think there's a few things there. I think one thing is terminology around mission and vision is sometimes interchangeable. Um, so I'll state the most common one. I think it's the most common. for this conversation. So mission is usually something that will never change. It's enduring and usually would last for decades if ever changed at all. So I would say my mission is making video games should be as enjoyable to make as they are to play. So the players have a good time usually, but the people who make them have a miserable experience. And I'm trying to fix that. And one way was. It's player psychology, like measuring the product, and now it's team psychology of game vision. But the mission's the same. In other words, why this product is made is a mess. So the mission's enduring. The vision for the last company on the product, it'll be product focused. You know, we're going to bring world class experience to the measurement of player experiences or something. That's a vision that would maybe last for 10 years, um, and that could be true. My vision is to say, well, I'm going to make sure teams are aligned on their product. So it's more team, team focused.

Geri: 00:30:23

hmm.

Graham: 00:30:23

The process. Um, we're trying to align on a vision is interesting. It has to be, you need a model for the domain you're in. That's one thing I've learned. So my model for game vision by itself would not apply to a company because the bits I'm building a mental model deconstructor. That's how it's going. So I will start off with the one sentence. My model does start off with one sentence saying describe your game in one sentence. It's a very high level. Or you might say, describe your research group in one sentence. Our research group or our research project, maybe research project is better, our research project aims to blah, blah, blah. But then the mental model deconstruction part is going down those layers below the surface thinking in terms of, I'm not going to name them, but something else. My video games are intangible. They're an experience. So I have to go from that thing that you think you're making. My job is to build a model that deconstructs the model in your head. And then we visualize it, and we see how people's brain has reconstructed information differently. So I visualize what's invisible, essentially. That's how my mental model

Geri: 00:31:25

hmm. Mm hmm.

Graham: 00:31:26

deconstructor works. But you can imagine applying that to your own research group. Why does your research project or group exist? Then people have a first, then you ask, again, another question, or another question. But you need an accurate model for those sub questions. This is where it would differentiate from the five whys, where you're asking the same question to go deeper. In spirit, the mental model deconstruct is the same, but I'm using different questions to pull apart these variations in thinking. So that's the main difference between the general five whys and my game vision model, which is, I'm going to go deeper, but I need a structure that is guaranteed to pull apart the variation in thinking, where the five whys may not pull apart. Some people may hit a plateau at the third why, for example.

Geri: 00:32:13

Yes. Yes. Because they serve different purposes, don't they? The five whys getting to the root cause, whereas

Graham: 00:32:19

You could do it as an example, and you may want to do this on your values. I will take a simple model. So I've tried to do this for companies as well, because going back to LSE, we do talk about different models of organizational culture, for example. And this is why it would different. I've got a model of video games that my game vision model works on. But for a company, you might say, well, these are our values. You know, we pride. Resilience, we've got a culture of resilience, we've got a culture of ethics, and we've got a culture of, I don't know, creativity. These are common models of culture, I'd say. And you might say, okay, well how do you prioritize those? Would you sacrifice some ethics in order to be more creative? Or to make more money, and some people will say yes, and some people will say no. I mean, if you see that variation in the, how they weight these different, uh, that's where you're getting the friction, essentially. And so then you have to tease out, well, why is that happening? Why do these people say it's okay to make more money, where they're praising creativity? Or ethics, or resilience, or whatever it may be.

Geri: 00:33:18

And looking for where those tensions might arise and doing the, the pre planning work about how you might deal with that, like,

Graham: 00:33:29

I've even said with some companies, whenever you start off a new project, I want you to do a kick off workshop. And in the kick off workshop, we're going to talk about this mental model for your game. And you're going to tell them this is part of how you make decisions. They're not arbitrary decisions. This is the framework, and there's all the criteria that we use. So when we say we're making that feature or that thing, here's all the reasoning behind it. Imagine a new research project where you would say, we praise, uh, resilience because we don't, this is research, right? We, we think we're going to start off answering X and we can end up answering Z. Like the research could pivot at some point because it's research. No idea where it's going to go. However, we will always make that pivot decision based on this value so that, you know, when we pivoted, it wasn't a random decision. It's because this is our value. We always go this this route, but I've never been on a research project where that's been

Geri: 00:34:21

yeah.

