LiveTiles: The UneXpectations Game
The Playbook from 4 Years at LiveTiles
One year my grandfather was appointed coach of the high school football team — perhaps the most important job in a rural Ohio town. Even before his service as a pilot in World War II, Grandpa knew training was key.
The first year on the job, he prepared a notebook for each member on the team. It had a play for every situation. Believing a massive arsenal of techniques would provide a strategic advantage, he shared his complete wisdom of the game with each player.
End of the year, they were bottom of the league.
The next year he gave every player four pieces of paper. Four plays that were generally good, but not specialized in any way. He drilled the players on the four plays every practice and gave five minutes at the end for the kicker to use the field to practice punting.
That year they were undefeated.
Graphs & Games
Life as a developer often boils down to two key areas of Mathematics: Graph Theory & Game Theory. They are useful for charting the relationships and behavior in any system.
In football, the playbook is a set of graphs that represent the strategies versus the game theory. They are a shared vision for how the play starts, the areas each player will attempt to influence over time, and finally the flexibility for improvisation after the snap. In business, I have most recently heard this called “flexibility within a framework”.
Even though plans are simple, they’re not easy or necessarily repeatable.
Game Theory most often focuses on the emergent behavior of actors in a system, sometimes together, but most often when they are in opposition. Even games with simple rules and obvious outcomes, the number of potential permutations can swell to vast numbers via combinatorial explosion.
Leadership is not about providing contingency plans for every situation, it’s about building attitude and culture. Ideally, you equip each player to see and seize the opportunities around them for the betterment of the ongoing objectives of the team. Shared vision, not shared instructions.
Simon Sinek’s second-best TED talk looks at Game Theory in another way. In it, he presents a simplified view of games and their players: Finite and Infinite games.
In a finite game, the goal is to win. Such as scoring more points before the clock runs out. In an Infinite game, the goal is to keep playing the game — more like running a country or a business.
Life is an infinite game and you are playing it right now.
Game Theory at LiveTiles
Leading the US engineering team at LiveTiles, we are playing an infinite game. While each quarter, cycle, and sprint may be trying to divide time into manageable chunks so we can communicate clear deliverables, ultimately, the game is ongoing and our goal is to keep playing.
The players in this infinite game do need a playbook, preferably one that is as simple as possible. Providing a shared framework begins with an agreed glossary and never ends. The most popular playbook nowadays in software is agile development focusing on rapid iteration, metrics-informed decisions, and moving in expanding timeframes.
At Microsoft, they call this iterative process the OODA Loop: Observe-Oriented-Decide-Act. Based on Colonel John Boyd’s model for running operations in the US Air Force, this simple four-step cycle drives insight-based action within an individual or team.
In my team at LiveTiles, we utilize the OODA-loop to drive key activities inside of the product team by layering the timeframes of each iteration into a scrum or agile life-cycle. The smallest timeframe is the two-week “sprint”. Followed by the 6 to 14-week “Cycle” for key features. Finally, we have the ongoing objectives that are captured as “Initiatives” inside of our system, all of which contribute to the “Vision” of the product that goes to infinity — and beyond.
Flexibility Within a Framework
Whether you’re coaching football or a software team, you’re trying to create a culture of grit, focus, and determination in each player. When players are told to try to memorize every detail of someone else’s strategy, the game becomes unwinnable. When a culture of grit is given a simple, straightforward playbook, they can play undefeated.
Since the beginning at LiveTiles we’ve talked about “UneXpectations” when delivering the User Experience (UX) of our products. At different times we would use different “un” words to describe it during projects:
Unexpected. Undeterred. Unflinching.
Starting my fifth year at LiveTiles, I believe refocusing on getting back to basics and applying lessons learned is the necessary work of sitting down and rewriting the playbook. What are the new “UneXpectations”?
Unpredictable. Unstoppable. Undeniable.
Erik Ralston is Chief Architect at LiveTiles where he leads the team building the world’s only Intelligent Experience Platform (IXP). Erik is also co-founder of Fuse Accelerator in Tri-Cities, WA where he works on connecting people and sharing knowledge to turn new ideas into growing startups. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or the next Fuse event.