Graham: 00:34:22

clearly transmitted. I think we're discussed. Like values. Maybe you do it. I don't know.

Geri: 00:34:26

Because it gives, um, in having that discussion up front, it also gives the team a shared language. You know, it's not just up to the leader to be responsible for implementing that. If it's a, if it's a process that they've all been to, they can have that discussion with one another. How does this fit with this value as sense checks?

Graham: 00:34:47

I'm pleased you mentioned language. The root cause of why most people get a different result than my game vision alignment check is language. So these terms are kind of, people think they know what it means because they came from a certain studio or a certain research group. And everyone's from a different discipline. Sometimes you have a manager or a researcher or people who change careers or like anything can happen. So just clarifying language, uh. Going back to the root cause. One of the problems with mental models is the language and the other one is structure. So the structure of the mental model is not sufficient and the language they use to describe the structure is not sufficient or it's ambiguous. So again, being general on what's transferable, whenever you've got a mental model for your research group, it's What is the structure? How do we think about this research group? What's the cues? What's the bits I'm using to describe this research group? And how do I define those terms? And do we all do that in the same way? I bet you it's unlikely to happen in a, even in a small group, you're unlikely to be aligned on that.

Geri: 00:35:45

Yes, I agree. And I see encouragingly increasing efforts to have team charters and things that sort of try to spell out some shared understandings that I think are getting better at somehow articulating some shared values. But I don't see the work being done to operationalize them into then, how does that play out practically in our decisions? And also not revisiting them because a lot of these things emerge in the doing as well. And it's, how do we have periodic checkpoints to say, how are we going in this? Do we need to revise, you know, what new language challenges have emerged? Um,

Graham: 00:36:27

You reminded me of a famous model of culture by Schein, S C H E I N. And he says, it's at the pyramid, if you Google it, you'll see. But at the top level, it's what people do. And then at the next level is what people say. So they'll say, Oh yeah, we're very resilient around here. We're always happy to change, you know, and go for evidence. But the bottom there is beliefs. It's very hard to see beliefs, but the method he advises and how to, detect if a belief is being broken or are present in your, in your studio or cultures. If you say something and somebody has an immediate and usually negative reaction, then you know, I've touched. Some people say touch a nerve is the way of colloquially saying it, but you've touched someone's belief that's held so strong that that will, that's hard to change. So if you're in a meeting and someone says something and someone has a strong negative reaction, you're touching on their belief, the cultural belief. And you know, flags should go up in your mind. There's something here I need to pay attention to because that's going to be very hard to change if it ever changes. I've seen it a few times in the game industry, usually in association with money, when the four day workweek come out. I remember asking a question like, how would you change to a four day workweek? And the reaction was immediate and negative. It was like, we would never move to a four day work week. And I realized right then, that's their culture. And they don't want to challenge it, or query it, or explore other models, or other ways, or how to be more efficient, or, they're not, they don't want to do it. Until something significant changes. New leadership, or they're forced to in some way. But that's interesting, you know, that lower,

Geri: 00:37:57

It is interesting and we're often not very good at reflecting on what's the belief underpinning that reaction, that strong reaction that we have.

Graham: 00:38:06

Beliefs are hard, yeah.

Geri: 00:38:08

Yeah.

Graham: 00:38:08

Hard to detect, but again, they're the ones that are, mostly holding a group back, a team back, is the beliefs.

Geri: 00:38:18

So this isn't the end of Graham. I went on from here to ask him about writing his book, and there's just so much wisdom and insight in the way that he talks about that both the art and the practice of getting into writing, that I thought it could be really useful just to pull out into its own short episode because we all are writing in various different ways. As a hook here is the question that I started off asking Graham. You said before about after you sold the company and you went away on holidays and you sat there and wrote a book or started writing a book. Talk us through the book, you know, both the writing process, you know, what lessons we might learn. So I know that for many academics, they have a book in them and it can be, feel really daunting. And also the decision to make it free and not try to get a publisher and make money from it. So I invite you to keep an eye out for episode three, where you can hear Graham talk about his very practical tips around writing and his decisions for how to write an impactful, actionable book. Insights that I think can be useful for all forms of writing, not just in the book genre. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, and Spotify. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together we can make change happen.